300 shadow resist on the warrior and just chase the druid on your mount to get joj on, have the warrior dps the druid full time, the lock won't be able to do enough damage alone with some resist on the warrior. It will take a long time and it is complete cheese (hence gear switching being nerfed in 2.2) but it can work depending on how good the druid is.

toppazz what you can do is constantly refresh some sort of magic buff, and drain the fel hunters mana by making it devour your buffs.

It cost 330 mana to cast devour magic. With righteous fury, detect invis, water breathing, a blessing and maybe a seal that is 1600 mana. If the other lock is UA spec they probably dark pact some as well. Add in a 30% chance for your spells to not be dispelled, and the fel hunter can and will go oom pretty quickly if its on auto devour. Personally I also have mana tap to give me a 0 mana magic buff, but i refresh BoW all the time throughout the fight if it was dispelled assuming I have any other magic buffs still on. If the felhunter is oom i also refresh BoW since it takes awhile for it to spirit up that much mana.

One thing to watch for however is tainted blood. While on one hand Tainted blood is another 215 mana for the felhunter to use every minute, if you try to judge wisdom on it and melee it you let yourself open to dots since its a 5 stacking magic debuff.

I have a question about blades edge arena.
As a paladin, I hate it.

For example, a 3v3 team we kept losing against, always in blades edge...
It was [me, a fury warrior, ms warr] vs [resto shaman, shadow priest, UA warlock]

What kept happening is we would charge in, and they would dot up and fear the ms warrior down the ramp out of LoS of me.
I would have to put myself in danger by running into the middle of the action to reach everyone, so i would keep getting chain feared, earthshocked by the shaman, or silenced by the priest.

I guess i'm wondering what i should be doing better in that situation, and maybe just in general how holy pallys should try to position themselves in blades edge.

i have always found BEA to be the hardest of the three arenas because it complicates things by diffrent playing fields.

Kiklion - I might try it out, but most warlocks at our level of play are going to have a point in mana feed. I'm relatively certain (and my partner agrees), that I'm not going to be able to run a felhound out of mana no matter how many buffs he devours.

Wh0areume - Against teams like that playing in Blade's Edge, we attempt to force them to play down below the bridge. Heavy shadow teams are still painful but dropping it to the ground allows you to play the pillars like you would in any other arena.

Yeah, it works better against UA locks wich are more common at the higher end scene then SL/SL locks from what I see in my group at least. I assume this is because pally/lock and priest lock are so popular in the group that UA helps alot since your probably going against teams with little to no burst. But your right, one point in mana feed will prevent the fel hunter from going oom.

~edit

Another thing that i do is keep a rank 1 SoCrusader up when you see that you may need to judge soon. It is only 25 mana, may be a buffer against having BoW dispelled, and it allows an instant cast JoJustice.

If you use a macro...

/cast seal
/stopcasting
/cast judgement

it won't cast the judgement in one button press since it reads you as not being able to. Even just keeping SoCrusader R1 up, since you already had a seal up, using a macro like the above one with Seal of Justice would allow an instant one button press of casting SoJ and judging it.

I don't see how teams in a number of brackets will survive without SR. If it gets bad enough, I imagine you'll all the top teams rolling with ~200SR against all types of opponents, just to have a chance at all. It's particularly bad as a paladin since the two classes with shadow-based damage happen to be your two biggest nemeses. Resisting the damage is great, but more importantly is resisting the tongues, fears, mana drains, and devour magics.

We'll see how it develops in the month or so after gear swapping is nerfed, but shadow teams are well-represented in all brackets even with the presence of SR - imagine once that counter is gone.

This isn't to say SR is balanced - it's obviously a cheesy counter that highlights poor game design. It's just that functionally speaking there aren't many 2v2 or 3v3 setups that can compete against shadow cheese without it, and I'm not sure anyone believes a 5-10% nerf to dots is going to change anything.

Actually I overlooked the fact that the #1 team on Bloodlust atm is war/pal, I have no idea how they are doing it. I'd like to catch up with them and hear their pov on strategy.. but I have a feeling there strat will be farm crap teams for 5pts a win really late at night.

Thanks to SR I'd actually rather play against Lock/Spriest teams than Druid+anything else teams. I can run 2 setups in 2s (pal+lock or pal+war) and either way, with me running my 220 unbuffed SR we demolish lock/spriest teams. Lock/holy priest is a bit harder but it's almost always winnable. The only time we ever lose to Spriest/Lock is if my war misses pummel on the mass dispell AND the priest resists my stun.

*edit*: Against lock/holypriest, your warrior needs to kill both lock pets, then get on the priest. If you're running 200 or so unbuffed SR with fairly decent other stats, you can easily ignore the lock. If he gets on your warrior, it's fairly simple to heal through a single lock's dots with nothing but FoL. If he gets on you, you just kite him around pillars and such, since your warrior won't be taking any damage. Warrior doesn't need SR for lock/holypriest (only for lock/spriest is it remotely useful). Tell him to wear as much DPS gear as possible, burn through the pets, and get on the priest.

It's important to note that gear switching is still enabled on the PTR's in arenas, and I'm not sure if it will be enabled when 2.2 goes live.

Granted I'm not a warrior, but my understanding is it is pretty much impossible to fear a warrior in pvp. Between berserker rages, death wish and the pvp trinket, how does that become an issue?

It's unlikely but it happens. I mean warriors are still vulnerable 20 sec every 30 with zerker rage outside of the 30 sec deathwish. You could be immune for the first 50 seconds of a fight, then vulnerable in 20 sec chunks until Deathwish is back up.

So just to change the topic here a bit, I was wondering if anyone could help me with a few dilemmas.

A combination of various rumors flying around (specifically, those involving ret buffs and arena point gains being equal for all brackets) and my general frustration with PvP healing has helped me decide to try out retribution in 2v2 for season 3. (yeah, yeah, stop laughing)

Basically, I was wondering if any experienced ret paladins on decently ranked 2v2s (at least 1700-1800-ish, I know there are a few out there) had some advice on the following two questions:

1. Trinkets: Wrath card vs. Bloodlust Brooch.

I've more or less decided that with all the resilience and crit reduction talents flying around, the best way to gear myself is to focus around raw AP/Spellpower and just get the biggest normal hits possible. However, that leaves the issue of keeping vengeance up. The wrath card seems almost tailor-made for this purpose, and would probably be my choice, but before I drop a ton of gold, I'd like to get some opinions from people who've used it. Specifically, the 10 second duration seems like it could be a problem.

2. Partner.

This one is a bit more complex. I've pretty much accepted that, even in a weaker battlegroup like Cyclone, any team with a ret pally has a slim chance of seeing drakes by a season's end, but I would still like to do as well as possible.

Word on the street is that Ice Mages and Shadow Priests work fairly well, and a guildie suggested the idea of an elemental shaman as well. I honestly can't see ret/healer working well in my mind, since I go OOM unlike warlocks. Basically, the lineups end up looking like:

Ret/Spriest:
Pros:
- 2 defensive dispells
- offensive dispell
- "passive" healing via VE
- Mass dispell

Cons:
- Priests are squishy
- No snare, so balancing offensive vs. defensive BoF will be tough
- Weak CC
- Extremely limited spell interrupts
- Priest's DPS is very vulnerable to cleanse/dispell

Ret/Ice mage:
Pros:
- Ice mages are quite survivable against teams without a priest
- Very good snaring and control
- Polymorph
- Counterspell

Cons:
- No offensive dispell
- Only 1 defensive dispell
- Mages tend to die pretty fast when there's a priest around
- Outside of water elemantal, mages don't do very much DPS when there's a Rogue, feral druid, or BoFd warrior on them

Ret/Elemental Shaman:
Pros:
- Obscene burst DPS (yay windfury and NS+EM+CL)
- No "soft target"
- Good spell interrupting via earth shock
- Offensive dispell
- Shaman can cleanse poison/disease
- Totems, totems, totems. Grounding, windfury, earthbind, windfury, tremor, windfury, FR/FrR, and, of course, windfury
- Bloodlust
- Both classes can heal resaonably well (provided I use BoL, of course)

Cons:
- Almost nonexistent CC
- Just as with a shadow priest, BoF usage becomes a major issue
- Both of us will go OOM fast
- Both of us are easily locked down, what with only having 1 real spell school
- Only 1 defensive magic dispell
- Not as much "raw" survivability as other classes, much more reliant on easily interrupted heals

Basically, it seems to me like an ice mage would be the best bet, since he can more or less handle himself against most classes, and he brings much needed CC. But once again, I'm going off pure theorycrafting, and I've never really seen anything above the ~1700-ish range in 2v2.


Soooooooo, any advice that anyone could offer would be greatly appreciated.

I tried Ret a lot last season and had some marginal success with a few weird team setups. The problem is you have basically all the disadvantages of a warrior plus a few of your own. And there's really no teammate that can fill all the gaps.

-You have the same problem with being kited as any melee class. You can provide your own freedom, but without intercept it is almost meaningless. For this same reason you have to have an offensive dispeller to get rid of their freedoms, and preferably someone who can snare people for you as well.
-You are just as reliant on buffs as a warrior. Again, you can provide your own freedom, but having windfury is a night and day difference in your ability to kill people.
-While you can cleanse many things off yourself, you can't really afford to be spending mana or GCDs on cleanse, so you need a defensive dispeller as well.
-You are highly vulnerable to mana burn or mana drain with a limited mana pool and mana-based DPS.
-Without the ability to ignore fear, you are reliant upon fear ward or dispels or tremor totem.
-You have no consistent source of interrupts for casters or healers
-You don't have mortal strike

The only advantages you realistically bring vs a warrior are the ability to self freedom, BoP a teammate in need, and bubble if you yourself come under fire. In every other way a warrior is superior.

Your best bet is to try and minimize some of your weaknesses and try to play to your strengths. A shaman teammate is usually suboptimal for a warrior, but you can get away with it - you can BoP him when he is in danger, give him freedom to escape a snare, CC someone who is beating on him, etc. And in return you get your windfury buff AND an offensive dispel.

Alternatively, since your biggest weakness is casters, you could pick a teammate that will mitigate that problem, like a warlock or frost mage, but they will leave you vulnerable in other areas.


In short, I think 2v2 is a poor bracket for Retadins past low rating because you require immense amounts of support. 3v3 is a bit better, but oddly 5v5 is probably the best bracket for Ret simply because it is easy to have someone fill all the holes (dispels, freedoms, even MS). I've always thought a team with an MS war, Retadin, Holy Pal, Holy Priest, Frost mage or some such would be an interesting variant on the 2345 team - less caster burst but more survivability/sustainability. I actually think the main reason you don't see this isn't because it would be ineffectual, but because Ret is such a "hated" spec by the masses right now, and hordeside at least, virtually all blood elves rolled paladin to be a healer 100% of the time. Basically I don't think it has been tried by serious teams with serious players when it is just easier to use a conventional strategy.

While in general Kamil's recent ret pvp video was long and boring with cheesy editing, in the middle there's some really good 2v2 arena featuring frost mage/ret pally in action, goodstuff.

The problem being, my guild only just killed kael this week.. so I don't have access BT crafted shadow resist yet..

I don't wear SR, neither does my Warrior for the last 2 weeks, and we do just fine vs. Warlock/Priest. The Warrior just rams the Warlock so hard that the priest is forced to heal. I buff him with Kings, he uses BS, and he just gets on the Warlock's case as hard as he possibly can to force the Priest into action. I play LOS games, range games (40 yards > mana burn), melee the priest and exorcism the pet when I can. A Warrior can basically shut down a SL lock completely. Taunt the pet when you can as well to force him to attack you for a bit. Just look at your Warrior's control panel, turn the dial to "RAM" and have at it - and DONT stop. Even if the Paladin gets feared, MC'd, anything - RAM. The second you let up, the lock can freely drain or fear and you will have problems. If the lock tries to kite - intercept the priest and ram him - force the lock to come into 30 to fear and assist the priest, then intercept back to the warlock. Your warrior has an unlimited mana pool - let him do his thing you just need to worry about running out of mana. Locks have pitiful burst when they are getting face slammed - when your warrior says its ok, run off and drinkcheese as much as possible.

Hardest match for us is Warlock/Druid - we slam the druid in that game due to cyclone/etc. Warrior needs to save trinket for bash, you need to apply JoJ ASAP and keep it up while dealing with the warlock on you. Same thing here - drinkspam when you can. Also keep hamstring or phowl up on the Warlock for distance seperation and forcing the druid out of the locks LOS.

The only team we just get utterly destroyed by is Frost Mage/SL Lock. We've managed to kill the Warlock once, only to have the mage kill my Warrior the same exact time. Then it turned into a 1v1 with him running off to drink then blinking back for ice lance to interrupt my rez. Next time I'll have focus meta equipped so when the moron runs off to drink, I can heal myself until focus procs and get a 4.3s res off for an easy win.

I’ve mostly been doing some casual 2v2 w/ a MS warrior friend and 3v3 with Ice mage/Feral druid/3 min mage combos. Have not done a lot of 5v5 until recently which has been nice. I feel useful in 5v5 because I get to heal more often and mix it up with sacrifice, freedom, rogue kiting and other activates that I just don’t seem to be able to pull off in 2v2 or 3v3.

My server only has 1 guild in BT and no one else is even close to getting into BT to open up epic SR gear. I’ve been frustrated by Warlocks in 3v3 and 2v2 and I honestly can’t find ways to counter all the interrupts to healing. Should I even bother building a SR set of greens with the coming nerf to in gear swapping? Against poorly geared warlocks (since my teams are all around 1500 rating), I can flash heal through all the damage usually but against good teams it is just so fast that it is not even funny. I really need some pointers on how to combat mage/warlock, rogue/mage, and spriest/warlock type teams. Druids with cyclone in 2v2 is ugly as well. I can’t stay out of range of their interrupts without allowing my warrior or in 3v3 my feral/3min mage from dying. I can’t really change my team up but would love to get some more hints on how to “not suck” in my 2v2 and 3v3 games.

Have paladins just been shutdown due to cleanse spam eating up the GCD, no HoTs, and no CC? Against some combos I just feel useless. Is it just because I’m not running with optimal team makeup’s?

@Amera: As I said, I'm under no illusions about how well a ret/whatever 2v2 will perform. Cyclone is a weak enough BG (I've gotten to almost 1700 playing holy pal/spriest with spriests that freely admit to not being that good at PvP) that if I get an optimal partner, a good weapon from PvE (Cataclysm's edge or torch of the damned most likely), and if both of us can get full s3 gear, we *might* be able to hit the rating required for a season 3 weapon as long as we play the queue metagame really well. I'm not doing this to prove anything, or to get a drake, I'm just doing it because I think it'll be fun

You are, of course, highlighting the problems I'm having deciding on a partner. I've run through all those scenarios in my head, and I just can't come up with a team that will reliably beat most of the common setups (even if I exclude warlock teams, since any paladin/nonwarlock stands little chance against warlock teams without cheesing the fight via SR gear). The good news is that this issue will likely be solved for me because I'll probably have to go with whoever will lower themselves to playing with a ret paladin

@Ragnor: Yeah, I watched that video, and that combined with Kamil's ratings (think he hovers around 2k-ish) was a pretty convincing argument for the power of ret/ice mage.

Pet + Him spamming = I had too many debuffs to cleanse off on top of keeping myself alive, and he spellstole freedom.

I came up against a pally/moonkin with my rogue/holy priest team. I think we were around 1800 at the time, and they were rated similarly.

We assumed the pally was holy and went after him, since kick + mass dispell takes down paladins pretty quick. It turned out he was ret and the team had enough burst to drop my (mostly PvE geared) rogue while I was HoJed + cycloned. I didn't trinket out of CCs early since a oomkin alone wouldn't be able to kill my rogue quickly enough to warrant it.

The suprise factor alone certainly helps ret pally + anything.

It only works on a team once, but a Ret paladin running out with a shield on also helps the surprise factor. When I did 2's with Teleyn, we'd always start each match against a team we hadn't seen before that way. More often then not they'd let the paladin get close, thinking he was holy. Then he'd pop the 2hander out and start hitting.

We ended up peaking at about 1800 rating, which was decent at the time since the top teams were just pushing 2000. I could see a shaman/ret ream doing "okay" simply because of the spikey nature of ret damage coupled with a windfury totem.

I've been playing ret pally in arenas in 2v2s with a shadowstep rogue since Season 1. We usually hover in the high 1600s. In general, I play a gimped healer with a low mana pool, starting off with a shield and sword, and switching to the higher-stam 2hder if we go up against an dual caster team.

We tend to lose 95% of our matches against war / holy paladin. We do well against priest / warlock...with my low mana pool, I concentrate more on cleansing their DoTs rather than putting out heals. We also generally do well against 2 DPS teams. We're probably 50/50 against healer / DPS combos, depending on the rogue to DPS down their healer before my mana pool runs out. If we can get a blind or a sap off, we'll both jump the partner and try to burst him / her down.

In general, our team needs a short fight. It's a race for the rogue and I to kill something before I run out of mana, which runs counter to the long, drawn-out fights you may want as a holy paladin who can outlast most other classes in a mana war. I wish I could say that the CC of repentence makes a big difference in arena, but with the trinket change, it's only good for a single-heal interrupt. I don't ever count on it now to last the full six seconds, and it seems to be resisted a lot.

One pair that our guild holy pally / rogue combo ran up against was a ret pally / resto shaman combo. The ret pally started off with sword + board, disguising himself as a holy pally, while the resto shaman started off with a lightening shield, disguising himself as elemental. Once in combat, the shaman put up earth shield, and the pally took out a 2-hander and basically three shot the rogue. It was a well done piece of deception that probably gets them a few free wins every week until they get recognized by name.