• goss

I will go out of my way to kill a Felhunter in any bracket, otherwise the potential for it locking me is too high. I'll Exorcism + DF/HS + JoRighteousness right off the bat, which usually brings it to about 50%, have your teammates breath on it a bit and it'll fall over from that point. Not exhaustive evidence by any stretch, but I think every time I've killed a warlock's felhunter in a 2v2 or 3v3, we've won the match, it removes a serious advantage and will often throw the warlock for a loop.

 

hip

I think it's kind of like a kick in the nuts when I bring up SoR in the process of attacking a felhunter only to have it immediately dispelled.

In regards to the monkey thing, I definitely wouldnt say that paladins are the most involved, but also not the least either. I do sympathize with what you're saying though, regarding the fact that its very hard to tell the difference between an OK paladin and a kickass one. After watching Sck's video the first few times I was really disappointed that I really didnt learn anything new or revolutionary from his tactics. I also noticed that it was the synergy and groupwork between his teammates allowed him to be reasonably conservative in his playstyle (IE he wasnt standing in one place spamming HL the entire game).

So I'm left with that kind of belief, that your teams performance really does wear off on your performance (as well as vice versa). If your warlock is doing well kiting opposing enemy warriors and other dps, if your mage is effectively sheeping dps'ers that are out of range of defensive dispels, then you begin to see a drop in the amount of healing you have to do, and you are enabled to contribute to the team in more "skilled" ways, like killing totems, interrupting enemy healers, and assisting with offensive and defensive stuns.

If I had to have a monkey though, I'd say it would be a warlock. Our warlock's main duty (and I'm sure this is the case for most other teams fielding one) is to keep CoT up on opposing casters, fearing opposing paladins, and staying alive. He gets some dots in and does the occasional damage when he gets a chance and his performance is definitely affected by "skill", but his most important jobs are very menial and replacing him with a monkey wouldnt necessarily destroy our team.

 

Leene

I have a question for the paladins with more arena experience. First let me give you a bit of background information. My main focus with this paladin is pve and raid healing, specced 43/18 at the moment. I do however enjoy pvp and have recently begun to play in the different arena brackets with a few friends. My gear is mostly pve healing gear, with a few random blue pvp pieces. The teams that I'm currently playing in are either Paladin and Mage/Warrior for 2vs2 and Paladin, Warrior and Mage/Warlock/Hunter for 3vs3.

I've started to encounter more and more teams that focus fire me right of the bat. Now when I first started playing around in 2vs2 and 3vs3, this never happend, so the fact that I run around in mostly pve gear was never much of a problem. But I'm finding that once I get focus fired early on, I'm very often done for. In other words, I have to blow my bubble way to early and after my bubble is gone, it's an easy job for the opposing team to counterspell/kick/earthshock and god knows what to keep me from ever landing a heal. I've managed to run around pillars to take advantage of LOS issues, but this is won't always work. Not to mention the problem of being to far away so that my teammates will be killed, while I can't reach them and land a heal in time.

What I'm asking for is simply advice on what to do in these situations as well as what my goals should be when it comes to gear. Should I aim to switch out some +healing and get a lot more stamina/resilience?

 

Keline

BTW anyone else using Violet Badge as trinket? It's pretty amazing how often I resist counterspells with just 50 arcane resistance

 

Ragnor

I switch it in for 2v2 when I see a mage but I prefer infinite cycle for 5v5

The universe is run by the complex interweaving of three elements. Energy, matter, and enlightened self-interest.

 

Ragnor

For 2v2 I'd definately wear more stm and resilience, in 5v5 and 3v3 you can get away with more +heal gear.

Your first spend of arena points should probably be for the arena healing gloves if you don't have them already.. after that save for the chest, that'll give you 2 piece bonus and some decent stats fairly quickly. Farm some normal honor from battlegrounds for the improved pvp trinket (32 resilience and shorter CD) and the epic lamellar bracers, boots and belt. If you can't be bothered going for the boots and belt no worries but the bracers are decent stm if you put a stm gem in and enchant with 12 stm.

Often people don't try to zerg down a healer because you can just BoF yourself and run round and round the nearest pylon or bridge ramp abusing line of sight. Meanwhile your dps is free to nuke the crap out of them. In 3v3 or 5v5 if your dps is trying to zerg down 1 guy and all their dps are trying to dps down you and you're not winning "dps zerg the race" it's time to change your strat and split dps on each of their dps'ers. If your dps ties up 1 of their dps each it should be impossible for them to zerg you down, then when one of their dps gets low both your dps switch to assist on that guy and it's game over.

If you are having trouble with melee dps on you in 2v2, it's time to get tricky BoF youself, judgement of justice the dude.. kite around a pylon till HoJ is up again, remember to unsheath your weapons when not healing so you can block/parry attacks. In 2v2 with a warrior, he can intervene to you and fear if the situation is desperate, remind them to watch your health and let them know when you are out of cooldowns etc.

The universe is run by the complex interweaving of three elements. Energy, matter, and enlightened self-interest.

 

Leene

Thanks for your advice, really appreciate it. Good call on the trinket, I'll most definitely have to get that. Five minutes cool down on the old one means I only get to use it once every game, but with that one I might just be able to break a second fear. Right now I'm using the blue pvp healing gloves/shoulder and I thought I'd try to spend my arena points on two other items so that I can get doubble resilience bonus. I'm going to aim to switch out my belt and boots as soon as possible through massive amounts of Alterac Valley. About the lamellar bracers though, at the moment I'm using Blessed Bracers with the +30 healing enchant, do you still think the trade-off is worth it?

 

◊ Shadowed

Good luck trying to split DPS in 5vs5 against high end teams, it only really works if you're locking down one healer and have random AE damage getting other people low, but the only times it'll give you results is either you killed someone already, or you're running a burst damage team...in which case you'll want to be focusing someone down quickly already.

Kiting isn't going to work either, decent teams have an offensive dispeller and if they're focusing on you they'll just dispelled BoF.

 

Ragnor

Casting BoF on yourself (if snared and being attacked) means you can abuse line of sight and avoid ranged dps, counterspell and mana burn. It's infinity better than doing nothing, standing still trying to cast a heal getting cs'd/pumelled/silenced/mana burnt and getting smashed, no?

Sure BoF will be dispelled/purged but it's likely you have enough time to move/position yourself properly and perhaps save your life, besides if you have 2-3 dps attacking you and 1 shaman/priest removing your buffs.. what's your team doing to help you out? Why aren't they snaring/interrupting/making members of the enemy team fear for their lives.. Most arena paladins have 20 points in prot for stoicism too for resistance to dispell/purge.

BoF is awesome on warriors but it doesn't always have to go on the warrior, often you can save the day using it on whoever is being assisted (including yourself).

If you are focusing on 2v2 and 3v3 it might be worth dropping 41 point holy and imp wisdom for Blessed Life.

You might want to try this spec:
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/...00000000000000

or this spec:
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/...00000000000000

The universe is run by the complex interweaving of three elements. Energy, matter, and enlightened self-interest.

 

◊ Shadowed

Running around pillars and LoSing puts you at risk of dying because your support can't heal/cc people off of you, I've seen tons of people who try and run around the pillars to avoid being killed and all they manage to do is LoS everyone and get killed even faster when they could have survived from a BoP or being healed. The only time kiting people around really works as a healer is when you have teammates helping to snare everyone, or a Hunter and you're running around the trap.

 

Vazu

Good luck trying to kill a SL Warlock's Felhunter in 2v2 or 3v3 play. I can count on one hand how many times it's died when teams try and do that. Every game where they successfully killed it, we've won because they spend so much time/mana doing it. The thing has nearly 8k HP in my gear and ~ 4500 armor or something. Even if you do kill it, I'll just instantly re-summon another one. Meantime my Warrior (on our 3v3) is chewing through your team while you focus on a pet.

(Most SL Warlocks have 3/3 Demonic Resilience, which reduces damage to our pets by 15%)

..now, if you see the Warlock casting UA, kill the Felhunter. But that's what I enjoy most about SL. I use a Felhunter frequently, and it takes teams some time to figure out that killing it is wasting their time. Most SL Warlocks out there will try and use a Felguard.

 

◊ Shadowed

Isn't the cooldown restriction being lowered to 10 minutes in 2.1, so you can't use Fel Domination anymore? Haven't seen anything offical on it or in patch notes (as far as i can see) though.

 

Vazu

No, the 10m thing has been one big rumor which would completely change everything in arena PVP. There are so many classes who would be hurt by this, and Shaman most of all. I seriously doubt they would do that. Go through a list of class abilities and count how many different classes would take huge hits (not to mention teams) if they nerfed the CD for arenas to 10 mins.

 

padrote

Heroism/Bloodlust are 10 minutes so Shamans wouldn't be hurt. I can't even think of any other abilities that have a cooldown of 10.1-15 minutes besides fel domination.

 

◊ Shadowed

Regarding the 10 minute thing, http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread....1&pageNo=9#162 so thats probably how it started.

 

Vazu

The rumor was Bloodlust/Heroism would get changed to 12 mins and the arena change would go down to 10.

 

Keline

What exactly do shamans bring to an arena team besides Bloodlust? I seriously doubt this would happen

 

MeCh

Windfury, purge, earthshock, among other things.

 

Keline

Winfury usually dies to target macros.
Purge is pretty nice but you could have a shadow priest instead who can also dispell defensivly and a shadow priest is just as squishy as a shaman.

Earth Shock is good, but that's about it. The shaman is a weak spot in any group as they don't have any "lol you no kill me!" button - Blood Lust is the main reason they aren't the rarest class in the arena.
enhancement is pretty pathetic, these shamans are probably easiest to kill
restoration is a far worse healer than a Paladin - in challenging fights I usually have more than twice the Healing done our shaman has
Elemental is shut off when under attack - we tried that one often enough.

 

drole

No player can benefit as much on hes own as the team can as a whole, obviously. Player skill is not always about what abilities you use, or in witch order etc. However what you say on VT/TS and how well you predict other players moves makes a huge difference.

The diffence between healing a player capable of knowing when hes going to take damage and one who doesnt is huge, for example.

If you leave the monkey with the paladin your going to see a far bigger number of "random deaths" due to LoS/Range issues and all that sort of things.

Where to place the monkey? The class that would take the longest to kill with no actions being done. A poor player will hurt your team no matter what class he plays, however the diffence between having him alive and not alive is what makes the biggest difference.

 

PSokar

I guess the first thing I want to respond to is the OP's suggestion that the paladin would be the best class in an arena team to be operated by a poor player. Well, that sort of question just seems like asking somebody how they would like to die, firing squad? Lethal injection?

Though he does have somewhat of a point. If another team leaves you alone (this is the opposite of my experience though), then the class doesn't take too much skill. With possibly the exception of warrior, most classes have it easier when left alone. I guess since this is a pvp thread I will just relate some of my experiences in pvp since I've done all 3 ladders a bit. Also I don't really like comparing say shamans to paladins in pvp healing because their role is different. I think they play the healing support role very well, and I think it'd be hard for them to match paladin healing because they are doing tons of other useful stuff. Totems, purges, bloodlust, earthshocks, etc... but we are talking 1,000's of mana spent that does not go into healing, and oh yeah; I love mana tide so much.

2v2 - So far I've only played w/ a warrior (Hieu - Dragonmaw US if you are interested). I guess all I have to say is that it is literally impossible to be consistent in this format. If your good I suppose you'll just win more than you lose and rank up, but it seems to me that with the paladins hyper-vulnerability to spell locks/CoT/Fear things can go wrong easily. I nearly always use a shadow reflector against teams with warlocks in them in this format. I usually use the shadow reflector when I am not aware of the felhunters spell-lock cooldown and absolutely must get the heal off. So far I agree with the general sentiment in this thread that a fair amount of stam is important in this format.

I've done a bit of 3v3 with a hunter/rogue/warlock and at that time it was just mostly for fun. With me as the only healing class in a 3v3, it really ended up being pretty similar to 2v2. Then me, Hieu, and Echoik (shaman) made a 3v3, and catapulted to 2150 in 50 games. That was really fun, and with another healer there, It wasn't quite as intense since he could heal me when I got locked down, although the shaman was most frequently the target. Somebody mentioned windfury tots getting killed quickly early in the thread, and this applies to 5v5 as well; the totems get killed but the buff stays on the weapon for another 5-8 seconds, plenty of time to drop another totem.

5v5 is what I really enjoy and is the reason I quit playing my priest. Our set-up was Paladin, shadow priest, hunter, shaman, warrior. This set-up was really fun, and we got to 2150 very quickly, (up from like 1750 which is what our old class set-up was more or less capped at.) Then we had a bad night (hunter was not there) and the team unraveled.

There are several things I find difficult about the paladin class. Spell locks are pretty much my bane. Somebody earlier mentioned Sck's video, which I enjoy a lot. The guy has a far greater degree of situational awareness than I do, and while it may just seem like a nuance to the paladin class I believe it makes a huge difference.

The second thing that I dislike is the 30 yard range of my blessings and cleanses. Generally I prefer to be as far from the fray as possible when I am healing (to avoid spell locks and be able to see people coming for me), but being close enough to bop, bof, cleanse when it is needed is important. I guess that just kind relates back to situational awareness. Which kind of leads me into my next point. I really feel that I have two primary roles in the 5v5 format that are of equal importance. One is obvious; keep my team up, and the second is to with intelligent use of cleanse/bof enable my dps as much as possible (or w/ frost trap keep people alive). In my experience having your team kill people is as important as not having your team die.

And I guess the last thing that I find difficult is intelligent use of ds. Right now I pretty much use it when I know a spell lock would certainly result in the death of a team-mate. Although I think in general that shield use is something that will just get better with experience. I can only recall two 5v5 games in which I was not the last, or 2nd to last player to die. I think going for a paladin is a bit (only a bit) under-rated, but generally I don't have a problem in 5v5 with being the target of dps. I think the reason for this is that they don't actually have to kill me to make me useless. I've played some teams with what I thought were great mages, because I went insane trying to stay away from them, but they would always manage to cs me. After that happened their team would trinket up and take someone out. I know paladins seem to have different opinions on this but I am eagerly awaiting the imp concentration aura change. A lot of those cs's would not have been deaths with the 2.1 changes. Kind of a different topic altogether though.

Right now the set-up I play most often with is Paladin, warrior, rogue, mage, priest and I can't even articulate how much I miss the hunter. I always thought that the only real benefit of it was to freedom kite and keep people alive, but now I realize how much it just controlled the other teams. Spell interruption was never an issue for me w/ that set-up. Maybe the teams were worse, maybe the trap just helped me (by hindering the other team) to get better positioning. It sure feels different.

 

Zraknul

This is true, however I do find the shaman beneficial over a second paladin which we have tried. Because he's a much more obvious target, I generally get harassed less because they're trying to burn him down. The resto shaman does better "on the run" so to speak than the paladin in my opinion. Bloodlust is pretty important for them though.

 

Leene