Xarmageddon

I've found an ele shammy to do 2v2 with (I'm ret).
So I was wondering what I could do to further optimize my gear with gems and/or enchants. Currently I'm saving up WG marks to buy the 95 resi and 700something ap upon use trink, which will replace my gnomish lightning generator.

Check out my armory and tell me what I should change^^

 

ks197

Take off the nitro boots, put on icewalker. Replace your +str/+crit gems with +str/+hit until you reach about 163 hit rating. Replace medallion of the horde with the WG 190 attack power platinum discs, and take out the gnomish lightning generator and put in the one you mention in your quote. Use it at the same time you pop your wings. Update your enchants i.e. bracers. Don't know what flex-weave underlay does, is it as good as +22 agi? Depending on your comp, perhaps replace your resilience enchants with straight dps enchants.

 

Xarmageddon

Noted :P
The nitro boots and flexweave underlay (parachute with 15 agi), are for some fun in bgs, but I guess I should replace them since I'm going for arenas now.

 

Arkenphal

I think you'll be a much better player if you never ever try to make a castsequence macro work in PVP. Also for your last question, I have no idea what you're trying to do, but I'd specify my two partners name in seperate target statements and add a modifier:alt or modifier:ctrl to one so that if you press it once with no modifier, partner a gets your whatever and if you press it holding alt, partner b gets it.

 

feladoo

I play my pally (Veltica, The forgotten Coast), with the Disc Priest Vanica. We did 0-1.1 in 1 night. We are going to continue once I'm done with summer semester, but I'm studying up on this as well.
1.) Would it be altogether better for me to group with a druid? (The priest has an ok geared druid too).
2.) Our hardest teams to beat, thus far, are druid + X. If the druid is undergeared, it usually goes pretty quick, but with their endless mana-pool, most of our Druid-X matches take about 10 mins, while my priest is busy dispelling, mana-burning the everlasting pool on the druid.
3.) Any basic strategies? We've done well thus far. The only Arena functional addon I use is Healbot to one-button mouse click cast Hand of Protection on the Priest, should she need it. Any other suggestons?
4.) We both pve ALOT. Any specific items that are better in arena than pvp items?
I know some of these questions are noob, so thanks for your grace!

~BB

 

Crossbones

Unfortunately, ret/disc isn't close to as good as it was a short time ago. This is owed to partly to various nerfs (R.I.P. vindication) and partly to the rise of druids. You can still succeed but you will never OOM a good team, so you have to set up your kills perfectly in the time you have until the priest runs OOM. I played with a priest and we were bouncing around the 2300s before resto druids totally drained his will to play.

Ret/druid on the other hand is ridiculously forgiving. I'm now playing with a RL friend who has never arena'd before until now and we're doing alright when he doesn't even know what several of the abilities in the game do. The problem is that you are going to play other plate/druid teams often and the games last forever and are pretty damn boring in my opinion. You'll end up in situations where you can't run a druid OOM before innervate cools down.

For your other questions:

Download gladius. It's a useful arena frames addon. I also use mik's scrolling battle text so I can set triggers that will alert me to things happening to my partner (for example, if he gets strangulated, the strangulate icon and "dispel!" will flash on my screen).

Wear enough PvE gear to keep yourself hit capped. I use the conquest badge neck and gothik bracers -- the rest of my stuff is PvP.

 

Gnomage

I'm playing Ret/Druid on my pally (Sturm), and we have all kinds of trouble with priest teams, particularly Priest/Plate. My druid always goes OOM first because the priest just mana burns him and dispels hots/innervate. I try to stay on the priest to prevent this, but sometimes even while I am hitting the priest they will just stand there and mana burn the druid. We almost always win against dual DPS teams, but all our healer/DPS games go 15-20 min, and we usually lose. I am totally at a loss for what to do. It just doesn't seem like I can burst anyone down fast enough. And with no way to interrupt spells (other than HoJ) a lot of healing classes will just sit and heal themselves while I hit them. We're only rated about 1250 right now, but I have about the best PVP gear I can get without a higher rating. How do you deal with these types of teams?

 

Amera

How is your partner getting innervate dispelled with barkskin as it is? Pop BS and a few hots and just LOS if needed and the chance of it getting removed is almost zero.

With the priest blowing through mana dispelling and burning you really shouldn't lose a mana war against them at all. Also, given you are going to win with burst, you probably want the druid with a more offensive spec with insect swarm (glyphed). If you can set up a burst window with wings you should be able to get a kill.

 

Gnomage

I'll ask him about that. Is it standard for Pally/Druid teams to have to rely on the Druid for a lot of assistance when bursting? My partner usually tosses a Moonfire at my target when I call for a burn, but that's about it. I'm pretty sure he's spec'ed primarily for defense/healing, since we also run a 3s cleave team where he just needs to survive and heal.

 

Amera

Well, it's a couple things. As Ret you are typically going to win with burst, so getting healer assistance is pretty important. But secondly, druids don't typically need the extra output/survivability of the full resto spec in 2s. With Lunar Guidance and IS you can put out a fair amount more pressure.

It's worth nothing that when 3.2 hits this may all be moot. The way Ret damage is getting redone I'm not sure it will be worth anything at all in 2s (and 2s itself will become way less popular also, probably).

 

Crossbones

Yeah, ret has no future in 2v2 and isn't so great at the moment but 2v2 won't matter in 3.2. We'll just hope 3v3 still works out.

I don't see much priest plate. Start on the plate, swap to the priest when he starts to mana burn. Innervate should never be dispelled and you should ultimately outmana them if you can't get a kill. Druid needs to dodge fears, be ready to cleanse if he can't.

For priest/rogue, make sure your druid recasts thorns whenever it is dispelled because thorns+ret aura on rogues is ridiculous. If the rogues goes on you, repetenance followed by cyclone will likely end up with a dead rogue. Otherwise, they're easy to outmana. Kill/cyclone the shadowfiend if possible.

Yes, healers will just tank you. You need to surprise them/get lucky and swap targets constantly if you want a kill. It's a good rule to get your druid to immediately cyclone their dps the moment it leaves them and comes to peel you.

Druid should help with insect swarm/moonfire and cyclones, but any non druid team with the exception of warlock/healer can be outmana'd. You can't constantly set up nuke chains like you would with a priest but you do what you can. Honestly, I don't think ret even has much synergy with druids in the way we do with priests and shamans and the whole strength of this team is based on how hard it is to get a kill or oom the druid. You should never lose the mana war to anything but other druids.

 

Gnomage

I know a lot of the ret pallies around here are much higher rating than me (1350). When you were coming up the bracket, did you wear a lot of PVE gear? I'm pretty much solid PVP gear, and mostly 213s, no Furious, and it really doesn't seem like I do enough dmg in 2s to get the job done. At lower levels is PVE gear more viable?

 

Crossbones

I didn't have much of a choice in what to wear. I reactivated a little over a month after WOTLK launched and just used whatever I had until I could spend nax badges on hateful and arena points on deadly. Started with a TSD, instance blues, and some brutal gladiator gear actually.

Use as much PvE gear as you can get away with without dying I suppose. Just don't fall into the trap of buying into the hyperbole about how much damage ret actually does by itself. Even with full t8 type stats, you still won't be reliably solo'ing healers or anything.

 

Fimka

Who is your partner, from what i have gathered so far PvP gear is good until you get your resillience up to around 700, after that concentrate on your burst dps. Resillience gives you the ability to stay alive longer which is more important imo than dps. i have a question as well, wheat is the best strategy to take down a Druid/plate, Sharman/plate or Priest/plate team against 2 dps. i have the hardest time to take them down

 

Mordekhuul

Any disc/ret teams out there still playing well at high levels? I recently started playing disc/ret after playing heal/dk for a long time, have decent gear (1850 weapon, 700 or so resilience, 4200 or so self-buffed AP) and it seems a bit rough.

We've been just staying above a 50/50 win/loss ratio as we get used to the comp, while playing 1800'ish teams thanks to the priest's personal rating being around 1000 when we started (mine at 2000 or so), so our team rating has been taking a dive while working his personal rating up.

Definitely any team with a tree or any team with a DK can be an issue. Trees are very hard for ret to kill, particularly if the opposing team has a DK or some other class that can put a lot more pressure on a healer than you can (keeping my healer from helping go for kills as effectively).

Macros to put Sac on my priest, cleanse him, freedom him, or HoP him help, of course, but there's a big difference between the pressure I put on a healer, where they can move at full run speed as desired or sit in my face and cast mana burns on my partner and the pressure an opposing DK applies to my partner (constant slows, death grips, interrupts on a 10s cooldown, etc).

 

Fimka

Whats your advise for taking down healer/plate teams.

 

Mordekhuul

To be honest, I consider my 2000'ish rankings to be pretty mediocre. For whatever reason, I've just had trouble getting more than a slightly higher than 50/50 win ratio in 2's and 3's with my teams, despite feeling like my teammates are good players in general (we raid together..have for a long while), so I'm probably not the person for advice on pushing for Gladiator.

This is particularly true as ret/disc, as I just started playing this comp last week and find myself losing to scrub'ish 1700 rated teams if they have comps like druid/warrior or druid/dk.

 

Fimka

[quote=MatsT;1225660]As a resto shaman, i can provide some insight on this. Bursting someone down during a HoJ is certainly not easy and not something that will succeed every time. Some things that will help you for killing resto shamans specifically:


[*]If you are going to use the silence, it might be better to start with it. If you silence as he comes out of the stun, he will likely use a stoneclaw totem for a 4k absorb shield (totems can be cast while silenced). If you start with the silence, he might not feel it's worth wasting stoneclaw, and when the stun hits at 60% hp, it might be too late.[*]Try to make him "waste" trinket on normal stun or a cc while you kill his friend, then use an Avenging Wrath combo when his trinket is on cooldown.[/list]



Can anyone shed some light on the above post, which silence is he referring to. We only have HoJ and Repentance as far as i know

 

MatsT

Arcane Torrent, which would obviously just work for 50% of the paladin population. Humans will have to rely on their double trinkets for some extra burst instead.

As for the HoJ 100->0, with the Vindication nerf even ulduar geared Retris palas have no chance at all to take me down during a stun without Avenging Wrath, and probably not even with Avenging wrath.

 

Mordekhuul

I try to be thankful we are being nerfed out of the bracket that won't matter in 3.2 anymore, though it is the one I've enjoyed the most. Imagine trying to take out a resto shaman in 2's after the resilience buff and the massive burst damage nerf.

 

Fimka

Hi,

i started thinking about Armor Pen and wanted to get everyones opinion. i see that a lot of 226lv gear has Armor Pen, which raises a question, how useful is it in PvP. Since Armor Pen reduces armor of another player, is it possible to punch through healers shields and their armor deductions spells. for Example a priest, maybe a rogue, etc..


Thx

 

clliche

If you're asking if you can use armor pen to penetrate through a shield, no. You still have to go through the shield. Wowwiki: "The amount of damage absorbed by the shield is calculated after armor is taken into account. This means the shield will last longer on targets with more armor, and benefits from Inner Fire." I am however assuming this means you can go through a shield faster since your mitigation from armor is calculated before the damage is absorbed. Armor pen was more useful when it was a straight number but now that is is a percentage it has become a lot less useful in pvp. I don't think armor pen is useful enough for paladins in the first place to warrant gearing for it though

 

Fimka

Hi,

Recently i started playing with an arcane mage (i am a ret pally 0/19/52), we are doing ok so far (bouncing around in low 1500's) but still missing a good strategy.

Our current strategy is to rush a healer and try and dps him down, the problem is that it doesn’t always work and we are having issues taking down a druid with a good dps. Mage is using a sheep macro to slow the dps down and silence the healer as we attack together. i find that with Ret Pally's healing limitation (unless i am missing something) the longer the fight goes the harder it is to win/survive with this combo. how woould you approach a druid/arm warrior, priest/rogue, priest/DK teams, warriors have a nasty slow and healing stashing abilities and its hard for my mage to stay away from him. DK is constantly pealing me off the healer so we dont have time to really dps him down. Hunter/healer is another bad team for us, the hunter takes the mage apart. I was thinking of maybe keep the healer sheeped while i take he hunter down?.

what strategies should i use against these teams

Any advise is appreciated

Thx

 

Dodo

I think my Hunter/Paladin combo never lost to Mage/Ret, so I don't know how you could beat it. Maybe try and get a good sheep/sheep/counterspell/repentance/stun combo on the paladin to kill the hunter.

Obviously your mage has to be on his toes to not get stomped by the hunter. Ret tries to be in dead range of the hunter full time, so that he's basically not targetted. Use HOF on yourself, when traps are lying around to negate any lock and load procs...

But if the hunter is any good and the paladin not an idiot standing in the middle of nagrand and letting himself being chain-cc-ed your chances are pretty slim.

 

MarshallX

I'm currently sitting around 870 Res for my Ret PvP Set - don't really do arenas as I can't stand them.

How do you guys think my chances are if I find a 5v5 team with my current gear? Too much resilience? Grabbing an Anvil of Titans tonight as well..

The World of Warcraft Armory

Everything cleaves. And their cleaves cleave. And those cleaves thunderclap. These thunderclaps deathcoil.

So, no rogues.