Yes, this is another topic about 5on5 and paladins, warriors and shamans synergy.
(And rogue/druid lacking more or less)

I would like to claim that at the current state of 5on5, there is only one drawback of using multiple warriors in a lineup combined with shaman and paladin. That is freezing trap(add entrapment talent) in combination with a priest and a paladin. Simply because it's the most powerfull anti melee spell ingame.
Now I wanna draw a nightmare scenario(spelling?) for 5on5.

We lost our paladin shaman and second warrior from our team, so we only have one lineup left.
That lineup is the following: Warrior, rogue, mage, priest, druid.
Now imagine fighting 3 MS warriors, 1 paladin, and 1 shaman on blades egde.

Like one of our players described it "its like going into a cleaning machine with blades".
They dont have to Crowd Controle, they can rely on bloodlust and windfury. They aim directly for our only offencive dispeller, the priest.

No matter how I think about it it feels like a insane upphill battle. We are looking for new players, but we have gone from 1960 rating to 1750 in 3 play days.
When fighting multiple warriors it really really hurts not having access to BoF and BoP, BoP being the only spell ingame except from Iceblock and Divine Sheild that can dispell Mortal strike.


With the current synergy/counter of paladins in relation to warriors domination in arena I cant see druids and rogues working properly together in 5on5. Even with patched upgraded sap its still only 12 sec and very easy removed in berzerker stance.
It feels very different from 5on5 playing for example warrior warrior paladin rogue shaman. Or just replace me with a hunter and the druid with a paladin and we are suddenly talking about power trips lineup. No matter how I look at it I feel like a big drawback. Am I wrong? Is there some neat way to make our current lineup working or should we just Stall 5on5 until we can get the key classes back?

Rotating Cyclone (and giving your Druid the cover he needs to do that) will be key to your setup, it's really jarring as a Paladin especially because you're used to not worrying about CC so much.

You can expect them to set a Warrior to guard a Cycloning Druid, which should also take some heat off your Priest as a good Druid will stay alive comfortably.

Telesis - We run the exact same lineup, and don't really consider ourselves a burst damage team. Usually burst teams rely on heavy CC to break an enemy team's rhythm, and then switching DPS to a key target.

With our lineup, shaman has no CC, druid has no DPS, and rogue can't CC and easily switch DPS. So how is the burst supposed to work?

Incidentally, we faced a team I really liked yesterday - dual rogue, mage, warlock, and paladin.

We run a similar lineup: Warrior, Mage, Hunter, Priest, Druid - it's not going very well, even for it's casual 10 games / week premise. All but the priest at one point or anther did reasonably well at organized BG PvP in classic, everyone follows instructions and coordinates well. Usually by the time we find a way to counter a more standard makeup team (i.e. find a way to make a rushdown work against their initial opening play) we're 1-2 against them and lose points anyway.

At this point I'm ready to pay an experienced Paladin gold to play with us every week and then go back to their regular team later in the week for the higher rating. If you have access to a Paladin, work them in.

We don't have any teams that are running 3 Warriors and ranked highly on Nightfall, but we do have Pal/Pal/War/War/Ele Shaman and we use Rogue, Mage, Warrior, Paladin, Resto Shaman, and had the same issue, we're an outlast team not a burst what your goal mainly becomes is being able to outlast the Warrior damage which you do by locking them down.

The trick in the end is you need to kill a healer as fast as possible, Paladin is your biggest threat and they go down quickly if you know how to take them out, don't even worry about CCing the Shaman just do everything you can to mitigate the damage the Warriors do, only one Paladin means you can kite the other 2 around, Cyclone the Warriors, jump between pillars, ect...if somebody wants to put a Warrior on a Druid just laugh at them, a good Druid can easly lock down a Warrior the entire time which is even better then a 6 second CC, but as people said, not having a Paladin hurts you.

Our group unfortunately varies widely but last week we happened to run that same makeup and did well - went 19-4 from 1664 to 1814, which is not bad given that some of our players are undergeared and played together for the first time. We used to run single healer before and coming from there this makeup seems godly.

We used to be in the ratings cellar too when we were all geared and specced for PvE (lol prot warrior) so I can emphasize with your situation. And we also thought "man, if only we had a pally". But truth is, a pally by himself is not the answer. Powerful, yes, but you need the whole package.

People seem to forget that arenas are highly competitive even at an average level. So even with decently skilled players you will get stomped if you are not prepared. And with prepared I mean gear and spec. Looking at your team I notice that you all have PvE specs. That is just not going to cut it as we learned the hard way. I attribute much of our ratings jump this week to the holy/disc priest we recruited. Have your priest go holy/disc for just one arena session and see if that improves your situation. I bet you will find that it does, and between a mage and a holy/disc priest a pally really isnt all that hard to counter.

The same goes for gear. One weekly reset I acquired 4 new items and I found that all of a sudden I was decent at arena after getting rolled all the time the week before. Coincidence? I don't think so. So if you want to PvP you will have to spring for the gear - yes those 12 STA gems are expensive but they are well worth it (I see you have those, so this is not directed at you personally).

The unfortunate (or fortunate) truth is that unless you commit yourself to arena you won't get very far. A bunch of people with PvE specs and gear can't just walz into an arena and dominate. That means either respeccing between raiding and arena or just doing one. Because unfortunately for most classes arena specs are pretty weak for raiding.

Just because you went 19 - 4 for a week doesn't mean much, other factors like who else is playing effects it, and at 1600-1800 rating you do have a rather large amount of teams you could possibly play against, honestly you should give it 3-4 weeks or play a lot more games over the week before you can really say that it's an actual benifit and not just a temporary boost.

Well The thing is. As I wrote, they just nuked our priest down, making it nearly impossible to keep BoP/BoF dispelled, renedering 2 of our 3 dps classes usesless.

To everyone else, mainly ur saying it works well with "simillar" lineups" hence u play with warrior mage priest, but those 3 classes aint the issue, its the rogue(me) and the druid. And the fact that we are "expendable" at best. I would rather say trash.

We have previously tried alot of matchups.
I will list a few examples:
2x warrior, pala, shaman, mage.(we also played that one but with rogue instead of mage)
warrior, rogue, mage, priest, pala
Warrior, rogue,mage, shaman, priest
Warrior, mage, mage, pala, priest

u get the point
We have had access to druid priest pala shaman in healing(not druid and shaman at the same time tho) and 2x warriors and 2x mages and 1 rogue.
And I think we have tried all different lineups between those.

My point is. Since we have played all these lineups I know that the difference between playing 2x warrior rogue pala shaman lineup and playing warrior rogue mage druid priest, is just scary.

Bloodlust WF and warriors in combination is really just the easy way to achive above 2000 rating on most servers. You run in, do alittle cc, maybe a HoJ on their pala while im on their dispeller, heck, we could even just rushdown the pala, swap, go back after sheild goes down. Since we have BoF and BoP than can be cast on me to render the melee dps killing me.

At least three of us temporarily respec every week just for our PvP night (myself, the mage, and the warrior), but the point about commitment is quite valid. 10-15 games a week is not enough time to gel teamwork or master strategies against specific matrices. Nor does a lack of non-areana PvP pieces speak well of our commitment (double 2 piece bonuses is looking to be a very nice resilience stacking strategy). Last week we plummeted partly due to subbing our regular MS warrior with someone's MS warrior alt still wearing quest greens (not such a bright idea).

We had our priest no-show this week and actually managed to beg a paladin from another team to cover us (and then rejoin his higher ranked team for their regular games & rating later on). Re-formed, managed to maintain 1500 range in our quick burst of matches. To be honest, the games we won seemed like matchups we would have won with the non-pally matrix as well, but several of the losses were slightly less humiliating than usual, and may have even been salvageable with better play.

At a low # of games played, the luck factor of specific matchups seem to make a huge difference. The class mixes that gravitate towards the top appear to be more robust in a wider variety of matchups, assuming beyond a certain watermark everyone involved is serious and committed to PvP.

Keep in mind that, with a tri-war/pala/shammy team, there will be no magical buffs other than blessings, bloodlust and earth shield, making spellsteal very viable.

I would advice you got the mage to specc a very heavy frost build with maxed out winter's chill, frostbite and permafrost, then have him /focus whatever healer needs counterspelling, and just do his best to crowd control every warrior he can get close to with poly, CoC, Nova, FBolt and Water Elemental[Freeze], having him spellsteal bloodlust and any BoP/BoF he sees. Have the elemental auto-attack one of the healers, naturally.

With the winter's chill talent, it's close to impossible for the paladin to dispell any snares or roots whatsoever (and a polymorphed warrior with 5 winter's chill debuffs would, in a perfect world, take over 9 seconds of pure spamming to free), while permafrost combined with frostbite will make it extremely hard for any of the warriors to move without the use of intercept. They will either have to spread out, or fall prey to the AoE Nova/Freeze/CoC combiantion, where if caught within they will simply have to wait for intercept to be ready before doing anything else.

If they spread out, there's absolutely no way a warrior without BoF could possibly do anything but slightly annoy a frost mage with his PvP trinket ready (while buffing the warrior with BoF would in this case only aid the mage), leaving him able to CC atelast two of them while keeping an eye for buffs to steal, the only real problem being mana.

A paladin would help, though.