Of course, 3v3 and (if there are any out there), 5v5 too.

G'day all,

Up until now I've done most PvP on my hunter (Hunter/Priest, Hunter/Rogue, and Hunter/Rogue/Pala) with mostly mediocre results, perhaps in part due to my teammates not having a great deal of PvP gear and being PvE oriented players. A particular gem: "Blind the rogue" "No powder" "wtf, since when?" "like, 2 weeks".

However, just last week a Combat Rogue friend and my Feral Druid alt hit 70, and we're PvPing with ~7,000-8,000 HP and at best 1-2 pieces of Spirit Shard/Halaa PvP gear. Firstly, a cautionary word: We're only rated 1,500 at the moment, but we're already finding gear to be the significant block as many opponents at this level are the casual-raider in good blues with a few karazhan epics. Against such dps and with mostly PvE feral gear, the healing capacity of my class is close to useless so this changes the dynamic quite a bit.

In any event, playing double-stealth has been a very unique experience that I can see a lot of potential for. My other 2v2 teams with my hunter largely left players to their own devices, such that the full extent of communication was basically what was being CCed at what time and when crucial cooldowns are being used. With my rogue buddy it's a bit more complicated, as we're much more CC dependent but also very dependent on each other's DPS. We're slowly picking up even more advanced strategies, such as a gouge + double re-stealth, or both of us opening up on a target, both restealthing, and starting anew with 5 CP on our main target. We also depend on short-term CC for my weak feral heals.

So far, Fel Hunter Warlocks + Paladins have given us trouble, but surprisingly, Paladin + Warrior hasn't so much - the rogue controls the paladin sufficiently that roots/cyclone can keep the warrior at bay while he forces a bubble. This may be a skill (or lack thereof) thing however. Against teams with a capacity to not fall victim to our opener, we can usually throw them off if I don my PvE bear form gear and charge in and take their initial fire. Burst teams are a weak point at the moment also, but I suspect that is likely a gear gap.

In short, I've found the potential for highly coordinated strategies to be significant, so I'm curious as to if there are any other double-stealth teams out there and what your experiences have been, your weak points, strong points, and major rating hurdles.

When you get down to it, the only reason double stealth is effective is due to Cyclone being overpowered. The higher up you get the more trouble you're going to have because they'll be wearing more STA and Resilience, or due to just being kited or CCed since you don't have a dispeller.

We've started to play them rather often as a Priest/Rogue team and most of the time outlasting Sap and Blind isn't the issue, it's the fact that Cyclone can be alternated or spammed on one person to take them out for 8-9s, which isn't very hard to do when you have a team that can burst or stun.

Cyclone is easily the most powerful druid ability in the arena at the moment, so get the arena gloves as soon as you can, the bonus is more noticeable than you'd think (minus 0.1 second from Cyclone cast time).

My experience from 2-3 months of rogue/druid pvp can be boiled down to plate = bad, cloth = good.

On a more serious note, we've tried more or less any reasonable spec (both of us) and found the only real viable way to win is burst. A couple of good pointers.

1. Get a sap of as often as possible
2. More often than not you'll loose if the match goes over ~1 minute, so spam your cd's before that mark.
3. Patience, dont ever rush an opener.
4. Make sure you are always the offensive team, dont start healing untill it is neccesary!
5. SPAM cyclone.
6. Make sure you cyclone the other player when paladins buble so they cant heal them and make sure to cyclone BoP'ed targets so they cant be healed too.
7. On blades edge, mount up and rush to your end of the bridge and stealth there, the last thing you want is to have two ranged classes standing on a pillar each, with the exception of bad mages.
8. Wound poison!
9. Against mages, force a blink and root. Either they are forced to iceblock or they'll die.
10. You are one of the worst outlasting combo's, so dont try to win that way.

I play in a druid/rogue/druid 2v2 and 3v3 team. We don't play a burst damage strategy as much as sustainability and control. Overall Drole is spot on.

We're getting better at synchronizing cyclone and a vanish/sap combo, using blind to reset diminishing returns on cyclone, and being patient with teams who camp the pillars in blade's edge. It's cheesy, but we wait for the opposing team to get bored and step off the pillar.

Our lineup: Balance druid, a feral druid, and a sub. rogue.

I find for our 2v2 team (me as Resto Druid and my partner as Subtlety Rogue), for Blade's Edge we cannot afford the chance that we face a Hunter/X or Shaman/X team as they will quickly abuse the pillars in the center---if they get their traps and totems setup, we are starting off uphill. We forego our usual stealth in that map and charge up mounted on the bridge to deny access to the pillars, stealthing at last second even if it gives us away a bit earlier.

I've found that in my Feral Druid + Rogue 2v2 stealth team, a useful strategy against teams who abuse the Blade's Edge pillars (any combination of class which camp out on one or both of the pillars at the start of a match) is to simply wait. Be a jerk and stay out of range of flares, blizzards, the stealth-detect powerups, rains of fire, etc, and just wait for them to get bored and antsy. Eventually, one or both of them will grab the sight powerup and look for you, and when they don't see you from their perch they will get frustrated and jump down to search you out. This is when you go in. Use sprint and dash if you must.

In a Stealth 2v2 team, the opener is your greatest advantage. Many teams will blow their perception right off the bat so be careful to avoid them until it wears off. Don't be afraid to just sit there while they jump around looking for you, maybe even go Armory them. The more you wait for them, the more distracted they will be, and so when you do go in for the opener it will have a much greater effect.

Edit:

If you are a druid and you find yourself facing another stealth team, I have found that switching to my raid-tank gear with the pvp trinket has won several matches which might have played out differently had I been wearing less durable gear. If it's a stealth team you're facing, you can be fairly confident that they will be very melee-reliant (the possibility of a dual-moonkin team is low enough that I'll disregard it), and using gear meant to take hits from Internet Dragons™ will help out quite a bit.

Well my friend and I have had good success this week, lifting up from 1450 to 1600 in our unenchanted blue/green gear.

Our best wins are fast, but often playing the survivability card can work so long as we can keep at least one target controlled while we dps the other. Stuffed up openers are our #1 reason to lose, e.g. at the last minute perception is flicked on, the rogue jumps off to escape but I've already laid in with my opener.

As others have said we're slowly realising that patience is a virtue, something we abruptly realised last night when it came down to 1v1 between my team's Rogue and a Moonkin, and it occured to me after the Druid cast Summon Treants that our rogue could have just vanished, waited for his crucial cooldowns to be up, and started from scratch again.

A strat that my rogue buddy and I have found very valuable is to hop on the other pillar, the one the opposing team isn't on. Usually when the stealth debuff spawns they'll hop across to our pillar, as you don't automatically gain the debuff when it spawns underneath you. Unwittingly, they become stuck and snared in a mess of claws and fist weapons. The discovery of this strat netted us 21 points against a ~1700 mage/hunter team while we were 1520 or so. Admittedly, we were lucky they didn't think to flare the other pillar, but our thinking was we could probably drop down, drop combat, restealth and try again.

We've also got in to the habit of using Armory on hunters to check if they're BM spec and hence able to break sap.

Good advice. We find a reasonable number of teams will have at least one human, which often gives them a large opener advantage. Additionally my rogue is combat and neither of us have any Equip: Improved Stealth detection gear.

Has anyone else had any luck with forgoing the opener and charging in in bear form gear to take initial fire?

--

Edit: Did have one question with regards to gear. The rogue in my team is currently operating under the burst premise and hence, mostly, wears his PvE gear. It's made healing a bit harder and I can't spend as much time in Cat but we're not sure what the verdict is on itemisation.

I did 2v2 resto/feral for a while and got about as far as 1700, while fun it wasn't very effective.

Started a 3v3 last week with me, rogue, and either another rogue or a feral and it's doing much better. Being able to start stealthed and use sap and cyclone to essentially start the match as 3v1 is very effective, we're up to 1867 rating so far. The stuns/snares of the rogue make it a lot easier for the druid to land shreds, and me getting two innervates in a single fight is very nice

My team rogue/paladin ran into a druid/rogue team this week which gave us a nasty surprise with a really well timed cyclone.

Remember cyclone is 30 yards, heals are 40 yards.. you can out range it and LoS sight it. On Nagrand it's easy to LoS the Cyclone with the pillars. This turns the fight into an endurance heal off and even healing through wound poison (where as the druid can cure over time it) a paladin will beat a druid every time.

On blades edge it's alot tougher but you can still out range it, pre cast bubble if you need to go into within 30 yards of the druid.

Warrior/Druid is alot harder.. who do dps on.. the druid who can forever run away if I can't get a Judgement of Justice on him (which puts me in cyclone range) or the Warrior who you feed tons of range and takes ages for a rogue to kill.

I run a 41/0/20 rogue 1/29/31 druid team, currently in the 2200's and continuing to go up.

The most important tip I can give is to make sure you get the dual-opener, because if you get pushed out early and you get behind your druid will quickly become overwhelmed healing and won't be able to properly do his CC job, which leads to a downward spiral until you end up losing.

In order to get better last week we had our druid FRAPs some of our fights so that I can see much more clearly what went wrong or if there was anything more I can do, and this week it made a huge difference(we jumped from stuck in the 1800-1900's to 2200 in two weeks). So we kept doing it, and he released the past weeks footage if you want to get any insight from our fights.

http://files.filefront.com/mookystin.../fileinfo.html

Key moment: In the Warr/Pal fight where we end up losing, we switch targets half-way through because the paladin was doing a figure 8 kite and I just couldn't touch him. Despite the fact that him using BoF on himself allows the warrior to be rooted when the paladin comes back to the warrior he can cleanse the warrior allowing the warrior to hamstring me giving them a huge advantage. Until the patch we are still forced to attempt to kill the paladin first(Commanding Shout can be nasty, we play warriors seriously even 1v2) but as soon as that happens you have to know to switch off.

Dwarf Priest/Warr scene: Not using Vanish->Cheap shot on the Dwarf priest as he started kiting, allowing him to ProM -> Desperate Prayer to full which made the match ridiculously close because my burst cooldowns were down and I couldn't quite kill him before the next fear.

Most builds can't get the stealth speed talent. You can make the jump with a runspeed gem + stealth, but the major issue is frost traps and snares, actually. That's the biggest weakness of a stealth team - if they get a talented frost trap down in the middle of Blade's Edge + a DPS on the pillars there's absolutely nothing we can do but go hide and wait for him to come off the pillar, and we have no dispel to remove snares.

As far as Exposing plate - it's a default debuff that you're applying to everyone. When starting a rushdown on a target, I'm the sword rogue so I'm typically CS -> Shiv -> Expose -> Shiv(optional) -> SnD and then I get to start actually DPSing. The dagger rogue is starting Ambush -> Backstab -> SnD or KS depending on what we're targeting. There's too much HP/Resilience gear out there now to bet the farm on a crit Evis, so you see that fairly rarely and more when you've had some time to beat on the target and save up combo points. Even when you've hacked away at their mitigation somewhat, you're still looking at mail mitigation at best, rather than zilch for cloth/leather or almost nil for mail.

It's still a lot of fun to play, and it will be interesting to see where our 3v3 ends up hitting a cap at.

Depends largely in strategy i guess. I've never seen my rogue use it, but then again our strategy is mainly based on max damage within the first ~30 seconds while keeping the other target CC'ed/otherwise occupied. Eh well he might have used it after we've gotten something down but really we are ussually in so good shape by then that it really doesnt matter :P

Fearie Fire reduces the armor by 610 and only takes a global CD to apply, but then again i guess it depends on your gameplan.

As for the Endurance vs Burst i would be interrested in learning how people on an Endurance strategy cope with paladins and warriors (not neccesarily grouped together). Even being resto i found myself going oom way before any paladin or just about anything trying to heal a warrior.

You can get a 5 CP EA up within 6-8 seconds of the fight and lasts for 30 seconds.

Two reasons:

First is fears, half the time if you trinket out of a fear while on the pillar, no matter if you try to trinket right in the middle, it will most likely fling you off before you get control. This brings us to my earlier point where if you get behind as a dru/rog team your druid can't keep up and it spirals out of control.

Second is mutilate/backstab, where if they stand in the corner with their back to the edge we basically get to play a game of 'chicken' where if he falls nothing happens, but if I fall we just lost the match.

The jump onto the pillar isn't a huge deal, unless its a hunter group with frost trap on the bridge. Or if there is a shadow priest and you get unstealthed, with mind flay being spam able it forces me to CloS to even make the jump, which allows him to fear asap(and I could possibly drop with it) once he comes out of my KS.

Most? Only ones I can really think of that can't are heavy combat builds, but mut or hemo can both get it relatively easly unless you specifically go combat for the white damage (but Dirty Tricks in 2.1 is hacks)

It sounds like you're talking about combat builds while i'm talking mutilate specifically...and i've seen far more mutilate Rogues over combat in arenas and pvp.

If they're jumping on pillars you can always go hide and wait them out, most people get bored after a couple of minutes and will either grab stealth buff and run around or stay, in which case you usually just get a drink.

My 2v2 team is usually around 1800 (we had a bad run last week and dropped to 1675). We run mutilate rogue (me) and resto shammy. The only teams that have beaten us consistently are paladin hunter (this was just brutal) and pally combat rogue. In general I find double stealth teams to be easy to beat.

With mutilate my opening set of attacks (typically cs -> mut -> ks -> cb mut) runs around 6000 damage. That combined with a nature's swiftness lightening bolt (or whatever spell it is my parter throws) + a shock comes to around 9k damage. Double stealth teams tend to fail because as soon as they rush in to hit my partner, I counter-stun one and soak up the counter-counter stun. If the second stealther doesn't counter-counter stun me they lose quickly due to blind + full finishers on their partner.

In general I love this matrix. My only complaint would be the standard, paladins are just too strong. When facing Paladin/X I am forced to rush the palladin (hopefully sapping) and hope that my parter lives.

Sapping a paladin is kinda pointless, given that if they are not retarded they will have BoSacrifice on their partner ;/

Thats part of why priest rogue is so brutal :P Or having a shaman or lock with felhunter is so fun. A paladin can only do 1 buff on his dps so unless its a magic buffing class themselves bosac can be removed fairly easily in 2v2.

Dark mantle has it exactly right. The first thing we do against buff teams is purge the buffs (after the sap, if I can get it off). We tend to play a very defensive style, but so far it works well for us. The only thing I wish is that shammies had a defensive dispel. We lost 120 points to a Pally/Hunter combo last week--you'd think we'd stop queueing, but we got stubborn and paid the price for it. There is absolutely nothing a non-defensive dispel team can do against scatter shot/ice trap.