Andemoni

First off, I would like to say that if I were to make this thread in the official Blizzard WoW forums, the replies I'd get propably wouldn't be what I'm after; constructive.

When the arena season began, we saw how double warrior teams quickly started dominating it with their favorite little pocket healers, the paladins. Intentional or not, the reign of this setup was quite short-lived as it was remedied by the advent of resilience gear and higher hp pools. As the new arena season is soon to be started, it has given birth to a whole new breed of cookie-cutter setup.

Our 5v5 team is comprised of a holy paladin, arms warrior, balance druid, marksmanship hunter and a frost mage. Not the usual roster, I know, but I take a lot of pride in being a part of a successful team that isn't flavor of the month. We are a group of friends who want to be able to enjoy the game together, so please do refrain from making comments how we should make some class replacements or such.

So, onto the issue at hand. Our team was at 2270 rating today, from which it plummeted swiftly to its current 2141. We played 29 games, won 21, lost 8. Of course, this means that the games we won gave around 1-9 points and losses were in the high 20s. We do not have any big problems with any roster other than the one we lost our rating to, namely teams with a warlock or two and a shadow priest. Even the low-rated teams with worse gear than we've got just rape us. We did, however, manage to win one fight against such a team after we got very lucky once. But it happened just this once.

We have tried about every conceivable tactic against such teams, and nothing seems to be effective. There just doesn't seem to be a way for us to have a fair fight against 2x affliction warlock, holy paladin, shadow priest and a <random class> team. It doesn't really matter what the random class is, as we've seen a warrior, a rogue and a shaman filling that spot.

What is the weakness of the double warlock coupled with a shadow priest team? How should we try to tackle this challenge? I'm at a loss here, and starting to lose faith. It is the only single setup that I feel violates me rapidly from behind, without even giving me a chance to fight back properly. If anyone from a decently high-rated team is facing similar issues, I would love to have a discussion about how to make do.

This is not a whine thread, so keep out the warlock-related insults as well as the shadow priest ones. And please, don't mention how we should get 200+ shadow resistance from some lowbie greens or the crafted epics that you need to PvE to get. So, in short, please refrain from making any comments that are similar to those that you would see on the lost cause known as the official forums of this game.

Let the discussion begin.

 

malthrin

Paladins, while definitely strong in their own right, really shine when they're up against a physical damage opponent (personal armor, BoP, BoF). DOT teams are strong against the weak dispelling of Cleanse and DOT teams are getting more popular as the metagame cements around Warrior/Paladin. Bring a Priest - a better defensive dispel and an offensive dispel for armor buffs counters the teams you're having trouble with.

 

hip

There's two easy solutions, neither of which you are going to like:
1) Remake your team; have your mage spec a more burst oriented build (fire or arcane) and replace the druid with a shaman. At this point you attain grounding totems and a nice burst to take down one of their players early in as they will likely do to yours. Alternatively, you can replace your druid with a priest and dismantle their paladin early on with some clever assisting and mass dispel use.

2) Get shadow resistance gear.
You dont need to PvE to grab "of Shadow Protection" greens off of the AH which will keep your stamina levels high and vastly increase your survivability against one trick ponies such as these teams. By refusing to acknowledge this as a tactic, you are effectively removing your teams one way of staying at its current makeup and beating this type of team consistently. My personal suggestion is that you try this before throwing it out the window.

 

Andemoni

As I already stipulated, we are not changing the class composition of the team. It has been stated by Blizzard how the 5v5 bracket is supposedly balanced. With the right ratio of defensive and offensive abilities, it shouldn't count which classes you have. Naturally, some setups might be a little more vulnerable to certain others, but this doesn't mean one setup should be allowed to steamroll anything without breaking a sweat.

Why would I change my *PvP* gear for some specialized resistance gear? Why is there no shadow resistance gear purchasable with honor points or arena points, then? Why is it that one would be forced to downgrade his gear to just have a chance against one type of team?

We are NOT changing our class composition, so stop suggesting it. We are NOT going to grab some specialized gear just to have a fighting chance, so stop suggesting it.

Yes, resilience is horribly broken against DoTs. Yes, it needs to change, but there must be something that one can do excluding the two suggested paths to overcome this obstacle.

 

◊ Kalman

Balanced doesn't mean that there aren't winning matchups; balanced means there is no composition which wins all matchups. Your team is weak vs. the caster shadow damage teams; other group compositions (some of which have already been suggested in this thread) are not. Refusing to adjust to the fact that your specific team makeup is your problem is just denying the obvious.

http://mmorchive.net

The WoW forums, explained:

 

◊ Shadowed

Fun combo to play. Chances are, you wont be able to beat them.

Only thing I could think of that you could really do it burn the squishest of the 3 and have your Mage locking the other 2 down, if they are only running one healer you could probably burn them down faster then the healer can keep up, or you'll force the Shadow Priest to drop out of form and help healing in which case you removed another person DPSing your team.

 

• Digo

I understand your frustration, but your desire to overcome broken mechanics without resorting to "deviant" strategies is flawed through no fault of your own, but rather, the broken mechanics themselves.

Fear is broken. Going up against a team with at least 4 different kinds of fear that doesn't break on damage (7 if they have 2 warlocks, and no, fear does not break with damage even post 2.1, as I can be loaded up with DoTs and yet fear still persists), silence, spell lock, passive mana and health regeneration, and unmitigatible instant cast damage can't be overcome by pure skill on your part.

You're realizing that the game is broken and looking for a way to counter it. Short of abusing the same rules, you can't.

 

Andemoni

This is what we usually do, and it does work - we do get the shadow priest down most of the time before any of us die. But even with the shadow priest gone, the double warlocks, even when fully controlled, just rape people. The crowd control and damage they can put out is nothing short of massive, and I shudder to think of the numerous times I've been completely helpless against such a team. The problem with warlocks is that no matter the control you exert upon them, they will still be effective enough to do their job.

If it is truly a necessity to get shadow resistance gear for a specific match up, then I'm completely disappointed by the arena system itself. Weak.

 

• probiscus

Get a rogue. You can reduce a warlocks effectiveness to near 0 - while forcing the opposing teams healer to blow exorbitant amounts of mana keeping him up. Especially if he's spec'd UA. Even better if he's demon, b/c w/ that spec his only defense is SL, so sweeping strikes/FF down his pet and have a rogue kick gouge and generally stun him so he can't .5 sec cast a new pet and SL it.

 

◊ Shadowed

Have you tried maybe splitting damage on both of the Warlocks, CCing the Priest and either the misc class or the Healer? It's rather hard since you're using one healer to keep up with all the DoTs.

 

Trippy

Is it a necessity to wear high stamina gear in PvP? Weak.

If you're not taking easy steps to increase your surviving power, its your own fault.

I fail to see how using a simple (and easy to get) set of gear is any different from enchanting your gear and using decent sockets.

 

Keline

How is shadow resistance easy to get? Are the Black Temple crafting items really that easy to make, don't they require Frozen Runes equivalents?
Won't wearing green SR items gimp your stats so much that you can't do anything?

 

Trippy

Greens "Of Shadow Protection" are all across the Auction House, they give excellent amounts of Stamina and Shadow Resistance, a full set with about 240 resistance (couple that with Shadow Resistance Aura) shouldn't take you any longer then 3 or 4 days to gather.

I play on a very low population server and I put a Shadow Protection set together after 2 days of AH browsing. I don't think it would be a big problem on higher pop servers.

 

Andemoni

It is the same for all classes against any other, apart from warlocks.

Easy steps? The epic shadow resistance gear requires high-end PvE commitment, something I will never do again. The 60+ shadow resistance greens are a rare find on the auction house. Why am I not forced to use specialized gear against mages? Why not against shamans? Why should only warlocks have this luxury?

Enchanting your gear is natural progression. You don't need specialized gear for that, you can enchant anything. You don't require anyone to stack fire/frost/nature/arcane resistance, so once again, why should shadow be the exception to this rule?

It seems the consensus is then to forget all your principles and go with the flow. Sigh.

 

◊ Lord BEEF

Warlocks are weakest against physical damage classes that can break fear. To beat that matrix you need to capitalize on that weakness.

Check out my friend's bitchin' Lord of the Rings Art

 

Trippy

Currently, your class makeup is terribly weak against a combination of Warlock and Shadow Priest, however, I will admit this freely. Warlocks are the most havoc wreaking, annoying, painful, and overall deadly class in the game if you let them have their way.

If you want to win, you'll have to either change your class setup (throw a rogue in there, maybe a shaman), which you don't want to do, or you change the way you itemize.

Now, another example, if I were to come across a team focusing on Fire damage, I would indeed use a Fire Protection set, the same with every other source of magical damage. As of now, the combination of Warlock and Shadow Priest can put out so much Shadow damage and is rather common and effective, it would seem that people will need to stack odd stats in order to get around this gross powerhouse.

 

Voljun

I understand the desire to not replace any of your team mates or gimp yourself by using Green BoE SR items. Unfortunatly, those are two easy ways of beating that group setup.


The only other option I can think of is to either go through Armory for the teams you happen to have trouble against. I'm guessing there may be 5 teams that fit that exact description with your rating in your battlegroup. Regardless of what the actual number is, you could create alts on those specific servers and just queue when those teams arn't fully formed. That would minimize having to go against those teams. It isn't necessarily the greatest solution especially if you view this tactic as "cheap". But it is a solution.

If I was having as much trouble with these team setups as you seem to have, I would definatly opt for the 3rd choice.

 

Andemoni

My principles won't allow me to do this. I want to be able to beat every single setup with our current one, which seems quite unlikely as we've currently seen. We might beat some crappy teams without the gear or skill, but just barely. Teams that can actually play and have attained the best available gear are simply something that overrun us without even flinching.

I was hoping for something new to come out from this thread, but so far all the available options are those that I've already tallied up. Keep up the suggestions, though, maybe someone's out there to show us all the light.

 

Thaumaturge

Rather than looking at it as warlocks having an extra luxury, perhaps look at it as warlocks having an achilles heel in that you can completely shut all aspects of the class down by simply wearing a resistance set. If only I could do the same to rogues & warriors.

I can understand not wanting to change your class makeup, but refusing to wear resistance gear is short sighted and unfounded. With your team's class composition, that's frankly the most reliable way to beat such teams. Does this mean that every single team facing this matchup will need shadow resistance gear? Absolutely not; warriors, rogues, and shammies are extremely powerful in such situations. For your specific team this matchup is a huge weakness, and for whatever reason you want to overlook the simple and reliable solution and remain weak against it, making this thread essentially moot.

 

Sumie

as someone who uses an affliction warlock + shadowpriest combo in our 5v5 (we've gone 24-2 with our makeup of Affliction Warlock/Shadowpriest/BM Hunter/Resto Druid/Holy Paladin), the key flaw about your group is you have no rogues or shamans. We fear those two classes the most. Secondly, you have no purge, thus if any one of us gets down low, a simple BoP can save our butt.

Generally, we always focus-fire the warrior first, because with the number of CC's we have to control healers (silence, spell-lock, fears, cyclones), it's not hard to drop him at all. Yes, we only have 3 DPS and 2 Healers, but 3 DPS is really all we need to burst him down. And by killing the warrior, we not only make it a 4v5, but we take out the most threatening target in your party and the only one we can't fear.

The main thing you can do, however, (and I don't see a lot of warriors do this) is play defensively. Switch to defensive stance if you see you're being focus-fired, spell-reflect, intervene to your healers, don't blow death wish so early, pillar dance, etc. While our combo doesn't rely on 3-min burst cooldowns like mages, the shadowpriest can run out of mana after a minute, and at that point, we're severely handicapped.

The main reason affliction warlock + shadowpriest is becoming more prevalent in 5v5 is due to the fact that there's nearly always a warrior and paladin in every group. And that's what we love to see. Just as in 2v2 and 3v3, it's rogues, frost mages, other warlocks, shamans, and disc/holy priests that give us trouble.

 

Bibdy

Prayer of mending, Tremor Totem, Grounding Totem and Druids' HOTs and curse cleansing make affliction warlocks' lives hell in arenas. Its unfortunate that you have none of those at your disposal.

There's always free cheese in the mouse traps, but the mice there ain't happy.

 

Andemoni

Actually, we do. As I said, we have a balance druid. This doesn't mean that he is the kind of druid that stays in moonkin form all the time. No, he helps when help is needed, which is practically after the initial 10 seconds of the fight has passed. He does the HoTs, and our mage decurses.

As for playing defensively, we tried that. The problem with that is that the warrior does absolutely no damage whatsoever if he goes 1h+s and spams spell reflect. Well, you can't *spam* it, but uses it as often as possible. This cuts down our dps by a lot, and even with me and the druid healing, the warrior will eventually drop dead. The healing output required to heal the damage output is something quite sick.

 

oldmandennis

Your understanding of balance is off. The idea that any collection of 5 specs with "With the right ratio of defensive and offensive abilities" can compete close to evenly with whatever other combo is put out there is pretty silly - and has never been a stated design goal of arenas.

Arenas are balanced as long as there is another combo that can kill the shadow based one. If the shadow one is overpowered and becoming overpopulated, and a little while the "shadow killing" group will start to become more popular. Maybe your immutable group will be able to defeat the shadow killers.

The obvious answer is green shadow protection gear, and an item rack button. As soon as you see a shadow based team, hit that button. It's a cheesy answer to a cheesy problem, but invoking "principles" over one little part of a video game is cheesier still. If Pom-pyro was state of the art for PvP, you be silly not to atleast look at some FR gear.

Or maybe you could just respec a bit. I'm not very good at arena, but wouldn't a BM hunter do better vs a lock? If your druid is spending all of his time HoTing, shouldn't he go resto?