Bakxs

Try being more flexible. I've never seen such a hard headed, short sighted plea for help. The answer is staring you right in the face, yet you choose to ignore it. The weakness of a double warlock & shadowpriest team is shadow damage. Take that away and they have very little. Your arrogance / ignorance that your team should be able to beat every combination without being flexible, especially a team of specialist is a joke.

Although, your concerns about these shadow damage teams is relatively valid. It seems there are a few teams with high ratings with relatively few games played that exploit that strategy. Still, it's not like they are unbeatable and can't be countered...

 

Zerakor

This is actually true, there are no PvP items designed to counter these two specs (shadow priests and affliction warlocks. I don't consider demo warlocks a problem of this magnitude however).

While people are explaining how to counter them by killing them fast or equipping sres gear etc, they forget the fact that 1) The other team will be killing your weakest link fast to, and 2) your stats will be gimped quite a lot by wearing the sres sets, meaning you can't do as much damage or heal as much damage as the other team can, considering they are wearing the standard gladiator gear which is superior to blues with sres.

I think the ultimate solution would be having resilience affecting dots in some way, lowering its overall dps as much as it lowers the dps of crit based classes. How much this is would be very easy to test and adjust, so I don't think it would be a balance problem.

 

obsolete

Someone else already touched on this...
The reason this shadow based combination is becoming more popular is due to it countering the current popular cominbations. As it itself becomes more prevelant, so then will teams that counter it start popping up and being successful much in the same way as it currently is.


Also re-iterating what someone else said... balance doesnt mean your combination has a EVEN chance of beating every other combination, it simply means every team has a counter... such that one combination doesnt have an advantage over every other possible combination.




Also i fail to see how you can distinguish shadow resistance gear being specialised gear compared to people stacking resilience. Resilience was never meant to mitigate all damage, simply burst damage (i.e. crits).

 

obsolete

The counter argument to this, from the warlock perspective, is that if resilience is to effect dot damage... then it should also effect the normal damage caused other classes (non-crit based damage). But then if this was the case.. then what is the point of resilience in the first place? then it just acts like a type of armour value which effects both melee and spell damage.

The strength of this combination lies in the the fact that its TWO warlocks AND a s.priest put together. Make resilience effect dots and any warlock roaming around by himself (i.e. no other lock or s.priest in the team) will be so severely nerfed youll find them almost non-existant in arena unless partnered with a s.priest and/or another lock.

 

Tectonic

Destroy their paladin first. Silence him to prevent the bubble. Use your teams strengths to your advantage. Both of your teams have massive DPS, lots of CC, but little healing. Whoever goes on the defensive loses.

Once the paladin is down it's a dps fight and hopefully you still have a healer. You must force them on the defensive at all costs and keep the initiative. Make them react to your traps, cyclones, Silencing shots, sheep and ice block. Almost all of their classes have a dispell but you can force them to waste precious seconds getting rid of annoyances. Use those seconds to sneak in as much damage as possible.

If they get the initiative with their fears and silences, you're screwed. You will be fighting their crowd controls instead of fighting their players. Be aggressive. Make them deal with your CC while you damage them.

 

Kullulu

You don't want to change your class composition, buy SR gear, or play to your class comp's strengths. What help do you expect when you rule out the cheap and/or easy solutions?

I'd fill out your roster more. Grab an extra rogue/shaman friend and switch them in to counter the team if you start matching up against them alot.

 

Andemoni

Playing offensively, while nice in theory and working against all other setups, doesn't really pan out. Problem for us against these kind of teams is two-fold; they have more offensive and defensive capabilities than we do.

If we go on the pure offensive, with me helping at the beginning with Holy Shock and JoR, we will get one of them down. This will leave us 5v4 against a warlock and a shadow priest or, alternatively, two warlocks. However, by the time their team member dies (remember, they have three AoE fears, two Death Coils and two Spell Locks), one of our team members will soon follow. This is inevitable without the druid helping me heal, as DoT damage is unmitigable (without specialized gear, shadow resistance aura only helps so much), cannot be LoS'd, cannot be outranged, cannot be removed. Usually the first to die from us is the warrior, no surprise there. This leaves us with 4v4, and we simply lose due to the fact that they do not require anything that we do to maintain high dps. Even if the druid were to help me heal, the damage output would soon overwhelm us and we would lose too much dps to maintain our ground in the long run.

There seems to be no balance that would help us have a fighting chance. To be forced to use green world drops as your choice of gear instead of the intended Gladiator gear to combat a singular setup seems off to me. Shouldn't these resistance "flavors" in the game be left for the people who like to PvE instead of us? Then it would just mean that Blizzard has once again managed to make PvE gear best for PvP, which is something I'd rather never see.

In short, they have more control, more dps and more healing (thanks to Healthstones and our warrior going down early in the game). Cannot really see what they lack in comparison.

I've been sleeping on this, and just cannot fathom a counter to this setup. This will propably result in us recruiting some people for our team, or just stop playing 5v5 ladder altogether. We do have some alts we might be able to use, but in the end, it's one less fun team to play against in the arenas of the Blackout battlegroup.

 

Andemoni

We do not have a priest in the team, so this option doesn't really work out so well. Silence doesn't prevent using Divine Shield, anyway.

We don't play defensively, we play offensively. We just die faster than they do.

The problem is, that their dps isn't really affected by our movement or crowd control; it just ticks away while we struggle to survive. Our dps, on the other hand, is completely annihilated by proper crowd control, much like any other setup's. When we use crowd control, we make a trade-off; damage for mitigation. When they use crowd control, they simply gain ground on us. There's no downside for a warlock to start casting chain-fear or CoT spamming after the initial DoT volley has landed, and I believe this is something that needs to be looked at by Blizzard.

 

Katten

I'm still not really understanding your reluctance to use shadow protection greens. It is maybe not an ideal solution; and you have to understand that wearing some will lose you some offensive ability; but if you're around 200 + shadow resistance, you'll be near cutting their dps in half.

It's not like you wear those shadow prot greens in fights with 1 warlock, or 1 shadowpriest; you pick and choose when to wear them. They don't replace your gladiator gear; they allow you to tailor your gear for one specific match up that is designed to punish you for wearing resil based gear. If a teams damage output is entirely dot based shadow damage, punish them for it.

 

• diospadre

Whatever you decide, stop posting about this here. The solution has been shoved in your face a dozen times, and you're either too cheap, proud, or stupid to spend 20 gold at the auction house. We don't need to hear about it anymore.

 

Andemoni

Reiterating the situation becomes inevitable when people don't even bother reading the original post in which quotes such as "please do refrain from making comments how we should make some class replacements" and "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" can be found. I would highly suggest for you to read the first post in the thread before making posts like these.

I'm highly relieved that it was not my abilities as a gamer that impeded our success, but rather the game itself, as noone seems to have a viable solution for this problem, barring the two obvious ones.

 

Tectonic

I meant counterspell, I was thinking about your mage but typed the wrong spell.

In any case, admit defeat, you typed out the solution in your very first post and you reject it outright. You're unable or unwilling to accept viable winning strategies. Ever wonder why some teams are way ahead of yours? Flexibility has a great deal to do with it. Things that are inflexible eventually break.

 

Zerakor

Only as nerfed as every other class is when they are facing a resilience stacker.

The problem with this argument is that a very large part of a crit based class damage is remove with resilience, say a total 10% dps loss at x resilience (Can't recall the number at the moment, but its somewhere around 250 for a 200% crit class with 25% crit (not accurate)) would lower said class damage even more, and to balance this out with dots, the suggested reduction would be even bigger (for the dots that is), ending at a balanced level.


Its a lot of should and buts in a discussion like this (I have 'hosted' a 20+ post regarding this matter on the official forums, where I surprisingly enough got some good arguments), but ultimately when you look at it, you have to keep to the facts:


Resistance reduces spell damage. Not just dots, but all spell damage, including crit based classes damage. Can be countered with -res and a trainable warlock curse.

Armor reduces all physical damage, can be countered by various items and a rogue or a warrior.

Resilience reduces crit percentage and crit damage, meaning a roughly 10% dps loss for all classes and specs except affliction and shadow. Can only be countered by stacking more crit, but this will only help on 'half' of the stat.


This is only obvious when you fight teams with proper arena gear, when a warlock/priest retains his previous dps, while everyone elses dps is dropped by x% (10% in this example).
I wouldn't go as far as saying resistance should be the counter to dots, as it is also a counter to all other spells, and they have to meet resilience as well.

Overall I'm pretty confident when I say that I think Blizzard is aware of the issue, and when resilience eventually skyrockets in season 3 (+- ), people will start to notice.

 

Drully

I think one already notices how lock/shadow priests make their way to the top. There are actually two main reasons why this holds true, and they are all linked to the rising stamina/resilience.

1.) The obvious reason that locks are not affected by resilience, while every other class is.

2.) Survivability grew all together faster than damage, solving one major problem of locks. They used to be focus fired away befor their doting damage could come through.

3.) on a minor note one may add, that games get longer in general, which also plays into the hands of the lock, since he is master of the attrition game.

I myself predict the new cookie cutter to be: 2 locks, priest, pala, warrior
And no, I am not a mingist!

Concerning the shadow resistance argument, I am pretty sure this will not work. Did anybody even try this yet? For 200 resistance you would have to wear something like 5 green pieces, i would bet anything that a lock team, equally geared (not in shadow resi, but normal pvp gear) would just laugh at your face, happily playing the attrition game, while you try to drop one, which will be none, of them.

I guess this signature will remind me of...

 

Kullulu

I agree with half of what you say. Armor mitagates physical damage, resistance negates magic damage, resilience negates critical damage of all kinds. Each has a seperate purpose: resilience specifically dictates longer fights by making burst damage easier to heal through.

I disagree that you can't counter the latter though. Talents like ruin, predatory instincts, mortal shots, lethality(etc.) all boost critical damage. I think of them as fair game, since there are also talents that remove/add armor or resistances.
------------------

I know we had priests/druids on our 5v5 team who made sets full of additional armor gear to counter the early two warrior composition. That's why I don't find the idea outlandish that you could aquire a set of shadow resist gear easily and without complaint.

Edit: I see your point Drully.

 

Drully

The problem is, that with the current resilience formula, bonus crit damage talents are crippled all together by such a margin, that added crit. chance will also get more and more pointless for casters. Any caster class will put their emphasis on + damage as a offensive stat, in high end s2 arena.

The added crit. damage for talents is for casters:

(1.5*RX-1)*H*CT

for melees:

(2*RX-1)*H*CT

with

H=Base Hit after armor or talent mitigation
RX= 1-resilience tool tip, crit damage reduction
CT=Crit talent modifiers(100% for shamans, ice mages, dest locks, 30% for hunters, rogues,20% for warriors, 150% for spell power/ice mages)

You can see easily that this equations quickly tend towards zero. At 20% tool tip reduction (about 400 resilience) talent bonus damage for casters will already be halfed, at 33.3% it will be zero.

reference:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...630017&sid=1#0

I guess this signature will remind me of...

 

Taja

Apart from the shadowres tips you could try a different playstyle. 4dps 1 healer teams are vulnerable to other 4 dps 1 healer teams. There team however has the better cards against your setup. Perhaps you shouldnt mass focus on the shadowpriest but say put the warrior on 1 lock, put the mage on another (just to silence out UA). And let your hunter burst down a fellhunter which shouldnt take that long. The longer you can stall the UA coming at you the more chance you get of winning. Its not a ticket to victory but trying different tactics won't hurt. Apart from that, the usual hot up warrior before charging in etc should buy some more time.

 

Kink

Green is the new epic.

I carry alternate gear on many characters depending on the situation. Stop getting hung up on the colour of your items.

Your team, in fact most teams, are weak aganst the 2warlock + priest teams because the DoT damage slices right through resilience, the fears prevent you from acting and you die a horribly painful death.

Now I have the utmost respect for a person who refuses to change his team makeup to be flavor of the month. This game is about fun and playing with your friends (even if they are not warlocks) makes it more fun come wins or losses. So kudos for that.

However swapping out gear is not a broken mechanic, it is not an abuse, it is not a downgrade of gear. Its is putting on a set of gear with a single specific purpose in mind: To resist shadow spells. When it comes to resisting shadow spells, those ...of the protection are your epics.

If you had a set of gear with 20,000 armour and 300 resilience, wouldn't you want to use it for heavy melee teams? Not changing your team members I can acept and respect, but acting like your arena epics are glued to your skin is just plain dumb. You have the means to win or at least do well, why not take advantage of those means? Besides, give it a few months and it will be pretty standard to have a set ...of shadow protection and then the warlocks wil be the ones complaining.


*edit* A lot of people above me seem to forget that you can replace rings etc for +resists too which provide minimal loss of stats, it is not just the holy 5 slots you are required to replace!

There is light at the end of the tunnel.
The only problem is, it's often an incoming train.

 

raal

I am going to have to side with the original poster here, sort of.

There should be no need to get PvE gear for PvP. Or the other way around for that matter. Blizzard has taken steps to ensure that the grind outside PvP is as small as possible, you can not stock potions, use alts for buffs or similar "cheese". The fact that you need to buy an alternate set of gear and then install an addon to be competitive is probably not their intention. If / when the higher-ups take notice of this, the hammer will come down.

The offender here is obvious. DoTs was tuned to be high enough damage to be relevant without any critical effect in a pre-resilience environment. Then resilience came in and affected everything a part from the dots.

It seems that resilience was a "quick" solution for scaling down PvP damage, which was added without much thought. They even implemented it as a "critical damage only" reduction the first time around, which would have crippled classes which was previously tuned around doing most of their DPS from Critical Effects. They changed this when they realized the problem.

It is easy to fix. All they need to do is to let resilience have an impact on damage over time effects. Scale to where the DPS of a warlock is somewhere below a warrior on a single target (warlocks can dot everything simultaneously so the single target DPS should be lower).

 

Aranik

This isn't about taking sides, raal - the discussion as to whether it should be the necessary solution is completely different to the original question asked. The original question is, how to beat excessive dot stacking, and at least one of the answers is, shadow resistance.

I don't feel the need to fling insults at the original poster if he doesn't want to accept that solution, but regardless of whether it should be the case or not, it is the case that shadow resistance gear will help you to win those fights, and I can't see why you wouldn't.

 

Keline

So why is no shadow resistance gear available from honor or arena point if it's the only solution to these shadow DoT heavy teams?