I am working on building a Feel the Pain team matrix for 5v5 in season 2.

This consists of a Shadowpriest, 2 Affliction warlocks, Paladin and Rogue (sometimes Warrior).

I have been experimenting with a similar team setup at the moment, with a elemental shaman instead of a second affliction warlock and I have seen great results (my 1800 team shooting to 1945 rating quickly).

Our general tactic is quite simple, burn down the enemy warrior or die. We UA the warrior, dot him up and burn him down in a few seconds. The Rogue locks down one of the healers. This tactic has seen great success, and we have beat some very skilled and well geared teams.

However, I want to ask if anyone has advice about playing this setup, is there any alternative to the "Burn the warrior and CC the healers or lose" stratagem, where you target another player, spread out dots, etc.

Any view or opinions on the strengths, popular tactics or counters to this matrix would be highly valued, I want to build this team to be one of the top on my tiny Battlegroup Ruin.

All my members have access to a high level of PvE dps gear, from SSC and other sources including arena gear from points. I would like to know if you think it is worth it for the shadowpriest, warlock/s to wear primarily high dps PvE gear in the hopes of a rushdown before losing, or to take a dps hit and be tougher.

I find this tactic is already working great in our primitive attempts at it with a less than optimal setup, but I wish to find out as many factors as I can and push the strength of this setup even further. Should the rogue be on interrupting a healer, or locking down a dps? (Mage or enemy Rogue for instance?) We have found if we do manage to burst down the warrior, we nearly almost always win, even if we lost one player in the process, because so many team setups revolve around Warrior/Paladin synergy, and the strength of MS.

I also see this being a strong setup due to the fact that dots ignore resilience (and with season 2 gear, seeing many top players with 400+ resilience) , and the overall powerful CC ability of Warlocks. I also find rushdown style, fast play much much more entertaining than playing a turtle/manaburn team.

Once your rating gets high enough and your fighting the same 2-3 teams...you need to be ready to change your strat..as they already know yours.

I'm thinking of getting my dps casters to build up a set of spell penetration gear, hopefully this might counteract teams that are sharp enough to get SR sets.

If a team knows we are working on bursting a warrior, and we get to the point where focusing the warrior first is a bad idea, what tactic do you think would be wise to change on the fly to? Dot up the warrior as a fake and burn down say, a Hunter or Paladin as a surprise move? Can my team deal with a warrior MSing and doing huge damage while we kill another member always first, or should we always try to burn down the warrior?

i play on a 4 dps team and you can't just go for the warrior every game. teams will wisen up, and you need to either swap targets every game or swap targets very quickly if it looks like your burst isn't working.

what we do usually is go for the warrior first off no matter what, and usually the paladin blows shield to try and heal through it. we dispel shield and instantly swap to the paladin while keeping up interrupts on the other healer. Warriors also aren't the only 'easy targets' for this type of group, hunters, shamans, mages without iceblock, non-demonology warlocks are all very easy to burst for example.

Well with season 2 coming up, it might not be unreasonable to just resocket your season 1 gear to spell penetration. Sure, you take a hit in stats, but not as big a hit as the guy wearing greens of shadow prot.

120 Penetration + Curse would probably do the trick. I'm assuming 2 warlock/shadowpriest teams use shadows anyways, never having been on one.