Tazeron

I just started a new arena team and my rogue partner and I (holy disc priest) are 30-5 with a 1880 ranking. My 5v5 team (2.2k) doesn't have any rogues so what im wondering is do rogues lose their effectiveness in 2v2 once you are facing 2k+ teams and everyone is fully decked out in gladiator's? Anyone here play a priest rogue team succesfully in the 2k+ area that could give me some pointers?

 

◊ Shadowed

Short answer, yes
Long answer, sort of

Me + Holy/Disc Priest are at around 2,060 and hover between 2,060-2,150 depending on whats playing, I'd imagine we could break 2.2k-2.3k if we were really trying to and I had decent gear at the start of the season.

It greatly depends on what other 2vs2 classes people play, if your top 40 teams are mainly Paladin/Warrior you're going to have issues as long as the team is smart about kiting, however if you end up with lots of caster based groups or healer/dmg thats not a Warrior, it's not so bad.

 

Gulaja

Once you figure out how to beat the Pal/War team, you should be good.

My arena team hovers between 2000 and 2100 on a daily basis. Most of our wins are against Rogue, Hunter, Shaman, Holy Priest, or Warrior groups. Most of our losses are to warlock/mage groups.

The key is finding out how to beat rock when you are scissors. As a war/pal combo, the only time we lose against Pri/Rogue combo is when the Rogue sticks on the Warrior the entire match and prevents him from DPSing the Priest. A full stack of Wounding Poison is absolutly gross and can deplete my mana fast. As long as I keep the Warrior above 80% the entire match, we win. It's not hard to Cleanse the poisons when he's at a high percentage.

One strategy we've been increasingly annoyed by is stacking 5x Wounding Poison on the warrior, doing decent damage. Priest starts MC and the warrior either doesn't have pummel/intercept up or the Rogue stuns warrior and blinds me so I cannot HoJ. Priest moves warrior in inconvinient location and rogue either does moderate damage on me, or manages to sap me the moment I get out of combat (I cannot apply BoS here because the Warrior is MC'd.)

It's only worked on us a few times, but the same group did it a few times. I'm not saying this is a perfect way to win, and I'm sure better teams will counter this faster than you can even think of it, but it's what nails us sometimes.

 

◊ Shadowed

Yea pretty much what you described are what we usually use.

Attacking the Warrior first can work, but it backfires if you're not careful due to the rage + enrage procs you're feeding them, usually I save blind when doing this as a just incase move.

Going on the Paladin works depending on how smart the Warrior is, against a Dwarf Paladin it's not worth it (!#$!#$ Stoneform), some Warriors will Hamstring you right at the start of the fight and then go off to try and kill the Priest.

Using MC works pretty well, but you have to be very careful since even if you MC a Warrior with your Rogue at 20%, he still can risk dying due to a HoW or just when MC breaks.

Also, you can abuse Sap pretty easly with Dirty Tricks, Vanish and Sprint to someone and sap them, or Blind + Sap useful for the annoying teams that will stay on mounts all day to avoid being CCed.

 

• Karakas

My 2v2 plays wither Warrior / Paladin or Rogue / Paladin, depending on which teams are queueing, and we hover around 2300.

Rogues are extremely effective vs. shadow priest / warlock teams. I don't think I've lost a single match to them with the rogue in, whereas with warrior in any decent SP / Lock blows us up.

 

Gulaja

I start off all my fights with might on warrior and we're both mounted. The moment we realize there is one hidden (a little more difficult since the LoS target with 2.1) I dismount and cast BoS on warrior. I mount up again, warrior activates perception, and we go from there. If he can find the rogue first, he'll hamstring + mortal strike the rogue and than get on the priest right away. If we can't find the rogue first, we'll just go after the priest. Sometimes we can kill the priest very fast this way if we time stuns/intercepts/pummels/fears right.

I don't think Rogues should go after Paladins in 2v2. I'm dwarf, so I might have the advantage (or just years of experience as both a rogue and druid) but I tend to excel when rogues hop on me. It's not hard to kite as long as I have BoF on myself and justice on the rogue. Usually Holy Shock is enough to keep me up. If the warrior got a nice MS or normal strike crit off on the rogue before he hopped on the priest, sometimes I can even kill the rogue.

 

panos

Or just check that compilation of classes on top 20 of all bgs for every bracket posted weekly on blizzard general and pvp forums.

Rogues are the third most common class i think in 2v2, and the class they group most to achieve this is a priest. After the mass dispel casttime reduction the combo is even more powerful.

 

◊ Shadowed

What kind of Priests do you guys usually go up against? A good Priest with buffs should be at around 10,000 health and with Blessed Resilience + Blessed Recovery it's not really that easy to burn them down when you add in a Rogue being able to stun/blind.

Both classes mounted is what happens most of the time, the only way I've come up with to counter it is either sap Warrior, blind Paladin, wait for Warrior to dismount, sap Paladin and go, but it's incredibly annoying having to burn all the cooldowns at the start.

Oh, and ask the Priest to dispell BoS before I attack anyone too.

How effective going on a Paladin is depends on your Warrior completely, killing a Paladin who runs around BoFed isn't that hard, it's only when I'm hamstringed that it becomes an issue, if it's a Dwarf I'll avoid going on them as much as possible unless I can force them to burn Stoneform ahead of time with Blind.

We started to get a bit better in coordination so usually when I go on the Paladin I can call out before he bubbles, blind the Warrior and get mass dispel off before the Paladin can do that much in terms of healing.

 

Gulaja

Oh trust me, we don't kill a priest early every game. I just said *sometimes.* If the warrior gets enough MS crits and the rogue is just far enough away, and I cleanse the fear the moment it happens, and all my attacks crit, and the priest messes up a GCD... You get the idea. Either way, if a rogue isn't by his priest friend when my warrior hops on him, it becomes a very much losing battle from the onset.

One thing I really like to see is rogues who shiv a non-dot poison on the warrior before they blind him. Another is stunning the warrior when he's either him or I are low so he can't pummel Mass Dispel. Priests spamming R1 SW:P can hurt as well, since it adds another dot to dispel over poisons and also acts as an instant mana burn.

If I was still playing my rogue in TBC, I would probably stay in LOS of my healer all the time. Attack Paladin while he was in LOS. When he runs out of LOS, immediatly hop on warrior, etc. Hopping out of LOS is just HoJ and a 5-10 second loss of DPS.

 

◊ Shadowed

The problem with shivving a Warrior is that you lose all your combo points on the Paladin, and lot of times i'll have 4-5 built up by the time he gets a bubble off, stunning him works but again, you pretty much have to either be attacking the Warrior already or have had 80-100 energy when you went on the Warrior, unless you want to rely on Gouge.

I'll LoS my Priest if I think I need to, if I can kill someone doing it then it's rather rare i'm in danger of dying before he can catch up. Against a dmg/dmg team typically they're always nearby anyway, and for a dmg/healer team you're not going to kill me fast enough that my healer can't LoS, or that I couldn't CLoS or Evasion.

One of the fun things about when he was Disc/Holy was Reflective Shield, I could go on the Paladin and the Warrior would be at 40% sometimes and I could just blind the paladin and gib the Warrior sometimes.

I took a rather odd spec which i'm still testing out, basically picked up 5/5 Vile Poisons, 3/5 Imp Poisons and 2/2 Master Poisoner over 3/3 Imp KS and 5/5 Find Weakness, it helps a lot against Paladins/Druids/Shamanas Vile Poisons 5/5 is basically a requirement it seems like since Paladins like to spam cure.

 

Gulaja

You should macro Shiv as a mouse-over attack. Do that for Blind and Gouge as well if you haven't already. That way they are more flexible to the combo point system.

 

◊ Shadowed

Eh, I can't stand using those kind of macros and in the heat of combat It's not the kind of things I want to rely on, rather just use an arena frame mod and use that to change targets, or use tab.

I hardly see how it's more flexible, unless you avoid losing CP for that it doesn't change anything, if I have no CP on a target and the Warrior is nearby i'll Shiv him regardless, but not when I'll lose 4-5 CP doing it and my healer isn't in danger.

 

Cel

That's the point, you don't build CP on targets you're not targetting so you don't lose combo points for doing so.

"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell

Alpha is recruiting... go go.

 

◊ Shadowed

How amusing, sounds more like a bug though

 

Orinas

Mouseover macros don't work, though it'd be nice if they did.

 

• Tiiki

Yes they do, I've use a blind one for ages:

/cast [target=mouseover] Blind

It uses your current target if your mouse isn't over anything. I also use:

/cast [target=focus] Blind

in Arenas, and usually put the enemy Paladin as my focus and then use it later on once he's blown his DS etc.

 

• aya

Correct me if I'm wrong, but nowadays losing Combo Points shouldn't have anything to do with targetting people?
From what I've experienced and gathered, CP's are lost when you build CP's on another target.

Blind doesn't do this, thus it doesn't remove your existing CP's. Guoge and Shiv however do create CP's on the person you hit them with, thus wipe out any CP's you had on some other target.

Granted, having a mouseover macro on these abilities is extremely useful, but it's in no way needed for the sake of preserving CP's?

 

• Chicken

Just saying that this doesn't work well for the part of preventing poison to get removed on a target by a Paladin. Cleanse doesn't remove one poison or one magic or one disease effect when cast, it removes one poison and one magic and one disease effect... So if someone were to have Rank 1 SW:P on them as well as, say, Wounding Poison a Paladin casting Cleanse would remove both the SW:P and a stack of the Wounding Poison.

It could be good for confusing someone with a bad UI setup I guess.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

Orinas

You're missing the point of mouseover macros. When it was brought up first in this thread, it is said to macro it with Shiv, so you're not losing your combo points on your primary target, when you want to shiv crip on someone else.

Mouseover for blind, while nice, doesn't solve the problem of saving your combo points on your main target. I can switch targets, blind, switch back, and still have my combo points.

So, like I said, mouseover macros don't work in regards to:

Originally Posted by Cel View Post
That's the point, you don't build CP on targets you're not targetting so you don't lose combo points for doing so.

 

Kardinalen

A guildmate of mine plays a rogue+disc priest setup and they are doing fine (2.4k-ish rating). However they are pretty decked out, maybe your problem is just the gear? Exactly how big of a gear cap are we talking about?

 

Corfius

If there's alot of warlocks in your battlegroup you'll be happy. I play with a demo lock in 2v2 and we hover around 2250-2300 (I'm a holy/disc priest) on Cyclone and we get rolled by good rogues/priests. There's just nothing we can do. I suppose you will be weak against pally/warr and probably against mage but you can pretty much win any other fight.

Like someone said it's relative to the combo at the top ranks in your BG. If there's alot of warlocks you can easely aim for the top of the ladder and if it's filled with pally/warr you'll most likely struggle. There's more and more warrior + stormherald and holy paladin playing. They can win most games by brute force.

 

valner

I just started in the 2v2 last week with a shaman friend. We are bouncing from 1950-2100 or so rating. So far we have almost always beaten rogue/priest groups. They will almost always go for the shaman but sometimes they will poison me up. My shaman has fewer tricks then a paladin for survival so it becomes a kite fest. On the whole, I try and debuff the rogue quickly ( hamstring/rend and maybe a thunderclap) then get on the priest. Unless we are totally out geared the priest usually dies before my shaman dies. If it ends up 1v1 against the rogue and he has already blown his cool downs then he is dead. ( I usually use stoneform to remove blind



Does anyone know i you can use smolderwebs eye still on yourself? Long ago you could dot yourself so you could break frost trap and sapp. This is ideal with a paladin using BOS since even if no one touches the warrior he can dot himself to free the paladin.

http://ctprofiles.net/talents.ct?cid=550342

 

Gulaja

Why would this matter though? I haven't run into a situation where I have been sapped and our warrior has not taken damage to BoS me out. I mean, if he isn't taking damage, than why worry about healing? I just figure it's free time that my mana has to regen more effectively than the shaman.

As a rogue/shaman group against War/Pal, how long is your shaman lasting? It usually takes my warrior a decent amount of time to kill the shaman in sham/rogue match-ups. I'd try to get your shaman a decent amount of length around LoS behind a pillar. Go to the opposite side of the field with the Paladin and blind him behind a pillar as well (as long as he doesn't have BoS on war.) The lower health he is the better. I'd waste a sprint here and try to burst the warrior down. When the paladin comes out of Blind he will either have bubbled early, or he will be casting a big heal/BoP. Whatever the case, have your shaman ready to purge & earthshock.

I don't know, it's a bunch of theorycraft, but unless you force the pal/war combo to do something stupid, you won't win, so it's worth a shot at least.

 

• Shifft

Myself and my holy priest friend took over a 1750ish team last week and are currently sitting at 2362 rating. What we found is that most of the 2000-2100 bracket ended up being warrior/paladin teams, and that got really tough, but once you break 2100 you'll pretty much end up against all of the caster teams like warlock/paladin, mage/rogue, mage/warlock...all the teams that just rape warrior/paladin really hard, and end up being really easy for a rogue/priest team to deal with.

Edit: Took over the team, didn't start it.