After seeing the war / pal thread on how to deal with caster teams, I hereby suggest a consolidated thread on dealing with other teams that inherently has the advantage against your team due to class make-up.

Rather than beating rock with scissors (excuse the catchy title), what I'm thinking is more along the lines of increasing our winning ratio against unfavourable matchups, e.g. from a 10% to a 50% win rate. This is by no means an attempt to overcome the (seemingly) impossible.

I'll start by contributing on beating war / pal with a holy priest / combat rogue combo, with a rating around 2100s.

The overall idea is to force the pally into the priest's LoS giving you chances to mana burn. This is achieved by fighting on the bridge on BEM arena, standing in-between the warrior and the paladin, while your rogue friend hits on the warrior. Given PoM bounces from deep wounds and rogue stuns, the priest's survivability is not as bad as it sounds. Basically, put pressure on the pally to heal the warrior, giving him no time to drink.

General tips against pally matchups is for your priest to use fear early and use it often. More often than not the pally will trinket your first fear, giving you an un-interrupted fear when you need it the most. It is also a good idea to keep your partners close by for PoM bounces.

Against war / priest teams, I haven't had much problems. Normally a priest will die by rogues faster than being by warriors, also rogues can use blind on warriors to buy some extra time. So you could either let the rogue 1v1 on the opposing priest while the your priest tanks the warrior on the other side of the map, or chase the other priest and spam dispel.

Shm/druid with warriors is also quite difficult, but I've had moderate success by using mana-burn while forcing the healer to come into LoS. Dispelling innervates and earthshields is obviously crucial here.

It seems your strategy for beating a paladin / warrior team relies on the warrior attacking the rogue in all situations. I'll go ahead and tell you that your strategy would fail against smart players. When I was doing 2v2 with my paladin friend before he quit the game, we would run into a lot of priest / rogue teams. Here are the general rules:

If the rogue is attacking the paladin, the warrior attacks the rogue. The priest is FORCED to heal, especially because the paladin is going to be using freedom on himself and trying to make it hard for the rogue to hit him by using the terrain / pillars / ect. The priest will have to move to heal and won't have time to mana burn or mind control between the warrior's damage.

If the rogue is attacking the warrior, then the warrior attacks the priest. The warrior will be fed rage and enrage by the rogue. The priest will got owned fast. No, the priest will not be able to kite because the warrior will have blessing of freedom, the rogue will have hamstring on him, and so will the priest. And above all, the warrior will be hitting the rogue and priest at the same time with whirlwinds. Rogue stuns will not be enough to allow the priest to get distance on the warrior due to intercept.

The priest's ability to use fear on the paladin assumes poor play by the other team. The paladin is not going to allow the priest to get near him, nor is the high rate of damage on the warrior's target going to allow the priest to move freely and position himself for a fear.

Honestly, a rogue / healing priest is not going to have a good winning percentage vs a good warrior / paladin team. Having a 10% win percentage vs a GOOD team would be pretty impressive in my opinion. Getting higher than that would require a whole lot of luck and a lot of mistakes by the other team. A rogue / Shadow priest team has a much better chance of beating a good warrior / paladin team.

I will say that the rogue / priest team could make it at least interesting by forcing a zerker rage with a gouge after deathwish expires, and then timing a fear after zerker rage. Then follow up with a mind control on the warrior to allow the rogue more time on the paladin, but even with pulling off something like that the odds are still against you when playing a good team.

My advice is to pray for bad teams :P

I'm really interested to hear other strategies out there for rogue / holy priest vs warrior / paladin.

Pray mostly.

Against a good team, we can last 6-7 minutes but in the end mana becomes an issue, locking the Warrior down at key moments isn't that hard, but if a KS or Gouge doesn't land you're pretty much screwed.

Mana burn the Paladin and get BoF off as soon as possible is the only way to really beat them, but if the Warrior is smart and keeps you snared the entire time or the Paladin is a Dwarf (Overpowered Racials are fun) then it's basically impossible to catch up with the Paladin, maybe if you were one of the silly burst damage specs like AR/Prep you could pull it off, but you'd pretty much have to win within 30-40 seconds or the games over.

If the Warrior sucks and leaves me alone after I vanish? Can usually beat them since the Priest can MC or just simply outlast the Paladin, next season I'll be playing with a Holy Paladin instead so will have too see how that does.

Constantly attacking the paladin is the way to go. The priest should always be in range for the paladin to dispel fear/mass dispel, while the rogue needs to keep snares on both warrior and pala at the same time. It requires some coordination, but we're actually having a hard time vs good rogues. The priest will outlast the pala if you manage to get off a couple manaburns.

That was the line I was looking for. If anything, warrior AEs will prolong the priest's survival by repeatedly bouncing off PoMs. The other night I was matched up against a war / pal team in the range of 2200-2300s, and we won in BEM arena. They were by no means a bad team; the warrior even had Storm Herald. We forced the fight on the centre of the bridge, and the pally has got to leave his pillar to heal the warrior, which leaves me to mana burn him.

For a good portion of the fight the pally was reluctant to come out in fear of being manaburned, but an uninterrupted rogue can and will do good dps on warriors, despite feeding him rage. In between PoM bounces, renews and shields, I had higher hp than the warrior. Granted, this may not be a very polished stragey and may only work on BEM, but we were certainly very happy to grab 20 points off a team that have been farming us all night long.

On the subject of facing a same team a lot of the times, a trick that we have adopted last night was to create an alt on the server of that team. Wait for that other team to zone in arena, and then we queue. We play at odd server times though (4-6AM) so that may not be so successful if done during prime times.

On vs rog / pal teams, I found that any teams that try to ff the priest first leads to an OOM pally real fast. If the priest is able to survive the burst, combined with well-timed fears or rogue stuns, usually they pose little threat. Forcing the rogues to face other will tip the game in the priest's favour, as the priest can now manaburn and use fiends. Timing heals inbetween CoS to wipe off the wound poisons also help the mana fight immensely, against any rogue teams.

Theres no reason a Paladin should be having issues getting range on a Rogue, the only hard part is at the start when you're making him burn his cooldowns, stay in range of the Warrior so he can reapply hamstring when needed (or better yet, run right by him) and you'll pretty much be able to kite them around the entire time.

And don't forget to JoJ.

What if the Warrior jumps off and simply forces you guys to follow?

I went for a rather crazy spec and picked up Master Poisoner 2/2, I rather like it against teams with a Rogue actually, it does a pretty good job of keeping Wound Poison stacks around 1-3, unless I have someone who can offensively dispell I'd rather try and outlast a Priest though Blessed Resilience and Blessed Recovery are a pain to counter and even worse if you're Mutilate.

On BEM at least, for rogue/priest v war/pally, one thing I can think of would be to force the fight to the middle of the bridge, then run to the side when the warrior is on the priest, forcing the paladin toward the middle of the bridge to be in range to heal. Then have the rogue ks the warrior and switch to the paladin while the priest mc's the warrior and jumps him off the bridge.

This should buy enough time to get some damage off on the paladin and some mana burns. A preemptive gouge on the paladin could help to prevent interruption of the priest's mindcontrol for safety.

Which is why I always Blind the Warrior as soon as the Paladin bubbles, not many Paladins actually cleanse it until 3-4 seconds have passed anyway.

I could use a little help too. My team is Shadow Priest and resto-druid, and any team with a healing priest and melee destroy us. Mana-burn wars get us nowhere, as that leaves them without healing and us without dps. Since their dps is mana-free that's obviously no good.

Once or twice we managed to just burst the priest down with the melee in cyclone, but that only works with lucky blackout procs, and depending on luck is no fun.

We tried everything I can think of. With Paladins, we preserve the melee with cyclone while the paladin is bubbled, then silence/cyclone him again. That doesn't work with priests though, as they always get some instant-heal off inetwbeen the cyclones, leaving the melee at way to much hp to finish off.

Is there anything we can do to improve our chances?

Heh, any ideas for a Rogue/Hunter team on beating a double Ice Mage team? We lost ~50 rating last night against those teams. :\

The way my shaman/hunter team deals with ice mages is to try and bait the water elementals while mounted, then ride around and avoid them until they despawn, then they're pretty easy prey.

My question is how our hunter/shaman team should approach teams with a druid. Their poison dispell is too good for them to be drained and they can easily sleep/root/travel form away from my scorpid so I can't get the poisons needed stacked to prevent the dispell quickly. We have decent success purging the HoTs, but generally the druid has too much health to burst down quickly and his heals are too strong to beat if we go for the other target.

WTB tips for beating warrior/druid and warrior/shaman with rogue/paladin. Those two match ups are the only two I feel we have no chance of winning unless the enemy are under geared or make serious mistakes.

I'm playing with a paladin, and we're having some problems with a druid/warrior team. It basically comes down to me versus the druid and their warrior versus my paladin. The druid has four ways to CC me (bash, cyclone, root and charge). He also have stun/disorient if he manages to stealth. I wasted too much time chasing him. Last game I tried taking down the warrior but between uninterrupted cyclone, root and healing was too much.

Should I keep chasing the druid? This might be easier if it's BEA, but ROL is too large to effectively "corner" someone.

If the paladin can get judgement of justice on the druid it's alot harder for him to kite if he chain BoF's you. You probably can't afford to go on the warrior except if the map is nagrand where the pally can easily LoS cyclone with the pillars. The full +dmg set would be handy because the paladin could holy shock and jor the druid for 2-3k too. I started arena late and don't have any of the +dmg set so it's not an option for me.

All in all cyclone is nasty in 2v2

During fights in which I'm playing my paladin I've found it is in general a lost cause to attempt to out heal a decently geared resto druid, their healing sustainability is sick if you don't have a way to purge innervate and the HoT's.

I wouldn't mind some tips on how to improve our win percentages as a warlock/shadow priest against rogue+druid or rogue+priest. We stay mounted and spread out initially to negate Sap, try to kite the rogue if he has a priest partner since the priest can't dispel Curse of Exhaustion, but beyond that, generally the rogue can just wear one of us down, especially if he gets a clutch Blind off at the right time. A druid or priest can do a lot to keep their rogue partner up while staying out of LOS 80% of the time, and the rogue himself has Cloak+Vanish if needed.

The other hardest matchup for warlock/spriest is warrior+healer if one or both of them are wearing shadow resist gear. If we see that the healer has put on a lot of SR gear, and as a result dropped their mana and regen by a fair bit, we'll generally attack them and use mana burn + drain mana until they're dry, then kill them. If it's mostly the warrior wearing SR, we'll still generally attack him first, and rely on the usual spell lock or silence to get enough time to finish him. It's important if you're attacking the healer first to try and avoid doing damage to the warrior. Their rage generation is already limited by lack of DPS gear, tossing on CoWeakness and not feeding them rage via dealing damage to them cripples their DPS even moreso.

It's common knowledge I would think? No form of mana-drain works on cats/bears.

Hmm actually I didn't know that either. I knew that you obviously can't mana burn or drain mana a druid in bear/cat, but thought a viper sting already on them would still drain mana even if they shifted... I suppose that wouldn't make much sense though, now that I think about it.

As someone with a druid alt, i can confirm that no mana drains of any kind work in forms. Heck, even those WSG healing things dont regen mana in forms.

The only exception i know of is Innervate. Innervate will regen your mana in forms.

Go out and get a lvl 60-70 scorpid? Dont know exactly which pet it is, but it stacks a poison up to 5 times. This is incredibly annoying as a resto shaman, as i can dispell it, wasting mana and a GC, or i can leave it on only to be viper stung- which wont get removed immediatly now. So gg really

Usually my warriors just kills the pet and its all good but a pally / hunter combo, omg the battles go for like 30 mins against them, with my warrior kited and me kiting.

Fun Fun

If a mage has his water elemental out before being engaged in combat, he's probably not that good anyway. Your strategy seems flawed if it requires your opponents to make silly mistakes.

Scorpid: can apply a charge of poison once every 4 seconds. If you root or CC the pet (frost shock + run away for example), the stacks will all fall off in 8-10 seconds. The pursuit speed of the pet cannot be improved by dash (unless BM speced, it's slow).

Still, I do try and use it to keep viper up. I'm not sure sometimes if I wouldn't be better with my dashing ravager DPSing cloth instead. A pet with dash/dive is much better at disrupting out of line of sight evocation/drinking.