I got up a little past 2000 2v2 rating before the season ending with my 2v2 pally partner. It got very difficult to get anywhere past 1950 or so, because when you get to that level it seems like every other team is a healer/warrior (resto shaman/warrior can be as bad as, or worse than, the pally), and we're going to lose 90% of those games.

I've tried various tactics - trying to flat out kill the pally, trying to attack the warrior and run them out of mana (like I'd do against another pally/rogue team), trying to pick the right moment to CC the pally to finish the warrior, and nothing consistently works.

I'm mutilate spec, my pvp build is 41/3/17, with all of the normal pvp assassination talents (including imp exposed armor, imp poisons), and in subtlety I've got 5/5 MoD, 4/5 opportunity, 5/5 camoflague, and 2/2 dirty tricks. I use wound poison mainhand, crippling offhand generally. I've considered a mutilate/riposte build to being able to disarm warriors, but I know they have a talent 25 points into arms that makes them immune - how many warriors take that talent?

Against a bad pally, I can kill the pally - I generally start fights, if I'm not going to be attacking the warrior directly, by popping evasion to interfere with his rage generation - although it's not hard for him to hit me in the back if I'm focused on his pally. A bad pally won't properly kite me, and while it'll take a while, I can kill him, assuming the warrior doesn't get a string of lucky crits off and kill me anyway.

But at that level, most pallies are good. They'll put freedom on themselves and run around pillars (making it both hard for me to keep hitting the pally, and also from my pally to heal me from the warrior's damage), or even put seal of justice on me and outrun me with a run speed enchant. I can use sprint to stay with the pally, but only for 15 seconds. I stun him when I can, of course, but it's very difficult to keep up with him when the warrior can intercept stun me frequently and give the pally either time to get off a heal, or get a 10 step lead on me.

Trying to kill the warrior almost never works, unless both of them are horribly geared, which doesn't happen so much at the 2000 level. The warrior is going to be doing way more damage to me than I am to him - sometimes up to 3+ times as much. I generally save evasion for a last ditch attempt to survive in the event that my pally gets stunned, or I break LoS for a heal, or whatever. I've moved away from stunning warriors, because of the extra health and rage that second wind gives them, although I don't know if this is a good idea. I tend to open with garotte, do a 4-5 point expose armor (with talents, that's 2500-3000 armor exposed), then a 4-5 point rupture, and even a slice and dice based on my combo point generation - and yet I still can't do all that much damage to him. Meanwhile, he just saves up a full rage bar (which seems to happen every 5 seconds) and unloads massive burst damage that even my very well geared partner can't always outheal. In the event that the warrior doesn't kill me early, we run out of mana way earlier than they do - especially since their pally can drink, if he wants to, because I'm not going to kill his teammate in 4 seconds, but the opposite is not true. I start these fights with a sap on the pally, generally, but it rarely works, depends on the team to be too stupid to BoS.

Third strategy is trying to CC the paladin at the perfect time to finish the warrior. This has been the most successful, but still works very infrequently. If I manage to get the warrior under 30-40% my pally will stun their pally. But I have a hard time bursting a warrior even when he's more than half dead anyway, and the pally can always bubble out of the stun, if he can't simply wait it out. He can bop his warrior to give him time to heal if he needs it. I'll generally follow the stun up with a blind, if the pally hasn't bubbled - and if he doesn't have BoS (some pallies use it through the whole fight) he'll still bubble out of the blind. Unless I get a string of lucky crits, the heal is probably coming in before I finished him. The pally also assists here with holy shock/hammer of wrath/etc. when wer'e close. It might be a better to stun, hope he bubbles, and then blind him when he gets out of the bubble, but warriors do so much damage to me so quickly that we often can't survive till that stage.

So, what can I do? Is it a match I should expect to lose 90% of the time? And because pally/warrior is overpowered, and everyone knows it, there are more teams that play that way than any other - and they tend to rise to the 2000+ range, so that by the time you reach that range, a significant number of your matches are against that team. When you have no chance in, say, 35% of your matches, it's extremely difficult to keep progressing in rating.

99% of the Warriors take the disarm immunity talent, or they have disarm gloves/weapon chain to counter it, generally the Warriors you can disarm are terrible and so you don't have to worry about Riposting them.

I'm pretty certain that the topic title can be answered with "no". The rogue has to switch targets to disrupt the paladins healing, so that completly kills whatever little DPS he can put out on a 300 resilience 45% mitigation target.

These words alone tell me you might have more luck with mindnumbing instead of wound. Maybe try keeping wound but loose crippling. I know it's weird but freedom does negate much of it.

Given equal skill and gear:

Short answer "No"
Long answer "No, unless you get insanely lucky and even then your luck will need luck"

I gained most of my rating in a Pal/Rogue setup and just got tired of losing 18-20 points to semi-good pal/war teams, so I picked up a priest. It's not much, but honestly it's a fighting chance. A slip-up and a bit of luck and a priest dispel can get you a win, but you're still going to lose a lot.

But you're mutilate, like me, so you're already disadvantaged. And you won't be disarming anyone in the 2k+ rating. You're alliance, so you don't have access to the Blood Elf silence from your partner. About the only thing I could recommend is your pally going Ret, if you're really that serious about beating the pal/war combo as a pal/rogue.

It is season 2, a serious dagger rogue should always have a 3rd dagger in his bag with Mind Numbing on it to swap in. However it can easily be cleansed as it doesn't stack.

And even with BoF up, it's still hard to PvP without Crippling as daggers. There's no 1 strategy you should use for going against warriors as I think you need to be prepared to swap targets more than once. If you can manage to bait a BoF on one target then switch to the other, you can sometimes get in much needed "face to face" time.

Mace spec actually helps a lot. It is still in no way a fair match-up, but the freedom-braeking mace stuns, combined with freedom on your on, escape artist and improved sprint the chances of winning are a lot better. Perhabs to 1 of 4 from 1 of 15.

That reminds me - the deep combat talent that gives a chance to daze seems pretty worthless, but.. maybe freedom doesn't work on daze? It probably does, but I figured I'd ask - because I can't see why anyone would take that talent, and this would give it a reason for existing.

Missed something in the OP, comment was redundant. Move along, nothing to see here.

64% armor, 300 resilience - the rogue couldn't deal enough damage and interrupt every single heal.

I also had problems with this exact setup.

The most important thing is wound/mind. With this, the paladin has a hell of a hard job helaing himself or anything else.

If the warrior goes for your paladin, he will be able to keep himself up longer than your enemy paladin will, rogue interrupts > warrior.

Just make the enemy pally bubble ASAP (surprising him with a burst damage move and a lucky crit at 20% CAN kill him, i've done it against 2200 rated paladins and their warrior almost cried). If not then take just run away, stealth/vanish once DW fades then start the pounding over again.

Whatever the situation is, just keep in mind that a Rogue > Warrior when it comes to disabling a healer. Forget about your CC as well, just blind the paladin if he somehow manages to BoP OR if your paladin is in a silly mace stun/stormherald stun then quickly blind the warrior to give your pally 1-2 seconds.

The hardest part of this is being kited by the paladin if the warrior keeps applying spamstring. If this is the case though keep in mind that your paladin isn't being beaten on as hard, and he's pretty much free to heal whatever is needed and you should eventually get to the paladin.

Its a tough setup but it is doable, probably the most gear intensive setup.

I've played rogue/pally up to 2150 rating or so.. I have to say that it just depends on enemy team and what they are capable of.

Some pallies kite rogues much better than others. When they judge justice on you, they will be running faster than you.

With a 23/38 build with quick recovery, I actually was able to go toe-to-toe against some warriors and beat their team on mana race. This usually is unexpected for them, as they assume you're being stupid for going against a warrior and feeding him rage + enrage, but its too late when they realize they are actually going oom faster.

However, a team was quite smart at countering it. Everyone once in a while the warrior would switch to defensive mode with shield, which would give the pally enough time to stop heals and drink. We can't switch targets as freely as a warrior can with intercept to prevent this.

Also, after beating a warrior by toe-to-toe mana fight, he decided to go for my pally. Well, the problem was, he was able to kill my pally before i was able to kill his pally. Intercept is just so much more effective at countering the paladin kite, especially combined with mace spec.

Even fighting 2200 rated teams, each had its own weakness that I had to discover and exploit. But I have to say, it's not too hard for them to fix those weaknesses after fighting you a few times. I would say, warr/pally has a slight edge over rogue/pally, in a perfect game.

Blade Twisting is for sure underrated if it actually works on freedom. In combination with mace stuns (which stuns during freedom). Also the combination with vile poisons is quite good. A shiv has then a 65% chance to keep the target snared.

I was 2301 in Rampage, got my netherdrake with the pally/rogue team.

The basic story is, kill the paladin or lose. We've beaten a lot of Stormherald warriors. The matchup is not good for pally/rogue but it's also not impossible. Only one person can have freedom at a time. Freedom lasts 16 seconds (with talents) and has a 20 second cooldown, and this is incredibly important. These games will go for a long time generally. The only way is to out finesse the pally/warrior. Save blind for BOP (though pvp trinket now removes it, but if they save it for that, they won't trinket out of stuns, making your life much easier). HoJ + KS combo is pretty deadly (not on the same DR).

Always KS with a full energy bar, or else you're wasting it.

The fights generally goes: HoJ + KS = bubble, then KS + vanish CS to force a bop, HoJ in bop, then blind, trinketing out of HoJ means a full blind (longer than the 8 second bop, and not trinketting out of HoJ means you can blind right after to interrupt the heal. Proceed to kill the paladin.

There is a lot more to the fight, but basically, you have to maximize the damage you can do to the paladin while you're on him. Also, always know when their pally is OOC so you can distract to gain ground. And yes, they do like to try to go OOC to either get one or two ticks of drink in (these fights are half mana wars as well), or they'd try to regen while not casting (and therefore, not doing anything keeping them in combat).

If any warriors go for your paladin, just have him tank the warrior. A good rogue can -always- drop a paladin before a warrior can, even with chain mace stuns.

Don't suck.

Also, mutilate is not at all disadvantaged. The key to winning this matchup is the maximize damage in the time you're on the paladin. Imp KS, FW, are huge damage boosts. I played 41/20 last season, and it was by far the smoothest spec for this matchup. And trust me, I know how frustrating it is to mutilate someone with freedom (and eating omg mace stun over and over again if the warrior's on me). I moved to Australia last year and I have 500 ping consistently. Run with Wound + crip, use another dagger for MN at the end of your stuns so when they try to heal the damage you're done, it takes them much longer, and makes DTing the heal much easier. A longer cast means you have that much more time to catchup to the pally.

That was odd. In a productive comment with generally good advice - the sort of thing I opened this thread for - you had to tack on an insult. Why? Unless I've misinterpreted...

Getting offtopic, but a blessed resilience priest can get Imp Mass Dispel easily, making it a .5s cast. Another great thing about priests is where they lack the ability to kite, they are able to do quite a bit of healing while running especially compared to a Paladin, a good priest can kite the warrior and stay in paladin range.

What race was your paladin combo Orinas? Dwarf? Hadn't really seen a lot of 2300+ Pal/rogue teams. My priest and I in less than ideal gear got to 2200 (tanked a bit trying to race for the Netherdrakes at the end) and I just couldn't see the real benefit in pal/rogue over the priest.

Human pally, night elf rogue. We have the worst racials . The big benefit is freedom and the immunity to CC. Priest rogue is too vulnerable to kiting. The only slow being dispellable by cleanse is pretty obnoxious. Pally warrior teams, if they ever need a breather, can simply piercing howl both of you (or hamstring rogue, intercept priest hamstring, whatever), intervene the pally, and wave goodbye, drink up, and start over. I never really played priest rogue, so this is simply TC out of my head. I would expect priest rogue to fail against teams with mages, especially double DPS teams with mages. The lack of a way to remove sheep after trinket is killer imo. I am running priest rogue this season probably, though human, not dwarf (/cry). 2v2 used to be my main bracket because I started season 2 months late (moving, starting college). This season, I'm more focused on the other brackets (season 1 3v3 was only 2150, 5v5 barely broke 2k) where having gear is a much bigger issue.

Plus, pally rogue > priest rogue if they ever faced together (there are a few priest rogues in Rampage and we haven't lost to any of them after 2200. Paladins have generally better mana efficiency, and that matchup is straight up a mana war. Priest rogue is also vulernable to blinding the rogue. 10 Seconds of beating on the priest without the rogue's stuns. After blind, have your pally holy shock the rogue to keep him in combat. Land a HoJ KS combo for 12 more seconds (during which you'll prolly eat a KS, but whatever). PVP trinkets screws up things, but this is all TC anyways. The real matches won't go as smooth as I'm calling it.

Another reason why paladins are pretty ideal is that they can also switch on PVE gear and be still wearing plate. Many pally warrior teams, after failing to kill my paladin before I kill their paladin, decided that they would stay on me, since I'm squishier, and this saves their paladin. This, imo is the most effective way to beat pally rogue as pally warrior, however, generally I simply land a full KS on the warrior while I'm going toe to toe with him, and my paladin switches on PVE gear. That's another key of winning pally warrior teams. Getting as much out of your gear, and drinking one or two ticks everytime you can. Good teams won't let you, constantly switching targets, but if you use LOS, pillars correctly, you can maximize. Their paladin can't really switch on PVE gear because they know they're the main target. A warrior beating on a pally in PVE gear is still going to take some time to kill him. If the warrior ever decides to go back to the pally, just use a full KS, or a HoJ to get OOC.

It's still an unfavorable matchup for pally rogue. We were playing around in Nagrand with guildies, and played a pally/warrior team in 2k from the guild. We won the first one without major issues because they had never faced pally/rogue in the higher level (we were 2252 at the time). The warrior had stormherald, 4 piece glad, paladin had like 3 glad or something. Second game, I told them just to stay on me, keep me off the paladin. We lost pretty easily. Though I think we could've done better the second game, it's a matchup where pally rogue has to play nearly flawlessly, and pally warrior can simply not suck and win.

Pally rogue, imo, is pretty even against most teams. I don't think there is a real hard counter to it (while many teams have significant advantages i.e. pally warrior, it's not an auto lose). The only team I'd ever consider as impossible is pally warlock (coex + SL). But then again, who can beat pally warlock (top of Rampage season 1 in 2v2 was a pally warlock team). I still might stick with pally rogue this season, haven't played this season yet except a few times in 5s.

Dispel not Mass Dispel.

Not sure on the mana efficiency, besides the ability to just sit and spam. My priest and I will actually use things like evasion or clos+sprint versus pally/rogue teams while the priest mana burns the paladin, been really effective. I'd say we have much trouble with priest/rogue than pal/rogue, but that's partly due to a couple dwarf priests pairing up. Mind Control is also a big boon, time a gouge with your partner and you can get a sap off or a good deal of distance between a rogue and your priest, particularly in Blade's if you want to reset the battle.

If the rogue is on the priest, a rogue can lock down another rogue pretty easily if he's being ignored besides the occasional attempt and short duration CC.

Looking forward to breaking 2300 this season, so maybe I'll meet your duo.

Waitaminute, you're in my BGG. Didn't even notice. Anyways, pally rogue vs priest rogue is a fineness battle for sure. I wouldn't say any team has a truly significant advantage. Don't be surprised if you see me on the bandwagon running priest rogue. Mana burn and mass dispel are both pretty tasty. Course, I don't even know if I can make it that far now that I've gone swords (I miss mutilate a lot really).

Dunno the combo points from Mutilate are nice, but I'm thinking of switching to a 19/42/0 type of build with Maces for 2vs2 and 5vs5 since the burst damage would be better from AR/BF.