Humbaba,
In terms of preparations. Hunter needs to go MM with Imp Sting and bring a scorpid pet. UA locks are really squishy, for survivability, Soul Link is a must.

We'll typically go after a shadow priest or mage as both bring out high burst and are very detrimental to the warrior, you'll have to focus drain. You see them most often on 4 DPS teams. In 3 DPS teams, typically when burst is low, we split our drain targets and assist train the main target down when it's low.

You, as the warrior, need to pick the target you believe the squishiest (via gear estimating, PvP knowledge against other classes) and just go with it, pressure the target and their healing. It could be their primary DPS, could be a healer. It's all up to your judgement on how to buckle their line-up the quickest.

With this set-up, the most dangerous teams you'll face is a double warrior, 4DPS CC teams. Your team just need to dedicate one person to rein in their CCs while wearing down the squishiest target. We do lose a lot to those teams, as they have high bursts. You are just going to have to do everything you can to take down one of theirs before your team loses a person.

Just as a side note, I've found elemental shamans and shadow priests to be highly mana inefficient. If you run into teams including these classes, but aren't high burst DPS teams, it's very reasonable to have the hunter solo drain/interrupt one of them and continue to assist the main target. By the time you kill one of them, said shadow priest/elemental shaman will typically be OOM.

Also, hunters are good to use to drain side targets as their drain is cast and forget, thus they'll rarely lose tons of DPS draining mana. It could be very powerful to have it in the midst of an evenly matched battle. We've been through many close fights where by the time one of our opponent died, one or two, some times 3 of their mana users will be nearly out of mana, trying desperately to get rid of the hunter/warlock pet on them to drink. When that happens, simply gun down the squishiest you, the warrior, see fit.

Lastly, mages are your absolute nightmare. They will CC often, interrupt casts at critical moments all the while doing high bursts. You'll want them taken care of either by focus fire backed by ready dispel or CC/interrupted one way or another. Having fought some of the mages from within the top 100 teams in our BG thanks to an utter lack of teams around 2k at nights when we play, if the mage is loose for a second, it might be over for your team.

So how do you people deal with SL locks in your 5v5s? Basically, they screw us completely over. We get on one, we spend too much time trying to kill it, our healers go oom to mana burns or the fight just dragging on; we don't get on it, and our pally is completely put out of the game and he basically ends the fight at 100% mana while the rest of our team is dead. We run 2345 setup at a ~2300 rating, but we can't absolutely find any way to deal with these warlocks, pretty much every match we've lost this week the other team had a SL lock. We've tried alot, but any suggestions someone might have would be nice.

How can a warlock take out your paladin when you have Fear Ward and Tremor and Decurse?

Fear ward is only one fear, and since fear can be spammed its honestly not that huge. Tremor doesn't always tick, plus it gets destroyed alot or I'm not in range to drop a new one effectively. Spell lock and earth shock can take care of his heals when there is no fear. Teams have been focusing the mage alot too, so if he dies, theres no more decurse, plus if he iceblocks there can't be a decurse either. I guess the pally isn't ending at 100% mana, but he still always has over half. Basically, the warlock is doing enough to prevent most heals and in the end it results in some kind of death, and it spirals from there.

You're doing something very different from the 2345 teams we play then. It's not that I dont' get any fear uptime but between decurse, tremor, resists from SR (priest buff and cloak at absolute minimum) I hardly feel like I could dominate a paladin like I can with certain other setups. Are you helping your Paladin out at all?

Well, I'm redropping tremor quite often, I'm not sure its getting him out of fear every time, but heres the problem...Our mage is being focused...meaning he gets very few sheeps off, and is stuck using CS to save himself. I'm pretty sure he's decursing fast, but if CoT is being applied often, alot of our pallies heals end up being slowed, meaning he has to cancel after being decursed or just deal with it as really slow cast...during that slow cast he can be shocked (most teams have shaman) or spell locked, or feared. It seems like they have an infinite way to interrupt his spells, which means our mage is mostly being healed by the priest, who just ooms fast. He did wear put on some SR for one game, but it didn't seem to change that much. Basically the team that really gave us trouble was a similar setup, just switching the mage for a lock. It started off with us dropping the priest every time within 30-40 seconds, while our mage was still alive. When our priest went oom, the mage died shortly after. We couldn't put out enough dps on any other class at that point before the mage died, and it just went down from there, with CoT on all the casters.

maybe the paladin is doing something wrong?

he might need to l2los like athene, best paladin in the world -> YouTube - Best Paladin of The World

Before we even go into tactics. More than a few of your teammates are quite undergeared. I started arena only when season 2 came. The first thing when I joined my 5v5 was grinding out all the possible honor epics and getting resilience enchants and getting my resilience above 150. We ended up starting our matches around August, but it was worth it as I became much more durable even with only 150 resilience than 0.

EVERYONE needs to be geared, having one person being squishy means the said person will become the weakest link and get focus fired often. This would typically lead to a domino of your team gets obliterated as a whole.

Hello all, I am looking for a bit of help with my arena team. Our 5v5 rating runs between 1540 - 1600. Currently, we run with:

Frost Mage (me) ~9000 hp unbuffed, 238 resilience, 830 spell dmg.
Holy Pally, ~9200 hp unbuffed, 245 resilience, 14k armor, ~1300 healing.
MS War, ~10.5k hp unbuffed, 237 resiliance
Combat maces rogue, ~9000 hp unbuffed, 197 resilience.

Then we have either an Elemental Shaman (mostly pve geared, runs about 8700 hp, not sure on resilience but its low), or another MS War with significantly less pvp gear - only 55 resilience.

Typically we do better with the elemental shaman in the mix rather then the second MS warrior. I do know that both are not really pvp geared. We have alot of problems with 2+ healer teams, sometimes we are unable to even get 1 person down (Especially when running with the second warrior, bloodlust seems to help alot). I am basically the only CC on the team, and tend to focus on that. If it's a 2 healer team I will usually try to CC a healer, otherwise I will typically CC a dps. Reading back in the thread it sounds like I should be focusing more on damage then CC in order to better burst somone down? I also think our choice of focus target is usually a problem - going up against a 2 healer team, should we try to burn a dps or one of the healers? Typically we try to kill priests/warlocks first. I saw some suggestions in this thread that we should perhaps try to kill the other teams warrior first. Would that be viable given our group makeup?

Thank you for any help.

Running a Feral Druid, Double Arms warrior, Resto Shaman, Holy Paladin matchup. We have lost so many games to Rogue/Warlock/Shadow Priest/Resto Druid/Frost mage.

Any ideas how to beat it. They generally lockdown a warrior and nuke him.

Cyclone spam between the mage and the warlock, and both warriors focus on the rogue. That's what I would do.

Hmm.. that's a strong team. This is the 4-DPS matrix that my 5v5 team just can't beat. I'm at 2060 with Warrior/Warrior/Feral Druid/Resto Shaman/Paladin (yeah, our team is weird, it has all melee DPS and very little CC), and we always get knocked away from 2100 by a 4-DPS team. Even with unfettered healing, the paladin and shaman cannot keep up the burn target.

CoT, Counterspell, Fear, and Silence on the healers. Poly/Cyclone/Roots/Blind on the non-target DPS. Maybe re-apply just once after they use their trinket. Then go to town with everything you have - they shouldn't be able to output healing to match your burn, especially if some are CCed. Perhaps some better PvPers can comment on some ideas.

Right now my 5v5 has one main lineup which is the standard 2345 with mage, but we also have a warlock and a hunter who we want to play and the difficulty is fitting them in (the resto shaman is leaving next season). I'm not interested in dropping any of these players, so what I'm aiming for is specifically the best matchups we can make with these players. I've learnt from experience that 3 lineups sucks pretty hardcore for organizing games so I only want to make 2 teams. Right now I think the strongest 2 we could possibly make to play all characters are:

Warrior
Priest
Paladin
Shaman
Mage

Warrior
Priest
Paladin
Warlock
Hunter

The first team is obviously 2345, the other team is a drain team with a warrior thrown in for offencive power. Can anyone see a fault in my logic here?

The other question is about the warlock. Right now he is UA/demo and honestly I don't think it's working at all. He is not only the easiest person to train but he has no burst damage whatsoever and has little damage in the face of dispells unless he can get a UA off, which is difficult when he is inevitably focussed. I'm thinking something like 7+/41+/11 would up his burst, give him some damage even when focussed and dispelled, and also give him more survivability. It seems like the perfect solution to me but he's a little touchy about specs so I don't want to bring it up if we can make his current spec work. Does anyone think we can make affliction work?

EDIT: To clarify the second question I mean can an affliction warlock work in a 2-2.5 healer group. I'm aware that they work fine in 4DPS teams.

UA Warlocks can work in 2-2.5 healer 5s but they need taking care of. A Felguard Warlock will not do more damage than a UA Warlock when focused. He'll stay alive a whole lot longer but his real damage comes from Bolts that he can't cast when being focused and Shadowburn.
It's a whole lot easier to clear Corruption+Immolate off a target with no dispel resistance than it is to dispel just Corruption+Siphon+Shadow Embrace with Contagion backing it up too.

When I played as Affliction we tended to hurt because I was always the nobrainer choice to focus fire. But we play Paladin, Resto Shaman, Moonkin, Warrior and yours truly. No Priest to present a second viable melee target (and no mage or hunter to help kite them). We hit a slump in rating and as soon as I went back to SL (using Felguard at first) our rating rocketed. So basically I'm saying I wouldn't recommend it based on my experience but your mileage may vary.

Just to get the line-up out of the way:

Arms Warrior
Marks Hunter (has Mage alt, prefers Hunter)
Frost Mage (has Rogue alt, no major preference)
Holy Pally (has Hunter and Lock alts, prefers Hunter)
Disc Priest (me)

I know it's less than ideal (the Hunter was brought in to replace an Ele Shaman that had to leave), but we squeaked into Duelist after the ranks were updated. With 2.3 we jumped about 200 points to 2k and were able to tread water at that rating relatively well at 2k until the end of the season.

Our largest problems come from 4 DPS teams, especially with Lock/Shadow Priest or double Lock. They can just tear our Warrior or Hunter new ones and the Pally and I are simply at a loss for what to do. Even with Pain Suppression we simply can't keep up, and once we're behind on heals, we'll lose someone. As for our strategy, if there isn't an obvious target (poor gear, deep Fire Mage, UA Lock, or Shadow Priests even) we'll: Poly/lockdown their main healer; put the Mage/Warrior on their squishiest DPS; split the Hunter off to put direct pressure on the other healer or anyone they have draining mana; and the Hunter and I drain the mana of their second healer. With multiple melee, the Mage will help keep people off me with Poly and Nova/Freeze, but the rest of the strategy holds. We can't out-burn or outlast a 4 DPS team it seems, and splitting pressure/CC to keep their DPS in check only seems to work occasionally against melee-heavy teams and not at all against caster teams that go after our Warrior/Hunter.

I'm mildly convinced that our make-up is retarding any serious push to Gladiator-type ratings and was looking at options to change things up. After talking with our Paladin at some length, the only semi-viable idea that sprang up was to replace my Priest with a Lock. The logic is that some teams will eat our Warrior alive, sure, but my Priest isn't providing appropriate cover for our Hunter as the first burn target. If a team decides to pressure our Hunter first, he's not going to be able to do much. On top of that, having me on the attack would provide some leadership to our Offense that's sorely missing. (Additionally, as captain, I'd prefer to change classes myself versus (politely) forcing someone else to. To top it all off, we have a Rogue in-guild who's a fantastic player that I'd like to include, but our 5v5 is only recently not-horrible so I haven't put much thought into alternate combinations. That said, just thinking about that makes we want to dig up my linear algebra book.)

In short: is there some glaring strategic or tactical failing in how we run our team? If there isn't, can a stronger matrix be composed by having me change over to another class? For bonus points and [Delicious Chocolate Cake], any additional combinations come to mind from the characters listed that are at least as viable as the current one?

I was wondering if I could get some strat ideas from you guys. We have an arena team where I'm by far the lowest geared player but we just can't seem to get out of the 1500ish rating area. (150 resil, but armory isn't updated)

Ms Warrior
Paladin
Hemo Rogue
Hemo Rogue (me)

Our fifth is my roommate and he has a Dest Lock, Surviv Hunter, and Arcane/Frost mage. All three very well equiped.

Should I be *asking* (his team) him to focus on one char only instead of swapping in all three every week? Which would be the best with our current setup?

We've had real problems with strategy. One time they even tried the "ff on warriors" idea, which I knew would fail heavily since we're melee-centric. Usually we just run a ff train on someone but now I'm starting to question that. With two rogues should we be trying to lock-down their healers with the rogues?

My team usually runs with
MM Hunter
Resto druid
Resto shaman
Shadow Preist
Ms Warr

The warr and hunter have 200-300 resilience others are lackin a little at 100-150 they are working on improving the gear
Im just curious about any tips with this make up, we usually cyclone a warrior or rouge and burn a clothie or the next weakest thing in the group.
Is there anything else we should be doing or can be doing to help us push past 1500-1600 rank and move on to a more competitive level?

Since you're running with 2 healers, vs. 4 dps teams you need to CC/drain their healer while you focus their warrior/rogue/sp. Your Hunter has imp stings as marks, but with your setup you need to control the map, and thus you might want to look @ having him pick up entrapment so you can protect your shadowpriest. You don't really give enough details about play style or gear to say much more than that.

Your shaman and priest need to push their resil above 300 to allow them to survive medium burst trains, without that sort of gear you're just asking for them to get Gibbed straight off the bat.

thanks a ton, but with our team what classes would be the most important to cyclone if we are draining the healer, beside a second healer

Cyclone their Priest/Druid, and try and follow it up with a fearbomb from your SPriest, or a scattershot from your hunter. you can pretty much just have your shaman focus target any paladin HLs, stick a scorpid pet/viper on him, and FOL spam vs. MS doesn't do much since hell be OOM in no time.

Hi guys, I am running a 3 healer, 2 DPS team.

This is our setup:

-Hemo Rogue
-MS Warrior
-Resto Shaman
-Holy/Disc Priest
-Holy Paladin

I'm the Rogue, so far I am waiting for a 1850 rating so I can purchase S3 maces. For now I am using Spiteblade and S2 Offhand. So basically our aim is to play the survival game,while throwing intense DPS, and mana drainage. I thought that me and the Warrior would work out pretty good because I can give him many benefits like expose armor (-2k armor) and hemo. On top of that, we are both using windfury and blood lust from shaman, so thats going to be somewhat decent damage for a 2 DPS team. Then we have the shaman, priest, paladin synergy for drain and survival.

Our weakness would probably be that we are short on CCs. So I would just like to ask for any tips if possible since we are newly formed. For example, what kind of target should be our focus fired for me and the warrior. People tell me priest, mage, elemental shaman. Mage is abit hard for us because we get kited around quite easily, during kiting, mage is still receiving good heals. What worked for us was to kill the most squishiest character first. So basically my question is, do we have the right tactics for the team, if not, what could we improve on. When we run into teams with mage, priest, and shaman, who would you rank to kill first, and would we ever be strong enough to burn down a warrior as well. Thank you for readin.

I have a question regarding how to balance a Hunter's utility vs. burst output. Our combination runs like so:

MM Hunter (myself)
MS War
Holy Priest
Frost Mage
Resto Druid (picking up a missing Paladin)

To start Season 3 out I started specced with 5/5 improved stings, 2/5 RWS, 2/3 improved barrage, 3/3 entrapment, and 3/3 improved wing clip.

Tonight as we played about 20 games I noticed that my mana drain on my target was generally pretty slow and when we got called to assist a target down, I wasn't hitting as hard as I used to with my PvE spec. So it seemed like we were taking too long to DPS down our primary target which allowed negative things to happen to our team: Healers OOM, my being taken out, etc..

So I've decided to respec to the following: 3/5 improved stings, 4/5 RWS, 2/3 improved barrage, 1/3 improved wing clip, and I put 7 points into the beast tree for 5/5 endurance training and 2/2 focus fire. (I also went from 5/5 survivalist to 1/5 survivalist. I have about 300 resilience and I thought 300 hp wasn't going to make a huge difference.)

I am hoping that with the mediocre performance of improved stings and the unreliability of improved wing clip, taking a couple of points out of each in favor of more damage output isn't going to cripple the team.

My question is how do 5s Marks hunters balance their utility to their burst output?