We've started to climb up higher with our 4 dps team, 1650 (Only play 10 games a week, went 9-1 last week), bit different to most. Standard UA Lock X2, SP, Paladin and then we have an enc shaman for the 5th, purely because he's a friend and good PvP'er. Today we went up against 3 healer team + 2 melee and had real problems. Our survivability was fine, it's hard for them to bust you with 2 melee only, and we all run with 150-200 resi, but nothing was going down. Lack of a heal debuff and 2 pallys and a priest meant they could out heal even the 6-8k of burst we put out.

I'm thinking this is where our losses will come from if we don't adapt a new stratergy, something along the lines of Dot up 1 target, interupting Mana burns(shm) and then when dots are on Death coil/fear and silence the t3 healers, if only for 2-3 seconds, burning SW/MB/Shadowburn/Shadowbolt all while bloodlusted is a rediculous amount of burst.

It's that or swap me or 1 UA lock out for a Rogue, with Wound poison the burst will be too much for alot of teams.

Anyone else had a hard combo for 4 DPS 1 healer teams, we're trying to go for 1800-1900 rating these next weeks and was wondering any other Rocks to our scissors that we may not of encountered.

Who were you focusing first? With 2 Warlocks and a Shadow Priest you shouldn't be having issues locking people down with Fel Hunters and Fears, and killing a Paladin isn't such a hard thing to do when you can Mass Dispel bubble.

Wound Poison isn't instant, and unless they go 5/5 Vile Poisons it's not very hard to cleanse it off, and if one of the healers is a Dwarf then they Stoneform out of it also.

Against the 3 healer team, we tried our normal tactic of burn the warrior first, this was when we didn't know who we were facing, and obviously when we realised it was 3 healers switched to the priest. Several times we dropped her to within 10-15% life but the heals kept flowing, usually the 10-15% was after a silence on a pally and fear on another.

2nd try we went for a paladin, but it was still no go, the rogue is all over either 1 of our warlocks or our paladin, warrior is on me, but since most my spells are instant it's not a massive deal. Several times when we tried this we got the bubble down but we could never finish the job, with the PvP trinkets it's near impossible to lock down 3 healers at the same time, well for us it is, perhaps with more practice it will get easier. Other problem is if we ignore the priest we open ourselfs to mana burn, but I am reluctant to focus a priest first as I know they are 28/33 and it negates a large portion of our burst with BR.

(Note: The warrior first has always been our strat, since alot of the lower rating teams have paper warriors or just are not expecting the focus on them, coupled with his death ruins most teams assit trains, though somtimes we do SP's, Fire mages and Druids/Shm first depending)

I'm in a casual 5v5 team, we usually play the minimum 10 games, try to get everyone some points to buy stuff every 1-2 months. But now some people are considering having a core of five to play a lot of games to push ratings. We have the following:

MS Warrior x 2
Paladin
Resto Shaman
Mage
Affliction Lock
Resto Druid
Rogue

Assuming equal skill level and gear, what do you think would be the best line-up?

Double Warrior, Paladin, Resto Shaman, Mage is good...

Double Warrior, Paladin, Mage, Afflock could be ok for a 4 DPS setup

Warrior, Paladin, Mage, Afflock, Resto Shaman is good too.

Rogues and resto Druids are very much filler in 5v5 at the moment, and only work well agaisnt certain set ups.

I'd probably take the Warriors, Paladin, Shaman, Mage, Afflock for a nice base of 6, since everyone isnt ALWAYS going to be around, and maybe even the Rogue for some redundancy in the Mage/Afflock slot. A rogue running pure control/interference with two other solid DPSers does ok (IME).

The Paladin + MS Warrior are completely irreplaceable parts of that lineup though. You need to only play when your Paladin is around, for the (defensive) BoF kiting meta-game. I'd look for a 2nd Paladin for this reason too (redundancy). Double Warrior / Double Paladin / Mage or Resto Shaman is also a fairly fearsome line up. Elemental Shaman in that spot, even better...

Is this a viable strat? I know any time a team tries to train our warrior down his damage goes insane because he's being fed rage like no other and it's not hard to keep him up really. my team also usually goes after the squishiest target first, being mostly priest > warlock > mage.

i found that most teams in the 1600 bracket were mostly people who have little to no PvP gear and no real knockout power or resilience to fight off crits (of course there are the full gladiator teams who power level teams up once in a while). While I am just in the 1750 range, the difficulty and importance of timing sure does ramp up from 1700 up imo because most teams at least in the 1700 range bloodlust battlegroup have at least a few peices of season 2 gladiator gear as well as their remaing season 1 gear.

but like I said my team has never gone after the warrior and usually warriors that drop fast aren't a real threat other then MS but can become a pain if they are blowing an ability every gcd because they are at full rage.

Hey guys! Just looking for some advice on who to cut from my Season 2 team. I ended up inviting and playing around with 14 different players and now I have some tough decisions to make. So heres who ive got and the quality of gear / skill they have.

1x UA Warlock (Myself - 400 Resilience)
1x UA Warlock (300 Resilience Solid PvPer)
2x Shadow Priest (Both in <100 Resilience / Both quality players however)
1x Elemental Shaman (400 Resilience / Top notch player)
1x Resto Shaman (250 Resilience / Excellent healer)
1x Resto Druid (150 Resilience / PvE healer somewhat PvP scrub)
2x Marksman Hunter (200 Resilience both, Both decent players but PvE mains)
1x Holy Paladin (250 Resilience / Scrub who seems incapable of healing if he has anything hitting him and taking pushback [yes not interupts just pushback] and refuses to precast Holy light for lights grace buff or ever cast flash of light for a clutch heal.)
1x Holy Paladin (200 Resilience / Excellent PvP healer)
1x Holy / Disc Priest (300 Resilience / Solid mana burner)
1x Frost Mage (250 Resilience / Excellent PvPer)
1x Rogue (250 Resilience / Tops meters in PvE, seems competent in PvP)
1x MS Warrior (200 Resilience Tier 5 DPS gear / Excellent player not much 5v5 Exp.)

So... Who gets the Chop and what should my team look like? Ideally I think 7-8 Players in the lineup would be good with a few sub ins for when we meet some bad matchups. The most effective setup we ran with while I was trialing everyone seemed to be UA Warlock + Shadow Priest + Frost Mage + Elemental Shaman + Paladin with people focusing largely on Control. This setup however met alot of problem when we faced the same team 3-4 times in a row as they learned that the Shadowpriest would drop in 5-10 seconds of focus.

Any advice would be great im really struggling cutting this number down to a managable 30% games played for everyone each week.

Pick your 2 x best Paladins, the MS Warrior and presumably yourself? Then go from there.

Frost Mage, Holy Priest, Elemental Shaman, other UA lock, and a Shadow Priest are all solid choices from there, depending on what lineups you plan.

If you can't always count on having your warrior, think about what sort of magic gib team you could make from what you have, too. Even the rogue could get a place in such a team, along with other high threat targets (e.g. 2 x locks, spriest, rogue, paladin).

All IMO, of course.

Reckoning is not the most extreme Battlegroup there is, 1600 is about the standard for most teams on our server and it's at this point you start to face people in half glad gear etc so it differs from your battlegroup. The 3 healer team we face was in 3/5 S1 and 1-2 S2 + the warrior had the Merciless Axe, they were rated 1750ish as an example.

What team are you using? I was always worried about leaving a MS warrior up with 3/5 of us being cloth casters and our lack of healing throughput, but if you run a similar team I may start to change to better targets and try it out.

Mmm thanks Tiiki I do enjoy the playstyle of a Gib team. I guess I could run with 2x lineups depending on whos online and what team setups are queueing. One with 2.5 Healer 1.5 DPS and MS warrior and the other as a magic gib team with appropriate overlaps. Would bringing an MS warrior to your suggested lineup be better or is a rogue the go?

The #2 team on Stormstrike right now is a FH team that runs Mage/Lock/Spriest/Esham/Paladin and is extremely, extremely ugly to fight. We thought we had decent gib until we met them.

I'm running a Mutilate Rogue, MS Axe Warrior, Holy Paladin, Resto Shaman, Frost Mage team, with a SL Lock as our floating 6th. We're at 1883 atm, and doing fairly well except for two scenarios :

2 War, 2 Paladin, 1 Shaman, or 2 War, 1 Paladin, 1 Ele Shm, 1 Holy/Disc Priest is a VERY tough match for us - we win 50/50 depending on if we can get the shaman/priest dead or not. We usually lose because our shaman gets locked down, and can't purge BOP from their shaman. Either that or we lose because myself and the Shaman run oom, and with double MS pressure we just can't keep up.

4 DPS 1 Healer - we *were* winning every single one of these games, as they invariably try to burn down my Shaman - who starts a match with a 2600+ healing Earth Shield on, with tons of junk buffs, then swaps to 250+ resil/11k health. But now that we've ascended past the cream of the crap, we're seeing 4DPS 1 Healer (most notably Forgotten Heroes) that just absolutely crush our Warrior - who has the most resilience on our whole team. They run UA Lock, Shadowpriest, Ele Shaman, Paladin, Mage. And they just drop our DPS before we can even do anything. I almost always pre-bubble or LOS them, but can't get enough heals off to save the Warrior. I've been trying to organize BWL and AQ40 runs for Trinkets to help with this, but no luck so far.

I think we're going to have problems as the season progresses and most other 4DPS 1Healer begin to copy what they do. vs the less successful 4DPS 1Healer, we just lock down the SP with our Rogue, and try to gib the Warlock since UA is "squishy" - with our Mage dealing with the Paladin.

Yeah, it's ridiculous the difference in HPS between what I put out on live (2 second Holy Lights with +1500 heal) and what I was doing at WSVG with Crystalforge and Scarab Brooch (1.75 second HLs with a +30% shield, same +healing). I've got to get into AQ40 somehow.

What's the name of that pvp team wodin? Tried looking them up on armory but no success there. Curious what the specs are and such.

Game Over - it's the same team Deris is talking about(sup Stormstrike buddies).

http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/te...Game+Over&fl=1

Specs are as follows:

Deztruckt: Standard heavy shadow priest, pure pvp
Radikal: 17/0/44 frost mage - gears for damage over survivability, but you can't really take advantage of it.
Azael: 43/7/11 UA warlock
Coercive: 40/0/21 Elemental Shaman
Odd: 40/21 pvp healing paladin.

They're really good at coordinating their CC and burst, and that's part of what makes them so lethal. Here's our paladin on Ventrilo when fighting them: "Sheeped" (pops out due to bosac) "Feared" (trinkets) "sheeped again" (bubbles at this point as our Spriest is at ~20%). Spriest dies anyways. "Deathcoiled" "Silenced" (at this point the rest of us fall over dead). I was kept snared away from the warlock pretty effectively because Radikal is pro, and our warlocks had their felhunters on Odd/Coercive at the start.

Actually, druids are not good specifically against certain matchups, they are good only *with* certain setups. Big difference.

What do I mean by that? My team until last week ran without a pally since day 1. And even now we still play without one on a regular basis. The problem is not that pally-less lineups are neccessarily weak, it is that they are *extremely* fragile. Example.

Our best lineup is warr/holy-disc priest/resto shaman/frost mage/resto druid. Swapping out the frost mage for a hunter who is equally skilled and geared makes us significantly weaker because without BoF, frost trap kiting is virtually impossible. On the same note, swapping a healer for more DPS is also pretty much a nogo because priest/druid cannot heal by themselves in 5v5. Really, a double healer team requires a pally to have any kind of success. I don't have to tell you how we fared without the warrior. And in a tri-healer lineup you need mana burn. So, without a pally we have virtually no options on swapping people. Once we do have a pally, pretty much all lineups that involve the pally and the warrior are viable.

So, the moral of the story is this. To work the "underprivileged" 5v5 classes (mainly druid and rogue) into your lineup you need to carefully craft the lineup around them. With the proper support, all classes can succeed.

Ok, here's my new lineup:

Warrior / Rogue / Ele Shaman / Paladin / Resto Shaman

We were doing well since we started this line up - and were 6-1 up this week. Then we just faced a succession of 4DPS teams. And even a 5DPS one (double shadow priest/double lock/ele shaman). The 4DPS team we lost to about 3 times was paladin/spriest/double lock (aff + destro)/rogue. We didn't beat the 5DPS team either.

It's ridiculously easy with 3 fears, shadowfury, 2 felhunters and a silence for them to shut down our 2 healers for as long as they will ever need. Equally, whenever I opened I was utterly shut down myself by the above, plus the rogue opening on me (he can wait as long as he likes for me to open on a clothie then own me). Me or the Ele shaman were always fairly effortlessly killed first.

Our only CC is my blind and the warriors intim shout. This makes these super high DPS teams incredibly hard to control. They can all trinket our high CD CC and then do what they like. The first target to get near death gets a BoP and our ele shaman (and everyone else) gets Tongues so can do almost nothing.

It was mega frustrating because it didn't feel like we were being rubbish, but just that we had no chance. We tried going for the spriest, the rogue and the destro lock. Even the destro lock (they usually go down FAST) survived our initial burst and CC on the Paladin just through their extreme early CC on us. I'm not sure we ever managed to get one of them down.

Considering shadow resist gear wont be an option soon, and they weren't REALLY that much of a DoT team anyway... how can a low CC, 3DPS/2 Healer teams cope with these teams?

Before the trinket change it would've been much MUCH easier. Now the likes on intim shout and blind are useless except to make them blow their trinket for your 'real' CC classes (of which we have none) to do their thing. We can potentially swap in an SL lock for any of us, if that would help, but I don't see how it would.... unless to make us 4DPS as well...

Any thoughts, good folk?

In all honesty, I don't think they can. They are your anti-team. You need either more healing or more CC - preferably both. There is a reason many top teams moved from 2 to 2.5 healers for season 2.

However, you really have 2.5 healers since you have an elemental shaman. Having him heal when the burst is coming is probably your best bet.

My RL rogue friend told me he was talking to the mage, who's the leader of Insurrection? Their 5v5 was Zerg It Down, but is now We Are Godzilla You Are Japan. Anyways, he says he has never seen a 4DPS team break the top 10 in BG9. I think once you get to the metagem, teams are just too good @ LOS and control.

Go for one Paladin and force him to bubble, switch to the other until the first Paladins bubble fades then kill the first Paladin, when they have Paladin/Priest then repeat the same thing but go for the Priest until the Paladins bubble fade, also get Bloodlust/Heroism off as quickly as possible.

Going for the Shaman doesn't work because you just leave 2 healers open to spam heals and the Warriors will mostly decimate your Rogue/Warrior since they have to be grouped up, and going for the Warriors you wont nuke one of them down fast enough before you lose.

He's wrong.

Current #4 team on BG9

Those guys are very good. Our rag-tag group of whatever we have online played them a few times and we got totally destroyed, their coordination of CC/burst is ridiculous.