Xavias

This thread is dedicated to strategy and discussion regarding Priests in Arena.

 

Caligula

Drop Blessed Recovery in my opinion. It will proc over Blessed Resilience which is a far more powerful talent.

Also keep your shield on yourself at all times, before the warrior even gets to you. If he can't generate rage then he can't do much but hope for a mace proc.

Hope this helps a bit.

 

Demosthenes

There isn't much you can do, but here are a couple of tactics I have found that have prolonged the fight.

- Kite him as long as possible before he can get his charge off(works best in blades edge)
- When he uses his intercept, trinket out of it as it will remove the stun and hamstring you most likely have on you, and kite him again. Most warriors dont expect that you will move after their intercept stun so it catches them offguard.
- Shield as much as possible + keep renew up all the time(shields dont give them rage)
- One thing that works sometimes, is when you're at full HP(or close to it) cast a heal to draw their pummel and then MC them. This doesnt always work because sometimes the warrior will be attacking so fast it take a good 5 seconds before the MC goes off. But with a well timed shield, you can gain a good 10 seconds from MC.
- Of course fear when they dont have Death Wish up(although if a mace spec warrior doesnt kill me in 30 seconds I consider him a failure).

I mostly 2v2 with a rogue partner, and the only time we have won against pally/war teams is when the warrior didn't have mace, or the pally didn't react fast enough to my mana burns and he was oom before he could move outta LOS.

Also to the other priests out there that have problems against warriors, would you favor resil gems over stam gems or vice-versa?

 

Xavias

Could you please elaborate on this, what do you mean by "proc over Blessed Resilience"? Does it override Blessed Resilience when it procs?

 

Caligula

Since they can't proc at the same time there is a random (I believe it's random) chance to proc either, so yes, technically one is overwritten by the other.

Also, If a warrior MS crits you for 2500 and then white crits you for 1k the white crit will override the MS crit (therefore healing for less) and reset the healing timer as well.

This talent is just a disaster all around in my personal opinion.

As for the kiting thing, put up rank 1 SWP on your bars and hit him with it when he gets in range before he charges you and force him to switch to berserker and intercept. Then he's out of distance closing options for 20+ seconds (and as the person above mentioned, trinket out of the stun and hamstring and you've got a head start).

 

Demosthenes

I'd rather use SW: D to get the warrior in combat, because forgive me if I'm wrong, but doesnt SW:P have to tick before it will get the warrior in combat?

 

Xavias

I had no idea about that, thank you very much for pointing it out. That surely would explain the crit chains that I take.

What do you guys think of Silent Resolve? I've heard its bugged somehow, but not sure how. Does it work on Blessed Resilience? Or is it only spells you physically "cast"?

Personally I'm thinking of stacking Armor items and effects, such as ZG tanking trinket, and perhaps the Violet eye Tanking ring and an Armor cloak. I'm leaning towards armor items over Resilence, as it seems it provides higher mitigation, even on crits.

 

Demosthenes

If you go the normal 28/33 blessed resil build, getting Silent Resolve will be a matter of playstyle. If you are an offensive dispeller in most of your groups, I'd rather get its mana cost reduced by 15%. It can also depend on which arena you plan on doing. For 2v2(my choice for arena's) the only team that gives us a problem is warr/pally and since none of them have an offensive dispell the points used in Silent Resolve would be a waste.

 

Elikai

I also had no idea that blessed recovery/resilience will not proc at the same time. I'm sure I've seen the timers for both on my buffmod, but I definately need to do some testing tonight as a respec may be in order.

I'm almost hoping it's as you say, since more BR uptime would be nice. I was aware of the 'crits overwriting crits' problem, but always figured that any passive healing adds to my survival.

I've been meaning to pose this question, and now seems a valid time to do it since it's a choice that seems even more baffling to me now. I've peeped at a -lot- of high rated priest's specs over arena s1/2, and I've noticed a lot of them had 1/3 in both inspiration and blessed recovery. Is there anything obvious I'm missing which would make that a wise choice during the normal course of things? I'm pretty certain these are pure pvp specs, and under normal circumstances I'd say those are 2 wasted points which could have been dropped into crit or something.

Here's a quick example of what I'm on about.

 

Caligula

I'm almost 100% positive that one of the more reliable priests on the Wow-Priests forum did a lot of testing at some point and basically showed that the two "BR" talents conflict. This was a few months ago so perhaps it has been fixed by now.

 

Demosthenes

More buffs = more things to purge/dispell. Getting these makes it so that they cover more important buffs such as a BoP or a Blessing or a PoM. At leasts that's the way I see it.

 

Calantus

The best way to stay alive against a warrior is to have your teammates save you. In 2v2 with a warrior partner a tactic we've been trying and having some success with is getting the warrior in combat and running away, forcing him to intercept me. When he does this I have my warrior intercept and hamstring him in return and I run off, free from damage for 15+ seconds. With a frost mage it's even better, if I'm the one getting targetted he'll sheep and nova the warrior for me when possible. We're still working on our teamwork in this regard, and our mage only just respecced to water elemental which should make it even easier, but my survivability has gone way up already. When I 2v2 with an elemental shaman (no more!) I just get ripped apart by a geared warrior because a shaman can't CC to help me.

This is a common misconception due to like you said, all the testing that made it look like this is how it works, but we now know it doesn't work like this. If you get crit all of your "on being crit" abilities will proc. The only problem is that the more resiliance you get the less likely you are to crit and so the less powerful these talents are. To counteract this Blizzard put in a system where you have a % chance to proc an "on being crit" talent on normal hits, based on your resilience (I believe it is equal to the crit reduction you get from resilience). For this type of proc WoW rolls for each ability seperately. Now you're looking at only 10% chance to proc each ability so it's fairly rare to get all 3 up at once from a normal hit, hence the myth that you can only proc 1 or 2 on being crit abilities when not being crit.

There was a blue post on this and a couple threads running calculations but the forums are running slow right now so I can't find them.

No, just having a hostile ability used on you puts you in combat, but of course lag can have him charge you right before the server sees him get in comabt even though he should be from your end.

 

Caligula

Aha, I knew there was something funky about it. I guess I was thinking of before they changed it so you could get the "on being crit" bonuses from a crit that has been reduced to a hit by resilience.

I still think Blessed Recovery isn't great as new procs will overwrite old ones and reset the heal timer. It's not quite as bad as I had originally heard though.

 

• Erongg

[Edit, beaten]

Could someone post some solid evidence that both BR procs can't happen at the same time? I'm concerned that the testers may be confused when they try this, because resilience means each *hit* has a small chance to proc one (or more) of your defensive abilities (see Drysc's explanation of resilience and proc interaction: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...10541937&sid=1). The chance that both abilities proc off of the same hit is small. That could result in people seeing the two abilities proc independently of each other and assuming that they don't stack. Crits should still proc both. Could we see some instances of crits procing only one or the other?

Finite Simple Group of Order Two

 

Caligula

Well that certainly makes me a sad panda. They originally claimed they would make it so everything procced off a crit-reduced-to-hit by resilience. Sorry for the confusion all.

 

Reft

Edit: Was going to say something about talent spec but realized I looked at it wrong, disregard this post ^^

 

Lavery

Edit: someone beat me to the reply.

 

necrodan

There are still certain talents that will proc when a crit is converted via Resilience. (can't get too specific with WoW's site lagging but its back in a patch note)

I noticed my survival is best when I'm shielded before the first charge. Furthermore, the high end crits that help a Warrior generate rage can be reduced via resilience. Psychic scream is a waste of a GCD unless you can get a lucky stun resist off the warriors initial charge. Without help from your teammate, you will inevitably die to a Warrior. If he is allowed to stand on top of you.

The Fake Heal as mentioned is a good tactic. I also like the MC or mindblast tactic so that if he does pummel these you can heal without fear of being silenced (good luck w/ MS and macestun ) I also prefer in most situations to keep the warriors rage at a minimum, and avoid doing damage to them.

On that note, I have stacked more resilience in the past weeks and it has helped a lot. Warriors were once my most feared opponent but not so much anymore.

Hope it helps.

 

Shadowed

DoTs on Warriors good, spamming Mind Blast/Smite bad basically.

 

Bygone

I would definitely start investing in resilience vs stam now that I've reached 11k unbuffed. Unfortunately the problem is that unless you farm the epic boss dropped Stam/Resilience gem, you currently have one realistic option being the +10 Halaa gem. Unfortunately I don't believe the craftable Mystic Dawnstone has been added to the Halaa vendor as of yet.

There was a very well thought out post on this forum citing the diminishing returns one gets on stam vs resilience at high levels that has had me seriously considering new socketing strategies for Season 2 gear.

As an aside, I think I will start swapping out to 4 piece Season 1 gear for the PWS set bonus against melee heavy teams (warriors in particular) vs having the stacking +35 resilience from two different season set bonuses.

Maybe that might keep me alive a few seconds longer :<

 

Crypta

Hmm.. this is big deal. I am currently specced in both BR talents.

Can anyone provide conclusive evidence either way? I was under the impression that the BR talents were a good synergy in that blessed resilience could prevent you from being crit for 6 seconds, and Blessed recovery would heal you during that time. This thread is the first I heard of the possibility that they might overwrite eachother.

Sorry for the derail.. but knowing how the BR talents actually work (or not work) is huge.



On topic... As others have said, there is little you can do about mace warriors. The talent stun and the weapon stun do not share the same DR. The best you can hope for is to rage-deprive the warrior with PW:S, heal yourself with instants, and hope your team can help you before he kills you. Sometimes you can get lucky with landing a mind control.. but again that can be pummeled, mace-stunned, or resisted. Healing through MS with only instants is ultimately a losing proposition.

I don't know about your battlegroup, but the number of mace warriors in mine has noticably gone up. I'd say more than half of the warriors my 5v5 team faced last night (and we played 35 games) had DT/SH. They used to be something of a novelty, now I'd have to classify it as full-bore FotM. Our class really does not have an answer for this.

 

Bygone

In a 1v1 environment it's definitely a lopsided fight. The alternative is selecting a partner/s for your arena team that can effectively nullify them and let you do your job without too much interruption.


Rogue Priest Vs Warrior Pally is an extremely difficult fight but for this Season I went with a frost mage and we are having very little issue with Warrior Pally teams.

Anything with a Rogue lock on the otherhand....

.02

 

Caligula

No I was incorrect. Read up further on this link:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...10541937&sid=1

The talents now have a chance to proc on regular hits but each talent has a unique roll. This is different than they had originally planned (where crits that were reduced to hits by resilience would proc the talents). I guess for awhile people (including myself) were under the impression that it was broken. Apparently it's working as intended but not as they had originally planned.

 

crimsonsentinel

Resilience doesn't make would-be crits into non crits. Nobody has ever said that so I don't know why everyone believes that to be the case. All it does is lower the opponent's crit % when the game does its outcome roll. Therefore, it is impossible to know whether a hit would have been a crit had there been less resillience.

 

diotox

They initially gave everyone the misconception that the game would be tracking crits that were "converted" into normal hits via resilience. The actual implementation of it was a bit of a hack where they just took the value of your -crit% from your resilience, and made every hit you take give you that much % to proc your ability. Ie, let's say I have 390 resilience, which is -10% to be crit. Every time I take a hit, I have a 10% chance to proc enrage, and then a separate 10% chance to proc blood craze. Thus, unless I've been crit, I'm going to only see 1 or the other up most of the time. I presume the priest talents work in the same manner, leading to the confusion. An impromptu way to test this is to slap on as much resilience as you can, and then stand in a fire, which cannot crit. You'll see your talents procing regardless though and you should eventually either have both up at once or see them directly overwrite if you watch closely. The less resilience you have, the longer this test will take though.