Anyone got some advice for 2dps teams in 2v2? I'm down pretty fast and I feel I could do more to stay up. Specifically mage/rogue teams. Pillaring the mage is hard with all the poisons im lubed up in and if I get stunned and nova'd its game over. When, ideally, should I pop trinket and run away? Should I stay defensive or be in there dispelling shields and fearing? I run with a warlock so I'd assume staying close by for fears on rogue would help.
You didn't mention if you're discipline, I'll assume that you are. If they focus on you, the warlock should be free to fear them both giving you enough time to survive, you should also stay mounted at the start and avoid them as much as you can while the warlock dots them. This will force the other team to start attacking the warlock.
At high ratings though most mage/rogue teams will open directly on the warlock and try to burn him down while sheeping/blinding/counterspelling you. To prevent this you need to position yourself correctly so that you can line of sight all sheeps and the warlock needs to be ready to dispel one in case it goes through, try to save your trinket for blind. Have your warlock fight in the open but in range of your pillar, if you have a chance to fear the rogue without exposing yourself to a polymorph that helps too.
Against 2dps teams where pillaring is not an issue and outranging isn't feasible, get in there. Just avoid getting close enough to get caught in the same aoe, and try to land that fear on both of them if they open themselves up to it.
We play disc priest/ms warrior/elemental shaman in 3s and our priest just constantly gets murdered, even with over 400 resilience. Her resilience can go up a bit more with another piece of s3 honor gear, but that will get it to 460 or so. The question is how to keep her from constantly being destroyed, especially against teams with 2 physical dps'ers (rogue, enh shaman, ret pally, ms warrior, hunter). Me as an elemental shaman have no way to peal one of them off her, and when I try to heal her to help out its usually only a temporary stopgap which then leaves us doing little pressure. Our warrior will often get on one, and sometimes that helps, but it still is an issue with her exploding from all the dps coming her way. PS gives us an 8 second reprieve, but once that is gone its back to her dying again.
We play disc priest/ms warrior/elemental shaman in 3s and our priest just constantly gets murdered, even with over 400 resilience. Her resilience can go up a bit more with another piece of s3 honor gear, but that will get it to 460 or so. The question is how to keep her from constantly being destroyed, especially against teams with 2 physical dps'ers (rogue, enh shaman, ret pally, ms warrior, hunter). Me as an elemental shaman have no way to peal one of them off her, and when I try to heal her to help out its usually only a temporary stopgap which then leaves us doing little pressure. Our warrior will often get on one, and sometimes that helps, but it still is an issue with her exploding from all the dps coming her way. PS gives us an 8 second reprieve, but once that is gone its back to her dying again.
Is she doing everything in her power to keep herself alive? Micromanaging Weakened Souls and timing Power Word: Shield's with the opposing warrior's rage? Watching for opportunities to get multiple bounces on ProM against teams that are splitting DPS (if only for a brief moment) against you?
Your warrior also needs to help the priest stay alive with intercepts and snares on the opposing team's melee. Get good at communicating and you can even have your warrior time his or her snares to coincide with your priest's snare wearing off to maximize kiting time. After that just get behind LOS to avoid Intercept and then heal up.
When healing up, especially in 2s and 3s when you can micromanage yourself a lot better, the priest should try and time heals to land right after a Mortal Strike debuff wears off when they aren't being directly pressured (like when they're in a situation created by the warrior snare in the previous paragraph). If they're also having trouble getting locked down, try to bait out interrupts with a Mana Burn or a Mind Control (try and wait for either Focused Casting or do this during a PW:S) so that they can heal relatively freely afterwards.
Specifically against teams with two melee, your warrior will be a huge aid in controlling the melee, as will your Frost Shocks and Earthbinds. If your priest can get out of melee range unsnared, they can usually stay out of it for a good 10 seconds or so . The only difficult part is when rogues still have Sprint up, but rogues are fairly easy to deal with using fear.
I'm a disc priest playing with a hunter and a rogue (3v3) and also find that me dying to physical DPS (usually rogues and warriors) is the most common point of failure for our team.
What I find generally happens is that the melee is snared (via the ice slick trap) but this doesn't really matter because I'm constantly hamstrung or crippled and thus can't get away anyways. I can open a brief gap by trinketing the snare and running around a pillar, but after that I simply have no way to open distance and the rogue/warrior is never going to allow their snare to expire (and obviously no one on our team can dispel hamstring or crippling poison). Apart from the gap I can open with my trinket, snaring the melee DPS on me thus seems almost pointless - if I'm moving at 30% speed (or whatever hamstring is) they can stay in contact with me regardless.
Am I missing anything here? Obviously LoS the ranged, try MC against warriors, use shield and PoM on every cooldown and keep renew up... This routine seems to be enough to let me weather a somewhat undergeared rogue or warrior, but against a well-geared melee, or against two of them, it's only a (fairly short) matter of time before I go down. (This may be a gear issue on my part - I'm at 11k health, 200 resilience in the 1650 ranking.)
Given that my DPS is usually occupied focusing one opponent while forcing the enemy healer to heal (as opposed to say, mana burn), that leaves one opposing DPS free (apart from traps and potentially a blind) to focus me. Is there anything else I can do (besides just more gear, better baiting of interrupts with shadow school spells, and better coordination with the limited CC my team possesses) to stay alive?
Its really not that much different with my priest July, and she has 410-420 resilience (up to 450 if she uses UB trinket instead of battlemaster one) and more health. We just can not seem to keep her alive. I do drop poison cleansing, but that is a drop in the bucket to a stack of poisons from a rogue. And if I spam cure poison, then I'm not doing anything.
is the warrior mace spec and intercepting/stunning the rogue on cooldown? A warrior can lock down a rogue pretty damn well.
Remember that the best way to get pressure off your team is to put pressure on theirs. If you start pounding the rogue, then they have to start playing very differently - and rogues go down very very fast versus warriors, if the warriors are attacking them from behind.
The other thing - tipically a priest can keep himself alive almost indefently versus a warrior without windfury. The trouble is if the warrior gets windfury, he then starts getting enough rage to be able to use his abilities a lot more - without windfury you can negate almost 2 hits worth of rage every 12 seconds - and he only gets ~ 100 rage to work with. Kill the windfury totems early. Stun + snare - the priest won't be able to get out of snare, but he can crawl away while the rogue is stunned, then if the rogue wants to get back on the priest he has to move towards him with a warrior beating on his back.
So I'm finally getting around to building up my arena set, and I play mostly as a holy/disc priest in a 3v3 team, and I'm wondering if it's best to get:
1) All pieces of the Gladiator's Investiture, and get the 4-piece reduced Weakened Soul
or
2) 3 pieces of Gladiator's Investiture, and 2 pieces of Gladiator's Raiment, so I can get 2x +35 resilience.
If I go for option 2, which pieces should I get from Raiment? I'm leaning towards the Chest and the Shoulders, since they are the most socketable, and therefore I'm theoretically losing the least +healing by going with those items.
is the warrior mace spec and intercepting/stunning the rogue on cooldown? A warrior can lock down a rogue pretty damn well.
Remember that the best way to get pressure off your team is to put pressure on theirs. If you start pounding the rogue, then they have to start playing very differently - and rogues go down very very fast versus warriors, if the warriors are attacking them from behind.
The other thing - tipically a priest can keep himself alive almost indefently versus a warrior without windfury. The trouble is if the warrior gets windfury, he then starts getting enough rage to be able to use his abilities a lot more - without windfury you can negate almost 2 hits worth of rage every 12 seconds - and he only gets ~ 100 rage to work with. Kill the windfury totems early. Stun + snare - the priest won't be able to get out of snare, but he can crawl away while the rogue is stunned, then if the rogue wants to get back on the priest he has to move towards him with a warrior beating on his back.
Windfury when dropped is like a 10 second buff. If you destroy the totem right away, then they can just redrop it a few seconds later for next to no cost and it really doesn't make a lot of difference. And yes my warrior is mace and yes we do tend to go park on a melee. But the fact is even though that that enemy is snared, so is our priest. So our priest doesn't get away. We're trying to work more on LoS to not get raped by hunters, but I don't see a way for our team to stop double melee teams from just blowing our priest up every single time. Add in there that if my priest is humping a pillar to try and get away from the enemy melee than I can't do shit dps on them due to LoS.
I run Rog/Hunt/priest in my 3s also, we're at 2012 and usually hang around 2000ish. On the way to 1900 we did run into alot of 2x melee gib teams. It was a huge problem at first, till our hunter respec'd into Scatter/Sleep Sting. Our strategy is to usually have the our rogue pressure a squishy or burst potential target (Mage/Ele Sham/Rogues) while the hunter plays drain/babysitter to me.
Always make sure to put the warrior into combat or destealth a rogue, it prevents a ton of intial damage. Once they are in combat we drop a frost trap and begin to pillar hump. I use my trinket in coordination with the hunters procs (Concussion/WingClip) or Scatter Shot to game some distance. Once I have distance its pretty much over. With constant wing clips on the melee, combined with freezing traps (great vs druid/shaman healer teams), sleep sting, concussion procs (stun is pro), counter attack (under rated talent) and scatter melee can't touch me. If all heck breaks loose we'll use the rogue's blind so I can get a few heals/drink ticks in. Meanwhile the hunter is constantly draining/harassing and eventually someone goes oom and we use our CC/Fears/Dispells to get a kill.
Here's our Hunters spec, i only recommend it for a drain/survival based team:
Yeah I'd love to have the cc options available that your team does. Or the drain ones. But in our setup we don't. Yet I know people get 2k+ with it. I don't know really what we're not doing right. I've tried to play it defensively like how a 2 healer/war team would do it but that has had limited results. Maybe I should just be blowing everything into the main target right off the start, but I don't know. Regardless, if I try to play the outlast game here to prevent the priest being killed, we lose.
I normally play Priest/Rogue/Warlock in 3v3. The last couple of weeks we managed to hit the top10 in our realmpool (with a rating of 2,1 - 2,15k). This week we lost like 80 - 90 points in a couple of games to two teams. One was Paladin/Mage/Rogue, the other was Paladin/Hunter/Ele-Shaman.
For the first team our general strategy is, to lock the enemy rogue down with our own rogue and to control an enemy paladin with our Warlock. The point was, we got literally destroyed by them. It doesn´t really matter if the paladin-control does work or not (it normally works very well), since the combined damage of a Mage and a Rogue (although our rogue tries to lock him down) on our Rogue, or the splitted damage of the enemy Rogue on ours and the enemy Mage on our Warlock forces me to cast a heal. Then comes the counterspell, followed by a CC-Chain (2x poly, HoJ, Blind) and an inevitable death of one of my team-mates.
Another quite nice strategy they performed was, to just let the Rogue pop evasion and then head for our Warlock and destroy him together with the mage. We can´t just put enough pressure on them, to really force them into defensive play. They just CC me and burn one of my mates down, then comes the counterspell.
The other team (Paladin/Hunter/Shaman) also was a nice one. They stood there in T6ish-Gear and simply destroyed us. Pain Suppression didn´t really matter, the combined burst of BM-hunter and Ele-Shaman just knocked one of us three in 10 - 15 seconds down. They didn´t even bother to CC me or to use traps or burn mana.
We ended up in a discussion about the the viability of our setup which we have been playing since S3-release (and which did work very well up to now). The problem I really see is that these teams were only the tip of the iceberg. Both teams which raped us would even be more deadly with a druid-healer e.g.
For me as a priest, these were some really ugly games. I have always seen the priest as a very viable and extremely versatile in terms of PvP-healing, due to many instants, PS, offensive and defensive dispells. But the thing is, what´s the use in being able to dispell the heroism, but by doing so letting a team-mate die due to a not used gcd on a heal? What´s the point in having a lot of instants when they will heal for so little, that I´m forced into direct-heals and thus counterspelled?
You see, I´m not really troubled by focus on myself, this does only happen on very rare occasions latley and can be countered quite easily in many cases.
Did we just meet counter-setups? Did we have a bad day? Does PvE-gearing-progress again (like pre-TBC) come to a point where you simply put on BT-gear (with huge amounts of Stamina and DPS-stats) and just burst away PvP-geared-people?
As a sidenote, we all stick with 400+ resilience and PvP-speccs of course (me Disc, Rogue Shadowstep, Warlock Soullink)
I play RMP but the general strat is 90% of the time dps the heck out of eachothers mages. I dont get why your not putting the rogue on there mage. This way he won't be able to cast anything and forced into defensive the entire match. A rogue alone cant output enough damage alone to force a kill on your lock so you should be able to keep him up. Remember if its gonna be a mana war your purely gonna win because there mage will go oom. Perhaps you can even sneak a manaburn in somewhere on the mage. I would even send the pet on the mage aswell and silence any poly's/frostbolts when the mage got away due to freedom or something.
The major problem with both on the mage would be that a warlock is nowhere as resilient against a rogue as a mage is (with the mage having access to a (at worst temporary) Freedom/BoP/Iceblock).
While the mage is able to kite (the longer the match, the better) while still doing moderate damage in between, the warlock will probably never get away.
Thus the better damage mitigation of a SL/SL lock won't really matter, as the mage has several options to get away.
It seems to me, that having a Warlock also requires a paladin or a druid (either to provide Freedoms/BoPs or CC to stop/lower the damage on the lock.
I play RMP but the general strat is 90% of the time dps the heck out of eachothers mages. I dont get why your not putting the rogue on there mage. This way he won't be able to cast anything and forced into defensive the entire match. A rogue alone cant output enough damage alone to force a kill on your lock so you should be able to keep him up. Remember if its gonna be a mana war your purely gonna win because there mage will go oom. Perhaps you can even sneak a manaburn in somewhere on the mage. I would even send the pet on the mage aswell and silence any poly's/frostbolts when the mage got away due to freedom or something.
The problem is, that you compare a mage with mage, we have a lock instead. A rogue on a mage will simply result in some serious kiting of the rogue, especially with bof (although I can dispell it). Moreover, a rogue let loose on our Warlock will not only pull off some serious dps, but also completely neutralize the warlock, meaning a completely uncontrolled healer of the enemy team, who is free to LoS manaburns, drink, heal, CC us.
And yes, burning the Mage is generally the strategy I try to pull off against mage-teams, but if I´m completely engaged with keeping my team-mates up manaburning becomes a quite rare pleasure.
Anyone use a G15 keyboard, and have any tips on Keybinds? I find myself having different PvE Keybinds compared to PvP keybinds (obviously) I think that slows me down too much in Arenas.
It has quite a few advantages for primarily the smaller brackets and the sacrifises you make in the holy school arent so bad. Greater heals are hardly cast by priests, and 10% less magic damage you can live without.
Benefits are 10% stun on shadow spells, which is pretty nifty.
But the biggest thing is 24 sec cooldown on your fear (glove bonus) which is super handy.
I see more and more priests switching to this build, and havent seen it in this thread, so wanted to share it here.
I've been running with this type of build for about 4-5 weeks now. The shorter fear cooldown with less resists has been extremely useful to the point where I feel it makes a difference in the outcome of the game.
Blackout and mindflay don't play a *huge* role for me in 5v5. They seem to be more useful in 2's, 3's, and BG's.
I really like the added utility from 13 pts in shadow. The only Holy talent I miss is Holy Nova when a snake trap pops. Like you said, Gheal is hardly ever used. I use my fears aggressively and this spec supports my style of play.
With that said I do have a few questions now with s3 comming up the next day (in EU). I've been thinking about which meta gem i should use for my head and can't decide between Powerful Earthstorm Diamond or Mystical Skyfire Diamond. I'm leaning towards PED atm because of the 45 sec CD on MSD, but im not sure.
I'm also wondering how usefull spellhit is? I've heard both that it's an amazing stat and that it's not worth it and atm I'm thinking of enchanting my gloves with spellhit.
In essence, +spell hit is marvelous in arena and battlegrounds because of how essential it is for your Mana Burns to not be resisted against mana users (of course, particularly Paladins). If you're going to focus on 2 vs 2 in arena, the power of a mana drain and a mana burn is amazing against a Warrior/Paladin team, for example.
However, this also depends on how much resilience and health you are carrying. I recently re-enchanted my gear to feature the benefit from +spell hit/spell penentration, and have found it quite a bit more useful than my original +120 armor and +healing to my gloves. Discipline Priests are can most certainly be seen as a support class, particularly in larger arena atmospheres. In 2 vs 2, you will encounter people attempting to mana drain you and beat you down before your partner. If you're only sporting a few pieces of arena gear, I would suggest sticking with the extra stamina beforehand. Once you can gather yourself a bit more gear, you can certainly switch your gems and enchants around. Do experiment what is most comfortable for your style of play. Mystical Skyfire Diamond can proc on anything, including Inner Fire, buffs, etc -- having a Greater Heal that is two seconds less casting time is marvelous. But, really, if you're only sporting 8.5K health buffed, consider a bit more survival for the time-being. Your mana burns will still be effective against teams that you may encounter with such gear (assuming you're new to arena).
The short summary: if you're running with 1,450+ healing and 11k+ health in your PvP gear, I'd suggest +spell hit.
Anyone use a G15 keyboard, and have any tips on Keybinds? I find myself having different PvE Keybinds compared to PvP keybinds (obviously) I think that slows me down too much in Arenas.
I recommend binding most of your spells to macros that do something different depending on whether you have a friend or foe targeted. For example, I have the same key bound for:
Renew / Shadow Word: Pain
Prayer of Mending / Mind Blast
Pain Suppression / Shadow Word: Death
Mind Control / Fear Ward
Flash Heal / Smite
Greater Heal / Holy Fire
Anyone use a G15 keyboard, and have any tips on Keybinds? I find myself having different PvE Keybinds compared to PvP keybinds (obviously) I think that slows me down too much in Arenas.
I only use a few extra G Keys for arena (again, bear in mind I mainly play 2v2). The mainstay macros I use (6 buttons) involve casting either PW:S, PrOM or Renew on either myself or my partner without dropping my target, allowing me to effectively mitigate a lot of our incoming damage without having to fiddle around targeting different players. That way I can usually run around with the enemy healer or appropriate CC candidate targeted for the duration of the match. Essentially I've used the quick macro record function to bind /cast (target=player) Power Word: Shield (same again for PrOM and Renew, then again for all three with (target=mypartner) making up the six buttons). I do go to the effort of using a third row for 3v3, but I don't bother for 5v5 at this stage as I bounce around between teams a lot in that bracket. At the very least I always have my (target=player) binds accessable so I can still heal myself without target dropping.
Other then that, everything is regular keybinds that you could do with any old keyboard. I just did this as I was running out of Macro space and I wanted to make full use of the keyboard (free extra macro spots, ability to use macros/abilities without having to add them to an action bar).
Does anyone have any advice for a Mage/Rogue combo in 2v2 against me and my rogue friend? They both seem to focus me, the rogues stuns and damage output means I'm using GCD's to Shield/PrOM/Renew myself, leaving little time to dispell Frost Novas from the Mage and his pet. This results in chain crits from the Mage with very little time for me to do any dispelling/direct healing (kick and counterspell).
Does anyone have any advice for a Mage/Rogue combo in 2v2 against me and my rogue friend? They both seem to focus me, the rogues stuns and damage output means I'm using GCD's to Shield/PrOM/Renew myself, leaving little time to dispell Frost Novas from the Mage and his pet. This results in chain crits from the Mage with very little time for me to do any dispelling/direct healing (kick and counterspell).
If that's your pvp gear, then alot of your survivability issues come down to getting more hp/res/healing to survive the assault. Also, have your rogue stick to the mage if he can, as it cuts the mage's damage by alot, and kill pets when you can do it quickly. If their rogue has to save their mage, you're in the clear to both heal yourself and start CCing the rogue to kill the mage and end it.
Does anyone have any advice for a Mage/Rogue combo in 2v2 against me and my rogue friend? They both seem to focus me, the rogues stuns and damage output means I'm using GCD's to Shield/PrOM/Renew myself, leaving little time to dispell Frost Novas from the Mage and his pet. This results in chain crits from the Mage with very little time for me to do any dispelling/direct healing (kick and counterspell).
We've found that playing disc priest/rogue you really need to change your pacing around a bit, ie. start offensively switch to conservative or start defensively and then assume the offense. This is one of the match ups where you want to start on the offense - at any stage if you see a mage with no buffs and no other visible partner (safe to assume it's a rogue) rush the mage. Get right in his face, dot and then cc him (ie fear, silence ideally if you have it), putting you in combat and safe from the sap -> opener. You still need to be careful though; you don't want to run right through the rogue on your way to the mage as you'll just make their sap easier (eg in BEM don't run over the bridge, go down and over to their ramp, then up to the mage). From there, switch back to a conservative LoS game. That should balance the game more to your favor (though not completely).
Pillars are your friend. Rogue alone can't kill you without help of the Mage. Trinket the KS, fear the rogue, keep LoSing the Mage who should be poisoned with crippling. The X/5/13 spec makes a huge difference vs this lineup.
01/27/08, 12:56 PM
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