Pressuring the mage has worked for us in the past, although you'll have your hands full keeping the warrior free, avoiding manaburns from the opposing priest, and staying alive. The mage outputs too much DPS and CC to leave him alone entirely. In the end, lots of target-switching has always been required to keep a team like that down.

In that matchup, your priority is going to have to be keeping that Warrior free. The more pressure on the mage, the less time the opposing priest has to manaburn you (especially with CC from the Druid).

I re-specced my alt to 41/7/13 the other day- I have about 300 resilience and it worked better then my old 28/33 spec.
Mind flay (r1) helps a lot if you are teamed with a rogue/warrior, like I am for 2v2 and like you are Sarenci.
(This is my first attempt at arena in TBC, so feel free to give tips on my spec and otherwise as you see fit.)

For 3v3 I have my rogue from 2v2 and a SL/SL warlock, we just started at 1441 rating and climbed to 1560 in the 10 matches we got in before I had to leave for my eastern holiday. Going to try climb as high as we can with that team when I get back to my gaming computer.

We are still working on a specific strategy for 2healers + warrior teams. They gave us some pain, and I would like some tips on this.
Problem is if the warrior is left alone I get killed / mana drained pretty fast, and the healers keep each other alive too well for us to burn down one of them first. Our best should would probably be to CC / silence / mana drain the healers and then burn the warrior while they are unable to heal him, but cycone/dispel makes sure the warrior gets on my ass anyway.

(The low rating was from trying to do arenas with a crap geared affliction warlock.)
Spec link: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I would max Shadow Focus 5/5 and drop Imp SWP. Rogues, Priests, Paladins, Feral Druids have more than 10% Fear resist, and you really want that Rogue feared when he's bashing you.

Herrara is correct, SF is a must if you are going for some form of tri spec.

If you're playing with a rogue in 2v2 I really advocate going all the way down to silence as it can allow some devestating cc combos, particularly later in the game. We usually work on sap -> fear -> silence -> blind -> fear (it'll be back up if fear/silence/blind are all full duration). Early in the game people are likely to trinket one of the fears or the blind (a couple of them if it's a pally with bubble or an undead for WotF) so you probably won't be able to chain the second fear directly in. However, once you get further into the game blind should be up again but trinkets won't be allowing you a full 28 seconds worth of quality CC to go to town on the control targets partner). Aside from the huge CC train that silence allows it's also another clutch interrupt at your disposal. It's nice to be able to lock out that pally after a late bubble with a quick MD/Silence before he can get one cast off, something you can't do reliably with MD/Fear.

This is the spec that I run with more often then not these days. I mainly 2v2, wouldn't advocate it for 5v5 (preferring a heavy disc/holy build with PS). Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

On a side note - I'm on Bloodlust BG so it's pretty competitive. I play 2v2 mainly out of convenience - I can rely on my partner for at least 10-20 games a week and we do ok. The annoying thing is this BG is fairly difficult and the majority of the teams we face are Resto Druid/MS War, so it's an uphill slog. Last week we peaked at 1849 before we lost a couple of games and called it. 1 point. This week or bust

Thanks for the tips. I'll put 5/5 in Shadow Focus before our next games. I think I will keep Pain Suppression though, as it really helps my rather squishy 3v3 setup survive (priest, rogue, warlock).

I may consider silence as my gear improves, only have +900 healing at the moment. So I need all the help I can get with holding my people alive.

Hello.

I am debating taking the head enchant:

[Glyph of Power] - +22 Spell damage and Healing, +14 Spell hit rating

over

[Glyph of Renewal] - +35 Healing, +7 Mana / 5 sec

Taking the +35 healing on gloves over the +15 spell hit, gaining 22 healing, losing 1 spell hit rating and 7 mp5. Any views on wether the loss of 7 mp5 will affect my arena play?

Also, I am currently dressed up in 2/5 S3, going 3/5 on wednesday and wondering if I should be socketing for more resilience(currently 414), sacrificing +stam to tighten the gap to the cap?

I still like skull of guldan + hit gloves (40 hit rating, only 2.2 over cap, and very minimal stat loss per point of spell hit gained relative to the other options), but barring that I'd probably go with gloves + gems to hit cap as suggested, and the new gladiator helm enchant.

Given that the new head resilience enchant is available, and that +10 resilience gems are more accessible, making it easier to hit the resilience partial-cap, has anyone considered gemming significantly for +spell hit?

I read a thread here a few months ago, where someone tested that +spell hit worked against fear-resist talents. Does anyone know for certain if spell hit helps when using dispel magic on debuffs which have a percentage chance to resist removal, and buffs which have a percentage chance to resist removal?

I'm interested how people would spec purely for 2's with a ShS Rogue? At the moment, this is me and my spec

The World of Warcraft Armory

But I'm thinking about taking Reflective Shield, Improved Inner Fire also, purely for tanking the Melee classes that usually end up all over me.

Yes, it does to all your questions. +hit reduces the chance your spell will be resisted on a target due to: passive spell resists of 5%, talents that increase the resistance to dispel/fear/silence/MC.
+hit does NOT help with shadow resistance, penetration does, but since you can remove SR buff, you don't need to worry about penetration at all, unless you find Undead racial imbalanced

Actually the base resist rate is 4%, 3% of which you can overcome with gear @ 12.6 hit rating per 1%, for a total of 37.8 hit rating (there is always a 1% resist chance). Going beyond that has it's uses, but I strongly recommend stacking survivability stats (resil/stam/armor) for the vast majority of matchups. It has been the tried and true gearing method for healing priests since pre-TBC for anyone pvping seriously.

Also, penetration is useful because it's not always feasible to fully purge the rogue on you before fearing (motw/SR buff), especially depending on how many buffs the team has. For this reason, and due to 10 resist goat/undead and 5 resist belf racials, spell pen to cloak is an excellent choice, but any further penetration through gems or the dps honor ring probably isn't worth it.

Dispel Magic - Spells - World of Warcraft

Dispel Magic is a Discipline skill. The talent Absolution that reduces its mana cost is also in the Discipline tree.

If you get locked out of your holy tree you cannot dispel. It is castable in shadowform however. That's sort of tangential to the topic of penetration.

I think we lost track here?

Spell hit helps all schools. Spell penetration also helps your shadow spells when you meet warlocks with felhunter, pallys with shadow aura or any group with a priest if you dont have time to dispel the shadow resist buff.

I didn't say it did. I said that you may not always be able to remove shadow protection and motw before fearing (or mana burning), in which case penetration >10 would have a use. Any penetration you get is useful only for your shadow spells.

Apologies, I've misread your previous post. I still stand against priest gemming/enchanting penetration over spell hit (maybe back enchant only), mainly due to ability to remove the shadow protection. Paladin shadow aura and warlock master demonologist buff are something of no concern. It's more important for a priest to be able to reliably fear a rogue, than a warlock, which means hit > penetration. This what I think with my priest experience in arena.

I too have been wondering if the new spell haste items are the route to take as a disc/holy priest. Without gems, if you take all of the pieces listed above, the total spell haste is rating is 109. According to WoWWiki at level 70, 15.7 points of spell haste rating are worth 1% spell haste. Thus, if you take all of the pieces you will reduce your cast times by about 7% (109/15.7 = 6.943).

Most people would probably replace the items as follows:
[Kharmaa's Shroud of Hope] with [Cloak of Swift Reprieve]
[Vindicator's Pendant of Salvation] with [Vindicator's Pendant of Reprieve]
[Veteran's Band of Salvation] with [Vindicator's Band of Subjugation]
[Battlemaster's Perseverance] with [Battlemaster's Alacrity]

The question then becomes, is the juice worth the squeeze?
If you switched out the items above...

You'd gain:

• +109 Spell Haste (6.943%)

• +5 Int

You'd lose:

• 17mp5

• +132 healing

• +9 Stam

My biggest concern would be the sacrificing of +132 healing for the haste. While a cast time reduction would allow more casts in a given period of time, I wonder if most people cast enough in an arena to find a noticable difference. 6-7% haste essentially means you'd gain 6-7 more casts per 100 casts in an ideal envirionment. Considering arena is not an "ideal" envirionment, we could safely say 6casts/per100 or 3 casts/per50 if you're lucky. For those fast matches, 1.5casts/per25.

If we assume that you'd cast 50-100 times in an arena match, would casting 3-5 extra spells at full mana cost be worth sacrificing +132 healing on all of your casts?

The other thing to consider is spell haste as an answer to spell pushback, and a way to decrease the likelihood of being interruped by a well timed kick, pummel, CS, or ES. At some point, mitigating spell pushback and avoiding interrupts will unquestionably be worth it. As far as how much spell haste is required to make it worth it is anyone's guess at this point.

Using the formulas from WoWWiki, at 109 Spell Haste:
A talented Greater Heal moves from 2.5sec to 2.3sec.
A Flash Heal moves from 1.5sec to 1.4sec.

Do the reduced cast times make it worth it? If not how much spell haste or cast time reduction would we need to see to make this viable?

Spell haste is one of the only ways to improve the effectiveness of Mana Burn and Dispel Magic, which are two of a priest's most important skills.

However, you have to give up a lot of stats for a very minimal gain, and if you aren't constantly casting, most of that gain is wasted. Instead, given the huge buff to spirit, it may be worthwhile to stack spirit via 1-2 pieces of PvE gear, so that you have the longevity to continue casting those spells.

The problem then becomes, where can you get a good amount of spirit, without sacrificing too much in the way of stats? The new badge vendor's Adorned Supernal Leggings (42 spirit + 2 sockets) are a potential candidate, and you can make up the lost resilience with the new Resilience head enchant and the Alembic of Infernal Power. There is also the crafted Swiftheal Mantle which has spirit and spell haste, and may be a decent choice for people who don't have the season 3 shoulders.

I dont believe the bolded portion of your statement is correct.

The testing in this thread - http://elitistjerks.com/f41/t13400-q...l_hit_talents/ - concluded that excess spell hit does work to counteract talents like Unbreakable Will. As far as I know, that was the only testing done on the subject, so if anyone has more conclusive results I'd be curious to see them.

I think the subject about spell haste is an interesting and important one. I think it's very well worth considering in at least 5vs5 where you spend alot of your time casting instant spells or mana burning, where spell haste would increase the effectiveness pretty nicely and on the non healing spells be the only way to do so (MC for that matter too). As also mentioned before it would be easier to get off your heals with someone trying to interrupt you but that is not a big issue in 5vs5 imo, where I can see the biggest potenial for spell haste. In 2vs2 and 3vs3 I just don't think it's worth it to pick up spell haste over other stats.

The question is if it's worth using spell haste in 5vs5? In theory it seems like a very nice stat now but it might be that it just adds too little haste to be effecient enough. I can defiently see myself socketing haste gems instead of resilience gems and switching a few other pieces for spell haste. PvE gear isn't an option for some though , like me, so there is no way for us to get good spirit gear instead.

I think people are valueing survivability too much too. At least for 5vs5 I barely never get nuked and it's pretty rare for 3vs3 and 2vs2 too. So imo the new stam/resil head enchant is a waste of stats and would be much better spent on the extra healing and mp5. This is considered from a person with full s3 gear though and I can see why you want if if you're still collecting gear.

Regaring Mystical Skyfire Diamond I think it's become obolete now and you should be using Insightful Earthstorm Diamond instead (not the 18 stam 5 stun resist for reasons mentioned above).

The new Power Infusion kinda helps a lot in those "get this rogue off me - spam flash heal button" moments, or fear+mana burn moments. Otherwise, it's too much stat investment into haste to make it viable. Also, I think currently it is still experimental, Blizzard added haste to PvP items, but not a huge amount, only to see how it turns out.
Personally, I wouldn't go for haste in any bracket, but I'd like to see a feedback from someone keen and persistent enough to gather 150-ish haste and try it out.