12800 damage in ten seconds (4 sec Cheap Shot, 6 seconds 5-point Kidney Shot) would amount to 1280 DPS. While this isn't really far fetched per se, it would certainly require the target (priest) to be stripped of all armor by purge and Expose in order for a rogue to burst the damage needed while using two global cooldowns (CS, KS, respectively) for the stuns. Especially considering the target is packing 25% reduction to critical strike damage, as well as almost 13% reduction to the actual chance of scoring a critical hit. After all, the rogue in question isn't presumably raidbuffed.

Perhaps with very lucky string of Windfury and Swordspec procs?

Despite the fact that my gear is worse than yours a full Vengeful Rogue will very rarely take me below 50% during his opening. I've never outright died to a single Rogue without being able to use a few spells, since I hit 400 resilience and 10k HP. Not even to a PvE geared Rogue.

But one thing is true: As S3 progressed melee damage went up a lot because of the availability of armor penetration. My static defenses didn't keep up with that. My armor is the same, my resilience is almost the same and my hitpoints went up marginally. Sure, healing improved, but it didn't quite compensate for the armor penetration.

I feel that my survivability against casters went up, but against melee went down in S3. Overall it's still acceptable, but I hope the trend does not continue in S4.

I have gotten exceedingly low, but I always trinket the kidney shot, I always fear the rogue whenever I can, and my partner helps peel if necessary.

I've found pre-refreshing PWS/Mending to be immensely helpful against rogue teams. They'll often wait to initiate until these have faded. Try refreshing them after they hit 10 seconds (to deny sap -> open). and you should only net a small loss of mana. Same goes for mid fight when you are kiting.

Also Touch of Weakness is seemingly lame, but actually does amount to about 235 less AP for a sword/mace sub rogue's white attacks.

What?
Because this is something worthwhile to be dishonest about for any reason at all, especially coming from a priest?
Yep, i'm a priest who hates rogues! Nerf them! I hate having any representation in 3v3 and I would love if half of my viable 2v2 comps went into the trashcan as well Give me a break.

Believe me or ignore it. Yes, it was the first time it has happened in probably a year. Not saying it happens every match, but I assure you it is possible. Guess you'll just have to take a giant leap of faith on this one?

PS I'll get right on that trinketing KS with blind up. Thanks.

Blinding a target that they're focusing down is always risky because they may have dots. A -really- good team can target switch with a blind at the drop of a hat, but chances are if you're getting focused, you're better off trinketing a KS.

Enh just outright trinketing every KS 100% of the time is not optimal. There's not a good way to say this without sounding like an elitist, but it only works well when your opponents are too uncoordinated to take advantage of you after that... but you will eventually fight people who are. There are too many factors and options to consider that you can never just say trinketing it off the bat is the best option. There are plenty of options, and plenty of things that can happen after the KS. This ranges from, of course, the best case scenario where you just get lucky with the RNG and don't take much damage at all, and can get off an instant before the next railcar on the CC train hits you.

Vs PMR, trinketing KS instead of a polymorph or a fear(in blade's edge if it is being retarded and pathing you down the ramp) will lose you the game. When we see the priest trinket anything it's not uncommon to hear on vent "woot we win", because we just pulled miles ahead momentum wise..
Infact I'd say that vs PMR your only real option is to eat the CS-KS, tell your teammates to try and peel off you, and if you survive, you survive... and you keep going. Trinketing the KS means you've effectively taken yourself out of the game as far as the other team is concerned, you're just homeward bound on polyfearblind express.

This is, of course, just things that have worked for me. I'm told that my experiences in this game are 100% unique and don't happen to anyone else ever.

You're right. It's not worthwhile to lie about it. But people tend to exaggerate these things. I guess that's the concern here.

This is my first post and somewhat new to the forums. In catching up on the reading, I have to say that this is probably the best abbreviated bible on priestly healing in PVP.

Aside from grabbing a rogue as a priest, what other good partners are out their for us in 2v2...or for that matter 3v3,

2v2 I have used a rogue partner but I would love to be able to change it up and am open to new ideas. I use a Tri-Spec hunter on occasion with improved stings, scattershot, and wyvern sting for improved cc and dual dps a single target. This seems to work pretty well.
3v3 I have been partial to working with a sword rogue and a boomkin. Although the boomkin doesn't usually take shape unless needed so a heal can be thrown out if i get into a bind.

I have been reading a lot on here about what a priest should do and how they should spec, but I am more curious on partner selection and innovative ways to synergize with your partners talents. I am sure there are teams out there winning with non-traditional setups with their priests. I am looking for some new ideas.

Rogue/Priest is clearly the top comp for disc, as a rogue can effectively peel almost anyone from you, possesses the survivability to free you to mana burn, and benefits greatly from your dispels.
Hunter/Priest you mentioned. I haven't had great success with this, for whatever reason, but people use it.
Warrior/DPriest has some potential, although possesses glaring weaknesses. Hydra 5 is an excellent video of Warrior/Priest in action. Hoodrych's latest has one match of him with a priest which shows his priest getting destroyed by a warrior/shaman team.
Warlock/DPriest is very strong in the right hands.
Feral Druid/Dpriest can have some success but appears to benefit greatly from the priest being troll (for the healing debuff) and having the T5 priest trinket for full mana bar innervates.


For 3s, RMP is the archetypal setup, and priests are generally considered a bit weaker than Rdruids in most other comps. fortunately, priests partner well with resto druids and people have success with priest, resto druid + warrior/hunter/rogue. You might consider having your druid spec 34/27 for improved healing while retaining the ability to burst when needed. It shouldn't fair much worse than deep resto given your current hunter comp, as he generally will not be targeted over a priest or hunter and with a priest's plethora of instant cast heals, swiftmend is a bit less vital.

I've tried Hunter/Priest, and it's a nice manaburn/kiting setup if you can get into a strong kiting cycle. Frost trap near a pillar and rely on instants to keep your team up and running around that pillar. Stings will be the primary form of manaburn, with PI/manaburn from the priest if the opportunity presents itself. Rogues complicate things, but they can still be kited if you make it out of their opening moves and use trinket/fear wisely.

Hi, I'm a long time reader of EJ (and this thread) and I wanted to ask you PvP priests some questions about my current 3s arena team setup. As background, the 3 of us have been avid PvErs all of our WoW lives but due to RL circumstances, we stopped raiding and have decided to PvP instead due to its less rigid time requirements. This is the armory link for my team.

The World of Warcraft Armory

The gear we're wearing on the armory is our PvP gear, laugh if you want but we just started :p. We're trying to get the offset stuff and gladiator's eventually but i wanted to ask you guys what you thought of our spec/class combo. I'm pretty sure it's not optimal, but these are our toons so we have to make the best of it.

First of all, how would you guys suggest we get more competitive? We know our priest is the weak point, he only has the blue pvp gear (of both spec) so we're trying to gear him, but it seems like we might have some spec issues to overcome. We've played about 30 or so games as varying specs with the following results:

Holy Pally - SL/SL - 41/20 Disc
Most survivable combinations of specs, but horrid damage. Against any team with a dispeller it seems like we're trying to kill them with pillows and feathers. Doubly worse if we draw dual melee and our lock winds up stunned 75% of the time.

Holy Pally - Affliction - 41/20 Disc
More damage this time around, but our problem with getting casts off is doubly compounded with less survivability on the lock.

Holy - Afflict - Shadow
Should be loads of damage, in theory from what I've been able to glean from the official forums but all the games seem to wind up with me (pally) getting cycloned or stunned and seeing my priest or lock get instagibbed (very frustrating!)

Holy - SL/SL - Shadow
Seems better than afflict lock, I rarely have to heal my lock now and flash heals will still hit for over 1k even under wound or MS due to fel armor, but still have the problem of priest getting gibbed.

It seems to me as the healer that when we run 2 healer 1 dps our dps can get completely shut down when our lock get mobbed, but then at the same time when we run 2 dps I can't keep people alive through assist trains so I'm at a loss to what I can do to make my team live.

What other spec combinations should we try in order to find one that "clicks"? The paladin has holy and ret gear, but overall has low resil while the priest has PvE gear, which we've quickly learned is made of tissue paper gets him torn apart. The lock has full S1 with S3 offset, and is open to respeccing anything that would give us an edge.

Another issue we have is people gibbing our priest. There are times when we face double melee teams, I can be in my bubble, chain casting HLs and he'll still go down regardless of my best efforts. How do you guys deal with double melee? They seem to have the ability to rip my team apart without much trouble and BoP only holds them off for so long. We're willing to try anything, as we are learning more about PvP, but it would be nice not to get completely plowed by warrior/rogue/X combos.

Lastly, and this one is a bit of a fear of mine, is the question of "is it too late to get into pvp?". S3 has been out for 8 months or so, which means that 90% of the teams we fight have at least some S3, which is so far above what we can muster that we get owned by any faceroll team comp, especially melee. With S4 around the corner and many teams with full point stockpiles, it only seems like it will get worse. Is 1300 the new 1500?

Sorry to ramble, but we just finished 6 painful hours of arenas and I wanted to put my thoughts down before I forgot them in the morning. I promise that I will have much more lucid writing come morning and I am eagerly awaiting whatever hints/tips you guys have to offer.

First of all, in that gear, your priest will very often get gibbed. You have no choice but to farm honor pieces, and/or farm arena pieces eventually too. Every rogue, every warrior and every druid you see at that rating will have at least full vindicator, full gladiator; possibly more.

It is too late for s3, but you can always prepare for the next season. Now this sounded like a football manager talking, but it's essentially the same anyway. Try to farm more battlegrounds and play at least 10 matches every week, you should eventually get full s4 too. If you keep it too casual and skip many weeks of arena, you will always lag a few months behind; I know I do.

An ungeared priest is just a gib waiting to happen. The holy setups are also outlast with almost no way to keep people off the priest (ie. druid, rogue, mage). You're simply going to lose a lot until he gets gear. There's no real way you can avoid it I'm sorry to say. A season or 2 ago you could go the shadow teams and hope to kill someone before your priest goes down but with the average gear level so high and various changes to DoT damage, etc it's not very likely at your gear level.

I recently got a couple new characters to 70 and they just run up against minimum full S2 teams and get plowed for their 10 games a week. The most memorable battle was where we fought a warrior/druid team as rogue/shaman for about half an hour until we gave up. They were so bad my rogue could just shut them down at will but I could just never get either of them below even 70% and we finally just quit out of the arena. New 70s lose very easily to gear advantage, fact of life at this stage of progression.

Your best bet as an undergeared Priest is to find a geared Rogue who's willing to help you. Someone did that for me and he was able to pull me to almost 1800 while I was fresh 70. I mostly just ran away on my mount. My Rogue put pressure on some squishy enemy. Eventually the enemy stopped chasing me and went to help his partner. Now I was free to heal from 40 yards.

Granted, if they caught me then I died a quick and painful death.

I've been using the same 2v2 combo (rogue/priest). We've only just started playing, and like most I've come from a PVE background and have only just started getting the hang of kiting and staying out of LOS of ranged classes.

The biggest problems I keep encountering are double mage combo's. They can nuke my rogue down super fast and whenever I try to pop out to heal him I get counterspelled. Other problem I have is my rogue getting ice trapped, which I dispell ASAP but it's still a long break in dps, plus i'm usually counterspelled around the time this is happening so can't get a heal or dispell off anyway. 3rd problem is their water ele's constantly belting on me, so I'm taking damage and getting interupted. Neither of us can think of a way to combat this combo, does anybody have any ideas?

I'm also having trouble getting belted by rogue/warrior combo's. The two of them always open up on me. The best luck I've had is just by kiting until they get on the rogue, and once they are on him I try and stay out of LOS, while sheilding/POM/Renew/PS and FH when needed.

The smart ones seem to shift focus and come straight after me when I dismount, and I'll just start running with my instants ticking over until I get intercepted then it's pretty much all over. My usual "OMG SAVE ME" rotation goes PW:S > PS > POM > Renew (if above 50%) or FH (if below 50%). I use fear depending on whether Berserker rage is up. If I'm being stunned up by a rogue I try and use it early to get him of me but I'm usually slowed down way too much. I try to use my trinket to start kiting but I'm immediately intercepted again and then I get taken down cause my FH's are interupted and I'm just stunned way too much.

Throw the fact that I've only got 207 resilience and 9.6khp with Fort and I'm not doing overly well.

Here is a link to my armory for those who are interested, but the gear check isn't really what I'm after, it's more the strat that I'm concerned about because I can't think of anything that could help more... Carlton's Armory Profile
My Rogue

If anybody can give any tips it would be greatly appreciated. Cheers!!

The big thing is to not even try to kill the mages in double frost mage. Run around like an idiot spamming dispell and instant heals until they're out of cooldowns and/or mana before you try to do anything more than SW:P in passing.

If you're playing mediocre mages, it's pretty easy to bait a sheep. Make sure it happens when you're not distracted, SW:D it, and til diminishing returns run out you don't really have to worry about getting sheeped again.

Rogues can't shadow step to friendly targets.

Against two mages, or any two ranged dps you have to stick around line of sight obstacles and so does your partner. Agree on the target and try to dispel frost armor from that target. That makes it a lot easier for your Rogue and he will take less damage.

Fear water elementals, they can't do anything about it. If you can catch both and maybe even one of the mages then you'll take quite a lot less damage. Water elementals on the Priest is generally a bad choice, because then the Priest is essentially immune to polymorph.

Keep your instant heals up. Stay away from the Mages. Counter-spell has a shorter range than all your heals. When the Mage blinks or moves to you stop casting and move. If he chases you he doesn't do much damage to your Rogue. Tell your Rogue to disappear when you can't heal him. If you get polymorphed or counter-spelled and he's on 50% then only CloS and Vanish can save you.

Put Pain on your Rogue's target, the sooner it dies the better. Make your Rogue play defensively. Start with sap, use cooldowns to avoid damage, like shadow stepping behind a Mage that's casting a Frostbolt.

It's always like this in Healer 2v2:
If you or your partner die to burst then think of ways to avoid damage. There's always something both players can do. It's not solely the healers job to counter-act all the damage.

Many thanks for the responses guys! It's helped greatly. Like I said I'm still getting used to it but I've been trying to LOS everything that I've been coming up against and it's working well. Haven't come up against double mage since I've posted this though which is a bummer, but it's helped on alot of other combo's anyway.

I do think your right with the gear check. I've been trying everything possible to keep myself up, just dueling the rogue I play with and getting him to burst me down like he would any other priest he goes up against and with all his stuns etc, I always end up going down eventually even if I manage to fear him once or twice.

Thanks again, and now I guess it's time to start grinding for that arena gear...

I can't check your spec, but don't worry about losing to a decent Rogue in a duel. For the Priest to win a few conditions need to be met:

- Reflective Shield is a must
- Equal or better gear than the Rogue
- Rogue uses PvP gear, rather than T6 say

If all those conditions are true I win pretty much every duel. Occasionally I run out of mana and lose, sometimes the Rogue manages to pull a bit more damage out of the hat than at other times and makes me lose.

That's not true. There are additional conditions:

- The rogue must take a real PvP spec and not a duelling spec. If the rogue takes enveloping shadows, you are almost certainly fucked. If the rogue takes a high damage combat spec, you are even more fucked.

- The rogue must not be undead.

As a fully PvP geared disc priest you can usually beat most rogues who do not use any PvE gear, spec into a cookie cutter subtlety build without duelling talents, and are not undead.