Warlock + Shadow Priest in 2v2
 

How do you handle this combo? I play with a Warrior, being a Paladin myself, and we found that this setup is extremely hard to win against. Since they do really heavy damage, I have to spam heal all the time, and if the Warlock has half a braincell, it is impossible to dodge Curse of Tongues without them nuking my teammate down. We always go for the Shadow Priest since he has the most dangerous nukes with the Mind Blast, SW: Death combo, where we always pummel the first Mind Blast incoming.

Sure, I can stand on a pillar and have my friend run backwards, leaving me in LoS to heal but Out of LoS from the Warlock, but then I have a Felhunter on me, and with a nicely put Spell Lock, my friend is dead anyway.

I've tried to use all three different blessings, Kings, Sacrifice and Light, but none seems to yield any different result, where in this scenario, not getting silenced and Tongued is the major issue.

How do you handle this setup? Got any tips for me? With the next patch coming, where you won't be allowed to swap gear anymore, no, we will not waste our gold and buy Shadow Resistance gear which will become useless for us in an upcoming patch.

A quick search would have netted you this thread: http://elitistjerks.com/f38/t13101-w..._caster_teams/

Basically, they are the rock to your scissors. Just as rogue/druid is the paper to their rock.

The tactics for beating them are listed in the thread above.

Sorry bud, but even post Resilience effecting DoT changes, you will not beat this team without Shadow Resist gear(also being changed as you mentioned).

This team is specifically built to beat healer/caster(dual mana drain style), and healer/warrior teams, while also being very competitive against dual caster DPS teams, it is often beat by healer/rogue teams, and 2 rogues - rogue/druid teams.

Your only real options are to play hard line of sight, and attempt to wear down the Shadow Priest's likely small mana pool + shadow fiend, as Resilience on the Shadow Priest/Warlocks increase your likelihood of bringing them down drops dramatically as well.

With the changes to gear swapping, you pretty much have to play LOS with this matchup now. Even then, it's enormously difficult. As the poster above said, most of these games come down to running their shadow Priest OOM. It cuts their DPS dramatically. Figure out a way to survive long enough and even with a Shadowfiend, most of these 2v2s are done when the Priest goes OOM.

Also consider that many teams (including my own) will have healers which run an SR aura, and 2 pieces of gear with SR on them. My Paladin has already said she'll permanently have 15 SR to cloak and 20 SR to helm. That combined with SR aura is a good 105. Not a ton, but not bad either. Make the Warlock run COS instead of COA, and it helps some. I donno. We'll see after the patch comes out.

I still think this matchup gets farmed by healer + Rogue though. It keeps them in check.

Better analogy would be rogue/druid is scissors, warrior/paladin is rock, and spriest/lock is paper, but yes that is basically how it works. That isn't to say that any of these is a guaranteed win for anyone, but the odds are definitely stacked in favor of certain class makeups assuming equal levels of skill.

Actually, 105 SR is a ton - that's 22.5% mitigation to shadow damage, and after resilience affects DoTs it'll be 30.25%. It also means 22.5% of their crowd control effects will be resisted, and fears will be unlikely to last past the first tick (with damage also taking place).

If the warlock is having to switch to CoS, that means you're not receiving either damage from CoA, slowing from CoEx, or casting speed reduction from CoT.

My priest is a member of an extremely poorly rated 2v2 team (partnering with a rogue) and, as stated already, the only class combination we can regularily beat is this spriest/lock team.

I'm in a moderately ranked spriest/lock 2v2 (1690 rating.) Our experience has been the exact opposite. The matches we really struggle with are warrior/paladin, warrior/shaman, or the extremely annoying paladin/paladin. None of them are an autoloss by any means but most of our losses involve a warrior. We rarely have trouble with any other healer/dps team and will lose on occasion to dps/dps (especially 2xfrost mage.) Most of our other losses come from one or both of us making significant mistakes that if we hadn't made, we would have won. Are the other problems only more prevalent at higher rankings with better players? Both the lock and I only have around ~125 resilience since we're only just getting into arena. Does a solid resilience rating (350+) completely turn the tables on the warrior/paladin matchup?

I'd think so, warriors rely on crits much more than either of you.

About the only times my spriest/lock (I'm the spriest) have lost to a war/pally combo is it goes something like charge/intercept -> thunder stun etc. Other than that I'm not sure what to say :( warriors pretty much just explode to this combo.

If you want to play riskier the only thing I can think of is to bubble as soon as he engages the spriest, and hope he can take him out (and ready to pummel the M.Dispell) before the bubble is gone. And to have a Deep Thunder/Stormhearld, god I hate that mace.

Hunter + Rogue (my team) feels like the essence of Rock/Paper/Scissors. We beat Spriest/Lock usually (if something drastic doesn't happen), but we lose to Paladin/Warrior unless they fail (or think I'm BM because <secrets must be kept secret>). And, of course, Spriest/Lock usually beats Paladin/Warrior. In the end, it all evens out, except for the fact that there are quite a lot of Paladin/Warrior teams. :\

There's no kind of LoS nonsense that is going to work since even when you ignore fear/silence/spellock, just trying to heal a heavily dot'd warrior with CoT on is mostly futile as is trying to keep up on dispels as a paladin.

We rush the spriest. There's no use trying to heal outside bubble because even if you juke the lockdown part of the spell lock the silence followed by priest silence is enough to kill the warrior. Spam cleanse and holy shock (you'll probably get 1 in) until the warrior is 50-75% hp (hopefully bait a fear or silence or something too) then bubble. Warrior needs to trinket the deathcoil to pummel the MD. If by some miracle they're not undead or dwarf, warrior fears and paladin pounds one of them with a HoJ when he trinkets. Even if they are undead/dwarf you still use both those things as disruption + arcane torrent.

We've got the point where we regularly kill the priest but the warrior typically dies soon after from huge DoT DPS as you now have to heal through CoT with a spell lock around and you've probably already trinketed a fear. At this point, regardless of his HP/mana, the warlock very skillfully will perma fear you while heavily DoT'd and using his drain of choice while there's nothing you can do about it. Honestly, it can get pretty close on keeping the warrior up and I imagine the DoT nerf may allow us to beat a bunch of teams burst cheesing up the ladder and leave the ones that are actually well coordinated and very well geared.

While your warrior very skillfully spams MS and you very skillfully spam flash of light/cleanse.

See what I did there?

The paladin I 2v2 with has this same dislike of being chain-feared. I don't see what the fuss is about...

The best option is definatley to try the shadow priest by sticking on it early- Shuts down mana burn and shadow priests have lousy pushback resist. Other than clever chaining of spell interrupts to try and keep damage under control there's really nothing to be done for it that I have ever found. Maybe a modicrum of shadow resist worn at all times is a good idea- good anyway because it helps resist mana burn and fear which paladins are notoriously vunerable to.

yeah you used one of those terribly unclever fad-phrases from the WoW official boards. Clearly I am owned.


I play 2v2 with many people. One of them is a rogue who is currently wearing bonescythe and a blue tbc dagger because he doesn't have any better. As you can imagine, we are highly disadvantaged against the 1600-1800 masses of war/pal teams who can't bust through the caster wall they end up hitting later on. Yet an actual fight occurs, they make mistakes we can occasionally exploit, we try to a few unpredictable strategies, we make mistakes and rectify them later. We still end up losing often. Being at a "disadvantage" is completely different than being 100% unable to control your character while all your hp/mana is removed.