malthrin

@Relinor: glad to hear that things are improving for you.

This match will be very close either way. Your Rogue has to go into a fully defensive mentality - getting Crippling on both enemy Rogues, using Vanish+Cheap Shot as an extra temporary CC, and Deadly Throw. If you survive their cooldowns, you've won - your Rogue just has to help you kite until then. Make sure you're using Demo Roar for mitigation since you will be in bear most of the time and hitting them with Lacerates to prevent restealths never hurt anything. Try to use Feral Charge to make them burn extra cooldowns. If your resilience isn't great (like mine) there isn't a lot you can do about double melee on you, sometimes you will just die.

You don't need to start off in Cyclone range - I'd stay at max heal range from your Rogue to start out with. They will lose a mana battle due to Abolish Poison on their Wound, so they have to pressure you, don't make it easy on them by hanging out in Cyclone range. This is a fight where the extra Cyclone range from 13/11/37 makes the difference on whether you can Cyclone their Priest before he gets in Fear range or not. Just keep a 3 stack of Lifebloom, Rejuv, and Abolish running the entire time on your Rogue and toss in Regrowth as needed. If you can make this fight into a heal-off, then you will win. Their CC is all short range.


We never figured out a good way to deal with this team as Druid/Rogue. If we chase the Druid, the Hunter gets to stand and shoot and I have to shift out often which results in Viper ticks every now and then. If we chase the Hunter, I can sit in Bear most of the time and eat traps, but we can't also keep the Druid in combat.

 

Bula

Concerning druid/rogue vs priest/rogue.

When fighting priest/rogue it really depends on who gets the upper hand. If their rogue is human and can find my rogue first with a sap then we need to get defensive quickly. If they are horde and I can have my rogue open on their priest first we like to go for that every time. Their rogue will either have to help the priest or open on me. If he helps the priest then we're in the clear for the time being. I can pop out abolish/hot my rogue, cyclone or root the opposing rogue, and then immediately root the opposing priest to keep my rogue on him. Keep moonfire rank 1 and fairie fire on both players for as long as is humanly possible for you to make your roots stick longer. We will continually pressure the priest until we are able to kill him. You need to be able to feral charge/bash while your rogue is feared and keep the priest rooted while the rogue is dpsing him to keep kiting possibilities to a minimum. This will burn the priests mana very quickly. If the opposing rogue leaves mine to pressure me it can work either for or against us depending on the skill of their priest. If he is very good, he can get a bit of kite time on the rogue, pop his shadowfiend, and possibly even dps the rogue slightly while I am having difficulty to root him due to pressure on me from the rogue. If the priest is bad without support however the game is pretty much over at that point as your rogue will finish off a priest long before a lone rogue will kill you.

The thing about putting the hard pressure onto the priest first gets them defensive. It prevents them from mana burning or fearing you. Finally it generally keeps their rogue close to your rogue to try and control him with stuns making your job very very simple. Once the priest is sub 60% and fighting for his life his dispels are going to come a lot more infrequently leaving the rogue with only 1 real out (clos+vanish) due to fairie fire on him at all times. He will also be extremely less likely to dispel your rogue, leaving your abolish up for full cycles and rejuvs ticking for their full duration making the healing extremely simple.

The only times where this type of thing may falter would be versus an extremely well geared mutilate rogue that can both control and dps your rogue with great efficiency. In this kind of matchup it's a bit tougher to stay on the priest and the allure of killing a rogue without cheat death is high, however I still think the best target will be the priest. With the general reason being that the priest/rogue team's gib cc capability starts with a fear or blind causing you to drop out of combat during it. Well if the rogue is constantly dpsing your rogue and your rogue is controlling their priest, the chance of you getting feared is close to zero and depending on the teams burst and your healing skill a blind->sap combination may not even be enough to kill your rogue due to the fact that their rogue will need to stop dpsing in between the cc's. All of the gibs that my rogue has ever taken vs that combination have included a fear in the rotation at some point to allow the rogue a solid amount of time to get dps into my rogue. By limiting that priests ability to fear you it pretty much cuts any chance of that out of the equation.

For when you are facing that human rogue with perception the goal is to get my rogue onto his priest with distance from their rogue, it just takes a little bit longer to get this setup due to their in stealth advantage.

With that said, the best teams always find a way, and you will never play every game flawlessly. Good luck.

 

Karoo

Have you considered tanking the hunter and chain CC'ing him while your rogue switches back and forth between the druid/hunter.

Lure the hunter around a pillar, root him throw on a HoT or two moonfire, faerie fire then switch to bear and start lacerating. The hunter will not be able to do any meaningful damage and if he traps you he's still stuck in Roots. Just don't get caught in a trap in caster form.

Have your rogue switch targets, if the druid gets away go directly after the hunter and apply pressure. You may be surprised how much health you can drain a hunter of without really using much mana and also while staying relatively safe yourself. If you get into a bind HoT up and LoS til you're back to full and continue.

In the lower brackets (1800 and below) most hunters tend to go into DPS tunnel vision mode when you, as a druid, aren't running away from them. They start using snake traps and raptor striking trying to kill you rather than getting away from you.

 

maelfurion

What I do is bind rejuv to scroll up and lifebloom to scroll down. Put those 2 spells in the bottomright/bomttomleft/blablabla and u can just scroll up and down to get u out of caster form and u can start hitting regrowth etc...

 

Zure

You have your heals bound to 1-5. This is fine. That doesn't mean you have to bind them to your main action bar. Simply move your heals to another bar, and rebind those action bar spaces to 1-5.

 

seron

Sorry to budge in on the convo, but I have a problem.

I can't seem to reapply roots while one is already active. In 80% of the cases I get "A more powerful spell is active" even though all my roots are rank 1, and my NG is also rank 1. Even if I use the same roots button, I get that error. What's even more odd is that if I do rank 1 from my spellbook, and then rank7 i also get a more powerful spell is active. Weird huh? I deactivated all my addons but no success. Only thing that's left is clearing my WTF folder but that would only be keybindings and macros, I doubt that would do anything. Anyone else experiencing this problem?

Sometimes it does work, but it seems completely random. I'm not using any other buff, or trinket when it does work. It could give me that error, but allow me to cast next time and give me that error again after it!

edit: I don't get this in PvE.

 

malthrin

I've been getting that now and then as well. I PvP with the Hyjal exalted ring, so I had assumed it was due to being unable to overwrite a roots that had been cast with a higher +dmg. You don't seem to have any clicky trinkets or procs, however.

 

Zure

There's no work around that I've been able to find. It's a fairly big bug, and has been around for at least two months now. The best advice I can give is to attempt to re-cast a roots early, so that you can know to switch to a cyclone/feral charge/kite before it's too late.

EDIT: the problem stems from roots causing damage I believe. It's really the only CC that does this.

 

Auran

I could be wrong, but from my experience, it stems from the Diminishing Returns on roots. I believe there may be an error in its calculation (I haven't done any direct experiments to prove this) but you're getting the error because the Ent Roots you're trying to place on the target would actually last a shorter amount of time than just letting the current one continue ticking due to DR.

In other words, if the ER you have on the target will last another 6 seconds, but due to DR if you recast ER on the target it'd only last 5 seconds, you get an error because the ER you're trying to cast is "less powerful" than the one currently on it. I'm not entirely convinced the error calculation is correct, but I believe that's where it's coming from.

Any mages or warlocks notice a similar thing with Poly and Fear respectively?

 

Pointyleaf

I doubt this is the problem, as I'm having the same error pop up in pve lately.

 

doogless

No (I play Warlock, Mage, and Druid regularly), the bug is unique to Entangling Roots, and doesn't seem to have any repeatable cause(s). Sometimes it just happens, and there isn't anything you can do about it other than recast once Roots wears off. It's really annoying.

 

Herrera

What previous poster said. It's a bug that nobody can reproduce 100%, but it does happen very often. Roots don't have DR in PvE.
Also, you should only be using ER rank 1 in arena. It's pointless to use Rank7, unless you care about the damage. Otherwise, you save 110 mana per root cast.

Totem of the Crusader
Tools: Earth Totem
Increases mounted speed of all party members by 20% while in range of the totem.

 

seron

I agree, I only mentioned it because even my rank 7 cannot overwrite my rank 1 due to the more powerful spell is active message. Thanks for the replies guys, glad it's not me.

 

Pointyleaf

I'm encountered this problem as a feral druid who was using roots in BEM while doing the mana cell quest for SSO dailies. I only have the highest level of roots on my bar and don't have NG. If it happens again, I'll get a screenshot.

 

Futility

A question to anyone who's run this strat before: With both you and your rogue on the hunter 90% of the fight, what have you found to be the most effective way to keep the opposing healer (priest/druid/etc) from drinking?

 

Mearis

You are not outlasting or running out of mana a druid/hunter team - ever. The key is to hope to score a good CC chain and drop the hunter - to that end, the druid drinking is useless.

 

Yolanya

Exactly. I have even experienced Full S3 Restos running out of sight for drinking...and seeing a dead teammate when getting back.

Restodruid/Hunter (mostly Marksman) is a low DPS Combo with strong outlasting properties against Mana-classes, which fail because you are in Bearform 90% of the fight. If you and your Rogue can keep enough pressure on the Hunter, his DPS drops significantly; so a single Lifebloom is almost enough healing for nearly 30 seconds while the other Druid burns his mana to keep his mate up.

 

Aanzeijar

I'm the team mate of Yolanya.

Fighting hunter/druid is pretty much a cruel game to slowly teach them they can't hope to win. Ever. The druid may drink 10 times, and the hunter may get a few sips every now and then too, but at some point they realize that they can't hope to kill one, no matter what they do, and the game will be eventually decided by the ammunition of the hunter.

At that point the opponent druid will usually start to blow loads of mana into additional cc, insect swarm, and even wrath, just to see that this isn't the answer either. The only thing to watch out for then are the hunters that keep their pet in for the first 10 minutes just to pop it when they think it's a good idea. Well, no problem there either, just hug the hunter, and hit pet instead (keeping crippling shived on the hunter). The druid will probably scream bloody murder on their vent because he cannot keep the pet alive... so it goes down.

The only part where it got real close was when I had to reapply poisons in the middle of the fight (shame on me for not doing so before the match, when they were at 20min), the other druid cc'ed me out of it, and the hunter took the oppotunity to force Yolanya out of bear, and burned like 40% mana in that time. It must have been soulcrushing for them when we got back on track to see a druid in bear below 10% health, completely out of mana, but still being unable to drop her.

 

Ving

I'm new to Arena with my Resto Druid and I find I'm getting slaughtered (stun locked) by rogues. Any basic strategies would be helpful.

Basically I'm just looking for "opening moves" to avoid stun lock. Do I need to rely on my partner more or can I avoid the lock solely through trinkets/thorns etc...?

Thanks in Advance.

 

Winfurae

Looking for some advice on playing with a BM hunter in 2v2.

My main is an enhancement shaman, I am currently at 2012 rating in the 2v2 bracket where I play with the same hunter I play with on my druid. I've always been fascinated by resto druids in arena and really fancied trying it out myself, so I leveled one. The last couple of weeks I've been farming BG's and T4 tokens and managed to get some pretty decent gear, currently sitting at about 9.5k hp, 350 resilience, 1500 healing and 150mp5.

This is my armory: The World of Warcraft Armory

The hunter is in full vengeful/vindicator. Yet we still find it very hard even reaching 1700.

The main problem is the hunter running out of mana or his pet dieing. Any team with a melee in it usually goes for his pet. I try to keep a 3 stacked lifebloom up on it, a rejuvenation and I'm always ready to swiftmend it. When there's a rogue on it I make sure I keep abolish poison up. Yet, the pet barely has any hp and absolutely no resilience, so I either go OOM spamhealing it, or I simply can't keep it up. My hunter tells me I shouldn't really worry about the pet once he's used bestial wrath, however in long drawn out games, it's a huge disadvantage when we lose the pet.

Another big problem is line of sight, obviously. However we can't really do much about people hugging pillars.

We use a fairly offensive strategy. Usually we try to cc the healer and nuke the dps and make sure we keep aimed shot on. Against double dps, we mostly cc the rogue or any other melee dps. I am specced for insect swarm, and always try to help out nuking wherever needed. Against MS warriors, I try to keep at least rank 1 insect swarm up, so he starts missing specials.

However, we find that teams are outliving our nuke. They either start to hug pillars during bestial wrath, and it gets wasted, or they simply outheal it. We aren't build for outlasting, we have tried the hunter respeccing MM and using a scorpid. We found this very boring, as our first game took about 28 minutes and was all about draining, there was absolutely no dps and we found that this bored us to death basically.

We realise a hunter isn't a great arena class, I mean I also play with a Karazhan geared rogue, that has absolutely no pvp kit except the 2 minute pvp trinket, and I do lots better with him. However I feel me and the hunter aren't playing the best we can.

Should we perhaps use a different strategy? Like I said, I play fairly offensive, I've enchanted spellhit on my gloves and plan to get it on my helm as well as soon as I get the rep, and get one spellhit gem.

Another problem is rogues. When there's a rogue around, we are pretty much screwed if he catches me in catform stealthed. This always seems to happen, even though Night Elfs are supposed to have better stealth due to shadowmeld. When a rogue is on me, I always trinket the kidney shot, go bear, bash and run away. However, my bash get's dodged/parried or even misses half the time. After that I don't have much left, I use frenzied regeneration as soon as I need to, try to get them rooted but they just clos or shadowstep through it. I'm not a fan of travelform, cause if I get caught in it, I'm dead.

I've been reading this thread for a couple of weeks and would really appreciate some advice on how to play with a hunter.

 

Aenur

to make a druid/hunter team work i think you will have to stick with MM, yes fights may be long every now and then, but the effectiveness of this setup is not to be underestimated. When it comes to keeping pets alive, this is the hardest task you will have, no matter the hunters spec, if you are playing vs a good team, chances is that pet will die at some point, but with some good CC from you and your hunter, the risk of this happening will be greatly decreased.

When it comes to rogues, your best chance to avoid getting jumped is staying in the flare and on the trap, and pray that you are not fighting a human rogue. If the rogues get the jump you hunter will need to do everyting possible to get him off you, just for the second or two it will take you to recover and get a CC on the rogue. Other than that try to stay CC the rogue as much as possible, and if you can't get this through, go bearform and try to feral charge the other enemy to get to safety. And last thing "RUN FOREST RUN!".

 

doogless

If he wants to spec BM, he shouldn't be playing with a healer - a single BM Hunter as DPS simply won't kill anyone with reasonable gear. If you want fast(er) 2v2 games, spec Restokin and play with a Rogue, or don't play a Druid - most Druid teams excel in longer games. The most effective way to play Hunter/Druid is MM with a Scorpid and beat people by draining their mana. Sorry if it's boring, but that's what's going to get you high rating.

Hunters are an excellent arena class, the problem is that most people who rolled the class don't like what their arena roll happens to be.

 

Winfurae