Our team currently consists of an MS warrior, Shadow Priest, Mage, UA Lock and Holy Pally.

Last week we were ranked 60 something in our battlegroup. We're not doing too badly, I guess, but we're starting to run into the brick wall that is Paladin/Shaman/Priest.

Does anyone else run in a four dps setup or is it just utterly flawed from the start? The main problem is that if I get controlled or mana burned then it's basically an instant loss. In a team with three healers and a lock, they can basically dedicate the priest and lock to CC'ing me and draining me dry while the warrior/paladin/shaman keep whoever the dps target is alive.

We have fear and poly but against good teams we're basically forced to use those to counter the people who are CC'ing me, meaning that we typically end up with their full offense still in play with only the mana drain bot locked down most of the time.

We've had limited success in going for the shaman first - everything else has been a disaster, though. For some reason, shaman seem to be the only one who won't run and kite us. If we go for the warrior he goes defensive stance. The priest and pally will both kite around los obstacles. The second dps, whether it's lock or mage seem happy to kite as well.

About the only time we get really lucky is when the fifth is a hunter or a rogue - for some reason those are easy wins due to lack of CC ability by the second dps.

The things we've tried but have failed:

• Priest mana draining. He'll get one target emptied but usually I've been drained to hell too. Even if he goes for the priest the priest can usually drain me before he himself gets drained. If we devote the warlock's fears to keeping the priest feared while he gets drained then we no longer have the dps to make a kill AND their entire dps is still able to go after us (meaning I'm still spending decent mana keeping everyone alive). Unless we focus on the priest after he's drained (and he'll kite at that point) he'll just run off and drink.
  
• Trying to burn the pally down first. It works against shitty pallies but more often than not the pally just tosses freedom up and runs around a pillar. In the same situation with no other healers I can stay alive for several minutes against most teams. In our situation with their pally having two backup healers, it's just difficult.
  
• Trying to burn down the warrior and thus cripple their dps - defensive stance. Doesn't work. I'll still go out of mana before their healers even if they're not doing dps to us. I've considered attacking the warrior and forcing defensive stance and keeping the secondary dps CC'd but I can't see how we can keep that up with diminishing returns - the secondary CC will be purged easily. It'll take forever to get the warrior down and I'll be mana drained to nothing by then.

I'd hate to rearrange my team's lineup just to be competative. We're all very good players, I think, and we're all good friends to boot. I'd like to think this makeup has what it takes to be competative it's just that the synergy between Priest/Pally/Shaman is just too solid to overcome unless the other team makes glaring mistakes.

Anyone have any ideas?

I think mostly we're having trouble defining our weakness. We're 4 dps, but I spend a lot of the beginning of the fight CC'ing, and then jumping in for Shatter Combos when I've just dropped a Poly+CS. Problem is, my CC doesn't always line up with a target in burstable range. A pally bubbles, spams heals for 8s and the other healers are bloodlusted and we just can't get our targets down.

We've been talking lately that our weakness is a lack of shaman, which adds a ton of dps to our warrior, and to the team with bloodlust, and defense with grounding n such. But I'm not sure if we're scapegoating or not.

What do people think are key elements to 4dps teams? Seems those that don't have shamans, many times have 2 UA locks, or no mages at all.

Teams almost always focus our lock, then our Spriest. Often just slapping a pet on me.

Trounce, Highest ranked US team currently, run a 4 DPS team. Warrior, Frost Mage, Aff Lock, Ele Shaman, Holy Paladin. > Here< is a video of them in action.

Their basic strat seems to be hammer the *&$# out of the opposing teams Warrior. Poly someone, fear someone else... counterspell/spell lock healers with /focus macros. The extreme pressure they put on 1 target forces the all the other teams healers to heal that target. If they are trying to do something else(mana burn), 1 counter spell on the pally and the target dies.

Prob is, we don't have the dps to hammer a warrior, least I don't think we do. Trounce has WF for their warrior, and bloodlust for their lock and mage, and a shaman bolting the fuck out of anything that moves along with their usual NS zap. The more I think about it, shaman seems to be the key we're missing, namely bloodlust.

I have plenty of ideas, not sure how useful they are, but you can take them for what they are worth. I play on a 4 dps teem as well and we struggle against any team where we don't get that first early kill, even when we shouldn't - we just seem to loose our momentum and give them too many opportunities to disrupt our pally enough to get a kill.

A Pally/shaman/priest/warrior/XXX lineup really does not have a lot of CC to throw at you. The priest is obviously a big problem in a lineup that is meant to outlast you and focusing on him should prevent the mana burns. CC on their CC class is probably also a must to keep them from disrupting your healing - starting with fears on their CC while your mage sheeps their warrior and then switching once they become immune might work. You keep mention that you are getting kited, and to me that seems to be your main problem - keep the priest snared, get UA and hamstring on him and dispel BOF/BOP... don't let him get away. As long as you can lock down their other CC class, they shouldn't really be able to kite you too much.

One of the big issues here is probably their shaman totems and LOS issues. 3 healer teams in general seem very good at playing the positioning game and this is definitely something you will have to be aware of and try to counter since the longer they can delay the game via these things, the more it works to their advantage.

You definitely don't have the dps that other 4 dps teams have, but dots can still put a ton of pressure on many targets at once which makes the burst you do have more valuable. You have UA to protect the dots and COT + felhunter to slow the their healing output. With 3 group fears and a good amount of other CC, you absolutely have to take advantage of against CC lite groups in order to give your dotters time to get things stacked up.

Who are you trying to CC?

I basically start by getting Winter's CHill up on a warrior at the start, then poly, then detect then assisting on the main target. My focus is always their paladin, and I have their casting bars enabled. As long as our main target isn't likely to escape LoS I counterspell the Paladin, then polymorph their priest (or second paladin). Like we've said we usually go for shamans in 3 healer setups. We're basically trying to create an atmosphere where all of their healers are locked down at once (hence the lack of poly on a healer at first, until CS has landed) If we don't get the kill in this window of time, it's usually game over for us.

I go back and forth on what my roll should be at the start, but I really think we're going to need my pet nova comboing to get targets down.

If you went with Warrior as the focus target. Your Warrior goes on theirs and keeps hamstring on him, use nova(from you and pet) to help keep him off your team... dispell his freedom asap. CC the 2nd DPS(Mage? in a Warrior, Pally, Priest, Mage, Shaman setup) and Shaman or Priest or Pally with Poly/Fear. That will free your Mage/S Priest/Warlock to cast freely.... it also removes counter spell and curse removal while their Mage? is CC'd. I think that would put your team solidly in control of the match at that point. Your taking in little to no damage with the warrior likely going to swap to a shield to spell reflect. Their Priest is not Mana Burning. He needs to keep healing or the Warrior will die... especially with tongues on himself and the Pally.. and Counterspell/Spell Lock to worry about.

Something I noticed from the Trounce video is they set up a secondary target, usually the Paladin, with DoTs from the Lock(which are not dispelled due to UA). If bubble is down and they don't keep him topped off cause they are to busy spam healing the Warrior... BAMM intercept with a full rage bar along with everyone following the Main Assist to the secondary target, and the secondary target is toast because the other team is to slow to react.

I personally think that a Combat Mace rogue is far better then a Warrior on a 4 DPS team.

Controlable stuns are far better then hamstring for controling the initial target, and beleive it or not but wound poision is better then MS, if you team ususes the popular UA-Lock/Shadow Priest combo.

My ideal 4 DPS team would be a Mace-rogue, UA-lock, S-Priest, E-shaman, H-pally, but really either the shaman or priest could be swaped for a mage or a second afliction lock. Some also feel a resto Druid is better then a Pally but that concept scares me a lot.

I'm not sure any one class is "essental" for 4-DPS, some of course are better then others. The set up seems to have a lot more flexibility then the 2 or 3 healers combos that almost require warriors, and Pallys.

I think that you are relying on that first, fast kill a little too much. You just are not going to get that easy kill against good 2-3 healer teams unless you really stack in the burst dps classes. I also know that for us, when we push for an early kill, we quickly get overextended and are pretty much guaranteed to loose whomever they are focusing on as well as exposing our healer to all kinds of nasty stuff. If we don't get the kill, we loose badly. Sometimes even if we do get the kill, we still can't recover.

You have enough CC to reduce their DPS to almost zero for the first 20 seconds or so of a fight. If you manage that and get the 3 healers loaded with DOTs and curses while your warrior keeps their priest locked down enough to prevent mana burns, you will have dramatically changed the fight.

Their warrior is likely their main source of DPS. IMO you can't really afford to go fight him where he wants. Maybe if he didn't have a shaman, but feeding him rage while he has bloodlust, totems, BOF and 3 healers spamming him is just a recipe for disaster. If by some miracle you do get him down, he is going to do a lot of damage first. CC and frustrate him, get him out of range of totems and force LOS issues for his healers. A full duration sheep or frost nova behind a pillar could very well win you the game.

Can anyone provide a link to (or name of) said video? I enjoy clean arena movies but I find there's too much lousy content flowing through WCM (and no good way to sort it) to keep up.

Honestly, I firmly believe 4 DPS teams need an elemental Shaman. Your entire goal is to kill someone quickly, and I see no better way of accomplishing that than with Heroism + Totems + burst DPS. Even still, your entire team philosophy has to revolve around killing one of their players (usually a Warrior) before your Paladin's bubble expires. I think a shadow Priest *can* work, but it puts MUCH greater pressure on the rest of your DPS classes to CC well and play aggressively.

Noob question : how can you zoom so far out (papa video) . A mod ?

Go under interface options and there's a slider near the lower right to increase zoom distance.

Papa's latest video is here:
WorldOfPapa.wmv - FileFront.com

His blog is here:
World Of Papa

If extending zoom-out using the normal WoW interface options isn't enough, you can also use this mod: World of Warcraft UI / Mods - The Unofficial World of Warcraft Mods site
Amusing sample picture zoomed wayyy out: http://i11.tinypic.com/54ed7rk.jpg

Yeah, I'm wondering if this might be the way to go. I spent about four hours last night redesigning my interface so that I can clearly see when a priest is trying to drain me (I figure we can flip on chain fear/poly on the priest at that point) and just concentrate on dpsing a warrior and countering heals when the warrior hits 50-60%.

Also, thanks for the tips everyone - it's definitely given me some ideas for how to make the team work. I really don't want to add more members, I'd rather figure out how to compete with my friends than all else.

I've played 4 dps in all seasons so far, not because I planned to but simply because that's what my friends and I have at our disposal. Our current setup is Warrior, Feral Druid, Felguard Lock, Elemental Shaman, Holy Pala. Very different setup than the original poster's team so I don't know how much this might help them.

General strategy is to call a primary and secondary target, these are chosen based on how much of a threat they are to our team and how easy they are to kill. The goal here is to either kill the primary outright or to force him to play defensively so that he is no longer a threat. If he does start playing defensively (kiting, defensive stance, bear form, etc), I immediately call a switch to the secondary target and then I'll continue calling switches depending on who of them is more exposed. Sometimes I'll switch multiple times in a few seconds.

Example: if primary is a druid, i'll pressure and force him to go bear form, then I'll switch to the secondary while still keeping my eyes on him, the moment he shifts out of bear he gets intercepted and focused down again. This works well on warriors too. Against plate spam teams both warriors will be primary and secondary target.

Healers like paladins and resto shamans are generally never targeted, they get harassed with CoT and interrupts/fears but not focused. Priests and druids instead are considered threats because of manaburn and cyclone so they'll often be primary.

Mages can be a problem, they can make us waste a ton of time if called primary so we try to keep them busy with curses and fears but a very good mage can really put a wrench in our gameplan. I'm accepting advice on how to deal with them as it's our greatest weakness.

So anyway, the goal with a 4 dps team is to pressure the other team in a way that lets your team free to act, your paladin and warrior especially (if you have them) need to be able to play unhindered, this means calling primary that priest manaburning your paladin, or that druid cycloning your warrior, etc. If you lose against a team, you need to discuss who is giving you the most problems and figure out a way to take him out of the game (mace stun and hamstring being my usual answer, but if you have polymorph/fear/cyclone that is an option too).

In the beginning of the season I ran a 4 DPS team with Rogue/Affliction Warlock/Shadow Priest/Elemental Shaman/Paladin (which got us into top10 in the BG). Whenever we got a team like that and they had a priest who was intent on mana burning me we would put our rogue on their priest and the rest of our team on a focus fire target which would more often than not be the shaman. The rogue would completely shut down the priests mana burning only letting 1-2 get off the whole fight, also hurt the amount of healing he can do and required him to get heals himself. We ran a slightly different setup but yours should allow you to do the same.

It depends on what kinda 4dps setup you wanna run... shaman brings bloodlust and totems yes, but priest brings mass dispel and aoe fear.

As an Elemental Shaman, my priorities in 5s come down to preventing CC (particularly from Mages and Druids). I set either the opposing Mage or Druid as my focus and I make sure to prevent all Polys/Cyclones with rank 1 ESes. Between that and Grounding Totem, I can prevent 3 consecutive CCs and I call out any that may slip through and whether or not I can prevent the next (so they know whether or not they need to PvP trinket). If the Mage pops AP, I Ground and Purge. If the Mage uses a Water Elemental, I turn around and nuke it once or twice to kill it. If one of our guys is getting burned down hard, I begin ESing every Frostbolt cast and save Grounding for Poly/CS. Since I'm constantly using R1 ESes, I have plenty of mana for mid- and late-game DPS bursts.

The best part is that all of this is instant cast, so I can be getting focused down myself and still prevent lots of CC.

Perhaps you can try to go after Paladins and mass dispel the bubble. In this case you can have the warrior pummeling them, and save sheep/fear for their dps or other healers. It seems that you are trying to kill someone as fast as possible as opposed to maintaining early momentum. 4dps is more about tempo, momentum, and controlling these through pressure than really playing 4 on 5. The teams you are having dificulty with seem to be able to take this momentum back before you are able to down someone.