This is my first threat here. So if it is considered pointless just delete it.

Our Arena Team is a group of friends, that want to play together. None of us has the time to play a new character to 70.

Our setup is the following:

1x Gnome Warrior
1x Gnome Rogue
1x Elven Hunter (on rotation)
1x Feral Druid (on rotation)
1x Holy Paladin
1x Holy Priest (on rotation)

So we have no one dealing magical damage and not every time a ranged class. I am totally aware, that this is absolutely no cookie cutter build and has some serious disadvantages.

Our strategy is mostly:

- Get one soft target (Priest, warlock, shaman, rogue) and attack it with warrior and rogue. Combined with double mass fear und whirlwind the paladin.
- If we manage to down this target with during my Ad-Rush, we send the feral druid to control the warrior an start splitting up to win the mana war 4vs5 with mana burn, mortal strike and wound poison.

What I want is to discuss the possiblities to work with a heavy melee team in the arena and to find strategies to fight against the cookie cutter setups.

With your setup you should do fairly well as long as your druid can play rooter/cycloner in addition to just doing feral dps. With your warrior and rogue both reducing healing effects by 50%, you can put some major pressure on healers, especially if your priest gets the chance to go offensive with mana burn. Since you have a 2 healer setup, I wouldn't say your team setup is especially weak, and while a rogue can't CC as well as a caster without polymorph/fear, a rogue can lock a casting type class down very easily.

I think your only real weak point in the team setup is that the 2 guys that should switch are your rogue/hunter, as warrior/druid/paladin/priest makes up a pretty solid arena combo, with the rogue/hunter being the more unorthodox class to throw in there (and arguably both weaker than adding a shaman or mage).

If you're not playing the priest then you have no way to dispell BoP and no way to dps through it. It therefore seems pointless to use any cooldowns before it gets cast.

So it seems to me that what you might want to do is dps the second-squishiest target until you can force a BoP on him and then switch, pop cooldowns and own.

Of course, it may be hard to even force the BoP with no cooldowns being used, but I reckon it's still doable a lot of the time. Many paladins seem to anticipate an early burst and BoP quite early.

Using the rogue on a healer (priest, shaman, druid) or a warlock and focus on the paladin with a timed mass dispell. Allmost any team has a paladin, and in lower brackets a lot of paladins only wear zero to 150 resilence and rely on their bubble.

Cyclone mostly annoying chars like mages (frostnova, sheep, counterspell) and warlocks (coex, fears, spelllock, cot!!) or frosttrap a warrior/using snake traps on paldin with viper sting and manaburn him (talentated stings will help a lot).

We also used a melee heavy team on season one (three warrior with windfury), but realised, that it's not working any longer, allmost everybody has 200+ resilence from 1-x pieces of merciless gear and some honor pieces, better teams will kite you and so on. You will need to take off a dps on heavy dps teams if you can't hold against their damage or control one or even two of their healer if they can manage to heal through your burst. With splitting your damage you will lose some burst, but while using -% healing debuff on different targets and kick/stun one healer, it's allmost impossible to keep both up for one healer.