With the recent nerfs to windfury and blessing of sacrifice, is the paladin/resto shaman/warrior combo dead? Or can it still compete.

Windfury can still give a good bit of burst, while the lack of Blessing of sacrifice makes the paladin very vulnerable to CC. Would it be better to just replace one of these with a Druid healer?

edit- I'm stupid. The title was supposed to be shaman, not druid.

2nd edit- changed title to 2 healer teams in general

Both setups are still viable, Bloodlust, Grounding and Earthshock/Purge provide basically everything that team is lacking. Tremor and Ebind are just icing on the cake.

The biggest strength the setups you are asking about provide is -3- hard targets. No one that is an "easy" kill. Alot of teams will try to burst the Warrior, and if they can't kill him - they get a facefull of a rage capped Warrior spamming HS/Cleave/WW/MS/Slam/whatever else he can do. If they try for the Paladin, the Druid or shaman can heal them with impunity. If they try for the Druid or Shaman, they get kited. The Druid/Shaman is debateable as to which is better - the Shaman offers a little more utility, while the druid offers some *much* needed CC. And quite frequently, between HOJ/Cyclone/Bash you can shut out the enemy healer for enough of a stretch to drop someone.

Its apples and oranges imo - the only time a Druid would be significantly better is vs a Rogue. Rogues can shut down a Shaman pretty hard heal-wise, whereas a Druid can shift into stuff and still hot/kite/decurse (I hate you cot.).. imo it boils down to your preference, espescially with the WF nerf. Not to say Shamans still aren't amazing utility .

But a slippery Resto Druid is a sight to behold. (I'm looking at you Mounsifjr.)

Hm what about resto druid & shaman, rather than a paladin? I know the loss of blessing of freedom may seem big, but I've never really found myself to be dependent on it (against frost mages sure, but they can be avoided). Plus the added utility of the druid combined with the additional dps support of the shaman and survivability could prove devastating.

Dahis and a couple of friends on BDF have apparently had massive success with the combo on our battlegroup - he's written a couple of articles I don't really want to poach on www.shadow-gaming.com. It sounds like it requires some seriously high-level playerskill to pull off.

I think the Paladin / Warrior combo is slowly being changed to Warrior / Druid combos, they are very versatile as I've seen and can often outheal and outlast a paladin if skilled enough.

I dont think the Blessing of Sacrifice nerf will hit us a great deal in 2v2, perhaps against mage / dispell teams, but there's still Medallion of the Alliance as a backup. I would like to see some kind of talent change that reduced the cooldown of Sacrifice from 1 min to say... 50 or 40 seconds?

I've watched a shaman just sit there healing himself right through a rogue. 70% interupt immunity +30% from earth shield can't be stopped by 1 player alone. A druid is fairly squishy in caster form, and if he drops to bear he is no longer healing. If he shifts around a lot to kite, he is no longer healing. Personally, I find shaman to be capable of outlasting druids. Druids can root, sure. They can chain cylcone, but doing a lot of CC and kiting is basically taking them away from healing completely.

Granted, I havent played a resto druid since I respecced feral for the TBC level grind (well, much. I have respecced resto on occasion for raiding and kept it for a few days of PvP). But with purge being allowed to take out paladin bubbles (at least I think that's what was in store for bubble), along with mass dispell I think druids are still the weakest PvP healer.

The shaman+pal+war combo seems to work fine for me, we started up a new team 3 days ago and are now at 2123, while also raiding mind you. With 53-8, we ran into some teams that caused us problems, specifically teams who have 2x CCers, and relative high damage. Such as paladin+frost mage+demo lock, and holy priest+frost mage +demo lock. They do manage to put out quite alot of damage on me while still having 2 silences, polymorphs and fears at their disposal. Its quite a intresting fight vs thease setups. Who would you target first?

if you find burst DPS could be a problem you could consider going for an Elemental Shaman, it has the same earth shock, purge, grounding, bloodlust/heroism as a Resto and also has the ability to NS/Heal.

I haven't had too many problems. We are still able to cycle drinks and outlast anything the other team tries to throw at us.

Re: the frostmage/demolock team I'd just hit up the warlock to stop the fears/mana drains. I have a ninja SR set and so does my pally that we'd wear. That team doesn't really have burst damage, so eventually the healer would fall behind to my MS.

Mind you, this will probably suck a lot more with the bos/bof nerfs. We're #2 on our battle group behind a war/restodruid/restosham team. They just switched up their sham for a lock though. We also cycle in a lock for our restosham. In my opinion, war/healer/healer or war/healer/lock are the dominant 3s right now.

This.

We also recently (last thursday) began a 3v3 with Resto Shm/Pal/War, and we basically either destroyed every other team all the way to 2200 rating, or lost by a VERY close margin until we fought a very high rated Druid/SL Lock/Mage team. We basically had -0- dps since our Warrior was CC'd the entire match with Cyclone/Poly/fear, while the lock/mage whittled away our health even with all of our heals.

Earthshield is frequently purged/devoured off anyways, and an Elemental Shaman is *almost* as hard a target as a Paladin or Warrior. Not to mention still picking up the basic heal talents on top of NS, along with 7-800+ damage assuming some level of gear - which also serves as healing. Not to mention good damage and insane burst and you can pressure the other team even if your Warrior is CC'd.

This is not a loss at all.

In order for the druid to be kiting, dps has to be focusing on him. If dps is focusing on him, that dps is most likely not damaging any other target to the point that the paladin cannot handle it. If dps is not focusing on any other target than the druid and the paladin can easily keep the warrior up then the druid is contributing just as much to the team as he would be if he were spamming heals on a focus fired warrior.

Rogue+Warrior+Paladin vs Warrior+Paladin+Druid.

Rogue gets on the druid who kites him away (if the paladin doesn't suck, the rogue will be justiced and thus unable to sprint).

Now it's Warrior+Paladin vs Warrior+Paladin with the difference that, as the druid runs by, he can hot up the Warrior and Paladin if they're low and keep kiting. If the rogue gets the bright idea to focus fire the warrior or paladin, the warrior gets into range of the paladin, uses sweeping strikes and goes to town with collateral damage on the rogue. When their warrior hits 50%, cyclone him until MS cooldown is ready, then cyclone the paladin and try to burst the warrior with MS, whirlwind, moonfire, holy shock, JoR and anything else you have up.

Many other 2 dps setups playout accordingly.

Against two healers - druids have incredible amounts of spirit and are up there with paladins in terms of longevity. Chances are they're going to run the other team out of mana first.

In w+p+shaman vs w+p+druid all they have to do is outlast bloodlust and slowly back up out of totem range, forcing the shaman in question to continually drop new totems thus forcing an already mana fragile class to run out even faster.

Warrior+Paladin+Priest is a nice counter due to mana drain, but cyclone/hoj the paladin and pummel heals and you're quickly forcing the priest into a defensive role while forcing the warrior to stick on your paladin/leaving your warrior free to kill their priest. (The warrior either kills your paladin or he'll just drink back all the mana that was drained - your priest cannot do that with the warrior on him nor can their paladin since he has to heal the priest once he's out of cyclone). Their warrior gets your pally low? Cyclone him to buy time for a heal.

Paladin/Druid is just a really great combo for 3v3 - one that I don't think is surpassed if you're going two healers.

Between Death Coil, Howl of Terror and normal fear, yes . I also had 3 BoFs devoured/spellstole. One thing we didn't do was kill the Water ele, we'll do that next time.

Death Wish, Bersrker Rage, Tremor Totem all break fear... plus Fear can be cleansed, although I imagine hard to remove with all the other debuffs from the Lock/Mage.

Did your shaman /focus the druid or mage? I would think focusing the druid for rank 1 earthshock of cyclone would be key as that is the only CC that can't be cleansed.

The pally can cleanse fear, and you have deathwish/zerkerrage. You should never get caught feared in battle stance. It's fine if they want to devour freedom...that means no spell lock and you can WW the pet for some extra damage. If the lock's pet gets to half health, the pally/shaman can shock it to burst it down real quick.

You are playing an outlast fight vs this team. They have no burst but tons of survivability. Getting rid of the magepet is something like 400dps+novas. If you can kill the lock pet twice after that, then you are set up to win the match as they will have a much rougher time keeping both your healers in combat. Make sure to surprise them--have the warrior whittle it down a little before the healer notices, then slap the MS on it and call for a burn in vent. It will drop fast with the pally/shaman helping. Land a HoJ immediately afterwards to dish out some damage before he can instasummon.

Edit: save your trinket for the full 6s cyclone. You will probably eat it when the mage's sheep goes on DM so you will catch them in a tight spot.

Devour Magic and Spell Lock are separate spells on separate cooldowns, using one in no way effects using the other.

Not only that, but the Felhunter doesn't have to be next to you to devour BoF - it's a 30 yard range.

Some locks will put Devour Magic on auto cast, so the Felhunter will cast it on whatever it is attacking... given what they are attacking has a buff. So you can set the pet to attack a warrior(you) and it will instantly remove BoF when it is cast on the warrior. It is the "easier", fire and forget, way of making sure BoF stays off a warrior.

Not to mention that bursting down a felhunter can be hard if the team is ready for it, and their healers spam heals on it while the pet is parked in their LoS. It's harder than you'd think to eliminate the felhunter with direct heals and health funnel being put into it (a rare occasion, I admit). That's when you'd need a druid in favor of a resto shaman, because at least then you could reliably cyclone to try to get the felhunter down.

The pet has a negligible amount of mitigation, especially compared to the warlock. In addition, its HP pool is tiny. Any healer rolling heals into the pet to reliably keep it alive for any period of time will be very mana inefficient and inevitably put himself behind in the mana game. Especially considering that I can switch on a spell damage weapon and sink 2.5k of damage into the pet inside 1 heal cast time, and I can time this around bursts from Gasmask.

Yeah, this is basically right on. If you want to kill a pet you can, I would never debate that. There's varying degrees, however, of how easy the Warlock will make that for you. If the Warlock is foolish enough to have the pet attacking the Warrior, what Gasmask suggests is exactly the right way to kill it. Warlocks who are more protective of their pets will make killing it slightly harder, although it's still entirely possible to do.

Yeah, no one's saying that the pet won't die, but at least for demonology warlocks, you can prolong it enough that you can at least take advantage of being given free reign while dps focuses on the pet with uninterrupted spellcasting.

Of course, that's only for demonology specced warlocks, where the pet gets enough talented buffs to make keeping him up worth the effort. It's less important if you're affliction, and your entire build doesn't revolve around keeping your demon up.

At least for the 17-1900 brackets.

Us being Warrior/Resto Shaman/Paladin vs. SL Warlock/SL Warlock/Resto Shaman team. (~2k rating, 500ish resilience on each warlock)

Ruins of Lordaeron, my healers play LOS games against the locks near the coffin, while i try my luck against their felhunters between hamstringing everything in sight.

The question is: how the hell are we supposed to keep their shaman from drinking? He is hanging on near the starting zone, and, since SL warlocks don't really die that fast, he gets more opportunities to get ooc and drink than needed. To reach the shaman I have to run for good 7 seconds (CoEx) one way, by then he has already refilled 30% of his mana bar.
Our healers can't go near their shaman without being exposed to chain fearing and mana draining (even faster).

Initial plan was to kill 4(!) felhunters and then wail it on the shaman full time, however, at by the time warlock pets die, my healers are already OOM. Their shaman is full, being able to drink freely, so it's a downhill battle of no win.

Ideas?