I'm curious what people think of a 2v2 druid team and what specs might work, or for that matter a 3v3. One I assume would have to be resto, because generally surviving as a druid simply means outlasting and kiting your opponents. But what of the other person? Would a feral or boomkin work better? And finally, is this sort of team just asking to be dissembled by just about any decent 2v2?

My guild had a 2v2 that was top 20 during the first season before they split up. I'd imagine they'd do about as well, but they are quite above-average in skill. In fact, with the addition of water, and the fact that they are both Night Elf, I bet they could do much better. Both gladiators from it though.

(resto/feral)

I'll see if I can't get him to stop by.

edit: My paladin/warrior team was beaten by a resto/feral team in a horribly painful 10m drink/kiteathon while they (very slowly) ran us oom. It was close, and I don't think I had my pvp trinket yet.

Yes, myself as feral and another druid as resto got gladiator through 2v2 last season. Our only real problem was very well-geared war/pal. We did this before the arena water/fear changes, too. Our 3v3 did very well as feral/resto/frost mage, although I only played later in the season (just shy of a second mount %-wise). It's not the easiest comp to pull off and a lot is dependent on how good the resto is since largely it was my job to just dps and occasionally get him out of trouble. I don't think all-druid 3v3 would be as successful, but then again, I didn't think 2v2 would be until we pulled it off.

There is also a double-feral horde 2v2 that is 2000ish, but I don't see them going much higher as comps like war/pally and sp/lock might rape them in higher brackets.

We're at 2150 right now though the highest we've hit was #13 at 2179. We don't get much trouble (but then again, when you compare a normal team vs us, all of our games take considerably more effort) with the war/pally or druid/pally make up (in fact in our only game against the #1 team (war/druid) we managed to beat them). SP/lock is rough but not nearly as difficult as the lock + real healer combos are, since more often than not you can lock down the spriest and kill it before the warlock can kill you. Lock/disc or lock/resto are just brutal. We've also run into a lot of trouble against shaman/warrior, though we're doing slightly better than our initial encounters with it. The problem is that we rely on shadow resist against some of the lock/healer match ups. There is absolutely no way to beat them without either a dedicated healer, dispel, or a way to shed dots unless you fall back on resistance. My biggest fear is that once 2.2 hits we won't be able to compete at all, since any game against a warlock will be an automatic loss (restraining myself from going on a rant about warlocks here!). Depending on when 2.2 is released, we'll probably hit gladiator but I don't know how high up we can get.

You probably can't do well in a 3v3 with three druids. You need dispel or massive damage that cannot be easily mitigated, neither of which the druid has. One stack of dots on each party member from a single warlock would wreck a two dps/one healer 3 druid team.

Azoth and Tribby, making up that 2v2 feral team, are also both exceptional players. If your question is "Can 2 druids compete?" The answer is yes, if you are very very good at the class. I also play my girlfriend's shadow priest in an sp/lock 2v2 for fun and its basically a cakewalk even with me not knowing the class all that well (we're pushing 2k on 10 games a week for like 4 weeks...)

My initial question came because a druid friend and I (both feral) started a team with the goal of getting free gear, nothing more. The plan was to reroll the team when we hit 1300 and just keep collecting our free piece about once a month. We figured it would be an incredibly weak team with both of us essentially being in a mix of blues and karazhan purples, but were suprised when we were losing only by a very small margin to most healer/dps teams on what we consider our "off-time-fun alts" for our first ever run together. I don't consider myself a "great player" but I learn and adapt quickly and I'm no stranger to kiting with my primary having been a hunter prior to rolling up the druid. My partner is always very quick to adapt as well, and I think the two of us can take it to at least 1800 given how quickly we were adjusting our play styles. What I was curious about is what combination of druid might work out for the best. I have a good healer set since I played both feral and resto (not great for PvP, but neither of us have good PvP gear for any spec anyway).

I will take the dive and go with either an 8/11/42 or 12/11/38 spec to see how we do. I can definately see a lock/priest combo being devistating with mana burn and end-less dots/drain life. We are definately going to struggle since we don't have the gear to back ourselves right now, but it is good to hear that the combination is viable.

Would the lack of any real dispell be debilitating for an all druid 3v3 team? You can decurse, but most warlock dots are magic based. I could see keeping triple stacks of lifebloom up to counter the health loss, but that doesn't account for any other damage people are going to incur. It seems like you either need a priest, mage, or paladin on anything beyond 2v2 in order to compete.

Having a 1800 2vs2 resto/feral team myself:
- War/Pala combos are generally easy but long. It's all about making the pala use bubble and then hotting up your teammate and using some fun CC combos (Cyclone/Cyclone/Feral Charge/Bash/Rake/Maim/Cyclone/Cyclone/Feral Charge, chain cyclone warrior to prevent him from getting heals/letting your teammate build energy and get back to the paladin) while your teammate kills the warrior.
- Resto Druid/Rogue combos are horrible, but the only matchups we've had were quite a bit higher in gear and rating than us. I imagine that the 4/5 set bonus would help a bit with this.
- Decent-geared Shadowpriest/Lock combos are not defeatable. DoTs are just too much damage to heal through while you're being spam dispelled as well as silenced and mana burned and (if you get too close, something you'll probably need to do if your teammate gets feared out of sight) feared. Staying out of LoS really doesn't work because your teammate needs constant healing and has to chase the other team to do damage.
- Other double DPS teams are generally not much of a concern unless they get a load of crits. Barkskin helps a lot with surviving the initial burst.
- SL lock/non-druid healer setups aren't much of a problem thanks to the druid CC combo. Resto druids, on the other hand... no experience but I'm pretty sure that we wouldn't win that.

- Always, always kill the Felhunter, kill it again after Fel Domination.
- Feral Charge is a requirement. Really, I never thought going from 1/0/60 to 8/11/42 would've made so much of a difference. It gives you quite a lot of CC over all other healing classes as well as being a damn good way to get away from melee.
- Blade's Edge is a very nice arena for resto druids. So easy to run out of LoS from casters, so easy to root melee.

All of this might change at 2000+ and when teams get 400 resilence on average; I don't know. But for now, we tend to increase our rating instead of lowering it.

We managed 1650 in season 1 (starting 3 weeks before end) when we started with 0 resilence, a 5 minute PvP trinket and full PvE specs.

Idd actually like to see a 3v3 all boomkin team. Dual cyclone, then all out on the last target seems like an easy kill if you can lure people to a suitable place (like the middle of nagrand(haha)).
Boomkin burst is not to be underestimated and 3 ns heals combined with 3 3-stacked lifeblooms make for A LOT of survival. Getting 2kseems quite manageable but i wouldnt expect anything gamebreaking.

Like the all shaman 5v5 team idea that floated around here some time ago an all druid 3v3 or 2v2 is not at all a bad combination and getting respectable ratings should be doable, but cookie cutter setups will propably outplay ýou in the long run.

I've seen a 5man boomkin team in action. They had 1 dreamstate/resto that did most of their healing (but started out moonkin so you couldnt just pick her out of the pack), while the rest would pop in and out to help with heals. They would kill 1 player right off the bat with 12 treants and 5 starfires followed by moonfires against melee heavy teams. The problem with their team is that it seemed to rely entirely on the aspect of "surprise! lazerturky trees of death!" We got wrecked by them the first time we ever met up against them, but beat them fairly easily every other time around. Those 5man-all-the-same-class teams are really just asking to be picked apart by any decent team that can adapt after the initial shock of "5 moonkin inc! assist on the... moonkin?"

They may have just been very bad at CCing as well, because it did not seem like we were getting hit with many cyclones or roots. Not to say they never happened, they just did not happen often or effectively and most of them seemed to be entirely focused on nuking.

Having been part of a resto/feral 2v2 that was 2274 last season, I can safely say that sp/warlock is not nearly as hard as well-geared pally/war. A good war, especially maces, who gets on me FORCES me to bear, and if he gets on my teammate, I often have to assist with CC because he's mace stunning or pummeling. Moreover, stack a paladin with 300 resil and he'll flash through your dps all day. We beat a couple of those teams, but it was anything but easy, and the games were very very long. This was also before the change to arena water, so now it may be easier to win, at the cost of a 25-minute game every time.

Resto/rogue was relatively easy for me because the resto can't get away from me and takes a lot of damage.

SP/Lock will always be hard, but hots are win.

I honestly can't think of an unbeatable combination for us. Obviously no team will have 100% w/l, but we did quite well.

We had the opposite problem where I couldn't get away from the rogue who was also supported by the other resto. Always rooted, being hibernated or having some of the various rogue abilities on me. This basically ended in me having to shift forever having no time to actually put hots on myself. Feral hots don't outheal rogue DPS. (one-second immunity, you never really mattered but still... I miss thee.)

Problem we had here was very simply dispel spam which even with 5/5 subtlety removes buffs faster than I can apply them. Lifebloom's bloom doesn't outheal this combo. My teammate also has problems with actually doing any DPS with 2 classes who can Fear/Curse of Exhaustion (eats mana). Then add a Felhunter (really don't have time to kill it in these setups) and a priest Silence to this and it's settled.

And for pala/MS war, yes the arena water was quite a change here. Trick here is to try trigger BoF on the warrior, near the end of it have your teammate (or yourself) cyclone the pala and root the warrior. Now you have about 5 seconds to run out of sight, preferably in a way where the warrior will have to walk for quite a bit (I like the starting areas in Blade's Edge and Lordaeron; it's a bit harder to do in Nagrand). This should give you ~2500 mana.
Burst hasn't been a problem since I got a few pieces of s2 gear altough I've had a few very very close ones.
Of note is that you mention "stack a paladin with 300 resil and he'll flash through your dps all day." - our strat tends to revolve around CC'ing healers while we kill the DPS instead of the reverse. With how long a druid combo can CC a healer, resilence doesn't matter all too much.

So am I to take from this that you can enter and leave an arena with mage water? Because (as this week is my first playing resto in a long time) I kept trying to get out of combat to drink vendor water to find it does not work, and I was under the impression that mage water was set to disapear upon entering and leaving arenas.

Star's Tears from your appropriate honor vendor.

Bag, it seems to me you have some good insight on druid play in the arena =). Would be nice to get some more strats and such that you found to be effective.

Feral Druids and Arena Play.

Is my Feral druid thread =). I play in a warrior/Feral druid 2v2 purely for fun. We don't expect to get anywhere, but I so VERY often find myself thinking "oh, if I only had done this etc etc".

It would be great if you could add some advice up there for us other ferals. Its so rare to fina feral in a smaller bracket, let alone one that does very well =).

For my 3v3, I think I'll give feral/resto/affliction lock a test run. I figure the warlock, while he wont have the survivability of a demo/SL lock will be more capable of whittling other teams down while the feral and i try to create as much chaos as we can to lock down healers.

Though do you guys figure a soul-link lock drain tanking people would do better for that kind of composition?

few downsides to a shadow priest there, though. one is mana. once an sp has burned shadowfiend and is oom, he's completely out of tricks. What a resto and an affliction lock brings to the table is a long, boring fight. If a team sees lock/sp, they may go shadow resist (even in 3s). Moreover, 2x cyclone can be pretty nasty and druid dps is actually probably a little higher in that instance because a priest should be silencing, fearing, mana burning, and locking down while in almost every case being the primary dps target. The druid, however, would generally not be the dps target, not be very cc'able, and can do what essentially equates to raid-level dps. I think a well-played feral might actually bring more to the table in that situation than a shadow priest.

Last season, I played a feral/resto/frost mage for 3s and we were very successful (gladiator). I think a shadow priest would have been a liability there.

My current 3v3 is feral druid/sp/afflic. We win most games without much of a contest because the shear damage coming out from the sp/lock is too much to handle. All I do in the match up is interupt casts, stun people, cyclone, etc. I rarely put out any damage, and occasionally spot heal my allies. I'm looking forward to someone being dumb enough to wear SR against us, because I'll just eat through them. People are dying so quickly that sp mana is not an issue, and if it is I have innervate to toss him, since I'm not doing enough to run out of mana myself.

I've once theorized which 5x Class teams would be the most hilarious to watch, and near the top two teams that I would pay to watch would be a 5 x moonkin team and a 5x elemental shaman team.

It just... i don't know.. panders to my childish side to want to see 5 turkeys raining down sky lasers and thowing down 15 treants on someone.

Besides, I think that team, with the correct amount of communication, could really work over other teams with 5x cyclone 5 x roots and some feral charges and more pew pew than you shake a stick at. Sadly, me thinks it would be very difficult to find 5 geared out 'kins willing to try this silliness, and the communication would suffer considering those 5 kins are most likely from different guilds. I have yet to see a guild that keeps that large of a roster of off specs.

That and I've always wanted to see 5 elemental shaman. With natures swiftness. Sure... it's a one trick pony, but still... I would laugh so hard the first time i saw a team get 2 people bursted down with instant chain lightning at the get go.