The problem with that strategy is that it sets you up for a bad resist. Yes it works 97% of the time. But the 3% get you killed. I used to use that strategy, and complained a lot about resisted cyclones. A lot. And the distance thing is iffy, too, due to lag. I sometimes dual box and the difference between where you think you are and where the other guy thinks you are can easily be 10 yards. I have more than once attempted to cyclone at max range only to eat an intercept immediately.

Also, chain cycloning and rooting puts it on DR for when you really need it.

The cyclone/root strategy works and is easy to use. But it is by far not the robust one. Which is why I am always amused when people complain about cyclone in 2v2. I have played against several 2300+ druids and they tend to not use cyclone a lot, probably because even the occasional bad luck can cost you 30 points, while the times it works you get 2.

You should watch Hafu's 2v3 video. Note the almost complete absence of cyclone. She pretty much shows perfect feral-charge-as-getaway strategy in that video. I don't remember seeing any videos on how to properly use travel form (probably because it is all about split second timing that does not translate well into a video) but I do know Spoh shook my warrior easily without cyclone, roots or bear form, simply by timing his shifts well.

Your druid should be continuously moving and using line of shit to his advantage.

Try just going to the arenas in the actual world and work on moving around and having him heal you while you're in a weird spot, ie you're in a bottom pillar and he's up top on the opposite side.

Well hopefully this is on topic, I'm in a similar situation in my 2v2: Feral druid + Mutilate rogue. Not having the 4pc glad bonus, (was saving for the mace for PVE as well as PVP) and coming into the season this late has really been hard on us. Even the warriors at 1650 are throwing stormheralds around and I wonder what the hell they're doing wrong to still be this low.

Anyways, we tend to do well against healer+DPS, even pally+war isn't a guarenteed loss... But every time we find ourselves breaking 1700 we run into something odd like 2 ice mages or a hunter + pompyro mage and we fall back to 1620 and have to chew our way back up. Mages in general tend to destroy us. We just can't keep on them and I have no mitigation against them and no way to heal without being counterspelled (feral hots being so bad... and healing touch is just asking to be counterspelled.) I'm still not sure how much I should be healing and how much I should be helping my partner chew up the other team. We usually get the initial target to 30% (or gibbed) in the opening, and try to force a 2v1. If we can do that we win, but if the healer comes out of our CC too soon, it's all healed back and we've lost our trump card.

I've watched some videos of feral+rogue and they work well when the druid has 2pc t5. Since I don't I'm wondering if I should just respec resto (been building gear for it since I go resto for 5's anyways...) Is resto+rogue a good duo? It's a very good friend and I'm not going to go find a warrior for a bracket I'm not really playing for points anyways (get em from my 5's.)

Finally, should I just save my points since S3 is coming out so soon, or actually pick up the merc. glad healing set (after i get my s2 mace)? The feral set just seems lackluster to me...

Rogue+druid looks good on paper and just feels like it should work, but I keep having the same problems. It is very gear dependent, and if you both don't have the full sets of arena gear to survive burst teams, it is going to be a struggle. I honestly think you would do better to just mooch points with a class that isn't gear dependent, like a frost mage or warlock until you get enough gear. Either that or just accept your low rating until you get the gear, which is what I'm doing.

Also, Mutilate isn't a good arena spec. Combat maces or Combat swords would be the way to go.

I wouldn't say that mutilate is a bad arena spec (points the thread in the direction of Neilyo), but you may find more success as resto druid with sub-optimal gear and a midseason start.

You have the luxury of a non-mana based DPS partner who can restrict healing with wound posion and the ability to bearform opposing drains/burns yourself. However shifting in and out to avoid burns could lead to some times where your partner is succeptible to burst if he is playing with low resil (though as resto you would hope your Hots are strong enough that them alone, or a shift/swiftmend would be enough). There will be times, though, where you catch an unlucky stream of mace stuns or something quirky and get totally steamrolled and curse resto, but those are pretty rare >_>

As an aside, i often wonder what stormherlad / healer teams are doing in the 1600's myself, but those are usually just fresh-formed teams either building up to sell or getting points last minute when their 3s and 5s teams cant make the minimum.

Mutilate is a good spec but when you are playing with a healer combat mace tends to be superior. Mutilate is by far the best if you do double dps though.

My mutilate rogue + resto druid team has run in to a wall too (we land anywhere between 1800 and 1900, but it's all rolls of the dice). Typically anything with a warrior, or any classes capable of kiting/controlling my partner full-time really ruin our day.

Mutilate Rogue + Resto Druid (cannot speak for feral, but the following applies anyway) is a powerful combo and I know some teams have brought it to 2200+, it's simply that it's very challenging to play. Mutilate rogues are presented with a small bag of long-cooldown tricks that either end a fight (Blind healer, KS -> CB/mutilate) or keep them alive or on their target (Evasion, Sprint, Vanish, and CloS to a lesser extent). These abilities must be coordinated intimately with the druid's such that you're almost functioning as a single class.

In some ways I liken it to a "harder" Shadow Priest/Warlock, Spriest/warlock success falls upon the team bursting one target with death coil, silence, spell lock, and fear on the healer. These cooldowns must fall in proper order with little to no interruption between them in order for the team to kill a target.

Rogue/Druid works the same, except you've only got one DPS class, and thus the coordination of control must be higher. You'll need 3 back-to-back cyclones, feral charge, bash, potentially maim, blind, more cyclones, potentially even gouge/kick. Most of these are easily trinketable and can ruin your day. Simultaneously your rogue is one of the easiest-to-mitigate classes in the game, and as such must have his cooldowns available to stick to the target. Using cooldowns pre-emptively is a big mistake here. If this kind of coordination is unsuccessful in killing the enemy, or they're able to escape from the rogue, then you basically cannot pull off anything similar for some time.

The additional challenge of the combination is that it requires an on-the-fly change of mindset depending on the situation, some circumstances favour conservation of cooldowns. Every so often you must wait for the ideal opportunity.

I play a warlock/warrior/druid 3v3, and getting to 1950 in that combination was much easier than getting to even 1850 in 2v2. It's very challenging and I do enjoy it, but if you're looking to rake in the points then it's not an optimal combination.

My druid has hit 70 and I have begun to arena on him for 2 weeks now so I have some experience. I started VERY under geared, we're talking tier1 here, so sub-outlands quest rewards (I took feral rewards almost always, resto rewards are few and far between anyway it seemed). My partner has been a rogue, with above average gear, and his spec has fluctuated between combat maces, to mutilate, to a hybrid ass/sub spec. I believe we play best when he is combat maces, mutilate second, not enough experience yet with the hybrid spec.

One of the main strategies we employ is we generally do not say "we kill this guy first then move to the next target". Basically we will start off similar in most games, in a 1 healer 1 dps setup the rogue will stay on their DPS and my job will be to control the healer. In these types of matchups, cyclone is useful but you can't rely on it at all. Usually, I will let my partner 1v2 them for a while, then pop up and load him up with hots. Depending on what arena this is and whether or not you are facing a warrior with intercept this usually lets you get an entire load of heals + new hots on your partner before they even see you or at least close the range to you. At this point now you can move towards your rogue to coordinate a kidney shot on the dpser on you. Generally unless it's a mirror match, you're ahead already, their dps will either continue to chase you while your rogue kills them, or they will forget about you and continue to dps the rogue. Either one of these things are very favorable for you. The reason why I say we don't like to open with something like a cyclone is fairly simple, it's unreliable. If I open with cyclone and my rogue cannot burst down the opponent, the cyclone will be on DR when I need it the most. If you are able to rotate your CCs, start with feral charge into a bash into a cyclone into another feral charge into a warstomp (if horde) and now you're talking about some serious interruption. If you simply rely on cyclone, you will find yourself losing many games.

To touch back on the original thing I said about not killing one main focus is fairly simple and is most often successful against a paladin is that split dps is not their specialty. Your rogue opens on someone and uses his combo points on evisc, then you cyclone him while your rogue turns and starts to work on the other player. 2 rotations of this against a weak paladin team and they're done. Paladin bops the player and winds up a big heal? Cyclone the paladin. Paladin bubbles and lines up a big heal on the dps? Cyclone the dps. Often times you're not able to pull this trick off precisely when you need to but if done more often then not its going to lead to big wins.

One big plus for the mutilate spec especially if your druid is undergeared is quick recovery. This little gem of a talent not only will increase the rogues dps with the energy refund, but it will also help your heals on him be more meaningful with lesser gear.

The only thing that will make or break you is your druids ability to multi-task. I'm learning that it's a complicated class to play correctly and little things like turning left instead of right, cycloning dps instead of healing, timing feral charges, saving combo points for maim, all make or break a game in a moments notice. Get your druid a good set of UI mods that show them things like their mana total in forms, hot timer, cooldown timers, NS macros, etc. and their performance will really go up.

For reference you can see my druid's pretty pathetic gear (nicer now that horde sucks less in AV and thanks to AV weekend) here:

The Armory

my 2v2 is at 1746 rating right now and I hit level 70 on september 23rd.

You should absolutely never have trouble with rogues.

Hamstring. Win.

It's as simple as that. If you get in trouble just hamstring and run away and give your druid time to heal you up.

If the rogue goes for your druid just throw another hamstring, or piercing howl him. You don't even need to be by him. As long as a rogue is slowed his ability to deal damage is severely reduced.

Just wanted to say thanks for the advice. I respecced resto, practiced a bit to get back in the habit in a couple WSG matches then went 8-2 in our ten games this week for over 100 rating up. The two losses were to 5/5glad mace war+ holy priest who just flat outgeared us. We almost got em the second time just by CCing the living heck out of the warrior but eventually my poor rogue took an MS crit and I had run out of cooldowns... Warlock teams were a joke and I'm sure we haven't reached our ceiling yet. It really makes me happy, but I'm sad at the same time because now I'm seeing just how bad feral really was even though my feral gear was several times better than my resto gear. Ah well, at least now I know we can make 1850 for S3 weapons.

Good rogue teams will absolutely never go for the druid first. Unless you get extremely lucky it is basically a free loss. Just last night I had this rogue chase me around the arena while my warrior demolished the priest. Not the way to win.

Contrary to popular opinions, a good rogue can stand up to a warrior quite well. And with blind being undispellable by druids next patch lineups like rogue/priest will actually stand a chance against warrior/druid. It is still an uphill battle, but with proper execution rogue/healer can beat warrior/druid. But the rogue needs to be very good to prevent the warrior from doing much to the priest.

Disc/holy priest or resto druid. I went up against a hell of a hunter/paladin team as well, but honestly hunters are the weakest 2v2 class there is. I wouldn't expect to get very far without a ton of top notch PvP/Arena gear and an equally equipped teammate.

Your only chance of doing anything in 2v2 is mana draining, and to pull that off you need to be capable of mitigating insta-gib teams (double PoM Pyro essentially drop my hunter with his measly 150 resilience in under 2 seconds, which means you will need at least 350-400 resilience to really compete beyond 1500-1600).

Personally, I think a mage/hunter is a good make up. Of course having played a paladin as well as a mage in arenas I can tell you that running a 2 dps team takes a lot more skill imo but it is absolutely possible, especially since hunters really are weak in 2v2. However hunter + holy/disc priest is also very, very good depending on the amount of mana regen the opposing healer has.

Hafu 2v3 should be required watching for any druid/warrior combo making their way from medium-low ratings in arena, it may change the way you think about druid positioning and kiting in arena..
(Hafu) 2v3 Druid/Warrior Arena - FileFront.com