Playing shadow priest and survivability to melee classes

Mokhtar · 10/24/07, 10:59 AM

I've been playing a little bit of arena lately with a friend, we have the horrible setup shadow priest + fury war. I know this setup is absolutely piss-poor but I cannot respec Holy due to raids and I chose to be "stuck" with this friend.
There are teams we do reasonably well against (namely all caster teams) but any team with a war or rogue / kitty druid generally destroys us. How do you survive those setups ? I usually manage to get my SW:P on both targets (avoiding the war charge), at this point someone is pounding on my shield, all I can do afterward is refresh shield, switch form and begin the infamous fear + renew + PoM kiting trying to survive while my friend tries to maintain hamstring on my attackers.
Is there anything I could do to try and improve my survivability ? I tried the fake heal / shield + MC technique to get a little breathing space but in general the melee classe goes through my shield too quick for it to be effective....

snakedance · 10/24/07, 11:27 AM

The only thing you really can do is try to gear up a bit and do what you're already doing - that is, be ready to drop shadowform and spam heals while running like a headless chicken, preferably in the direction of a pillar.

You're going to have an awful time with stealth teams in general, but try to get your warrior to Hamstring and stun (if possible) the opponent as much as possible. You'll probably be countersnared with no real way to get out of it short of a trinket, but any bit of breathing room is better than none.

Tower · 10/24/07, 11:33 AM

Stay mounted while your warrior charges in, only dismounting in a safe position, when the warrior has their dps snared.

Rogue/Spriest is a solid 2v2, the weaknesses of War/Spriest are pretty apparent though.

Juli · 10/24/07, 12:08 PM

Originally Posted by Tower

Stay mounted while your warrior charges in, only dismounting in a safe position, when the warrior has their dps snared.

Be careful with this. We've had plenty of matches where a partner thought they were cool because they could ride around on their mounts and kite us. Which resulted in us using a rank1 SW:P/ice lance/whatever to scare them into running behind a pillar of off the bridge in BEM, and subsequently blowing up their unsupported partner in a grand total of about 5 seconds with help nuking from the healer.

Keep your distance, but don't overextend, and keep an eye on what's going on. Staying on your mount the whole match only helps if they keep trying (unsuccessfully) to chase you down.

Tyrn · 10/24/07, 4:02 PM

Originally Posted by Tower

Stay mounted while your warrior charges in, only dismounting in a safe position, when the warrior has their dps snared.

Make sure you leave the opening gate properly in relation to the opposing team in each arena to avoid being caught and hamstringed or a pally hitting you with JoJ. All the warriors/pallies I've gone in arena with come out of the gate mounted just to catch people doing this. And every time they catch them, its game over for that player.

Caillech · 10/24/07, 4:33 PM

One on one, I can take down most warriors with relative easy by dotting, kiting and keeping shield up along with well timed Fear + trinket out of hamstring. Of course, you wouldn't have this luxury in arena and have to deal with said warrior receiving heals. So this leads to one of two strategies.

1) Your teammate CC's the healer while you test your luck alone with the warrior. If you feel you don't have the gear, resilience and faith in yourself to do this, then try...

2) Your teammate obstructs the warrior so you can get away from him. At this point, you should keep dots on the warrior while fearing and mana burning the healer. When the warrior turns red that is your cue to SAVE that fear (he'll be Immune) and head for a pillar/around a tomb/ you name it.

Be sure to utilize Focus Targeting here. I use the Proximo addon for arenas and you can click on their unitframe and set focus easily that way. Set a macro to Silence the Focus Target and Target Focus the healer. I have something like this:

/cast [button:2,target=focus] Silence; [harm] Silence

This makes Right-Click Silence the Focus Target so you don't have to manually switch to the healer, allowing you to continue nuking the Focus Fire.

When the warrior/dps class is down to around 30-40%, time a 5-point Kidney shot with your rogue friend and right click that silence macro and start nuking HARD on the Focus Fire. Follow up with a fear if you have to. If it's a paladin healer, be sure to dispel Blessing of Freedom, otherwise the warrior will have no troubles catching up to you, and LOS as much as possible, never stand out in the open since you don't have a true healer, and also to avoid charges and intercepts.

As far as gear goes... Get the "good" honor trinket first if you haven't already. From there, work your butt off getting that resilience up. 10k HP unbuffed and 300+ resilience starts to make you a lot harder to burst down. I chose a [Resolute Cape] with 120 Armor to Cloak over the honor one because I feel I'm more of a tank and most fights depend on how long I can survive or IF I can survive.

The hardest fights you will have would be 3v3/5v5 when you have a rogue+warrior on you with poisons and hamstrings. You have to rely on solid CC'ing in those cases. I hope I've helped you out some. Good luck.