Try running with a Shadow Priest and a UA lock sometime Gurg. Tell me how you do. Other than against SR fgts obviously. Fire and forget classes that can babysit you and still surpass the other team's output gives some very favorable results.

I suppose that'd also be part of what shapes my experience -- I've done arenas almost exclusively with melee DPS classes, except for my current spriest/rogue 3s, which still doesn't offer much in the way of meaningful CC. Against, say, warrior/warlock/druid, their warrior will be beating on our spriest, my teammates are trying to kill their warlock who has a felhunter waiting to spell lock me, while the druid mixes HoTs and attempts to CC my rogue to eliminate pressure on their warlock.

A shadow priest with a warrior hitting him (let alone possible additional DoTs from their lock) requires basically full-time healing attention from me. If I don't try to shock/ground the druid's roots/cyclones, then my rogue partner ends up being useless once his cooldowns are blown and we're doing minimal damage (since the warrior is pummeling the spriest's non-instants), and we lose. If I do contribute with interrupts, then I almost certainly eat a CoT for my troubles while I'm out there, and even with Bloodlust keeping up with the healing needed on my spriest is extremely dicey, and as soon as he dips at all low, I'm going to get spell locked, and possibly cycloned as well. (I'd certainly welcome advice from better players on how to handle this matchup, BTW.) But yeah, I suppose a lot of it boils down to dealing with matchups that have a control advantage over us, enabling them to really disrupt me when they need to.

Well, you're thinking in terms of a more drawn out game, but your classes are designed around blow up teams. Shadow priests especially aren't a good choice for a long match, their CC options are poor compared to a mage or warlock. Your best bet is to enable a heavy offensive to keep the other team off balance and hopefully score a kill before your rogue burns all his timers. Might even consider throwing out an NS-chain lightning->shock now that you've got that latent spell damage. Forcing their druid into heavy healing will prevent him from having time to CC, and that could easily shift the momentum in your favor. I can't say there's an easy or correct answer to this, though, that I know of, the classes in your lineup don't necessarily seem to play nice with each other.

Maybe I'm crazy, but I kinda doubt I would send my rogue after a Warlock and ask the Spriest to deal with the Warrior. Dump on the warrior early game, throw out an early blind. Jam some lightning bolts at him early game. Money says the control on you is either 0 or the Warrior dies. If he doesn't, you can make the switch to the druid after his trinket is down. AR/Prep doubles your team's opportunities, it's so amazing(sorry, that had nothing to do with anything, but rogues are nuts now).

The only suggestion I can offer is to put more pressure onto their team by putting out more offense. Warlocks just keep throwing up dots when GCDs are available. Warriors go into D stance and absorb punishment.

Going after warriors isn't something we've done as much, but I think we'll give it a try. I think our concern was that it would allow the warlock to act (i.e. fear) unhindered. I can try to disrupt either the druid CC or the warlock CC with a mix of shock/grounding/reactive tremor, but if our rogue isn't kicking fears, then our DPS seems unlikely to be able to stay focused on the warrior long enough to finish him or apply sustained pressure. We'll have to see how it plays out in practice though.

You'd be surprised what an Spriest + Rogue can do to a Warrior, especially if his MH is a Druid. The first thing you'll notice with this is that the Warrior will instantly stop doing nearly as much damage to your spriest. Lust it early and Shocking the Warlock Fears will probably help you more than shocking Cyclones, because that Druid ain't going to stop and cyclone when his Warrior is being hit that hard. If he does, have your Priest line up a nice 5 second silence on that Druid and I guarantee you he ain't going to do anything except spam Heals. Grounding and Tremors will also be quite nice in mitigating that Warlock.

We usually do the same thing (CC one healer, gib the other, kite/CC the warrior when needed). A lot of it is execution and co-ordination, though. Time your blinds, your fears, your Counterspells, be aware of when anyone has used their two minute trinket and keep the pressure on them. Once the healer gets gibbed, the rest is cake.

Care to elaborate on our versatility? I don't mean to be rude but I really don't see how we are versatile compared to a druid or priest healer. It is very discouraging to join virtually any game in any bracket ass a resto shaman and know I'm going to be a liability to my team. If I were to be replace by any other healing class except maybe a paladin on literally any setup it would be a benefit to my team. And to be honest I'm not even sure how we would be fixed without changing the class drastically. The way the pvp game is right now, every game comes down to using los and conserving mana. Both of these things shamans fail at miserably compared to the other healing classes.

The way I envision a shaman to be is a powerful healer class that is used on an offensive type team, but at the moment a priest or druid is just flat out better in every way. Basically the reason shaman and to a lesser extent paladin have been fazed out of lower bracket pvp is we lack a defining ability that forces the opposing team to deal with us. Take for example a priest has mana burn, the other team MUST do something about the priest or they will lose to mana burn. Same goes for a druid and their cc abilities, combined with nearly all of their heals being instant you have to pressure him or he will wreck you. Take shaman on the other hand I've had games where me and my partner(s) are in the match and I'm left totally alone and we know its over very early unless we get lucky.

An example of this is priest, mage, rogue vs my current 3s setup of paladin, warrior, shaman. The rogue goes onto my paladin I'm forced to heal him. Literally the paladin cannot get a single heal off with a mace spec rogue on him. In the mean time since I'm spamming heals to keep up on the rogue the mage is free to sheep my warrior which turns our dps to 0 which allows the priest to mana burn and the game is over. Sadly this is one of the closest match ups we have. Most other teams have a warlock in them which dominate shaman even more.

Some solutions to this problem which I hope are addressed in wolk because I doubt blizzard will give us new skills at this point are to either buff earthen shield to match lifebloom/pom renew levels of healing (and make it harder to remove) or give us some kind of useful cc (hex please =)). The main problem at the moment is that priests and druids can be healing outside of using global cool downs to cast heals. A druid rolls hots up and they have a full 6 seconds to do what ever they want whether it is playing offensively (roots, cyclone, and bash ect.) or defensively (los). Meanwhile I’m stuck spamming lhw most of the time with tongues up praying for my target to stay alive, knowing that I will be oom well before the other team is. The most disturbing part of this is that in 2.3 priests and druids received buffs while shaman were nerfed, I honestly wonder if blizzard even knows how the current arena meta game is.

While my 3:3 team isn't really in any range to reap a gladiator title....yes, go for the warrior in a warrior/druid/lock team. A warrior under pressure won't kill the shadowpriest and if he is forced to kite, the other team practically doesn't put any pressure on you besides their CC (which won't be more than a fear - negated by totems - since the druid has to stay full time on the warrior. In our Warrior/Disc Priest/Ice mage setup we routinely blow up warriors and for the most time it works. A good caster can really melt a warrior away and your rogue's wound poison will help a lot. Even better: you have two classes to purge almost any heals the druid throws and the warrior won't survive from lifebloom spam only. Blind is pretty strong against druids as well since its no longer a poison.

An alternative would be to go for the druid (we did that when we fought a pretty good SL lock/rogue/druid team). I don't know though how good a shadowpriest is against a kiting druid. The warlock is possibly the worst target in this team you can focus since he is actually specced to tank.

I don't think warlocks dominate shamans. Mages do moreso. Counterspell is evil and we have no answer to poly. Shock one, then get the hell out of there because you can't do anything about the next. And their damage comes from a different school than their pure control, so shocking one doesn't do much about the other.

Anyway, I agree with you. In the part you just quoted I said that I do think priests and druids are better PvP healers than shamans. It's a combination of HoTs/instant heals and game-changing abilities like mana burn and pains suppression, or druids having actual CC and amazing mobility. Aside from the obvious advantages in playing the LOS game, the ability to apply HoTs also makes it easier to find short drink breaks, whereas as a shaman I often need to rely on my partners to create those breaks for me. I can probably get out of combat while my rogue partner is unloading stuns, but if I'm doing that then I'm also not helping with Purges or shocking the enemy healer.

That said, totems are certainly versatility, though warlocks with totem-killing pet macros can get frustrating. Earth Shock and Frost Shock are certainly versatility. More than any other healer, shamans thrive in environments without an offensive dispel (or no dispel beyond say a felhunter devour). If the other team can't just purge earth shield or bloodlust right away, those are incredible advantages. If the other team can, then ES is worthless and lust becomes a short-term situational effect to use when the enemy dispeller is CC'd or can't afford to spare GCDs to remove the effect.

I still feel that shamans are not well-suited to the role of sole healer in a 3v3 team because of these factors, though they obviously can do it. My 3s was 2250 on a pretty good Battlegroup until we took a break for a few weeks and got rusty (and had to relearn a bunch of matchups -- goddammit in 2.3 playing blowup style vs. disc priests doesn't work very well, stupid PS, and PS castable through silence no less), but we should get back up there with some more play later this week, so obviously it's not like I'm a complete liability. But I definitely do end up feeling fairly helpless in a lot of games. It's frustrating having to worry about the opposing healer the same way I do about their primary DPS. That's what, as you noted, paladins and shamans lack. If I see a paladin as the enemy healer I breathe a sigh of relief. If I see a druid or priest, now I have to factor their position and current activity into every decision I make or I get mana burned or might get cycloned when I need to be casting a crucial heal.

Hey Gurg, speaking from Rogue/Spriest/Shaman (2278)experience here against War/Lock/Druid.

Focusing the warrior seems like a solid idea, but it will only make you lose faster. A focused warrior and unfocused lock and druid in that setup will merely spamstring, fear spam and cyclone until your Spriest is half mana and your rogue is out of snare breaks. A smart warrior can merely shield up (hello 40% rogue damage mitigation) and time his spell reflects if your priest attempts to Mind Blast > PWD. Focusing the warlock is still the way to go, it severly limits the warlocks dps and cc and he's much less resilience than a shielded warrior.

Keep abolish off the warlock when it goes up, have your rogue swap to the warrior to cripple him when available, but not at the cost of the warlock getting away. Basically you need to use your Spriest like a tether, he will be hamstrung and begging for heals, but the key to victory is a simple fear on the druid (which will cause him to trinket) into a blind > silence. We mostly go about creating this situation by getting Bloodlust up early and creating a lot of pressure on the warlock, the druid will not be doing a lot of LOS kiting with a full round of Spriest dots on him and a bloodlusted rogue wailing away. You should be denying the warrior his initial charge, you need to be able to trinket his intercept > hamstring early or later to get over to the druid for the fear. If you're playing with an AR/prep rogue you can actually have him stealth over and have a good chance at sapping the warlock and snagging the druid out of stealth, which can put the team on extreme defensive. To which you can just waltz in for a fear and guarantee a trinket while the rogue swaps to the warlock.

The hardest counter we've found to our team is Warrior/Disc Priest/Paladin. It revives the double healer+warrior setup with the new incredibly powerful 41 disc priests. You have to fight an uphill battle of target switching and weathering BOP, PS, DS with a warrior beating on you and an unfocused priest mana burning you.

I guess the thing I hate the most are the situations when there are nothing to heal and I'm done purging, my teammates would be doing their job ccing and now what do I have to contribute? I shock every 6 seconds and then spin in circles waiting for something to do. This happened for me a lot when I was running shaman warlock rogue and even though we reached 2300~ with this setup there were plenty of situations that I felt were like an auto loss when we zoned into the fight.
Out of curiosity are you happy with how shaman are currently?

As was stated earlier the value of dpsing warriors is understated, for example in 5s there are plenty of times when I target the opposite teams warrior shoot one lightning bolt at him and his reaction is to put on a shield and intervene away, and in case your wondering this is in the 2300~ rating in 5v5, and I would say that works 9/10.

I think your slightly overreacting. Every healer has its good and bads, even Druids, although they are in my opinion the best 2's and 3's healer by a large margin.

I quit my Holy priest when he hit 2250, because I found it impossible to counter other Warrior/healer combo's. I was wishing every day that I was a Shaman/Pally/Druid. And i'm sure some Shaman are wishing that they were Holy Priests sometimes.

However, after playing a Druid in 2v2 and instantly getting 2400 rating at a 95% win rate, I might be biased in saying that Druids are by far the best 2's and 3's healer in the game.

I think your underrating priests and my whole point was there should be at least SOME combinations for every healer class that they would be ideal for. Priests have it druids have it shaman simply don't. There is simply no setup in 2s or 3s where a shaman is the ideal person for it. You're tell me that's not fucking retarded?

Well Holy priests don't really enter into the equation now, it's Discipline priests which are clearly superior. For our matrix, the changes have turned teams which had a priest healer from generally wins into losses. I think this is a good thing too, but shamans/paladins are at quite a lower level at the moment due to their extreme weakness having almost nothing in the way of instants for healing.

Playing on a warrior/druid/lock team, initially I found that when team-mates went for my Warrior they typically could burst him down if I am blinded/feared. However since improving as a player and becoming more able to avoid CC, I'm finding that keeping my warrior up is not too difficult. All they need is the window of a full duration fear or blind, and they can drop my warrior in that period. However provided I am not outright CCed, dropping a full lifebloom stack and keeping rejuv on is generally sufficient - with intercept/intervene/spell reflect/NS/HS as backups if they drop low.

Ice Mage / Disc Priest is a taxing combination in this regard as the priest will be free to attempt to fear bomb, and the ice mage will be able to pummel your warrior full time with a CS macro if you try to cyclone or regrowth. As a druid, I just run from the priest and if I'm out of range of the mage (or he's feared), I'm usually able to cyclone the warrior / regrowth mine to stem the damage. But it's tough - the disc priest only needs to fear bomb once when trinket is down, or one CS at the wrong time, and then it's over. But if the druid plays flawlessly (and I'm still getting there in that regard), he should be able to dodge every fear, not get CSed, and keep steady heals on a warrior who knows when to play defensive.

I'm only really starting to develop these skills now, at 2050 rating. Before I had some intuitive grasp of them, but at the high-end it's the case that a 10-second window is all they need, and you have to be vigilant for a good number of minutes to never give them that window.

How to play 2v2 and 3v3 as a Paladin:

Don't.

Seriously, no exaggeration. It's really not fun at all.

I run with a Warrior/Warlock/Paladin comp for 3s and we're all very good players. I've played against every good player in the battlegroup, and really, the class is just stale. I'm not going to call Paladins broken because everything we have is working properly, but the class is just terrible. Druids will outmana me (the "efficiency healer") because of supreme mobility, Innervate, and the ability to stack HOTs and just run and drink. Any minor advantages I may have in efficiency mean close to nothing when you can drop combat so easily and drink. Druids can easily match incoming damage with instant cast HOT spells and they have two burst healing options in Nature's Swiftness and Swiftmend. All of this is completely risk free and virtually impossible to shut down. Whenever a team bursts hard against my team (for the sake of argument, I'll use Rogue/Mage/Priest bursting my Warlock, a very common setup), I have only two very inflexible options:

1.) I use Divine Shield, thus eliminating possible crowd controls on me (Blind, Polymorph, Counterspell, Psychic Scream, etc.) and enabling me to spam HL11 on my Warlock. Because Wound Poison will never really drop off, my mana efficiency is complete garbage and my HPS barely matches the incoming damage. With MS/Wound, HL11 heals for about an average of 2500 every 2s. Mage (with Power Infusion/Water Elemental) and Rogue with AR can easily do 1000 dps together to a stunned Warlock. My Warrior is usually Blinded during this, and if he trinkets, he'll get Polymorphed. Because I'm spamming my Warlock, usually I can't spare the global to Cleanse it -- especially factoring in the fact he'll likely have dummy debuffs up too.

In a perfect world, my Divine Shield will last the full 12 seconds and that will buy enough time for my Warrior to begin locking down the Mage with my Warlock's Felguard. The fight then scatters as the timers begin to wear off on the Rogue/Mage, I can juke some Counterspells and we go on to win.

In a realistic world, my Divine Shield gets stripped by the Priest. Reactively, I throw up Sac on my Warlock anticipating the Polymorph. Against good Priests, they'll strip the Sac, I'll get Polymorphed and my Warlock dies. Even if the Sac sticks, it's not always possible to avoid a Counterspell. So if that happens, Warlock's usually dead without a timely Intimidating Shout or Fear. Another fun scenario is my Sac does so much damage to myself that I can't spend the time healing it (because, as mentioned previously, my Warlock's getting drilled) that the enemy team notices my health pretty compromised, the Priest fears me, Rogue vanishes and reopens on me, and they kill me and go on to win. Another issue is that my healing can barely match the damage on the Warlock. Naturally, because he's Soul Link, the pet's taking unanswered damage. Good players notice this and with a quick target switch, his pet's dead. GG. Guess what a Druid would do here? Stack Lifebloom on the pet, swiftmend/NS the Warlock, Cyclone someone.

2.) Blessing of Protection, the only other clutch ability a Paladin has. Dispelled or Spell Stolen immediately. Warlock dies.

Paladins contribute absolute zero offensively. The only ability worth mentioning is Hammer of Justice: long cooldown, highly restricted by range, highly resisted, easily dispelled. There is often a pretty major contradiction with the turtled way a Paladin has to play to avoid being abused by crowd controls (sneaking around corners and sneaking out FOLs) and the 10 yard range on Hammer of Justice. Simply put, the Paladin's growing weaknesses defensively do not warrant the complete void of offensive utility in the form of crowd controls or otherwise unique abilities.

I'm pretty fed up with the class entirely. I am currently levelling a Druid. I don't really feel I should have to, but it's the way it is. Shamans and Paladins are complete bottom tier for 2s and 3s with no real fix in sight. They seem to be making attempts at helping Shamans with the halving of Earth Shield mana cost and Water Shield buffing, but the feeling I get is that they don't really understand the way high end arena works. Paladins are pretty good against bad players so maybe that's what's intended, but being completely abused at the top end of the spectrum is not my idea of fun. Ret is still not viable at all.

Basically. Shamans' situation is obviously a fair bit better. The ES change makes it a bit more like a Renew with a giant "dispel me" graphic, but at least it won't be completely idiotic to cast it if you expect it to be dispelled, which was the case at 900 mana. Water shield obviously helps with longevity. I really don't get what they're thinking when it comes to paladins, though. It's like they're stuck back in March or whatever, when paladins were the must-have healer. They've gotten nothing but nerfed since then, and every other healer has gotten significant buffs, and those buffs keep coming.

As the sole healer in a 3v3 or 2v2, shamans and paladins both really suffer from a lack of meaningful instant heals. Against teams that are pressuring me, NS is probably an even more valuable cooldown than my PvP trinket. Once that's blown, I'm basically reduced to praying that I don't get shut down again, because I'm certainly pretty helpless when I'm in situations where I absolutely must heal. I can try to juke CS or Spell Lock or whatever, but when my partner is at 30%, there isn't really any juking going on. If I cancel my heal that wasted time alone could result in death.

As discussed above, that's really the core of the frustration for me -- I'm forced to depend on my teammates to create situations in which I can heal and contribute comfortably, whereas priests/druids are versatile enough to do so under adversity and create their own favorable situations.

This is the entire problem summed up with both Shamans and Paladins in small scale arena.

When I am against a Priest, I am at a constant threat of being Mana Burned. I have to play perfectly to avoid it because even just two Mana Burns over the course of a match will usually spell defeat. I have to rely on my meager 10% Fear Resist talent to protect myself against the impending Psychic Scream bomb (Blessing of Sacrifice doesn't break Fear, popular misconception) because a Priest can just chase after me waiting for me to stop and cast my heal, otherwise my teammates will die. While he's running, he's spamming Dispel Magic, Prayer of Mending, Power Word: Shield, and Renew. While I'm running, I'm contributing nothing -- I'm juggling Blessings when I need to (not really too often considering the good ones are all substantial cooldowns) and spamming Cleanse. My teammates are dying. His are not.

When that same Priest sees me, he thinks nothing. I am no threat to him at all. I am not an active threat of any kind to his teammates. If I stun someone, big deal, dispel it. As a result, I can only use it on someone that's not in LOS of the Priest at all. There goes my trademark 60/50 second cooldown. If I stun the Priest when he's running at me, he's probably casted Psychic Scream at the same time, so he just traded a 9 second Fear on me for a 6 second stun on him. Pretty good trade considering he likely has a Prayer of Mending bouncing and Renews ticking.

Priests and Druids are active threats. Shamans are active threats with Earth Shock and Purge, but to a much less significant degree. Paladins are idle threats -- just crowd control them. That style of gameplay is very frustrating.

The problem with the pvp game is that it has evolved based around too many instant cast spells. The classes that have strong instant cast spells are very strong. The classes that don't have instants are terrible compared to the ones that do.

The rate at which they are re-balancing the Arena game is much slower than new household strategies are being produced.

A good example is the elemental Shaman nerf on the PTR. They were nerfing an era that has already passed - elemental Shamans are not as effective as they were in S1 (although still quite effective in 5's), and Blizzard attacked their ability to burst on that basis, and made them retarded. Luckily, it was corrected in the end.

I'm strongly opposed to Kalgan's decision to only balance 5's and let the other brackets go to shit. Its getting to the point where if your not a Warrior, Druid, Rogue or Warlock, you won't generally break 2300.

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Resto druids in that setup are quite vulnerable to a focussed nuke as well. I have been playing resto shaman/spriest/rogue the entire season and we found that by putting some initial focus on one of their dps and then suddenly switching to the druid with a vanish, stun, silence, fear combo was enough to put him down in alot of cases. A bloodlusted rogue and shadowpriest can really deal alot of damage its just important you save abilities to break cc's untill you decide to burst the druid down. Our shaman also helped bursting him down with a CL+ES combo if our health was high enough for us to get that off.

Are comments like this really helpful?

"Even" on EJ it's a tiny tiny proportion of members who can ever hope to break 2300 regardless of their class. I'm playing Rogue/Shaman/Afflock at the moment, a team Gatzu says (well he probably had an SL lock?) can get to 2300? Well we're bouncing around the 1800-1900 range. And I'd like to think we're not totally retarded players... !

If the class balance issues are so minor (and don't get me wrong, I DONT think that, and I do think our Shaman is liability atm- he just eventually gets CC'd and our lock dies) that they only manifest above 2300, then I think that's pretty well balanced...