Ok, So I'm new to PVP in arenas in the small format, and I have got to ask, many questions. I attempted to research google for a few hours and could not find clear answers, so hoping the people at EJ could help our team's situation out.

We have a:
- Warrior with high damage + Stormherald
- Restoration druid
- I have full S1 gear and 415 resilience + 11.5k HP unbuffed.


Everyone on our team has high resilience, including myself, and we have played several combos that have strong cc involving different makeups, some more annoying than others (hunter/mage/paladin), but what should I do in situations like this?

I've tried putting dots/curse of tongues/drain life/etc and cast shadowbolts when possible, but we seem to have trouble with our Warrior getting stuck with frost nova, imp hamstring, and root.

What spec optimally should I be for this setup? SL? Felguard? UA?

Thanks for any input.

I run this team also. I've tried different specs, UA is too squishy for your druid (and pretty much any healer in general, I wouldn't run it unless you're on a gib team). Felguard would probably do ok. I prefer 23/38 or 27/34. Anyways, vs hunter/mage/paladin your job should be to stick onto the mage like glue. Don't let him get any polymorphs off, if he gets any off, you have your fel hunter around to cleanse it. Make a macro to dispel your warrior and yourself and put these on your bar somewhere. Drain the mages mana and keep your fel hunter on him at all times.

Keep dots up on the pet. You have a choice on whether to keep Curse of Exhaustion, Curse of Weakness, or CoA on the pet to help to DPS it down. I like to keep CoX while the mage is still a threat, and at some point burst the pet down with the help from the warrior (like when your druid needs to get a drink off).

Keep tongues up on the paladin to keep pressure on him. Keep full dots on the hunter always. Your warrior should stick to the Hunter. This should be an easy matchup for you. Once the mage is OOM, he is totally useless, and you can totally lock down their pally.

Why curse of exhaustion on water elemental as opposed to say, banish? What's the unsnared mvmt speed? If it's just 100%, why is 70% that big of a win?

I'm pretty sure he's saying CoEx on the hunter pet.

Thank you for the input, forgot to ask about this other head-butting team...

mage rogue priest





...pretty much any team with a frost mage on it, we have trouble with, is the main objective of the mage format to mana drain/force him to iceblock, then kill him? sometimes I find I can't DPS as SL/SL in 3v3, should the Warrior on our team be doing the DPS? it seems like the healer can heal through his damage, though.

The warrior should be on the rogue and control with intercept/hamstring/mace stuns, the lock should have dots on all 3 but focus the mage, and the druid should just mess with the priest with cyclones. lock/war/druid is a pretty easy counter to PMR.

I strongly disagree with this statement.

I played significant amounts of warrior druid warlock in s2 for 3v3. In s2 I believe RMP had very little chance to beat WWD because typically your average rogue was combat maces and you could simply just try to outlast his set of cooldowns and once AR/sprint/evasion were gone the game was basically over if your 3 players were still up.

However, with the recent changes to priests and rogues and the increased damage from mages I no longer see this as the case. Most rogues in this matrix will be AR/prep and will be able to put significant pressure on any member of the Warrior Warlock Druid team. Due to the warrior sides lack of defensive dispel besides the felhunter frost nova and sheep will play a huge roll. Any decent frost mage is going to have points in winters chill and will try to get some stacks of this debuff on the warrior before trying to sheep him - thus making the felhunter dispel useless in most cases.

I also don't forsee the druid having time to do a lot of offensive cycloning. The opposing priest will have very little healing pressure on him at the start of the game because both of his dps classes have built in escapes that the other team can't really counter - rogue has vanish evasion and cloak mage obviously has ice block. Thus the priest can play super aggressive on the druid going for screams -> mana burn or can concentrate on offensively dispelling the druids hots on the train target. As a result the druid will be seeing a lot of healing pressure cause he has to escape the priests offensive abilities and will most likely have to defensively cyclone to keep his teammates alive.

As far as the OP's conerns:

Warrior Warlock Druid is built to do 1 thing. Be extremely annoying and outlast other comps that have mana bars such as mages and priests. When in doubt about making decisions in this comp I would always err on the defensive side of things and try to prolong games. There are certain games where you can try to burst but an SL/SL lock really doesn't offer that much in terms of burst which puts that burden on the warrior.

Specifically against hunter teams I would put a priority on quick switches mid game onto the hunters pet while you have some CC on the opposing teams healer. If your warlock can get a round of dots on the pet (corruption, agony, immolate, siphon) and your warrior intercepts during this time the pet should die in a few seconds. This allows your druid to get less pressure from viper sting since it will be easier to cleanse now and also lets him get away for some drinks once he has hots on your warrior and lock.

Thanks, Carrion. I have fought against "good" rogue/mage/priest combos and they did exactly that. I don't know about SL/SL in 3's, it provided me extra survivability but often times felt like I wasn't able to help DPS, and often times the opposite team would ignore me and DPS druid or Warrior.

When I am focused, the same issue happens, I can stay alive for a short-lived period of time (about 20-30 seconds) even as SL/SL, against teams with healing debuffs.

I am convinced that the team make-up I am running is becoming obsolete/harder to run, or I'm just terrible at the game and we have to learn to work with each other better.

I think your problem is thinking that your main job is to DPS. Your job as a warlock on this team is disruption/mana drain/survive. Your strengths are, as a poster above said, outlasting and annoying the other team. So play to your advantages.

ok so just a recap, felguard and sl/sl I should just annoy the CC on the other team and shutdown the healer while the warrior puts pressure on opposing team?

I think you will have serious issues playing that setup as UA.
Since you lack defensive dispel you are going to spend a lot of time playing 2vs3 with the warrior stuck in novas or sheeps.

I would suggest felguard, but SL/SL is probably just as good.

It depends what else you could be doing. There's almost always a better spell to be casting than Shadow Bolt.

if i wasn't casting a dot or a fear, i was drain lifing something.

I would strongly recommend against casting shadowbolt; it just takes too long to cast, even if you have the Bane talent. Use searing pain instead as your primary nuke. If you get counterspelled while casting a shadowbolt, you're in big trouble, whereas if it happens while casting searing pain, you can go back to cursing/fearing/DOTing.

After thinking about it, I don't know why you would go felguard with this setup. Without my felhunters devour magic we would lose every match against a team with a competent mage.

You have to use a Felhunter with War/Lock/Dru, go SL/SL

I'm speaking from the opposite side, playing rogue/mage/priest on my mage alt, ending last season a little over 2300 rating.

With the amount of trash debuffs you can stack up quickly as a mage, felhunter devour is unreliable at best and often completely wasted (removing winter's chill or a rank1 frostbolt snare). If you are removing polymorphs or novas with any reliability, the mage isn't doing his job.

Against a felguard I'm pretty much forced into using only instants because of pushback, and it is a lot harder to deal with then a felhunter with weak melee damage and slower attack speed.

For 3v3 and 5v5, felguard is better if your druid can keep an eye on its health. SL/SL is mostly for 2v2.

Against mages, felhunter is good for the focus spell lock, but otherwise devour will usually hit the winter's chill. Having felguard + CoT on the mage puts him under a lot of pressure, which in turn pressures the priest to focus more on healing, freeing up druid from LOSing mana burns.

I've seen quite a few mentions of CoT on mages, and it perplexes me. Do mages not cleanse it before casting? I know I try to make CoT removal a huge priority when playing my druid, and have decurse on a very convenient hotkey on my mage (and always make a point of cleansing it). Cleanse->start casting will guarantee at least one un-CoTed cast, unless the warlock is spamming it on you, and even then you can just use your instants while he wastes his time / mana, then go for the cleanse->cast when he decides to do something else.

Slightly more on topic -- I love playing with a felguard lock, even in 2s. We can still summon a felhunter if we think it's needed, but most importantly, the games are quicker and (imo) funner, or ... more fun, whatever. The warlock having shadowburn, combined with our ability to force healers to trinket early through CC spam means that we can generally try for a burst early, without using any significant cooldowns (as long as he has a healthy supply of soul shards, we simply wait 15 secs for SB cooldown and DR to wear off before trying again). We often get outplayed (either they put too much pressure on him and I have to heal the entire match, or they burst me down with a stun in caster / travel form), but as opposed to SL/SL, when we lose it happens in 2-3 minutes, rather than 20-30, when the deciding factor was that the other healer got 41 drinks in while I only got 37 or something stupid like that!

A Mage isn't always in a situation where he can allow a Warlock to completely lock him down by just spamming CoT on him over and over as he tries to remove it. Sometimes you just need to live with it for a moment. It's mainly an issue in smaller brackets though when the Warlock may have the Mage dotted or such while doing it.

To answer the CoT on mage thing, basically he's using GCDs to remove it with felguard and possibly warrior still bearing down on him. GCD on decurse is GCD not used on sheeping or casting frostbolt, and there is no way he will cast with CoT and felguard pushback.

In my experience, you need the Dispel, and spell lock on the Mage that FH gives. The attack speed of FG and FH is the same as far as I know (both 2.0 seconds I'm pretty sure) except FG gets an extra attack every 6 seconds from Cleave...

If I was using a FG I know my Warrior would just get owned by the Mage...

The biggest thing I think is the Spell Lock. You can Spell Lock the first Poly, and since he's locked out of CS, your Druid can Cyclone, then you can Fear... You can start a huge CC chain on the Mage