Pally should have been consecrating the snake traps, and the druid should have been pre-abolishing whoever the hunters had their scorpids on (or whoever they appeared to be going after with their drains). The warlock is stronger than adding a second hunter, so I don't quite understand how they won either. Two full CCers, two poison dispellers, and two magic dispellers should have the upper hand since they only have 1 CC, 1 person that can dispel magic, and if you are on top of knocking down totems, only 1 that can cleanse poisons. I probably would have had the Druid going after the priest the entire fight while your priest and hunter burned the opposing Hunter's mana. Hunters have very small mana pools and once out of mana, they are pretty much screwed. That leaves your warlock open to drain whoever he see's fit and he should be fearing the opposing Druid. Your druid should call a switch when the Priest becomes immune to Cyclone, so the warlock can start fearing the priest while he Cyclones the opposing druid. This leaves the shaman free, and all he can really do is earth shock the occasional spell, but it doesn't hurt to spam him with curse of tongues.

It sounds like you guys have not worked out your target selection for CC or Draining.

We followed the general drain order of priest > shaman > druid and rotated cyclones and fears on the hunters to minimize damage while burning down the shaman. Our logic dictated that draining hunters wouldn't be as effective due to their ability to Feign Death and drink, nearly always getting a tick or two of drink in every time Feign was up. However, you're absolutely right that we should have had better management of the snakes and cc rotations through the healers.

I think in a battle of drain vs more drain, the more extreme the drain team the better the odds. Of course if you go overboard you lose against more traditional lineups. I think subbing your hunter for a warrior would help there.

With the new hunter buffs it has become critically important to LoS the hunter at all times. Otherwise you will get pelted. The problem is when they frost trap the pillar you are kiting around. On Nagrand you can switch pillars. But what do you do when the hunter traps the top of RoL?

Hey -- you were playing my alt's team (Burtch, Lunedi and company). We were just trying out funky team combos that would work with a druid/hunter core. I do not think you can win against a team with two hunters and a druid unless you drain the druid. The way my healing style is (expecially against warlocks) is that I output close to 80-90% of the team's healing with lifebloom. I attached a screenshot of a typical healing breakdown against a dual warlock team [You guys played dual lock against us] (This team in the screenshot drained me) You can extrapolate with lifebloom tics I ended up healing the majority of damage against any sort of slow dps team.

P.S. I wish I'd taken a screenshot of when we played against paladin 3x shadowpriests 1x warlock team, I dropped down to tranquility (PI'd, trinketed) and did something like 120k healing in a space of a one minute match. Dispeling vipers simply would not work because two snake traps are too much to handle.

Contrary to what Kaber said CCing healers would accomplish nothing as they were not healing -- only my hots were. Similarly, you can not cleanse poison from two scorpids and two traps, the paladin is precycloned / silenced / feared / scattershot before the trap. If your druid stayed on our priest he would end up with no mana in fifteen seconds. Similarly hunters need no mana to do autoshots and vipers. I do not think it's viable to land CC's on me either as I certainly never show myself to opposing priests or druids unless I intend to CC them. I don't think your strategy would work at all Kaber. As I said again there was absolutely no pressure past what a lifebloom rotation was healing, something that I can maintain for minutes without being drained.

Molp: We played only for one day (and with some pick up people --- ) but we had no trouble beating all gladiator 2345 setups this week. I think that this kind of team can be extremely powerful because a druid counters warlocks and hunters counter mages, shamans and rogues/warriors.

If the warlock does not have VST, what would you recommend? It seems like the VST is quite critical to running a fel guard spec.

If the Hunters want to keep your team from drinking, their pets cannot leave combat. And if you do force a Hunter to go drink, you can interupt him or just leave yourselves with a 5-4 or 5-3, both of which favor you. I mean, you could use the same argument for draining any healer because all they have to do is run out of combat and drink.

The idea behind CCing the Priest is to keep him from Mana Burning and dispelling magic, which has nothing to do with healing. I don't know what kind of druids you face that let themselves get mana burned when they have cyclones, charge, bash, and maim, but a druid can lock down a Disc Priest. Fear locking the druid is to keep him from chain cycloning, HoT stacking, and abolishing people, and since you admit that he/she (you?) is the one doing most of the healing you want to minimize the time he has to do so. The idea is to CC these two to keep them both out of the fight as long as possible because leaving them alone is a much more dangerous proposition. And you're right, you don't need mana to auto shot, but you do need it to drop snake traps and use viper sting. I play both a Hunter and Druid: without mana my Hunter is generally screwed and has a choice between using viper sting every ~20 seconds or using snake trap every 30 because the MP5 from AotV is not high enough to sustain both, without mana my Druid can just escape pets, drop combat, and drink.

I never made Gladiator, so you do probably know better than me, but going after the druid with all your mana burn leaves 3 opposing mana drainers open to do whatever they want, and to me that sounds like a bad idea.

Something else I did not mention is that the Hunter pets should be killed early. LoS them behind something and call a focus fire so they cannot be healed. Granted you probably will not find Gladiators letting their pets go out of LoS to die, so it is probably going to be tough to kill them.

The hunter pets have shadow resistance and can be healed by four people. The reason why druids should LOS priests rather then try to CC them past a maximum of two cyclones is such: Shift costs 580 mana. Mana burn cast does not go off hence it saves the priest some mana or time. The druid is my far the most efficient healer against a two DPS team -- when he is not healing but CCing we might have as well mana burned someone else as the druid loses mana anyway and heals aren't as efficient and they are done by people who have no way to escape and drink (where as a druid has the most regen while casting and can travel form to get drink tics in).

Well aside from draining the druid, is there some other insight you can offer? What do you do about the hunters? Who do you CC? Who is on the priest?

I have just recently joined a drain-oriented team with the line up of war, disc priest, hunter, warlock, pally. We did pretty well (about 1800) but ran into a wall against 2x war, feral druid, disc priest, holy paladin. Basically the 3x melee is rough on our lock/priest. I (war) start out on the druid, forcing him to go bear then switch to debuffing/slowing all the melee, then back to druid if he changes form (esp to cast tranquility). I think in general our strat was to survive/slow the melee until healers are fully mana drained but 3x melee seems to win that war.

Any advice on this or other pros/cons/weakpoints of our team setup would be appreciated. Perhaps our lack of a druid/mage for CC would be an issue (prob sub me out for them)? I am also fearing if we faced 2xwar/sham/priest/pal.

Today was the first day that we tried hunter, warlock, disc priest, holy paladin, resto druid...and it seemed very powerful. We still have some practice to do, but climbed very easily to 1650 rating or so.

Really controlling a warrior is pretty easy if you have a hunter to drop a trap, and a paladin for BoF on whoever the warrior is on. I really liked having a resto druid instead of a warrior though, as the control was very nice.