Yes, I noticed this too. On the weekend I had one WSG with 7 Rogues on the enemy team. I usually end up being one of two healers usually there are 3 to 5 physical DPS on the enemy team that just shred anybody I try to heal. Or they shred me for that matter. The combination of Rogue stuns and Warrior/Hunter damage on top is quite lethal with mind numbing poison (be it snakes or terribly Rogues without Wound Poison) and MS. That combo reduces my Healing to less than 25% of normal. Ouch. On the other hand, we have more melee too of course and if I heal them without getting spotted then I do OK.

I was mainly just intending to use it as an example of a "burst" that has been possible since the start of arena that could kill anyone, even in a non 5v5 environment. Given lack of defense scaling, it's more powerful now than before. And what is worse is that now melee can pull this off with far less coordination. I'm sure anyone who has run double melee (especially one without a rogue) who has played a mirror match has noticed how ridiculous it is - both teams charge a target and flail at each other until someone falls over, with the victor being decided more by the RNG and gear advantages than any real tactical awareness. RPM may be an over-powered combo, but I've always appreciated the skill differential between amazing ones and decent ones. With double melee it can be difficult to tell who is even better other than noticing one has these green glaives and the other doesn't..

The Warlock is still alive in 3s due to the power of Druids and Rogues (both as friends and foes). The Felhunter wins stealth wars and helps the Druid's lack of dispel magic; Druids and Rogues are the top peelers. The synergy is there. As long as Druids and Rogues are not significantly nerfed, the Warlock will be alive in 3s as part of the Warlock+Druid+? and Warlock+Rogue+? comps (which, of course, includes the Warlock+Druid+Rogue comp). It is like RPM keeping Mages alive in 3s, except the Warlock has more options on comps.

Of course, Druids and Rogues are in demand for so many comps, there is no doubt that many (less "elite") Warlocks will be left over (and be forced to take on, say, leftover Holy Paladins as partners).

Druid+Warrior
Druid+Warlock
Druid+Rogue

Yes, I see your trend.

How does dispel resistance on poison help Entangling Root hold?

Ironically, without much rating resets in 5s (from both highly rated people resetting and lowly rated people resetting), it is the only bracket where the team's rating reflects the team's difficulty with some accuracy at the lower rating brackets. I see 2s and 3s headed in the same direction once the lowly rated resets dry up due to the lack of further rewards, at which point we will finally have the truly elite arena in 2s and 3s everybody always wanted and finally got in 5s this season.

Admittedly it doesn't. In a state of sleepiness I confused matters and thought that Cleanse works like Dispel Magic, but it doesn't. But it's still important because it makes crippling and wound poison stick at least.

No 2v2 in the Top 10 without a druid.
#1-27 (with ties) has 24 druids.
Of 97 teams (including currently unpartnered rogues), 75 have druids.

Needless to say, no one else comes close to druid in representation, although warrior and rogue are pushing bimodal status behind them.

In 3's 1-99 (with ties):

58 Druids, no more than one per-team, ever.
20 of the other teams are RMP.
60 teams with rogues, 62 rogues due to two D/R/R teams

Warlocks aren't dead, and there's a bit of a surge of shadowdps teams is just as mindless as melee zerg (moreso, when you barely even need LoS let alone melee range).

Both are exceptionally irritating to play against.

The CC+Pin-n'-Burn BM Hunter comps in 2s require very little coordination and are irritatingly effective.

The archetype is ShS+BM, CC one, stunlock the other within LoS of the BM Hunter and the BM Hunter just shoves an obscene amount of damage down the kill target's throat. The Restoration and Dreamstate variants work on pretty much the same principle, except with different CC+Pin abilities. The Warlock+BM "lotto" variant is like, flip a coin, if you get horrored/feared away from the pillar you are dead, if you get horrored/feared around the pillar you win.

It requires very little coordination. One toon basically initiates all the control and the BM Hunter just mindlessly zerg down the target with whatever damage support the other guy can muster. These BM comps are actually around at higher ratings. If you don't have a pet to put on the BM Hunter the comp is simplistically scary. At least double melee comps in 3s actually take significant coordination against some comps and cannot mindless zerg every match.

The BM / dps 2's comps may be simplistic to run but they require a lot of gear.

BM Hunters and Feral druids are both considered weak pvp "off-specs" meanwhile both are scary to play against when in s3/s4/t6+ gear.

Me and a warrior partner (when I was still playing RDruid/Warr in 2's) came across a BM / Feral 2's team in the 1750+ bracket.

We laughed the first game, then they beat us, and farmed us for 3 more losses. Combine a Feral's CC+Spot Healing +immunity to snares/roots with a BM Hunters burst potential and basically what happened was my Warrior was nearly perma CC'd while I wasted mana trying to stay safe and CC the druid.

They weren't able to burn us down but they won the mana war everytime. Mind you in order to be successful as a feral druid you need a very large mana pool AND good offensive stats.

If I had played more offensively to try to keep one locked down for my warrior to assault I'd get bashed/intimidated and they'd try to burn if Beastial Wrath was up. If it wasn't they simply viper stung and kept my Warr CC'd.

We tried killing the pet and succeeded in one match 4 times. We killed the pet 4 times but every time the hunter was able to rez because of the feral's CC + frost/freeze trap. And since he was NE he could drink with ease whenever he wanted. I was unable to keep both a pet and feral off of me for any extended period of time and so could never drink myself.

So yeah, BM hunters can be scary, they need the gear for it though and before this season it wasn't really readily available and so they weren't very prevalent.

Updates:

2v2 (2200+):
Druid Druid: 156 (29%)
RogueRogue: 124 (23%)
Warrior Warrior: 121 (22%)
WarlockWarlock: 49 (9%)
PriestPriest: 30 (6%)
ShamanShaman: 24 (4%)
Mage Mage: 16 (3%)
Hunter Hunter: 11 (2%)
Paladin Paladin: 8 (1%)

3v3(2200+):
Druid Druid: 27 (20%)
RogueRogue: 25 (19%)
Warrior Warrior: 22 (16%)
Mage Mage: 18 (13%)
PriestPriest: 18 (13%)
WarlockWarlock: 12 (9%)
ShamanShaman: 7 (5%)
Paladin Paladin: 4 (3%)
Hunter Hunter: 1 (1%)

From Zilea's blog.

I hope we get some more accurate statistics soon from Vhari So far this basically confirms every impression I had of p2, melee zerg is out in full force. What surprises me is I expected a lot more hunters, I see a lot around at 1900-200.

I don't know about the 2s, but I took stock of 2200+ rated 3s with consistent lineups last night and this was what I got:

Warlock+Melee+Healer (19)
9 Warlock+Warrior+RDruid
8 Warlock+Rogue+RDruid
Warlock+Enhancement+RDruid
Warlock+Enhancement+Dreamstate

RPM (18)
18 Rogue+Mage+Priest

2xMelee+Healer (12)
3 Warrior+Rogue+Dreamstate
2 Warrior+Rogue+RDruid
2 Rogue+Rogue+Druid
Warrior+Enhancement+HPaladin
Warrior+Retribution+RShaman
Warrior+Rogue+HPaladin
Warrior+Warrior+RDruid
Rogue+Enhancement+RDruid

Melee+Nuker+Healer (10)
3 Rogue+Mage+RDruid
Rogue+Dreamstate+Disc
Rogue+Mage+RShaman
Warrior+EleShaman+HPaladin
Warrior+EleShaman+RDruid
Warrior+Mage+HPaladin
Warrior+Mage+Dreamstate
Warrior+Balance+Disc

Warrior+2xHealer (5)
2 Warrior+RDruid+Disc
Warrior+RShaman+RDruid
Warrior+RShaman+HPaladin
Warrior+Dreamstate+Disc

Warlock+Disc+RDruid (4)
4 Warlock+Disc+RDruid

Others (6)
2 UA+SPriest+RShaman
Warlock+Mage+RDruid
BM+PoMPyro+RShaman
Rogue+Hunter+RDruid
Rogue+SPriest+Warlock

The percentage of 2200+ rated teams with double melee comps is not that high. Warriors and Rogues are just good in a lot of comps.

From that data, there are

35 druid single healer teams
20 priest single healer teams
5 shaman single healer teams
4 paladin single healer teams

With the breakdown on the double healer teams being:

8 druids
7 priests
2 shamans
1 paladin

And 1 token 3-dps team.

I think that speaks for itself in terms of healer breakdown.

I'm personally surprised there's no priest/druid/hunter teams in there, from what I've heard it's almost the new fotm.

There are so many Dru/Pri/DPSer teams on Ruin atm it's basically making it not fun to queue up for 3v3 most of the time sadly. All of these games take forever to end, since all the other team does is have the healers run around a frost trap while the single dpser (usually war/rog/hunter) slowly pecks away until we're oom.

You are playing a cleave comp and you complain about others playing 'lame' teams?

Having a 'brain dead' comp is different to a comp that takes forever to finish, win or lose.

I cannot wait for the next publically broadcast lan game where they have a 2 healer-hunter mirror match.

You can blame that on priests being all but forced to go PMX or PDX because of cleave being too hard without one of those classes to peel and druids being better than priests for every other comp. As much as I hate PDH (sooo much), I can't blame the hunter and priest for using one of the few comps they are actually best-in-slot for.

/rant

I'm getting pretty irritated by the complete dominance of druids in the 2v2 bracket.

/rant

Your post is about a month old so looking at s4 in 5s after some time has passed... There is nothing "truly elite" about it. Unless somebody considers sitting at 2094 as 4th in the BG with 5+ minute queues just to get between 1 and 8 points and drop the occasional RNG game as "elite." This is the worse season of 5s yet. The changes have basically ruined the bracket.

Why bothering organizing a 5 man team where you need a lot of communication and synergy with each other to even begin to compete when you get pretty much the same points from playing the "DRUIDS" or "RMP + Druid/X/X" Brackets?

Blizzard refuse to fix this because of the amount of people playing 2s and 3s over 5s, which is literally the only bracket where every class has a chance of success, and isn't a unique snowflake ;p

Our old charter got to 2170~ but people just don't play after they get their weapon and / or shoulder ratings, which means lack of points falling from the top, and if the teams still are active, the majority will dodge and get a 4 point gain in a week by dodging and playing horrible teams.

Admittedly, I hate the JAC Comp and Triple melee in 5s, but at least I'm playing a bracket which isn't about which of the two stealth classes come out of the door :p

The bracket is as elite as it was a month ago - Almost all of the weakest players are out of the bracket then; almost all of the weakest players are out of the bracket now.

The skill variance between teams is much smaller, therefore it takes many more match samples for the bracket to fan out. Teams with 2100 skill but 2000 rating won't be able to get to their rightful rating "quickly" until teams with 2000 skill and 1900 rating get to their rightful rating first (they in turn have to wait for the people below them all the way down to the 1600-1700).

Of course, with the overall skill in the bracket much higher than it was in S3, a 2400 rated team in S3 may only be rightfully worth 2100 this season (let's take the simple figure of one 2200 team per two hundred active teams, and you will need eight hundred active teams in the bracket for the #4 team to be rightfully rated at 2200; the presence of the scrub base has a significant impact, even for players near the top).

However, with the pro resets curbed due to how hard it is to get up there and the scrub resets curbed due to, well, scrubs quitting altogether, at least you have very few 2200 skill or 1100 skill players playing at 1500, so the overall rating accuracy in 5s is better than ever (however little comfort that turned out to be).

It is a simple matter of being careful what you wish for. Most people who welcomed the "hardcorizing" changes before the start of S4 had no idea what would happen if the scrubs dropped out on them, and thought it would just be business as usual at the top, except with more exclusive gear for them than there were in S3.

For whatever reason teams are stil re-rolling, 20 games, 8 unique teams, 3 teams were rerolls with 4/5 s4 and/or s4 weapons at 1550-1650 rating in 5's last tim I played. From my alts games it feels like their are very few genuine 1500 teams playing as well, Both teams broke 1550(just) the 2nd week of season and have since retreated to 1400, Typically both teams might play 9 or 10/10 games against 1550-1600 teams and losing 4-5 pts a game with the occasional win.

My mains team after playing since early season 1 has petered out the last 2 weeks with the realization that despite breaking 1850 three times last season its much harder to break 1800 this season.

I can only compare it to season 2 but to me 1800 feels easier this time around. Maybe it's because we're better now or we're getting lucky with crap opponents but unless it's shaman/warrior or druid/warrior I feel confident when the doors open these days. 1500 does feel somewhat harder on my low teams though. I can't say for sure but I suspect that there's less team selling for gold (which moves the sellers all the way through the brackets) and more people just resetting to faceroll low teams (keeping them low).