The thing that annoys the hell out of me is that GC has this delusion that resilience is a panacea to the problems that face arena.

My armory did not update yet - but I have 2 piece deadly (Archaevon lottery wuwu) and 2 piece Hateful (PvE badges), and I am spec'd into the most durable arena spec in the game (37 disc/34 holy with zero mana conservation talents, focused will/blessed recovery/blessed resilience/spell warding) and I still die like a little bitch to rogue / feral zerg or ret paladin / rogue zerg.

I have 4 piece resilience gear, and things are not 'fine' under any meaningful definition of the term. Eventually I just said fuck it, reglyph'd, had my hunter respec, and now I literally play as a punching ball. I play with a BM hunter, he does not even attempt to peel for me - our plan is for him to kill one DPS one they zerg me, then I spam heal him from angel form (I have the SoR glyph) and he pops readyness and then solos the second person.

This works OK - sometimes it is not enough if the other team is clever enough to run away while I am in angel form - however, even with 4/5 season 7, full resilience gems, the most defensive spec in the game, our entire battleplan revolves around me dying and him killing people while I get blown up.

The only silver lining in this arena season is that we managed to snag the team name "you got kzmdnd son" which is the best name ever for a team of two dwarves.

It seems like every second post I read these days about pvp is parroting 'damage is so out of control and deadly gear won't fix anything' and after having played a large number of 2v2 games over the past couple days as mage/dk I have to say that I just don't buy it. As far as I can tell, burst damage is not any more significantly out of control than it was in Season 1.

I've seen resto druid/warrior, a comp that, according to most people, should be utterly nonfunctional against the zergs of rets/dks/mages/rogues do very well, they were rated 1750 last I checked(considering top ratings are 1800ish) and when we fought them several times in a row, it was hardly trivial. I've seen restokin/frost mage do well, and damn but a well-played druid can still be hard to kill even with only 400 resilience. Resto Shaman rogue? Again, very competitive comp with a healer. Also seen lots and lots of holy paladins in 2s, and a few disc priests.

I've also seen a tank-geared 33k hp DK paired with a 25k hp feral make up the most absurdly tank-everything, near-impossible to kill comp I have seen to date in WotLK.(The 9k Rune Strike from a DK wearing full tank gear is cute) It is seriously. fucking. impossible. to kill a feral who goes into bear form and uses barkskin. So impossible that we ended up finding the easier strat was to double-silence the DK(he wasn't unholy) and blow *him* up. Even though he had more hp, DKs are surprisingly defenseless when you disable their ability to pop AMS or Icebound Fortitude if they don't have Bone Armor. I suspect this strat will become a lot more popular once Bone Armor is nerfed.

While I think there are definite class imbalances that need to be fixed, and some burst damage that may be too high, I strongly disagree that damage across the board is overpowered and I'm really glad that Blizzard is not knee-jerking this one, because I really don't think it's necessary. If I'd have to say there's anything that needs toning down, I'd say that it's Arcane Mage Crit-RNG burst(they have very poor crit chance, but when barrage and pom crit consecutively the burst is absurd -- they need to be more like frost mages, with better crit chance, but burst balanced around the assumption that they'll crit), Feral Druids(I'm sorry but Ferocious Bite is unacceptable, I've seen 15k crits from that shit. It shouldn't be doing 2x the damage of eviscerate), and Rogues/Rets. I think DK burst is fine, especially after the already-scheduled nerf to Rune Strike, which is the only thing that I've seen do unreasonable numbers. It's worth remembering that non-unholy DKs are actually quite vulnerable to bursting down, much moreso than Rogues, just a lot of people don't have good experience/practice doing it yet.

Sancus, you are playing double DPS as mage / DK, and you genuinly think damage is not wildly out of control? You might be the only person I met with that opinion.

World of Warcraft Arena Ranking | SK Gaming
World of Warcraft Arena Ranking | SK Gaming

I mean, goddamn - if you normalize by numbers played, which is fairly reasonable early on in the season, those numbers are pretty astounding.

With 24.5k HP, 21.7k armor, and 500 resil I am forced to bubble a PVE geared mut rogue/arcane mage opener. I don't care how much resil you give a priest, there is no way in hell it would make that survivable. I don't understand how anyone could think that it would change anything. I just really don't.

On the plus side we're totally taking advantage of the dps candy-land that is S5. Prot warrior/holy paladin would be bad against healer/dps, and even worse with the kind of gear and spec I'm wearing into arena, but with most teams being 2DPS being able to say NO to a gib is very nice. What's crazy is that it's still a struggle to stay alive, but at least we have that option. I don't know of many other comps that actually play outlast this season. It feels somewhat like priest/warrior vs 2DPS did, kite/LOS and spam instants while my warrior peels and slowly kills whatever he can.

As a warrior in defensive stance I was killed in less than 6 seconds by double rogue, 23k hp, 400 resilience. My paladin partner even landed 2 heals during that time.

I think it's just the tip of the iceberg though, there is a mountain of stuff that needs to be balanced and won't be looked at before damage is under control and people start playing proper games. I'm confident (as I have always been) that the developers can eventually make it fun/balanced again but I'm afraid it's going to take them several months. The wait and see approach is only going to delay this. As others have said this was very clear already in beta when everyone had access to premades which had around 700 resilience and no PVE gear to boost their damage.

It's just common sense that if my DK with 500 resillience and 60% phys mitigation in Frost Presence can be bursted by a rogue then it doesn't matter how much resi you give to my priest he will not survive.

Personally I'd never worry about maintaining a minimum amount of crit as frost, so I wouldn't really factor that into your decision. However I'm curious - If you are running 2dps, why would you prefer battlemasters over your current trinket? While frost mages may not have an excessively high amount of crit, you still will crit quite frequently thanks to shatter. As far as proc trinkets goes, I'd definitely opt for something like embrace of the spider, but I don't necessarily see what the appeal of battlemasters over a dps trinket would be.

Its actually 3's 2dps and 1 Healer. I have yet to see an embrace drop and I have been running Naxx since week 2....

Our "Leader" of the 3's team more or less suggested I get it. I have been using a Sundial cause thats all I have that would work for pvp. I think the reasoning behind the suggestion is that I am 99% of the time the guy that gets opened on. The team is Frostmage(me) / Feral Druid / Holy Pally. 3385 HP is roughly a 1/5th of my Health.

No offense but have you considered that it could be you/your team mates lack of skill/gear that is making things seem balanced? Because 95% of players pvping right now, including players of your classes are talking about how ridiculous burst damage in pvp is right now.

Ah, was my mistake to just take 2s into consideration. I'd go for the haste one, personally - I'm a big fan of haste. 11% haste allows for 4 lances during deep freeze with IV on, or 1 frostbolt and 2 lances if it's not ;D

All I know is the game is so imbalanced right now that I debating telling my disc priest to reroll a different healer. From what I have seen so far Priest are getting absolutely destroyed in arena's. It is very stressful for me to play arenas right now with him just because of this point. We have always ran 2's just because we enjoy it, but as the game is now, our 2's team is dead because of the lack of survivability a priest has now.

I'll also agree aside from a few small tweaks (Feral Druids, Unholy DKs, Mirror Images, Multiple rogue ambushes, etc.), PvP seems better then season 1. I think people are still in the TBC mindset, trying and hoping the same comps will work. Priests currently NEED to play with a CC until they stack as much resil as possible. Aside from 5v5 (which is it's own world of craziness), I personally don't really find the burst absurd or unavoidable.

If you're standing in the open and a mage is capable of arcane barrage spamming you until he can line up an imp CS-Pyro, the burst is high. But it is also largely avoidable with proper positioning.

People need to realize that 400-500 resilience was enough at level 70, it is NOT enough at level 80.

Well, before someone else brings it up, you managed to mention all those without including paladins, who are dominating in every bracket as two different specs. Ret is still capable of soloing anything in an HoJ, and the immunities of holy are obviously incredibly prized in a burst environment. I actually think much of holy will work itself out if they put in a damage reducing patch, thus devaluing the scaling of immunities, but until they do it will continue to dominate. Basically that aspect of the metagame hasn't changed at all since level 70 - in eras of insane damage, paladins are the best healers. Once it has toned down, priests and druids excel because they actually have versatility and offensive ability aside from being raw heal turrets.

I'd also like to point out that the comment about barrage is funny since it is instant cast. If most of the damage abilities people were complaining about actually had a cast time, it would be a completely different story, but they don't. Melee can stick on targets easier than ever before (and do more damage in smaller windows), and mages in particular have so many devastating instant casts now that damage is even harder to avoid, and virtually impossible to heal through.

I have a higher rating than that priest, and priests are not fine in any sense of the word. The reason a few priests are doing OK is because most people know absolutely nothing about the metagame and you can take advantage of the utter ignorance of game mechanics on behalf of pubbies.

Priests are never able to survive a dedicate assist, the only classes that can do it are class with real invulnerabilities and plate, those doing well are those that realized this and adjusted accordingly.

At the start of the season you will always have outliers since most people are completely unable to figure out proper team compositions/strategies, so you can beat people by theorycrafting better set ups/strategies. Later, once people start watching PvP videos and all the good set ups are known, arena is down to execution pretty much.

How many people learned about the pillar trick on Nagrand from Hydra? SW: D sheeps? The warlock/druid strategy versus priest/rogue with devours on rogue?

Note mid 1800 in 2s, when many teams are well over 2000 now. 3s is a much better option for priests.

Ring of Valor makes "LOS it" a less compelling argument for balance.

Ring of valor is a sort of special case, but it can be argued both ways. I had a game earlier today vs rogue/priest where I got ontop of the rising pillar, and the rogue was unable to reach me.

All I know is that after recently hitting 80, I feel more vulnerable in my entry level gear on my shaman that I did when I hit 70 in the middle of season 3 - when I was over a year behind the gear curve.

What do you think a good 2v2 team would be for a enhancement shaman? I was thinking along the lines of a mage or holy paladin.

What Ret paladins aren't speccing into Improved Hammer of Justice (30s HoJ). Did you consider when making your post that 4 out of your 6 suggested classes are the exact classes whose damage potential are in question?

Right now, mages are the only viable caster DPS class, while rogues/dks/ret paladins/bm hunters and to a much lesser extent warriors are all viable melee DPS classes. Having plate armor is a much bigger deal than having 500+ resilience - you know that ambush that crits you for 5000? It would have been 10k on a cloth.

I was thinking about an enhancement shaman pvp build and would like some feedback from the pvp veterns.
Here is the build: (18/53/0)

Earth's Grasp and Earthen Power to keep myself and my team from being kited.
Improved Fire Nova Totem was taken for the extra stun.