Yesterday, our 5v5 team got a new warlock and we were one win away from hitting 2k rating with warrior/warlock/ele shammy/priest/pala setup, considering most of our guys are not gear-capped and we played this setup for the first time, we have huge potential here, and it’s a blast comparing to 2v2 (as my pally says: “I’d rather hit the desk with my head than play 2v2″). The team first played 10 games with “secondary squad” so everyone can get 30%, they dropped 1866 to 184x or something, no hard feelings, everything working as intended. Then we played our new setup for the first time and in 20 games we had 13 win streak, giving us total of 17 wins and 3 loses, too bad those 3 loses were for 20, 19 and 26 (that was our last game, bad mistakes happen when people get tired), ended at 194X which is still a huge jump in rating comparing to last week, could still play 3 games today without people dropping < 30%, but we wouldn’t do 2k unless those 3 games were wins for 20 points. We managed to beat one supposed to be good team on our realm (hi2u Wolowin ;]) for 20+ after they won with our 2ndary squad 5 times during those 10 games they played, felt good. Either way we can always get 2k early next week to get our shammy and priest new shoulders (they, like me, will upgrade S1 to S3).

5v5 is not only better balanced, but it’s much less stressful, when playing 2v2 in a setup that has very low mistake margin, a single mistake of one of you can decide on the result of the game. In 5v5 there is always backup healer, or backup dps. If I stand in nova and out of LoS from pally, there can be still a priest around to dispell me and so on. Basically instead of swearing and doing drama, we had a really good time yesterday, even when we lost. We are also starting to get serious points per week so guys from the “secondary squad” will get geared up faster and we can try different things (were doing really fine with hunter instead of the lock, our new lock got much better gear than the hunter tho).

Terhix

UPDATE: Added MatsT’s comments

Why would you pick a Paladin and not a Druid? I don’t know, you might know someone you used to play for months in wow or even before who got well geared Pally (my case), you might not know any Druid, or all the Druids you know already do 2v2 with a warrior, or better yet, a warlock or hunter. Either way, you are foolish enough to want to get your ass up on the ladder with what you have, since if you don’t have what you like, you like what you have. So here is a short list of tactics for most popular 2v2 teams you might face:

WARRIOR/DRUID
Status: winnable

It’s very unlikely you will win a mana war with such team, since it’s very easy for druid left alone to drink, while hots keep his warrior alive. What we did against that setup was simply killing the druid, you will need Mace Spec for that, a bit of luck, good timing on pummel, good to have freedom under your feet, and the druid MUST have Judgment of Justice on his ass. Since the druid starts in stealth, start on the warrior but don’t beat him too hard, get as much rage as you can for when the druid shows up. You can trinket one cyclone and than you have to pummel all the rest.

Warrior/druid: You are partly right here, as killing the druid is the way to go. However, it’s quite a bit more complicated than you make it sound. Against a good druid, you have little to no chance to catch him and kill him straight up, even with a JoJ. In order to win, it is imperative that you can also help your paladin to drink, until you finally get that lucky crit+mace stun streak that will kill the druid. Sometimes, a simple hamstring+freedom can let paladin get away and drink on other side of pillar. Sometimes, you will have to wait until druid tries to drink, then nuke warrior hard, to force the warrior into turtling and meeting up with his druid, while your paladin drinks. We have never lost this matchup in season 2 nor 3, but the wins often take as long as 15 minutes, when trinket+NS is on cooldown and i i get lucky.

WARLOCK/DRUID
Status: pain in the ass

Basically same thing as with warrior/druid, except this time you are killing the druid with a timer, that timer is your pally’s mana being constantly drained. You can also try to do it the “normal” way, push on the warlock, kill the pet, back on the warlock, kill another pet, your pally can drink now, push on the warlock and if they do enough mistakes you have a chance to win. Pummel all fears and mana drains you can.

ROGUE/PRIEST (HEALER)
Status: this is your day!

Try to get in combat, find the rogue or do whatever not to get pally sapped. Picking your target depends on what the rogue will do, if he goes for your pally you have to go for the rogue, if he goes for you, you can go for either priest or rogue. If you decide to go for the priest with rogue on your back (not good idea if it’s dagger rogue btw), prayer of mending will heal for some nice amounts every time you use whirlwind, there are two solutions for that: a) don’t use whirlwind or b) use sweeping strikes, I prefer b, you will have tons of rage anyway from rogue beating you. If you stay on the rogue and your pally is smart enough to LoS mana burns, you will win mana war, the priest can’t really do many mana burns since after evasion fades he will have to drop heavy healing bombs on the rogue. It’s good idea if your pally will assist you with hammer of justice on the rogue when he use evasion, also use intercept to stun the rogue whenever you can, stun means he can’t dodge, and dodge is what makes keeping MS debuff on him difficult, either way you should deliver him a lot of pain.

Rogue/DiscPriest: After the HARP nerf, this is one of the better matchups. However, it’s not nearly as simple as sticking on the rogue and winning the mana war. If your paladin can stand still and keep you up with flash of lights, yes, his mana will last longer. However, the other team won’t let him do this. The priest can easily keep the rogue up while still having plenty of time to chase paladin with fears and mana burns. If the paladin is forced to use holy lights to keep you up between LoS-ing mana burns, the priest’s mana will last longer. In addition to this, keep in mind that even ONE dodged mortal strike will cause mortal strike debuff to fall off for at least 2 seconds, which is more than enough for their priest to land a greater heal. The strategy to winning usually involves staying on the priest whenever there is an opportunity to do so. Your damage output becomes a lot higher, and your paladin will have a lot more freedom to stand still and heal, or even drink. Once their rogue manage to peel you from the priest, you usually have no choice except hitting the rogue, especially when pillars is involved. The priest will typically heal himself to full and try to drink. If you can not follow him, you must instead nuke the rogue to force the priest to come back. This may be a win opportunity if you have HoJ and/or intimidating shout to cc druid while finishing rogue with paladins help. If you don’t think you can pull it off, intercept the priest as soon as he comes back into LoS. This will put pressure on the priest while the rogue is still on low hp. Hopefully, the priest won’t have enough to heal both himself and the rogue and still get away and drink more. Eventually the priest will oom and die.

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Terhix

2v2 makes me want to slap someone in the face… Yesterday me and my pally wanted to get 2k rating to get him his S3 shoulders and so I can get mine next week, we started at ~1920 rating, finished playing 5v5 at around 8pm with 5 hours till the end of the week and full of optimism we queued for our first 2v2 that day. We farmed one team to 1960 and then it started.

Literally, we met 7 teams in a row that were:

hunter/druid
warlock/druid (like 3 different teams with this setup)
warlock/priest

At 11pm we stopped meeting those (pretty much becase they got boosted to 2k by us and happily stopped playing), we still managed to stay at around 1950 despite how overpowered they are against our setup (killing not so careful druid with JoJ and lucky mace stuns and what not).

After a lot of drama about 15 minutes after midnight we were at 1976, so close! Basically the only teams that were playing at that time were mage/rogue, lock/lock (one demo, one not) and war/druid, after loosing 5 games straight to those (despite the fact we beat them, exactly same teams, before) and dropping down to 1909 we were just to pissed to talk to each other not to mention playing and went off.

P.S.: any comments saying “get a druid” will be deleted, tell me something I don’t know.

Terhix

Current world top 100 player ranking representation to class population:

Druid: 24% arena / 10% pop = 2.4 ratio
Warlock: 20% arena / 11% pop = 1.81 ratio
Warrior: 22% arena / 14% pop = 1.57 ratio
Priest: 13% arena / 11% pop = 1.18 ratio
Rogue: 7% arena / 11% pop = 0.63 ratio
Paladin: 5% arena / 10% pop = 0.5 ratio
Mage: 4% arena / 13% pop = 0.31 ratio
Shaman: 2% arena / 8% pop = 0.25 ratio
Hunter: 3% arena / 13% pop = 0.23 ratio

Population data from Warcraft Census. Hunter situation is a very funny one, they are on the bottom of the food chain in representation, yet they are actually most potent arena class atm. Hunter/Druid teams got up to the 3rd most popular setup above 2200 rating in 2v2, which is one of the reasons why warriors went down, as druids are switching over to hunters for the most part. I guess forum nerfcallers can finally see the truth: It’s not warriors that were shining in warrior/druid 2v2, it’s druids, you tools! That doesn’t mean Blizzard should nerf druids, they should just remove water from 2v2 bracket and problem is solved! It’s much harder to drink in 5v5 than it’s in 2v2, and druids are masters of exploiting it, especially night elf bastards with shadowmeld-drink.

What’s inspiring, especially for me, is that there is still a fair amount of (4.3% which makes it 5th most popular) warrior/paladin setups, with the rise of the druids one could expect paladins go up as they bring one excellent tool to counter druid teams - Judgement of Justice. That being said warrior/paladin is still far from the X/druid easy mode, no free drinks, not much CC, yet I like to play it as it really feels rewarding.

On a side note, last week paladins were on an uproar (when they are not?) about retribution viability in arenas claiming that they, as a hybrid class, should have more then one role in pvp metagame, which is something you can’t really disagree with. Either way 5 minutes of analyzing situation made me come with those particular suggestions for the paladin class:

Step one: change repentance with crusader strike in retri tree.
Step two: make repentance trainable for all paladins at level whatever.
Step three: put charge at 41p retribution.
Step four: give paladins fear ward.

What this fix: Gives retribution paladins a way to enter melee combat, they already have tools to stay in melee combat despite not having snare ability - it’s not perfect, but neither is hamstring - they just have nothing to get back into melee once casters start to kite their ass. 30 second c/d in combat charge with immobilize effect like druid one (might be without spell interrupt as well) would be gimped enough one not to make it overpowered, yet good enough to make this damned spec work. Crusader Strike as 31 talent point is just cosmetic and brings them closer to what enh shamans have. Trainable repentance would bring a bit of CC for all teams with paladins, making them more viable especially in lower brackets where paladins stopped to shine after S1, long cooldown long range CC which breaks on damage, it’s not a cyclone, but I guess it would make it a bit more even in fights against teams with warlocks. Fear ward is something that I would also see on them, warlock/priest can really push it on paladins, and it’s easy to back this up with lore, heck, paladins in D&D have passive fear immunity since level 2, they are holy warriors, they are not afraid of some clowns in pajamas.

Terhix

So you are getting your PvP gear and started to wonder how to gem it and what trinkets should you use. The first thing I’m going to cover is the metagem + feet enchant choice. Why those two? I simply cannot imagine pvping without minor speed effect on my character, so you either get that from enchant or metagem.

FEET ENCHANT AND METAGEM:

1) [Powerful Earthstorm Diamond] + [Boar's Speed]

This configuration will give you a lot of stamina along with 5% stun resistance, which is good since it stack with Iron Will (and Orc Hardiness if you are an orc). Bad side of this is that you will have to change 3 red/yellow gems in your armor for purple/green ones for the meta gem to work (which will give you even more hp).

2) [Swift Skyfire Diamond] + [Surefooted]

This configuration won’t give you any stamina, but is very good for maxing attack power. Even if you don’t put any stamina gem in your gear and won’t have stamina enchant on legs or whatever, you will have over 12k hp in full S3 gear, which is very fine. Surefooted enchant will give you 5% snare resistance, which is nice (not very reliable tho, as we have no snare resistance talents), and 10 hit rating, and while hit rating might not be the sexiest stat ever, this enchant with full S3 gear and S3 weapon will give you pretty much enough hit rating not to worry about missing in arena.

3) [Relentless Earthstorm Diamond] + [Boar's Speed]

I’d never use this configuration for my arena gear, but some people do use it, so I feel I must list it :p.

ATTACK POWER VS CRIT:

When wondering if you should gear for attack power or crit as a warrior, there is only one answer: you need both. PvP gear have a lot of it’s item value spent on crit and have 3 red slots and 5 yellow slots, which makes it much easier to max crit rating as a pvp warrior. When maxing crit you can get 40 crit from [Battlemaster's Cruelty], 50 crit from 5 epic yellow gems and 15 crit + 30 attack power from 3 orange meta gems, giving you total 105 crit rating and 30 attack power. When maxing attack power you can get 80 ap from [Battlemaster's Determination], 60 ap from 3 red epic gems and 50 ap + 25 crit from 5 epic orange gems, giving you total 190 attack power and 25 crit rating. So all in all, the difference is that you will have either 160 attack power or 80 crit rating (3.63% crit). Which is better.

Using my axe vs sword calculator as a dps calculator tool for comparing the two, with base data being 1900 attack power, 31% crit, 134.2 dps 3.6 speed weapon hitting 400 resilience target, the results are:

Base damage: 178079 - no spec
Maxed crit: 183076 - no spec (2.8% dps increase)
Maxed attack power: 184853 - no spec (3.8% dps increase)

Maxing attack power will give you more dps over time than maxing crit. There are two reasons for that, one is that resilience cuts a lot of dps from crits, second is that pvp gear have tons of crit on it’s own. The difference is not very big tho and you can easly max out crit for having a bit lower burst damage, but have it more often.

Terhix