OHHHHH the shame!!!
12:08 PM
Okay, continuing from our reasonably strong showing on Wednesday, we headed into the arena against yesterday to pretty poor conclusions. Here comes a run-down!!!!
Prot+DK: Fought this team on Ring of Valor and Blade's Edge... there's just NOTHING you can do to this team if they play defensively. The prot pally has infinite mana and the DK can't be gibbed unless some truly magical luck pans out in your favor.
Prot+Warrior: This is less of a headache than DK because we can actually do damage to the warrior. We beat this team every time we play against it.
Druid+Warrior: Played poor-to-mediocre, this team is free points; played well, this team is auto-loss. The druid can drink at his leisure because he's alliance and can drop combat whenever needed. The druid spends the entire match casting Cyclone/Roots/Hibernate on me forcing me OOM and really lowering my damage to nothing. We went 1:3 against this comp... the one we won was on Lordaeron and we had to bleed the druid dry through two innervates and Guntir had to kill him because of the insane CC he can still apply to me with no mana left. Got to the top of the center while his warrior was rooted, the druid was at 100 mana, 1000 hp, I was out of energy and cooldowns, and Guntir landed a Holy Fire with his last points of mana for the kill... then we turtled and had to keep the warrior at bay for 30 seconds until Innervate came back up... we almost lost even then because of Bladeskillz. If I never see another Resto druid in the arena again, I'll be happy.
Rogue+Shadow: We are definitely seeing this team more... and we CAN win if we play defensively and we get a little lucky... I need to work on Cycloning the priest more. We basically went 50:50 against this team because they would occassionally get us into a spot where Guntir was at 50%, get hit with Silenced while I was feared for 5 more seconds, and they would do that much damage... it's unfortunate, but we CAN stop this sometimes. I'm really limited by the fact that I have to save my trinket for Blind...
Lock+Healer: I don't want to understate this... this team is back in full force. Locks are invincible now that their pets are invincible. Haunt locks just throw out TONS of DoTs (which cannot realistically be dispelled), then drain Guntir... it's a long-play team back from s2-4 and I miss/hate it. This really is a strong argument for resilience should NOT be transferred to the pets. Essentially, the lock takes 12.5% damage reduction from resilience (at the cap), then 20% damage reduction via Soul Link. THEN, the pet gets a portion of the lock's resilience, so the 20% damage that goes to the pet gets reduced further... I CALL BULLSHTEIN!
... Unfortunately, that was the extent of our matches last night. Again we were pitted against 2400 rated teams, so our losing record of 9-13 for the week STILL has netted us a gain in rating (though a loss from yesterday's rating)...
Here's what I'm worried about: someone is going to figure out that Prot pallies are invincible healers, particularly when with a second healer, who never run out of mana... someone is going to get two of these healers together and pick up the dps class with the most innate survivability AND damage output (Haunt/SL locks, imo), and run a 3s comp that cannot run out of mana or hp...
My prediction for Season7 is that Prot+Prot+Haunt/SL will be #1 team in 3v3 bracket.
August 7, 2009 at 2:50 PM
When I watched the druid/warrior in Ampere's vid, it looked to me like the lynchpin of their strategy was the priest's movement. Since the priest was eternally heading LoS with the warrior glued to his ass, Ampere just followed while DPSing the warrior and used the available LoS to minimize the opposing druid's opportunities at CC.
Of course, this was on Ruins where you said you managed to beat the druid/warrior.
What are your thoughts?
August 7, 2009 at 2:54 PM
Obviously, you are right in thinking that positioning the warrior such that you can better position the druid to be on the move (rather than spamming cyclones in your arse) is penultimate. However, it's extremely difficult to do effectively against good druids (we're talking druid+warrior teams from s1-s4 getting gladiator titles... this is who we're playing).
In the end, it seems like a better idea to basically sit on the druid and use all our CCs to try and peel the warrior off of Guntir. If successful, I can peel them BOTH off him for enough time to get some drinking in (if the warrior turns his attention to peeling me off his druid, then I can usually get a bash+roots on the warrior and cyclone combo off against the druid keeping them both off Guntir for ~12 seconds or so which should be enough time for him to gain 3-4k mana... this is really our new strategy)