We might be jumping into Meg’s blogging area, but so be it! Lunchmoneyy and I jumped into the Arena last night to see how Holy Paladin/Hunter would fare against the field. Given that it was the first night there was a wide range of class compositions to be had. Some good, some bad. Some with good players, some with bad players. I am fairly confident that at least some of the good players thought we were the bad players.
We didn’t do nearly as well as some of our guildies, like these guys. But by the end up the night we pulled out 1550. Now at face value that is a pretty awful rating. But provided it’s the first time we have ever played together I can be OK with that. But it was quick to see what kind of compositions we were going to repeatedly run into through out the season.
I find that sometimes I am far too aggressive for my own good. As was Lunchmoneyy. Too frequently we found ourselves in a pile of dirt after deciding we wanted to go toe-to-toe with our opposition with undesirable results. Our focus, as games went on, was to consciously make the defensive effort. Apply Viper Sings and Chimera Shots, trapping melee, repeated use of Hammer of Justice. Things like that. There were some trends last night in these teams, which merits discussion.
Mage
Teams with Mages proved to be exceptionally challenging. Their burst is so high and Iceblock, as with previous seasons, puts a damper on bursting them down. Teamed up with a Death Knight proves to be fairly devastating due to their high number of snares and immobilizing effects as well as both classes being able to interrupt or Silence a caster/healer. And for Hunters, having no magic defense really really hurts us in this category. Making sweet love to the pillars was a game I should have played better.
If the Mage wasn’t paired up with a second DPS class I usually felt better about the match-up. While the games went longer, it was easier to manage the damage. Or even Ret Paladins with the Mage, unless they were very geared, was do-able. Unless we hopelessly out-geared them, going blow for blow against a Mage was very detrimental.
Paladins
These are showing up in two very distinct flavors obviously. Retribution and Holy. And their dangerousness varys greatly. A Retribution Paladin’s mana pool makes our mana pool look like . . . well a Holy Paladin. Here we have Modeezy, our guildie I linked to further up the post. His mana pool is a whopping 5764 according the Armory. One Viper Sting and Chimera Shot will obliterate the mana pool. Of course a good paladin will cleanse that right away, but even if they do . . . less mana.
There are a number of reasons Paladins are dangerous. Blessing of Freedom and Pursuit of Justice make them difficult to kite inside an Arena. The ever-present bubble is always a pain as well. Last night, when I saw a Ret Paladin, I went straight for the mana pool. Sure, they aren’t actively trying to heal anybody, but zero mana is still zero mana. And if it reduces their DPS output, that reduces the healing output my healer had to do.
But Ret Paladins have great DPS, as evident by my above example of our guildies wrecking face. Stay out of range the best you can. Remember, they aren’t Death Knights. Feel free to Disengage. Unless they are paired with one. So be careful
The weakness of a Ret Paladin is gone completely against a Holy Paladin. Rocking mana pools of 20,000 or so it can seem like an impossible task to drain their mana. In one match up we had, it was Warrior/Holy Paladin and the match was turning into who’s Paladin has more mana.
We ended up losing due to bad timing on our opponent’s Hammer of Justice (good timing for them) and had to chalk that up to a learning experience. Facing a Holy Paladin you have to worry about the DPS that they are healing all the while attacking their mana.
Warlocks
There were a few Warlocks we tackled last night, all seemed to be Soul Link while a few went all the way down to Metamorphosis. One key adaptation we made was bursting down Warlock pets. We wouldn’t do it immediately from the start, but rather after we started the drain/defense game. Lunch would call out on Vent when he had the demon positioned and we would quickly turn to nuke it down. We would do this twice since all the Warlocks had Fel Domination. After we removed Soul Link, it made the Warlock that much more vulnerable.
Warlocks danger level was directly proportionate to how dangerous their partner was as well (I suppose that’s obvious). But some Warlock teams were easy while others were a struggle. One particular nasty team that was unexpected was Feral Druid/Warlock, which really put a hurting on me. In hindsight I am sure we could have beaten the team. A quicker BoP, catching the Druid in a Flare, etc.
Death Knights
These things don’t die. Unless they are under-geared or terrible. Well-timed Strangulates killed us more than once last night. As I mentioned in a previous post, keeping an eye out for Mark of Blood is important. Our best efforts involved locking down a DK the best we could while attacking/harassing their teammate. You run in to the same problem with Death Knights as you do Mages. No magic defense. And they can get all their diseases rolling from range. I wish I had more tricks to handle Death Knights. I just don’t know enough about them yet to know how to deal with things.
Conclusion
I know there are other classes I didn’t cover. These were just the ones most prevalent in our matches last night. There was one game where I died in less than half a second, literally. The combat log recorded all attacks in half a second. Shadowstepped Ambush times 2. It was stupid ridiculous. Both of us were like “WTF….” Only a few Shaman, most were Resto. It’s going to take some work, but I think we’ll manage somehow. Vault or Archavon needs to start dropping some Hunter gear for me to start building up the Resilience.
Did you do Arena last night? On what character, and how did you do? Thoughts, comments, leave ‘em here.
It will be interesting to see anti-paladin (both holy and ret) strategies after the next mini-patch. With viper-sting changing to a %mana drain, those ret paladins are going to be just that much tougher to handle.
I managed to snake in a few matches as a prot paladin actually, and using the fact that Shield of Righteousness (paladin shield slam) does not share a CD between ranks (currently, fixed next mini-patch) meant if people weren’t paying attention I could drop them pretty quick. Our record was still terrible (being eaten alive by mages and warlocks) but it was fun.
That’s my concern. Ret does great damage and emptying them is my best method to stay alive. The longer it takes to drain them, the longer they beat on me.
Played with a feral druid friend, it’s really a jokeish comp we did in S3/4 just for fun. At one point we went up to 1650 but it’s iffy because most teams can burst me down fast. Regardless, we managed to play 3 games last night and went 2-1. The one game we lost was versus muti rogue and feral druid. Not much to say other then I got ripped apart within the first 10s while running for the stealth orb thing. Oh well, should be interesting to see how we do when we continue later this week.
Ouch… rogues hurt.
I never want to face one right now, they are too cheap!
It takes nothing at all to burst anything down from 100-0%.
As far as death knights go…
Grated, they have snares, but so don’t we?
What pet were you using?
Klinderas’s last blog post..Another Apology
@Klinderas Just my cat right now. I have a Nether Ray I need to level but didn’t get around to it as I wasn’t expecting to Arena so soon. I might try a spider as well.
Eeeeek. those pesky rogues x|
Luckily I didnt meet so many of those last nite, at least not good ones =) Me and my resto druid partner lost our 4 first games against some players that we knew were good (basically 2xDPS all of them). After that we managed to get 9 wins in a row, only to loose the tenth (dang, no achievement this time). We did a few more games and ended at 1611, so we could buy our deadly necklaces =)
The one game that annoyed us most was against a hunter and tauren DK (I know, funney ain’t it? hehe). well, the hunter was killed pretty fast, but the DK ripped apart my druid while I pewpew’ed him to around 30%. I was thinking, no problem, I can take this dude solo now, I’m at full hp. But after he came back from the pillar my druid was hiding behind, he had close to FULL HP!?! .. I panicked and lost after some crappy attempts of kiting him to death (pun intended).
After reading quest log it appeared that he had thrown that annoying Mark of Blood on my extremely fast-hitting kitteh. So, after this, and after reading this post of yours, I did what I normally do in situations like these. I MADE A MACRO =)
/run for i=-1,5 do if(i==-1)then P=”Player”else if(i==0)then P=”Pet”else P=”Party”..i end end for j=1,40 do D=UnitDebuff(P,j) if(D==”Mark of Blood”)then SendChatMessage(“{star}”..D..”{star} on “..UnitName(P), “RAID_WARNING”)end end end
There you go, hehe, I know it ain’t pretty to look at. But I had to smash it together, to save characters (to keep within 255). Basically, add a “/click ” line to your most used macros, and voila, you will get a warning if anyone in your party got the mark on them.
Example: (my macro for Aimed Shot)
#showtooltip
/cast [nomodifier] Aimed shot
/cast [modifier:shift] Freezing arrow
/click MultiBarBottomRightButton6
(“MultiBarBottomRightButton6″ is where Ihave placed my “tiny” Mark of Blood macro)
I chose Raid warning for this (you can change to “party”, “yell” or other chat types if you like). The raid warning wont work unless you are raidleader or assistant, so i also made a short macro for promoting everyone in your party to assistants:
/run for i=1,4 do P=”party”..i; PromoteToAssistant(P) end
In terms of arena it basically means that the first one to enter, will be raid leader. But if everyone got this macro, and click it at the start of every match, all will be able to do raid warnings. This will also fix the optional raid warnings from Proximo.
I hope some of this made sense to some of you at least =)
Please let me know if this doesnt work, and in that case, what kind of problems you encounter. And ofcourse, let me know if there are any wishes for any other outcome of this macro.. I tried to do something to make my pet passive if he had it, and myself stop attacking if I had it. But i cant think of an easy solution at the moment…
Happy hunting fellas!
Sillie, Kor’Gall (eu)
…as a reply to myself (since I can’t edit my first comment), I realised that this macro doesn’t comsider party pets, only your own pet. To handle other’s pets as well, I don’t think I can manage to keep within 255 characters… Hmm.. when i think about it, I guess i could split it into two macros though, but then again, a hunter’s action bars doesn’t really have plenty of slots open, now do they?
Note to self: Get started with addons already… slackor!
Sillie, Kor’Gall (eu)
Another helpful addon is Power Auras. I have it setup to detect the debuff Mark of Blood on my pet, and it provides me with a notification of my choosing where I want it with a timer. Very useful for buffs and debuffs alike.
Shaedon’s last blog post..Nuramoc Tamed
Wow Sillie, you seriously rock. The kind of stuff you throw together is amazing. I am looking forward to trying it out!
Drotara’s last blog post..Winter Veil – A Time for Achie… giving.
Holy crap!
That macro could be extremely useful!
…If I can spell it properly. It’s like Hieroglyphs mixed with Norse runes, put in a bowl and mashed to death by a Rhino.
@ Drotara
Cats I expect should be good for damage, but they won’t be too useful other than in bg’s. I find nether rays to be somewhat picky myself… I would rather have on pet that was good for most situations. But hey, if you can manage the Nether ray, it should kick some serious rear.
Spiders are a great idea, and hyenas should be alright… although very fragile.
You should also look at a Warpstalker(intervene and Roar of sacrifice look like fun, plus warp adds a little more time to his life) or a Crab(Pin!). Scorpids still work as well, I think.
Man, if only you were BM… =P
If BM works for me, I’ll post about it. Until then, good luck Drotara.
Klinderas’s last blog post..Santa’s a Hunter too!
I am going to try a crab and try running double BW for a bit. I was informed that 50/21 with a Priest is crushing Ret Pally/Warlock since they can mass dispel bubble.
Drotara’s last blog post..Winter Veil – A Time for Achie… giving.
Won’t work for much longer friend…
I would attempt to work with builds that will work once the patch hits, or that’s what I’m doing anyway.
One other thing that might be of interest:
Birds of Prey?
I’m guessing you went Chim shot, so you have the scorpid Disarm and witht he bird of prey, that’s another 6 second long disarm. That could kill a rogue/anythign except a caster dead I would think. In addition, Scorpid Chimaera Shot and Snatch have a 1 minute cooldown each. SO when one is ready, the other will be ready in time as well.
Klinderas’s last blog post..Santa’s a Hunter too!
Not that 2v2 was anything stellar during TBC, but I find it to be an utter joke still. I’ll be doing it casually here and there, but I’m sure I’ll get sick of seeing DK/Ret over and over.
Do 5′s! My planned 5v5 has a Hunter in it, we are going to keeeeeeel stuff.
megan’s last blog post..Just Plain Old
Klinderas I’m gonna have to use:
“Holy crap!
That macro could be extremely useful!
…If I can spell it properly. It’s like Hieroglyphs mixed with Norse runes, put in a bowl and mashed to death by a Rhino.” as a signature quote on the WoW forums. I almost choked when I read it!