5v5 - Thoughts on Improving

[Bolty]

Chickenscratch area for improving my 5v5 group's rating. Currently we keep hovering in the 1700's and always seem to put together a string of losses every time we're one game away from 1800. Group makeup is MS Warrior, Mutilate Rogue, Resto Shaman, Holy Priest, feral Druid. This is an extremely non-traditional setup, and we know we're never going to be super-uber with this composition, but I feel that we could be higher than we are.

Our general weaknesses are a lack of crowd control and a lack of a Paladin.

Our general strategy is to have our Warrior and Rogue focus fire on a target. If the enemy team consists of two melee, they will focus on either myself (Holy Priest) or the Shaman, so our Druid does a Cyclone/Root rotation on them to keep them clear. With two of our team players starting in stealth, we play a "wait for them to come to us" game. I'm not always sure this is the correct strategy though, because it allows the other team to get the initiative. A well timed Warrior charge with stealthers in place to pounce simultaneously would be harder to execute but more rewarding overall, I think - I've seen other teams pull this off well and it's highly effective at putting the other team on the defensive.

Our typical target order is cloth, healers, dps, Warrior. I also start to wonder if this is the best strategy. We're not a DPS-heavy team; we're an outlast team that is highly adaptable to different situations, but will never be a burst team.

Our lack of a Paladin really shows when we face the 4-DPS, 1-Healer gib teams. One of us simply gets blown away and there's no way to stop it, and if the other team couples the DPS with high crowd control, we're smothered fast. That's when you really miss BoP.

A few thoughts I'm having:

1) We need to go after Paladins first more. We *never* go for them first, and I think that's a mistake. Yes they're plate and we're a melee-DPS team, but often Paladins don't gear for PvP because they're so rarely focused. If you don't do anything to them at all, they spam Flash of Light on our focus target and eventually BoP it. If we focus them, they don't spam Flash of Light (as much) because they're being stunned a ton, and eventually BoP themselves - in other words, we could get a faster kill in. Crowd control should focus on their DPS to allow more freedom on our side to continually purge/dispel the Paladin, especially Mass Dispel the BoP. And consider that CC like Blind would be more effective if the Paladin's too busy getting wailed on to Cleanse it.

2) Perhaps we should consider using our Rogue as crowd control more than DPS. Yes, this means our DPS is cut severely. But we're not a burst team anyway; all of our wins are going to be protracted battles of mana control. The idea of using our Rogue as CC on a DPS'er is to once again limit their DPS on us so that our Shaman and Priest can take more offensive actions (Mana Burns, shocks, purges). We can win the mana war with Mana Burn abuse, but only if our Priest isn't getting focused by 2-3 players.

3) In general, crowd controlling their DPS seems more important than trying to disrupt their healing. If their DPS'ers are handled, we have Mana Burn to take care of the enemy healers and force them to run off and drink - then we can try to burst focus a player and get them killed.

4) Enemy Hunters should be crowd controlled, not attacked. They're too slippery and attacking them doesn't limit their DPS like it does other DPS'ers - any intelligent Hunter will keep attacking a ranged target, not switch to useless melee'ing of whomever's in their face (sans a Wing Clip). Anyone getting targetted by a Hunter often (basically, me) should try to play LOS games as much as possible and get off Mana Burns otherwise. In a 2v2 engagement, it's easy to have both players just follow the Hunter around to limit his DPS, but in a 5v5 game, that doesn't play out.

Comments/ideas from anyone welcome.

-Bolty

[Tal]

1) We need to go after Paladins first more. We *never* go for them first, and I think that's a mistake. Yes they're plate and we're a melee-DPS team, but often Paladins don't gear for PvP because they're so rarely focused. If you don't do anything to them at all, they spam Flash of Light on our focus target and eventually BoP it. If we focus them, they don't spam Flash of Light (as much) because they're being stunned a ton, and eventually BoP themselves - in other words, we could get a faster kill in. Crowd control should focus on their DPS to allow more freedom on our side to continually purge/dispel the Paladin, especially Mass Dispel the BoP. And consider that CC like Blind would be more effective if the Paladin's too busy getting wailed on to Cleanse it.

In my 5v5 we always focus fire on the paladin first to make them blow their shield then focus on the other healer. Once the bubble is up we destroy the paladin and mop up the other healer. Now keep in mind our rating is in the 1500s so my experience is not with teams of your level of skill but that seems to work the best for us. Our typical setup is 2 hunters, 2 paladins and a MS warrior. We've also had good success with 1 paladin, 1 priest, MS warrior, 2 hunters.

Edit: The fastest losses for us seem to be when one of hte paladins is taken out first and fastest.

[TheDragoon]

I'm not really sure there's much that a Rogue can do for CC that he's not already doing. Realistically, Rogues have stuns, poisons and blind that they can use in combat and I think Quark is using all of those.

Regarding Paladins, after playing one in the arena for a while on Terenas, I get the impression that a Paladin who gets a Rogue/Warrior combo on him is really at the mercy of the other healer and/or has to rely on a bubble. Since Paladins have, at most, one instant cast heal (which has a cooldown), it is quite easy for a Rogue and/or Warrior to shut them down via interrupts. Under that kind of pressure, a Paladin can only Cleanse, use that one heal and eventually bubble. The main problem to targetting them with a group like ours is that they will likely be wearing 10-16k armor, so they will mitigate a lot of damage. The good news is that a lot of Paladins don't wear as much resilience gear as other classes since their PvE gear is often more effective. Also, this might still be better than targetting another class since it will mean there is really only 1 healer trying to heal up the damage we do, rather than 2. The downside is that we would obviously be ignoring the other players who can run around wreaking all sorts of havoc.


Thinking about our team a bit more, we really have a generalist sort of group. Here's what we've got available to us:
Holy Priest (Healing, Mana Burn, Dispelling)
Resto Shaman (Healing, Purging, Depoisoning, Spell Interruption, Heroism)
Feral Druid (CC, Spell Interruption, Decursing, Depoisoning, Melee DPS)
Rogue (Melee DPS, Stuns, Spell Interruption, Poisons)
MS Warrior (Melee DPS, Mortal Strike, Hamstring, Spell Interruption)

Overall, I would say we have a little of everything, but no obvious overwhelming strength to use. Thus, I get the feeling we often try to adapt to what the other team is throwing at us and adopt a control/mana burn strategy, and that's a hard thing to coordinate and figure out on the fly. Maybe we need to better define a strategy for dealing with each type of group we might see (3 dps melee/caster heavy, 4 dps melee/caster heavy, etc) so that we're a bit more coordinated, going in. Plus, I'm not sure we are really a group that is designed to play the control strategy we've been using. We only have one mana burner (who is also a healer) and one real crowd controller (cyclone/roots). Maybe it would also be better to spend less time worrying about control (via CC and mana burns) and more about burning things down.


Here are some random other thoughts of things we could try that might help out:
- Disrupt Polymorph: It seems like we are at our worst when we get CC'd, so disrupting that might be more of a priority. Polymorph is the worst since they will generally go after the Priest and we don't have anyone else who can dispel the Polymorph. Possible options are Earthshock and Cyclone (I assume the Warrior and Rogue will be busy elsewhere).
- More Feral DPS, less worry about CC: I have generally been playing CC to try and help keep our healers alive. Perhaps it would help us out more if I were to go more on the offensive and try to help burst down a target. This could be particularly good when Heroism goes up - give a yell that it is going up and then we'll have 3 powerful melee dishing out damage rather than just the normal 2 that we have. Also, going to feral form means our melee DPS gets an extra 5% crit and they heal themselves when they crit.

[Concillian]

In your setup, I think I'd be going after their DPS on shaman or priest first and here's why:

- Most good 5v5 teams have a priest.
- A large portion of priest healing is dispellable.
- you have no purges / dispels on your "offense" (rogue + warrior)

Switch the feral to a role of molesting the healers. Feral charge + bash + cyclone + whatever the cat disorients are called rotations can do this pretty well
Switch rogue / warrior to a role of disrupting whatever is on the healers, these become focus target.

As TD mentioned, healers have little they can do if they are being focused. While he said Paladins, the same is also true of any other healer if the other team is smart enough to be purging them. Priest's can sometimes bait into interrupting shadow so they can get a heal off, but no guarantee, especially without Concentration aura (one of the most under the radar crucially important tools in 5v5).

So at this point their focus target becomes your "offensive purge" player, which is worth an unmeasurable amount of DPS if they're trying to heal with priest or druid instants (and they likely will be).

My philosophy in 5v5 is to ensure you have an offensive dispel on whatever the focus target is. This is because I have experience from both ends. On my priest I can survive a warrior until I'm approximately OOM if I'm not purged. As a warrior I've seen this too, but I've also seen from both sides a priest getting flattened in no time when someone else is doing nothing other than spamming purge / dispel on the target. When you do this you can kill a target that is being healed with much less DPS. Without this you are likely to be hitting the target until their healers run OOM. Ideally you want the first focus to be a healer, but in your case this probably isn't possible.

The downside to focusing a paladin first is that bubble is a lot more difficult to dispel than BoP. If you have a focus target on the non-paladin, and someone literally spamming purge/dispel, you won't even see BoP when it's cast except that it will clear MS, deep wounds, etc... (but not wound poison). This is part of why with such a physical damage focused team you need to center your strategies around offensive purges. BoP is a complete killer to you if you have to purge it in a reactionary fashion. If it gets insta-purged, it becomes helpful to your focus strategy because their paladin just burned a global cooldown where he wasn't healing.

[TheDragoon]

As TD mentioned, healers have little they can do if they are being focused. While he said Paladins, the same is also true of any other healer if the other team is smart enough to be purging them. Priest's can sometimes bait into interrupting shadow so they can get a heal off, but no guarantee, especially without Concentration aura (one of the most under the radar crucially important tools in 5v5).

My main point was that Paladins (and probably Shamans, too) are particularly bad when under fire because they don't have instant cast spells. A Priest or a Druid could throw on instant cast HoT's, PoM, and shield, so they can actually still try to do things. But if we were able to have a healer focus more on purging those spells, then the result would be largely the same. And of course Cyclone doesn't care what you're trying to cast...

[NotSoDarklord]

2) Perhaps we should consider using our Rogue as crowd control more than DPS. Yes, this means our DPS is cut severely. But we're not a burst team anyway; all of our wins are going to be protracted battles of mana control. The idea of using our Rogue as CC on a DPS'er is to once again limit their DPS on us so that our Shaman and Priest can take more offensive actions (Mana Burns, shocks, purges). We can win the mana war with Mana Burn abuse, but only if our Priest isn't getting focused by 2-3 players.

3) In general, crowd controlling their DPS seems more important than trying to disrupt their healing. If their DPS'ers are handled, we have Mana Burn to take care of the enemy healers and force them to run off and drink - then we can try to burst focus a player and get them killed.

Not trying to nitpick but the problem with shaman healers is how fast they run out of mana compared to paladins. They are great offensive healers but they simply don't have the longevity even with mana tide. Shaman are fine healers but trying to play the mana war with a shaman main healer just seems like a waste of the great offensive synergy of a priest and a shaman.

[Concillian]

My point being that any 2 healer team is susceptible to this in that if you focus one healer (and purge spam) then the other healer is doing all the healing.

I suspect most teams in the 1700-1800 range are smart enough to have an offensive dispel on the focus target, so all your focused target can really do is cast heals and get locked out of them. So may as well use them as your offensive dispeller by choosing a focus target who is attacking them. Sneak a heal in when you can, sure.

[Delc]

Not sure how open you guys are to the idea of respecs, but I think swapping the druid and the shaman might help. Enhancement shaman and resto druid. The burst dps of a rogue, warrior, enhancement shaman combo is huge. Also if your druid is spending their time using cyclone and roots you aren't getting much out of the feral spec and are in a 2 dpser situation.

[Xame]

So at this point their focus target becomes your "offensive purge" player, which is worth an unmeasurable amount of DPS if they're trying to heal with priest or druid instants (and they likely will be).

My philosophy in 5v5 is to ensure you have an offensive dispel on whatever the focus target is. This is because I have experience from both ends. On my priest I can survive a warrior until I'm approximately OOM if I'm not purged. As a warrior I've seen this too, but I've also seen from both sides a priest getting flattened in no time when someone else is doing nothing other than spamming purge / dispel on the target. When you do this you can kill a target that is being healed with much less DPS. Without this you are likely to be hitting the target until their healers run OOM. Ideally you want the first focus to be a healer, but in your case this probably isn't possible.

I would take this to a previous thread Bolty posted about how a holy priest beats a shaman (they typically don't). A shaman has huge control over healing classes. With an offensive purge to stop HoTs and a shock (rank 1?) to lock a school, they can greatly reduce the effectiveness of a healer (easy to do with focus and assist) and still have time to dps/heal. Also an earthbind totem to reduce movement if you have running battles helps keep the other sides melee more under control. With healing not landing, it forces the other side to start using cooldowns which should give you the tempo to play your type of fight.

[TheDragoon]

Not sure how open you guys are to the idea of respecs, but I think swapping the druid and the shaman might help. Enhancement shaman and resto druid. The burst dps of a rogue, warrior, enhancement shaman combo is huge. Also if your druid is spending their time using cyclone and roots you aren't getting much out of the feral spec and are in a 2 dpser situation.

That's not going to happen any time soon from a pure gearing standpoint. Both characters are very significantly well geared for their respective roles and it would take a very, very long time to regear enough to be effective. :)

This is one of the reasons that it makes me wonder if we should play more offensively and less defensively than we have been. Most of the matches that go quickly for us are due to us completely obliterating a member of the other team and perhaps the feral druid in feral would be better for that than we are currently doing. It feels like it has been a long time since we won a match by outlasting the opposition.

[oldmandennis]

Enhancement shaman don't usually burst that well. Also, that means you have 3 melee DPS, which can be difficult to keep on target. Elemental burst better and shock more, while being less vulnerable to kiting. It's also frequently easier to gear up Elemental when you are resto.

Trying to ambush is probably a mistake. If one of your stealthers gets caught, you are probably down a man before anyone can reach him with a heal. I love it when people make that mistake.

[mjdoom]

I also was wondering if it might behoove us to have TD go on a more offensive role in feral to try to burst down a target. Even with BoP being involved we still can usually burst a target close to death but have trouble getting enough dps to push them over the edge sometimes before the heals can land. While Earth Shock (and of course I use Rank 1) is a nice heal disruptor it is on a longer cooldown than the minor lockout it causes and is not a reliable constant source of heal interrupts. With more dps on the focus target getting one interrupt will go a longer way to putting the other team's healers behind.

Another consideration is that we can tend to have trouble with certain classes "getting away". While BoF is a part of this I think another thing is that our warrior is *not* a mace spec stunlocking machine (OMG). Having an extra stun from the druid availabe if necessary may be a key ability to keep certain targets from getting away as easily.

While we are heavy on melee dps they still synergize together well and with heroism up our damage can still be decent even on higher AC targets. I even recall when we face the occasional double pally healing teams when it comes time for us to kill one of the paladins they generally die fairly fast while not BoPped or bubbled. If we go harder for that first kill and just use the shaman to try to shock heals as he can while trying to keep the priest from going splat that may just be the best strategy to use at this point.

One other personal note... it is sometimes really hard to be an offensive purger/interrrupter while being forced into being the main healer at the same time (because they are trying to obliterate our priest):(

[Concillian]

One other personal note... it is sometimes really hard to be an offensive purger/interrrupter while being forced into being the main healer at the same time (because they are trying to obliterate our priest):(

Indeed, you need to be healing at that point. The priest has a very difficult time healing, and if the team is any good, they will have a purger / dispeller on the priest so most of his healing is useless... which is why I suggested whoever is getting focused becomes the offensive purger.

[Bolty]

which is why I suggested whoever is getting focused becomes the offensive purger.

It's definitely a good idea. If I'm getting focused, I dispel the focus target heavily. If the Shaman is, he does the purging while I try to keep him vertical.

I still think we should go for Pallies more. We've got 2 offensive dispels to nuke off Blessing of Freedom and Blessing of Protection, and a Priest for nuking Divine Shield. They should drop like rocks, plate or not.

-Bolty