Rogue Warrior Warlock |  | Resto Shaman Holy/Disc Priest Resto Druid Holy Paladin |
The basis of the healer/dps team is that they are going to outlast you (one dps will kill both of you before you kill one of them. So what are the strategies?
1) Kill the healer! This is everyone's first instinct, and with good reason. If you can take out the healer, the dps will fall quickly thereafter. The problem is- you can never kill that little bugger! If you decide to go for the healer, you had better kill him. Almost dead does not count. In the meantime his dps is free to do whatever he wants (which on a no-healer team is sure death for at least one person)
2) Kill the dps! Let's just focus fire the dps, there is no way the healer can heal through BOTH of us right? Please. That guy over there? Yeah, the one with the yellow glowing weapon-- he healed through the damage from Gruul. Are you more badass than Gruul?? I'm not! (Although sometimes I forget). This strategy might work if you have a MS warrior or a rogue with wound poison on both weapons, but even then-- that guy healed through Temporus and his debuffs stack up to 100%! In any case, neither Nomakk nor I are a MS warrior or rogue.
3) Crowd control the dps. Take the dps out of the fight via roots/trap/sleep/cyclone. The problem is, you have 12 seconds max to kill the healer now, who is probably pole dancing on you (hunter dps goes to zero!). You can cycle crowd control with moderate success, but this requires excellent communication. One miscue and the dps gets to restealth/charge/drink/bandage/fearbomb. It's like an angry hornet coming out of that crowd control. What's worse is he's had time to analyze the fight and think about exactly what he's going to do when he gets out.
4) Crowd control the healer, kill the dps. We try, and we try. This strategy never seems to work. We just can't get the dps down in 12 seconds. As SOON as that healer gets the smallest window, he is throwing a PW:S/renew/NS-HT/earthshield/BoP on the dps. Unless you can keep the healer on complete lockdown, he'll get some heals off- you can be sure he's smashing his macro so it will land the millisecond he is out of captivity. This strategy works well if you have a rogue on your team; they are great at control. Again, hunter/moonkin != rogue.
So what's left? It seems we've tried everything possible! Is there no hope?
Of course there is! And like most great inventions, discovering it was completely by accident. And the secret is: split your dps. It's counter-intuitive, sure, but there's good reason behind it. The key is to put pressure on both the healer and the dps. No matter how much +healing the opposing team has they still have to deal with the global cooldown. Make the healer make a choice on who to heal in his next global cooldown. Make him feel like he can't keep up. He'll either completely forget about himself or his dps, or just not have time to heal both. That's when you can take advantage.
So how do you keep pressure on both? For Nomakk, it's multi-shot, stings, and pet. For me, its going into dot mode. IS/MF on both, roots on the dps, treants on the healer. Never underestimate your treants. People panic when there are 3 trees beating on them, even though together they are not as powerful as one Curse of Agony. Get in the healer's head, make him panic, and you have the upper hand. When there are treants, people have a hard time focusing on the person who is landing a starfire (which, when it stuns, freaks the healer out even more) so it's unlikely you'll get an earthshock/HoJ/feral charge to stop you.
If you are having trouble with healer/dps teams, try splitting your dps. Remember, keep the pressure on both with dots, confuse the healer as much as possible. Generally, induce as much panic and mayhem as you can! The sky is falling!
4 comments:
I hate to toot my own horn, but maybe this will help you out:
http://outofmana.blogspot.com/2007/05/arena-initiative-momentum-parity.html
Some games, due to classes (what you bring vs what they bring), the win doesn't come from simple "kill the healer" or "kill the dps"---but a combination of timing and resource management.
Nice blog btw.
Im a Balance Druid and my Arena partner is Feral. We own every combination thrown at us, except the dreaded Pally/whoever combo. The freakin pally bubble is outrageous. And, it seems every team we face has a Pally, so our wins-losses aren't looking so good. Priest/whoever, Resto/whoever, Shaman/whoever = no problem. But not the Pally. UNTIL - during our last battle of the week, when we needed the win to go over 500, a Pally/Rogue combo comes a-charging. We attack the Pally in unison knowing the dreaded bubble is gonna pop any second. I hit him with dots (MF,ISW), and once we get him just over 50% down, I hit him with cyclone. While the Pally is swimming harmlessly in twirling air, my partner spams the pounce button while taking vicious hits from the rouge. Counting my ticks, I start my SB wind-up hoping I timed it correctly. Then bang, SB unloads, partner pounces, MF and mangle and to our utter surprise, the Pally drops dead. It took us a second or two to realize we finnally downed a Pally and this gave the Rouge time to run away and hide in shadows. Once we found him, it wasn't even a contest. I don't know if we'll win the next time we face the Pally combo, but we at least have a plan now.
By the way, I hate Pally's.
Update - last night I did the 2v2 thang to get our weekly points, and low and behold, we get the same Pally/Rogue combination 4 times in a row. FOUR!!! Sadly to say, they owned us all 4 times. In each contest we had the Pally near death, but our new strategy could not finish him off before the bubble appeared. Once those beasts bubble, its over.
Watching a Moonkin and Bear cry openly in public is heartwrenching...
@megan That was a fantastic article. Thanks a lot for linking it, and thanks for checking out my blog. Not sure if you will ever see this comment since I'm so late to post it, but thanks!
@pesce Grats on beating a pally! Typically Nomakk and I play the debuff game with pallies. I try to load him up with IS, MF, and FF while Nomakk keeps Hunter's Mark and Viper Sting (this is what we are trying to protect) so he has to cleanse multiple times to get VS off. Against a pally rogue team, we'd try to CC the rogue and do the same. It's all about debuffs. If a rogue has FF, HM, and Ice trap and the pally has IS, MF, FF, and VS on him, that's a lot of cleansing to do. Like Megan pointed out in her post, the tradeoffs are much more in your favor because you are forcing the pally to play very defensively while the rogue is locked down which means 0 dps vs our uninhibited dps. As far as fighting the same team over and over, once Nomakk and I lose to the same team twice in a row, we take a 10 minute break so the chances are lower that we see them again-- you never know though. The arena gods don't like druids :)
Post a Comment