Q n A

8thDragon, a reader, recently asked me this:

My situation is this: I have a fairly well geared priest, but my 2v2 partner is a ret pally that has trouble tracking debuffs and using freedom / cleanse on me. This results in lots of CC chains that leave one of us dead. I tried 3's with him and an enhance shaman, only to get frustrated by how
easy it is to get tunneled to death by 2 melee on the other team.

So I started leveling a druid myself. She's up to 72, and I'm starting to question my decision. It seems to me that a druid is better able to self-sustain in 2's and 3's, but giving up on my 5/5 deadly priest (with all the furious off pieces) makes me want to start breaking keyboards.

What do you think? Find a rogue (or a mage, or both) and profit?

Response:

8thDragon, my initial gut response here is that the problem is two fold, as these kinds of issues are often unable to exist with some mistakes on both sides. Let's address each of the scenarios and point out some things that you and your partner(s) can adjust to make playing your Priest more enjoyable.

2v2: Ret/Priest. Before going into what your Ret buddy is doing, ensure that if you're playing a comp that's trying to kill your Paladin before you, utilize LOS as much as possible while trying to get your Psychic Screams off whenever you can.

Ret Paladins are quite mana sensitive if they spam Cleanse and so they need to pick and choose when to use their GCD's to cleanse you to stop a cc chain or when to play defensive. Recognize, first, that Cleanses weakness is that it can affect three different types of debuffs: Magic, Poison, and Disease, and that it only removes one application per Cleanse. That acknowledged, there are two scenarios in which Cleanse could benefit: If the CC effect is protected by alot of magic/poison/disease debuffs or if the cc is not protected by many debuffs.

The first situation comes when you are playing against Warlocks, Ret Paladins, good Frost Mages, Unholy Deathknights, or Mutilate Rogues who like to sit on you. As these classes can easily and quickly apply debuffs, it may not be worth the GCD's, mana, and time for your Ret Pally teammate to cleanse as their likelihood of hitting that cc debuff is quite low. In such cases, if it looks like your partner is going to die while your trinket is down and you're getting chain cc'd, your partner needs to play defensively to try to interrupt the cc chain with Hammer/Repent and/or your partner needs to learn how to get out of LOS of the opponents so that he can pick up a heal once you get out of the cc chain. It's cruicial for DPS to avoid the tunnel vision syndrome in order to recognize when they need to gtfo.

The other situation comes about when you're playing against Priests, Survival Hunters, Frost DK's, who are not paired with one of the classes from the first group. In this case, the likelihood of snagging the CC on the first or second Cleanse is very high and as such, should be a priority for your Ret Pally buddy to remove. I highly advocate creating separate macros that auto-target teammates for both yourself and your buddy for dispel purposes. A simple /cast [mod:shift,target=partnernamehere]Cleanse;Cleanse macro is a great way to quickly dispel your partner without having to manually target them.

Additionally, I would recommend practicing calling out every cc that you get hit with or specifically asking for a Cleanse. Optimally, your partner should be dispelling the moment he sees the cc land on you, but that can be difficult to see unless he a) uses a mod to tell him when you're cc'd or b) is expecting it. It seems as though he isn't expecting it, so I would recommend having him configure a mod or two to help him keep track of things. This is especially cruicial for Hand of Freedom as it can save you from many a Kidney Shot or Hammer of Justice.

In 3's, tunnelvisioning melee cleave teams are currently plaguing many battlegroups. The weakness of 2 hybrid melee teammates is that you have neither a Mortal Strike effect or multiple chainable cc's. However, you should have superior mobility with both Earthbind Totem and Hand of Freedom to help you remove snares so that you can escape. Your Shaman should Frostshock to help peel stuff off you and your Paladin should force defensive play through swaps. Force your teammates to save their Freedom effects for you as you will need them for every Rogue, Warrior, or DK that likes to sit on your face and take a big steaming ... yeah you get the picture.

With respect to your DPS teammates, since their damage is healable, they need to prePurge their swap targets and swap quickly and often. Repentence, Hex, and Psychic Scream can be and should be chained as much as possible, and depending on opposing healer, can be either used offensively or defensively (Tree's can't be Repented or Hexed). If your swap target is a healer, dump your cc's into their main peeler. If your swap target is a DPS, dump your cc's into the healer and try to pull out a Trinket. If you can get that healer to pop his trinket, either immediately swap to him and cc the DPS or play super defensively and wait until the cc chains comes back up and do it all over again.

What about the Druid? Well, if you have spare time, level her up. Druids have a very, very, very different game play from Priests and with the right classes can be a super easy faceroll to whatever rating. However, some people prefer the offensive power of a Priest and the safety of defensive dispels. Go with what feels right to you. I will say that both classes are incredibly fun when played correctly, so either way, you can't go wrong there.

Learning Curves

First of all, apologies for the lack of updates. We're not going away a la Resto4Life. We're just a little lacking with post topics that don't cause our readers to retch from the QQ that oozes from my written words after I continuously fight DK/Lock/Pally teams in 3's as a Resto Druid. Since the game and the players seem to be holding their collective breaths for 3.1, there is this almost palpable pseudo-apathy among the seasoned raiders and arena junkies alike that 'things will be better soon'. Even if it might be remotely similar to joining a cult, I'd like to put myself into that perpetually hopeful state with everyone else and pray for some beneficial changes to the classes I enjoy playing. I hear the juice is quite good, too.

I've been playing with my Priest more and becoming reasonably proficient, or so I thought. A previous Gladiator friend of a friend and I have been talking, theorycrafting, and generally shooting the proverbial shit, when I managed to convince him to try 2's with me on his Ret Paladin. He's a 2400+ player on his Priest that he doesn't play anymore, so I figured I could learn something from him. If anything, the random misogynistic comments that come out of him when something crazy happens always lighten things up.

Even if we didn't do so great, (about even in the 18-1900's) I definitely learned alot from that outing because nothing makes you play better than someone screaming at you, "Why are you standing there?" or "Fear! Fear now!" or "Holy cow, you're so bad!" At least I know now what I'm doing wrong. While I consider myself a reasonably good player, he's definitely a few steps up and one thing that struck me is his explanation of the difference between Gladiators and non-Glad's:

The difference is that there is no thinking at the higher levels. If you don't Freedom the Kidney or Mass Dispel the bubble, as an automatic reaction, you lose. If you have to think about it, you lose.

You know, in retrospect, it's really not that far fetched. How many raiders can do Sarth3D in their sleep now? Probably a ton. What about the Heigan Dance? Probably completable with your eyes closed. Regardless of the activity at hand, it's really a matter of conditioning and strategery.

So, back to 3.1. Let's hope it comes soon and brings a more balanced Season 6. Otherwise, I'm going to pop my Asian racial and finish up leveling the Mage so I can graduate myself from a broken class to a Kalgan approved class. (Kalgan plays a Mage)