Tick tock tick tock season 5 starts tuesday....Follow

I'm running Boomkin/Rogue as either 12/5/54 or 17/0/54 idk which will provide greater arena utility.

I'll be eating rogue's faces with my feral druid/blood DK combo.

ShD would probably be better with Blood. Blood has the most susceptibility to being kited of any of the DK PvP builds, and with how kiteable mut is, it would be very easy for a team to kite you.

I'm all set and prepared. Fixed up voice communication with my healadin partner, aiming for 2100 at the least. Mut/prep spec here, like mentioned a couple of times. Just waiting for the starting signal right now...

Edited, Dec 12th 2008 4:18pm by Mozared

Ret/Rogue as always. The rogue is mut/prep spec, so we're gonna divide and conquer with some double-cold blood burst action.

Fantastic changes to our set-up: Sap works on basically anything. And arcane torrent is off the GCD! I made a heresy macro (stun+silence). Blink/Hand of Freedom out of that one, sucker.

Paging Doctor Theophany to the thread please.

I'm the paladin in the set-up (by the way, i never got higher than 1840 i'm certainly no expert) so here are some very basic points to consider:

Get on Vent, or TeamSpeak or Skype or strap a telephone to you ear (my original stopgap solution). Ret/rogue is one of the more difficult teams to play. It's certainly viable, much more so than just any old dps specs slammed together, but you need to co-ordiante a lot of stuff. You'll want the pally leaping in and beating up the opponent the second after you've sapped his friend.

He will want some targeting macros to apply various effects to you. If a warrior gets some dps time, or a feral druid opens on you, you're going to need Hand of Freedom. It stops bleeding so you can restealth, and gives 10 seconds of PHYSICAL damage immunity. You can manually right-click the buff to restealth, or continue attacking.

Another one is Hand of Freedom. Mutilate specs especially are a little prone to being snared and kited around. The pally can bubble and laugh, so Hand of Freedom is generally reserved for the rogue. Put Hand of Sacrifice on as if it were a buff at the start of the match. The pally becomes immune to most forms of CC (they will break when he takes the 33% shared damage).

The macro i use is

/target (arena partner)
/cast (hand spell/cleanse/heal etc). There is an infinitely better version which lets you cast the spell without losing your current hostile target, but i can't remember it :P

Speaking of which, Cleanse can remove any disease poison or magical debuff. Walk into an Ice Trap? Get Feared, or Polymorphed, or Repented, or Hammer....you get the idea. A single press of a target-cleanse macro will clean that right off. Unless you have other trash debuffs on you like winter's chill and so on.

I'll let Theo or Kavekk or someone discuss rogue specs and glyphs and what-not, heres my prefered lv 80 (arena) pvp spec:

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=sZ0ebGcZxdbtbfufMkgzAo

Important bits: Deep enough into Prot to take Hammer of Justice and half the cooldown. Most ret/rogue matches will last about a minute or less, this talent is fantastic. Only 1/3 Heart of the Crusader. A bit of loss to crit chance. Doesn't matter since judgement of command auto-crits a stunned target, and my rogue partner has a mut-prep spec. Cold Blood times 2!

3/3 stoicism 2/3 Sanctified seals. Exploits the dispell mechanics. Purge and Dispell will aim for the Seal first and bounce of the 96% dispell resist leaving other buffs intact. That might have been fixed, i'll have to check. Divine purpose self-breaks stuns. HoFreedom to break kidney shots leaving the trinket to break blind and ruin a rogues escape. Everything else is pure burst chaos, not as much mana efficiency/regen as a ret would normally have but the fights wont last long enough for that to matter. I'll make another post about strats against some common teams, cause this is becoming an essay.

Which build do you use or favor the most Theophany?

ShD daggers in this arena season. Burst is king, and ShD is king of burst.

I'm not playing my rogue, though. I don't know if I ever will again, sadly. DK is too much fun.

Uh, because the people that rated it are stupid?

That's almost the same as my build except it takes Focused Attacks instead of Imp KS, and Initiative instead of Camo.

Did some skirmishes with a prot warrior just for fun a little while ago, we lost one out of 25 against some genuinely decent teams. It's a tremendous amount of fun. He has endless healing pots, enraged regeneration and that herbalism heal thing; it's like trying to chew through a brick wall killing him. If i get opened on and need to bubble and heal up he can happily smash face with shield wall and last stand.

He was hitting something like half my damage too. And as a nice bonus the incredible overpopulation of retadins simply aren't frightening, nothing can kill him quickly enough that i can't snap off a few heals. Great team, no idea how viable it will be higher up.

Edited, Dec 18th 2008 8:51pm by ArtemisEnteri

We've been having such good fortune with Mut/prep + retpally that I'm afraid to try ShD... I mean, more burst? it would seem unreal. But the potential is there.

I'm just so comfortable with mute, i'm afraid I'll get to panicky with shd..

5-5 this week as double rogue mut & shd. We have some major work to do to work together efficiently.