Warriors Can't Kill Me!

Taking a temporary break from my other series, and returning to one I started a while ago, today we are discussing some arena (and BGs, to a lesser extent) counters for different classes -- specifically, warriors and the gigantic woodchoppers they usually carry in an attempt to deforest you.

1) Lookit their hands. Gladius, if you have said addon and you're in an arena, will tell you spec, but if not, you can get a spot idea by checking what they're packing in terms of destructive weaponry. weapon + shield = prot (rare but sometimes you'll see them), weapon + weapon = fury, one ginormous 2H weapon that's probably bigger than your sequoia cousins = arms. Now by and large, at least in a 2s bracket (and in 3s, I've noticed, though I play that bracket less), most warriors you see in arena tend to be arms. There may be a slot for prot in 5s as a damage soak and also the spell interrupts, but *shrug*.

2) L2Kite. Warriors are so kiteable, it's not even funny. *pause*. Ok, it's actually very funny. Laugh with me. The nice thing about warriors and other melee classes is that it opens up two forms of CC -- now you can use Entangling Roots and its instant-oh-crap-counterpart Nature's Grasp as an additional way to keep a warrior away from you. Because you know what warriors have when you're not in melee range? They have crap.

3) Travel Form. It's one of your best friends, especially against arms warriors, because they have two major things that will saw through your bark. First, the bladestorm. You cannot miss this, seriously. Even if you're asleep at the keyboard, it will reach through the screen and shake you violently until you wake up. The warrior goes into a spinning machine of death, and goes all red. RED is BAD. Just like how red means stop at a traffic light. Warriors are IMMUNE TO CC for the duration. So what you must do, is get the heck away from it. Now you could run...but the warrior can keep pace with you. Besides which, he's probably hamstrung you before he started. Travel form runs faster than a spinning warrior, which gets you distance. The act of shifting INTO travel form also removes movement-impairing effects (like hamstring). It's like two for the price of one!

4) Study this picture. Memorize it.

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Mortal Strike, this is called, and it is the other incredibly dangerous thing a warrior will do to you. It reduces the healing you take by 50%, and it lasts for, wait for it, ten seconds, with a six second cd. What this means is, if a warrior is pounding on you, and you do not GET SOME DISTANCE, there is nothing to stop them from keeping that debuff up on you continuously (following the basic rule that 10 > 6, cwutididthar).

Pro-tip: Warrior's got a MS on you. Hamstring, Bladestorm. You run like a good cheetah, rejuv yourself somewhere in the mix, and keep running. Your heals suck until that MS goes off. Run it out, and as soon as it wears off, swiftmend yourself. Matches against warriors, I find, frequently come down to me watching me and my partner's debuffs and carefully timing the important heals to go off in the little windows of non-MS that you manage to snag. You will never be totally free of them (well, until the warrior is dead, obviously), but you can create windows by making it very hard for the warrior to stay on top of you. Druids are *the* most mobile healer in the game, and if you don't use that mobility you're losing a major tool. Also, when the warrior is bladestorming, he's very dangerous to be around...but he can't do anything besides spin in a circle (it requires concentration not to get dizzy and fall over). So for the duration of the BS he's not going to be putting up MS on anyone. Get some distance, and look for the opportunity that opens up. Every cloud has a silver lining, yes?

Another option here is strategic CC -- if you've almost got free of a MS, it may be a good idea to throw a cyclone up to get those last couple seconds to go by without a reapplication.

5) Gear...it's all about gear, for warriors more than anyone else. Good gear on a warrior = massive hurt. Bad gear on a warrior = roflfail. The nice thing about arms warriors is that they're not very bursty so you can likely get a fairly non-skewed picture about what kind of DPS they're going to put on you from the get-go, and that in turn will educate you about what kind of hotting you need to keep up.

So there be a melee class...next time...locks? Or maybe we'll get lucky and I'll get my dogtag scripting to work and share a fantastic BG tag I came up with but haven't quite ironed the kinks out of yet...

Rogues can't kill me!

Two notes of interest --

1) A couple teams apparently hit 3k ratings last week, which is supposed to be impossible, but isn't. Response: some would claim the arena system is broken. Other more rational beings, and I would tend to agree with them, interpret this as meaning that in fact it's not just the players who don't understand the system. The designers also have changed and tweaked everything so much over the course of S6 that they too have no idea what's really going on.

2) I read somewhere, I don't remember where, that DK/tree is one of the best 2s comps ever, which is great news b/c that happens to be what I'm running right now. And World of Ming just confirmed it as one of the best ways to get to 2350! I guess that explains going 9-1 last week, but it doesn't really explain the 2-13 the week before unless you want to call that learning jitters from a new comp and a new battlegroup :-p.

EDIT: I remember now. It was in the course of checking up on those 3k teams, and one of them was a DK/tree combination :-).

Anyway, main course. Many people ask me, "WTF do you do about rogues?". Ha, I try to make myself sound more popular. Actually, one person asked me that b/c they were spamming dalaran general chat for resto pvp advice and I happened to be around so I answered his questions, thus feeling like a rock star while at the same time feeding him what I sincerely hope were good tips. I generally laugh at rogues, unless they're paired with good dps who ALSO simultaneously jump me, and even then it's not so much the rogue as the combination of the two. Three tips:

1) If you think you might be facing a rogue, or if it's been confirmed b/c they opened on your partner, PRE-HOT yourself. I read somewhere, from the rogue side of things, that a good rogue team will be watching to catch you with your pants down to do a quick switch onto you and bam-o. I sometimes pre-order Abolish Poison as well but it depends on how much of my attention is being absorbed at the time. At any event, don't give them the window they're looking for. Remember that HoTs are largely preventative in any case; we don't have a big heal for spiky rogue bursty damage so if they're hitting on you you better already be countering it, which leads to

2) for the love of all eight-legged deities, do not cast anything with a cast time. Yes, sometimes it's unavoidable, but as someone who has a rogue and their six billion stuns, you do not want to be locked out of your nature spells for six seconds. Do you. If you have the pre-hots rolling, you have a swiftmend available. If things get really, really dicey then you can do a NS+HT, though it's best to save that if you can for your partner. Obviously if you're gonna die though, you don't have much choice. Without you your partner is dead. My warrior partner over on ED once snapped at me after a match to watch my own health first and the rest would take care of itself. Exaggerated from his stress at losing, but the general point I think is valid.

3) Do. Not. Panic. Recognise your mortality, or immortality as the case may be. Remember the cardinal rule of most rogues (combat may be an exception but I don't think you see many of them in arena): opening burst. Again speaking from my (sub) rogue's perspective, you do not want to be anwhere near me the first six seconds after I come out of stealth, but if the mob's still alive after that then trouble ensues b/c my dps goes to hell and gone, at least relative to those first seconds. A lot of people get jumped by a rogue and freeze up / panic. If you must panic, save it for later, b/c doing it at the get-go you're feeding right into a rogue's strongest points. If you can keep your cool during a rogue's opener on you and react appropriately, you'll be much better off once he's blown his opening burst. I have found a wide discrepancy in rogue damage to me, so when he jumps me my first move is to watch how fast my health bar is going down. If it's dropping fast enough to be worrisome, remember that Barkskin is your best friend. If not, keep the hots (because you put them up preventatively...right?) rolling and use Abolish Poison where you would have popped BS.

4) Save the trinket. If you're hotted up a rogue should not kill you in the 4 seconds of CS stun. But he might if he goes straight from that into a 4-5 point KS; use the trinket then.

Next week, barring something more exciting coming up, counters to DKs/Warriors...