Heya guys!!  That’s right, that IS my gopher 5v5 team!!  Step off haters before they kneecap your sorry a$#@!!!  Word!!

Heh.  That’s my boys…that’s my boys… 

So I made a quickie little 5v5 last night to generate some points.  I had intended to get that off of the ground sooner, but I’ve been busy.  It was far from an ideal composition, but it was a full SK guild team using people who enjoy PvP and doing it frequently.  Wait…that sounded wrong.  People who enjoy PvP and PvP’ing frequently.  Yeah…heh.  So we had that going for us.

Nightmare Before Xmas – props out to Jack Skellington, the original Skeleton Jack.  We went 8-3, which I was very happy with considering it was a last minute effort.

• Unholy Death Knight
• Retribution Paladin
• Fury Warrior (using Furious Attacks)
• Affliction Warlock
• Discipline Priest

The start to every fight was exactly how you might imagine.  The primary kill target was always either the Warlock or the Priest.  Which, the Priest survived pretty well considering we could BoP her.  But the Lock got owned regularly.  With Blizzard publicly admitting here and here that Locks are not up to par for PvP damage mitigation, this came as no real surprise.

So the strategy finalized into something like this.  The group tries to nail down which types of toons are on the opposing team, and then pick the best kill target.  Once this is agreed upon, we prepare for destruction.  If we cannot get enough time before we engage to do so, the team defaulted to whatever target I picked.  Once I had something on Lockdown we just opened up on it.

I would Death Grip the target directly to me and Chains of Ice it.  Then I would drop an AMZ making 3-5 of our team in it for any initial burst damage dropped on the party, negating a massive amount of damage we were originally taking.  Once this is down I would lay down the damage, reserving my ghoul stun for if the target trinketed and was trying to make an escape.

Past that it was a bit of chaos.  CC’ing ranged that we could, dropping massive amounts of AoE dmg (Pestilence, Whirlwind, etc…), and generally out bursting anyone else’s capacity.  It was a lot of fun.  Most annoying thing ever?  Watching your Death Grip beam shoot off to another direction away from your target as a Grounding Totem eats it.  Always lead off with an Icy Touch if there is a Shaman, or have a caster drop it.  Wasting your DG to a GT is totally suckage.

I do not think this is the exact team I will stay with down the road however.  S5 in LK is all about burst capacity, or being able to survive burst capacity.  This gives a distinct advantage to any toon that has both of these things.  While eventually a CC compostion team might come back ahead, it’s too easy to kill someone now for that to bring as much to bear as it used to.

The composition I am in the process of forming:

• Unholy Death Knight
• Retribution Paladin
• MS or Fury Warrior (depending on which proves better since they both provide a healing debuff)
• Holy Paladin
• X Factor

So that X Factor is throwing me off.  Ideally any Plate dps would be awesome.  Hard to kill and good dps, but I’m not 100% sure that would outweigh the CC a Rogue or a Mage could bring to the table.  Also an upside of bringing a Rogue or Mage is that the other team would always try to kill that target first, meaning we could build our strategies around the expectation of whom would be the primary FF target.  With a 5th Plate the best assumption would be that they would go after either the Holy Paladin or the Warrior, with no clear ideal kill target. 

Then we’re not even covering the potential CC brought to the table by the Mage and Rogue.  I could care less about the Sap and/or Polymorph.  A POM/Pyro spec’d Mage, or just a pure Frost mage with their Water Elemental and Frost Nova Shatter Bombs = WOW!!!

For those unsure of what that last part just meant, when you are Frost Nova’d you are subject to their talent Shatter, which means they are at +50% crit chance on top of their base chance for all spells.  So if they land say 3 spells on you in that time, they will probably all crit.

And then the stun locking capacity of a Rogue?  Get out!!  Drop a Mutilate rogue Cheap Shot, Kidney Shot, Mutilate burst combos + plate melee = WTFJUSTHAPPENEDTOMEOMFG!!!!!  /win baby!!

The last slot is almost definetly going to a Rogue/Mage, but we’re not sure yet which one.  My buddy Lia (he was a S1 Gladiator on his paladin Rashera) is the warrior on the team, and we’re still discussing what to run with.  When it’s settled I’ll let you guys know.

So anyways, that was my 5v5 first time experience in WotLK.  I hope it was informative and helpful.  GL guys!!

Tags: PvP