Healadin Arena'ing

[Mordekhuul]

I saw a post by Gum that he was planning on making his dual spec a healadin PVP spec, and wondered who else out there is healing an arena team or 3, and what their 3.1 plans are.

Best my partner and I hit in our 4-6 weeks of season 5 arena battles was 1837 rating, and I was running 49/0/22 (didn't want to get too reliant on JotW or Repentence since I didn't plan on going deep enough in ret in 3.1 thanks to the IoL change).

I'm looking at http://ptr.wowhead.com/?talent=sxudxhMsVucugdxGzur for PVP in 3.1, personally, at least for starters.

I look forward to hearing other perspectives and plans (and results as the season progresses).

[Artega]

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#sxAdxhMsz...uro:TjsMVm

I'll be running that for my 3's and probably my 2's as well. Sacred Cleansing is a worthless ability simply because it's a RNG chance to proc an RNG-based effect. No thanks.

Whether or not Holy Power is better than Divine Intellect is really up to personal opinion. You'll have more crit with Holy Power, but you have more MP and spellpower with Divine Intellect, and your Divine Plea will recover more.

Holy Shock and Salvation are no-brainer glyphs. I prefer Turn Evil for my third, but Seal of Wisdom is also perfectly acceptable. I like being able to instantly get rid of gargoyles and felpuppies, though some may prefer the reduced healing cost from Seal of Wisdom, especially with the loss of Benediction.

[Mordekhuul]

Yeah, there are definite choices to make in holy.

Sacred Cleansing is fairly lame, but I'm wondering if the odd procs when rogues are beating on me or mages are messing with my partner might not add some wins here and there that we'd otherwise miss. Its heavily debated on arena junkies forums I know, mostly because I don't think anyone really understands exactly what the 30% extra resistance actually means.

I doubt I will be picking up Beacon. I don't think it will be useful in 2's unless some really popular team completely lacks offensive dispel abilities AND applies pressure to both my partner and I at the same time. If we start doing 3's I might need to sacrifice some 2v2 throughput for beacon as I hear it is useful in 3's, somehow, despite the massive mana cost.

I'm also trying to decide how to gear at this point. Whether to pick up the new WG trinket with +crit to try to help make up for the crit lost moving from ret to proc....or keep the resilience. I'm not sure.

Also, on HP vs. DI - for 2's I think I'll go with more crit just because half my matches in 2's (or more) are me running away from some kind of melee DPS, and IoL procs are pretty important.

[Artega]

Yeah, there are definite choices to make in holy.

Sacred Cleansing is fairly lame, but I'm wondering if the odd procs when rogues are beating on me or mages are messing with my partner might not add some wins here and there that we'd otherwise miss. Its heavily debated on arena junkies forums I know, mostly because I don't think anyone really understands exactly what the 30% extra resistance actually means.

I doubt I will be picking up Beacon. I don't think it will be useful in 2's unless some really popular team completely lacks offensive dispel abilities AND applies pressure to both my partner and I at the same time. If we start doing 3's I might need to sacrifice some 2v2 throughput for beacon as I hear it is useful in 3's, somehow, despite the massive mana cost.

I'm also trying to decide how to gear at this point. Whether to pick up the new WG trinket with +crit to try to help make up for the crit lost moving from ret to proc....or keep the resilience. I'm not sure.

Also, on HP vs. DI - for 2's I think I'll go with more crit just because half my matches in 2's (or more) are me running away from some kind of melee DPS, and IoL procs are pretty important.

To be fair, IoL is now a lot less important to me than it once was, because it no longer makes your Holy Light faster. Instant Flash of Light is pretty nice, but most teams are going to have a healing debuff somewhere, which means your FoL will only be hitting you for about 1600-2000 base. I imagine I'm going to be juking heals a lot more often than I was before, because I'm not going to be able to rely on lag and user error to squeeze in one of those .75 sec Holy Lights anymore.

[Mordekhuul]

So, after an initial post-3.1 foray into arenas as 51/20/0 (no points in beacon), I swapped to retribution in frustration (had pretty solid Ret PVP gear banked and The Jawbone for a weapon).

My DK partner and I had fun for a week climbing up through 2's to around 1680, and I'm sure we would have gone higher, but...

Last night for our 2v2 I went to 32/0/39 to pair with his unholy spec, and I think we've found our home again. The matches are incredibly fun with this spec, unlike the holy/prot spec (not enough CC breaks, overly defensive spec, bad in a field of rogues and disc priests - for me anyway) or the retribution spec (fun, but matches are won or lost in the first 20 seconds - so no real strategy beyond lasting long enough to coordinate bursting someone down before lack of healing kills us).

I honestly feel like 32/0/39 + DK is more fun to play than pre-3.1 2v2 and like we have a much better shot at going 2000+. Maybe it is just a couple of months of holy/DK experience behind us from last season, but man it is fun playing a bit offensively like the spec demands.

We were beating higher rated disc/rogue teams about as often as not...perhaps more, and a lot of our losses were "oh yeah, we could beat that team, I just didn't create an opening to heal soon enough".

I think we stopped around 1750 last night after some initial losses due to, you know, being out of practice as a healer/DPS team.

[shoju]

So, after an initial post-3.1 foray into arenas as 51/20/0 (no points in beacon), I swapped to retribution in frustration (had pretty solid Ret PVP gear banked and The Jawbone for a weapon).

My DK partner and I had fun for a week climbing up through 2's to around 1680, and I'm sure we would have gone higher, but...

Last night for our 2v2 I went to 32/0/39 to pair with his unholy spec, and I think we've found our home again. The matches are incredibly fun with this spec, unlike the holy/prot spec (not enough CC breaks, overly defensive spec, bad in a field of rogues and disc priests - for me anyway) or the retribution spec (fun, but matches are won or lost in the first 20 seconds - so no real strategy beyond lasting long enough to coordinate bursting someone down before lack of healing kills us).

I honestly feel like 32/0/39 + DK is more fun to play than pre-3.1 2v2 and like we have a much better shot at going 2000+. Maybe it is just a couple of months of holy/DK experience behind us from last season, but man it is fun playing a bit offensively like the spec demands.

We were beating higher rated disc/rogue teams about as often as not...perhaps more, and a lot of our losses were "oh yeah, we could beat that team, I just didn't create an opening to heal soon enough".

I think we stopped around 1750 last night after some initial losses due to, you know, being out of practice as a healer/DPS team.

Since you have had some experience in the arenas, how hard is it to get to the rating required for Relics? Crush and I have been talking about doing a 2v2 team, but we weren't sure if a ret + resto or holy + enh or ret + enh shaman could get there.


Any thoughts? Is 1250 (where the relics are) hard to obtain?

[Mordekhuul]

Since you have had some experience in the arenas, how hard is it to get to the rating required for Relics? Crush and I have been talking about doing a 2v2 team, but we weren't sure if a ret + resto or holy + enh or ret + enh shaman could get there.
Any thoughts? Is 1250 (where the relics are) hard to obtain?

1250 is easy in my opinion. We blew up to almost 1700 running ret/DK and we had a lot less experience with that than we did with holy/dk.

I'd recommend ret/resto. I have yet to run into an enhancement shaman combo in 2's that we didn't just laughably dominate - though maybe there is one or is one that does well against the prevalent 2v2 comps but not good against paladin/dk (any team that can reliably beat rogue/priest, mage/rogue, or rogue/mage is likely to do well).

[Concillian]

Since you have had some experience in the arenas, how hard is it to get to the rating required for Relics? Crush and I have been talking about doing a 2v2 team, but we weren't sure if a ret + resto or holy + enh or ret + enh shaman could get there.
Any thoughts? Is 1250 (where the relics are) hard to obtain?

I have my priest nearly geared enough to do serious arena (20k / ~600 resilience, but still a couple of S4 epics in my gear), my warrior isn't really there, but warrior / resto and ret / disc are both reasonably strong combos, with warrior / resto being the more difficult of the two to learn.

[Mordekhuul]

So Higgles and I had a frustrating start last night. We were at 1747 rating when the week started and went something like 4 and 11 to get going this week. To encourage other healadins feeling like they just can't help the team live long enough in the bursty two's, though, we found our stride and ended up going something like 32 and 21, clearing our goal for the week of 1850.

2v2 is really fun this season, by the way, at least at these mediocre ratings. There is a large variety of teams in the field, and while I expect it to narrow some as we go up, it is a fun ride right now!

For example, if we see a warrior, DK, or paladin standing alone at match start and he has mark of the wild up, we know its a druid...but we have no idea which kind until the druid pops to cyclone one of us and goes tree or starts shredding my DK (literally) while stun-locking him. A lot of the fun, once we found a stride, was maybe losing once to teams that surprise us with their comp and then beating the snot out of them the next 1-3 times (like the double-dps feral druid team we ran into).

We also got comfortable enough with our play last night that we were much more effectively chaining our cooldowns and coordinating our burst against enemy healers, and I was playing a lot more aggressively (generally leading off with holy shock on our target + focus macro's repentence on his teammate, and then hammering either our target or his teammate based on which one is the healer).

Amusingly, with 1850 rating and almost 2k points banked I didn't buy a healy weapon though - picked up the furious gladiator's bonegrinder. I'm running as ret in our 3v3, with Higgles (DK) and Velion (disc priest) as mates - we hit 1827 last week and I think we'll go higher, particularly with both DPS running upgraded weapons.

Fun season to get into in my opinion.

[Mordekhuul]

Tried the prot healing spec tonight, again, after a disappointing downward slide earlier int he week that made us seriously consider adding a disc priest to our 2's team and just taking turns running as ret / DK with him.

After getting the hang of it...man is it fun. Scraped back up from ~1830 to over 2000 for the first time in the 2's bracket, just two days after clearing 2058 in 3v3 (where we run a ret/disc/unholy team).

Spec 19 holy, 52 prot, gem for stamina and man it is fun. Totally different ballgame...you have no instant cast heals at all, so kiting is out of the question, and you feel like a shaman sitting there trying to juke interrupts and spam cast fast heals in the face of rogues and death knights =)

[Mordekhuul]

1250 is easy in my opinion. We blew up to almost 1700 running ret/DK and we had a lot less experience with that than we did with holy/dk.

I'll take this back, now that we ran into our first enhancement shaman team that actually beat us (after some 400 games or so).

Disc/Enhancement seems viable with good teammates. The shaman just stuck to me like glue while his priest worked to stay alive against my partner.

I've also read of a ret/enhancement team in the 2500's.