Rogue / Priest Strategy: Position Discussion Audio

One of the most important, yet most overlooked aspect of playing rogue / priest 2v2…or for that matter any arena team comp, is without a doubt positioning. Too often I think players and teams get so caught up in the ideas 100 other factors that they completely forget about their positioning.

Being in the right place at the right time isn’t an accident, in many ways it’s the only true strategy in arena. Knowing the type of strategy your opponents are going to attempt will allow you to develop a strategy to appropriately counter your opponents.

This is the very essence of arena position strategies, but believe me, learning how to do this is no easy task. It takes a lot of experience and practice, but by simply being aware you’ll have a keen eye for areas where you can exploit your opponents position and quickly take advantage of their mistakes.

I say all of this in preparation for the very first Zug Gaming audio strategy discussion. A few weeks ago I had a brief conversion (relatively speaking!) with a member of the Zug Gaming community. He had a some questions regarding different strategic aspects of rogue / priest as well as overall positional awareness factors in arena.

The following recording includes:

• Priest / Rogue strategy discussion
• Positional strategy points
• Healer / DPS movement factors of arena
• Among other points

Rogue / Priest Strategy: Audio Discussion

I’ll try to get an actual player up later this evening.

Discipline Priest Arena Strategy

This post was a question I received via email, I thought I’d just cross post it here so anyone with similar concerns might be able to get something out of this as well.

Priest Arena Questions…
Hey zuggy, I’m a disc priest who runs currently with a shadow step rogue. I have trouble keeping up with all my dispels and strats as the matches progress. I don’t have any addons currently except Proximo. Could you give me some advice on what addons to use?

Thanks so much

Things i would like:

Low health warnings for my rogue partner.. sometimes i miss it when his health gets low.. an alert of some kind would be nice.

CD tracking. I would like to know when my fear is ready I would like to maybe know when my inner fire is not up on my toon alerting me i need to re-apply. Please tell me if you think this is a good idea.

Also mass dispel for pally bubble or mage iceblock? How should i configure the spell sometimes it seems it takes too long to get it fired off. Also along the same lines… Heroism! I need to get this dispelled quickly .. how do you typically handle this?

My team seems to shoot up to 1600 or 1650 then go on losing streaks. We’ve beat teams with rating around 1700 and lost to teams with ratings much lower than ours I just can’t seem to always figure out what to do.

ON the map with he coffin in the middle i struggle with positioning of my priest. I generally move around the coffin trying to LOS but i definitely struggle on this map. Sometimes I don’t know if i should mana burn or heal myself.. so i have so many questions. I’ve read your dis priest rogue guide and it was very helpful but I need more help!

Priest Arena Strategy Answers…
As far as addons are concerned, I’m more of a minimalist. So I wouldn’t concern yourself too much with trying to pound your screen with additional buttons and flashing warnings.

In my opinion keeping a clean UI allows you to much better manage targeting and awareness, as you can see everything much easier.

As far as low health warnings go, I’d just suggest looking at getting a unit frame mod. My preference is AG unit frames, but there are lots of others out there. Check out this article I recently did on best unit frame mods if you’d like to check out more.

For cooldown tracking I keep it simple. I use SCT and OmniCC. Configure your SCT to bring up cooldown warnings, and in addition omniCC will overlay textual cooldown counters on all of your abilities.

Dispel Macros
As far as managing your dispels goes, I’d just create a few macros to better deal with it. Here’s a few that I use.

/target (name of your rogue)
/cast Dispel Magic

/assist (name of your rogue)
/cast Dispel Magic

/cast [target=focus] Dispel Magic

You may not want to use them all, but at least having an assist dispel is absolutely crucial in my opinion. Check out Dispel Macros discussion for additional help.

Arena Positioning
As far as positioning is concerned, all I can say is keep moving and keep using your globals. Too often I see players just panic when they are under fire. You need to maintain focus and stick to your game plan.

Conclusions
Keep the hots up, heal before you “have” to heal. Don’t let yourself red line before trying to los and heal. If you’re comfortable playing the offensive mana burn game this is a great way to put the opposing team into a defensive position.

Here are some additional resources you might find helpful:
Priest / Rogue 2v2 Arena Strategy

Addons..
Quartz Casting Bar

Hope this helped answer some of your questions, as always feel free to shoot me any additional questions if you have further concerns.