Now anyone who’s been playing 3s this season has noticed the biggest trend to hit this bracket is the shear volume of cleave teams. It comes as no surprise as you can add just about any two viable melee classes together excluding enhancement shaman, group them with a healer (probably a druid or a prot paladin) and succeed in 3s.
While I don’t think cleave is grossly overpowered, I do think that the amount of skill that effects the outcome of cleave games is much lower than classic caster / melee / healer teams. You can be the best DK in the world, playing at the highest level and the degree of separation between your cleave team and any random DK / Ret / Warrior / Hunter + Druid / Hpal won’t be too noticeable. I actually feel bad for people playing cleave because it doesn’t really give you a chance as an individual player to really excel, although I’d assume its fun to play the role of a blender. In fact when I think of a ret paladin training a priest, with about 7 buttons, spinning around, I don’t see it much differently than making a smoothie.
That being said, cleaves aren’t going anywhere any time soon; their popularity only continues to grow. As RMP, which is currently the most viable and most played rogue comp in 3s, you will no doubt have to deal with countless cleaves and their variations when playing arena. It’s also possible for your priest to simply die in a strangulate regardless of how well you play, but there are some key steps you can take toward giving your team the best chance for success.
Strategy against Cleave
A lot of what I’ve learned over the season in 3s, coupled with the advice, tips, and chance to practive with some of the best RMP players, including Realz, who plays with one of the best rmps in the world in Sk-US, has made it clear what the most important thing is against cleave. Make the first move. When the gates open, rogue and mage should be mounted and rogue should stealth as late as possible without getting knocked out. If a quick sap is possible on the way to your cheapshot target, that’s fine, but don’t let it slow you down. The mage should through down an early ranged nova and cut the opposition melee off in the middle, keeping their distance from your priest.
As a rogue, at this point if the cleave has a warrior, it’s best to go for the other class (probably a ret paladin or deathknight). It’s probably best to open on a ret pally if the opposition has one. Go hard on this target with cs ks while your mage shatters. The whole point here is to put pressure early, force them to use defensive cds and keep them away from your priest for as long as possible. During this time, your mage can cc through not only sheep but also novas and snares. The important thing here is pressure; early pressure; pressure on the opposing cleave well before you priest has two melee on him.
Next what will likely happen is a swap. It should be nothing new to any rmp that swapping targets is essential to victory, but here you want to swap shortly after your first opener so long as another target is within range of the rogue for a stun, especially on resto druid teams who’s weakness lies in swapping to a target without hots. A deepfreeze switch is great when possible but if not the rogue should be the one to call out or confirm the possibility of a switch. Ret paladins are usually a solid choice to swap to as mage damage absolutely destroys them and swapping to them doesn’t necessarily require a stun. Warriors are one of your worst targets in general so swapping to them should only be situational, if you have a full stun lock for them and full cc ready for the healer.
Trying to kill healers is always a possibility so long as the melee are under some semblance of control. Obviously you don’t want to start a game by rushing a healer and letting a ret paladin and dk immediately through to throw your priest into a meat grinder. If you can get a sap or your mage can get strong snares on the melee to start a fight, then opening on a druid can be very effective in that you’ll probably waste barkskin. This means you can switch to a melee at this point, and then back to the druid if the melee swap doesn’t end things. Going healer is dangerous though, especially on paladins. They are an extremely viable target but really should only be attacked when they are in the open or out of position because they require a lot of priest pressure through damage and dispels as well as frostbolts to die in most cases. Another thing to keep in mind with paladins (ret or healing) is sacrifice, if they are at lower health because of sac your team should always be looking for an opportunity to swap to them.
BM hunter cleaves will usually run with a paladin and deathknight. Here you want to open quickly on the hunter and dismantle early, one of the few ways you can actually shut down their damage. The mage should go for an early imp cs on the pally followed by cc that will force a trinket, and even so put the hunter under a lot of damage and pressure. Although BM hunters can’t be controlled and do a lot of damage, they can be killed very easily and paladins can be shut down by a mage.
In summary, the key here is to be the aggressor. The most important factor determining who wins against cleave is whether you can cut off the rush and put pressure on the opposition before they have a chance to be offensive, and that matters way more than target selection or cc rotations, as important as these are.
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rofl, i’ll use that man. ‘I don’t see it much differently than making a smoothie.’ so true >.>
Comment by irpete — July 25, 2009 @ 10:33 am
Thanks for the tips, anyway, even though you are playing carefully, the fu***** crits of a Frost Dk or a Retpally can still make a rogue bite the dust in less than 3-4 seconds. “You got wotlk’d” like people say… :/
Comment by Zolnir — July 25, 2009 @ 10:36 am
i also play rmp. we do the best and most synchronised cc chains on our targets, if say a paladin is free for 3-4 seconds.. it’s a very posible game over. (soz for double post, this just seems like the best place to chat about this
)
Comment by irpete — July 25, 2009 @ 10:46 am
yup. Rogues blow half their CDs lose more than half their HP trying to burst a healer down and then he heals in One spell crit / 2 non heal crits and makes it all worthless. ghey
Comment by Rohan — July 25, 2009 @ 11:17 am
hey, need to get ahold of you, um email is as listed, dont wanna post any info here dont know if you can see that, cellphone is canceled so yeah
Comment by Aeias — July 25, 2009 @ 3:24 pm
^
Zomg its Aeias zomg
I am just started 2v2 with a Retribution Paladin and it’s going great. Yeah, it’s actually not faceroll, as we assumed it would be. With the CC of Sap, Blind, and Repentance we do quite well.
Comment by JizzTheThug — July 25, 2009 @ 7:43 pm
Forgot to mention I’m going to run PPR with the same pally.
Comment by JizzTheThug — July 25, 2009 @ 7:44 pm
I run hunter/rogue/priest (not the same, I know) and we really haven’t had many problems with Cleave teams unless our priest doesn’t make use of frost trap. DK/War/Healer, we try to get the sap off, then work the DK. The healer will let sap wear off most times, and that’s when Blind > Trinket > Fear comes in to play… The DK will most often die during that. I agree with going ret hard when it’s ret/war/healer. There are even times we’ve gone healer first during cleave and between cs > ks > garrote > silencing shot- they die.
Guess I’m just agreeing with you and tossing out some ideas for people who aren’t RMP. (Btw, before we tanked about 50 points we were the #7 R/H/P in the world according to what Arena Junkies had posted)
Comment by Phrin — July 25, 2009 @ 8:10 pm
dude, i totally agree, i usually run lock rogue in 2s, but decided to try a ret, and weve been kicking ass, sooo much easier to reset, with the bop and heals, its great
Comment by Bendickson — July 26, 2009 @ 7:21 am
good post, just started running Sham, Mage, and Rogue, we’ve doing switches pretty hard to some classes and sticking on other teams… PMR is still tough for us. yea i use to run Ret Disc Rogue… it was joke how fast things would die… and when they didn’t die it was my fault
Comment by Suishi — July 26, 2009 @ 8:19 am
I’ve been playing RMP around 2600 for quite a while, obviously meeting plenty of cleave teams. However, as opposed to what you’ve written, versus warrior cleaves (Suchs as Ret / War / Druid) we’ve found out that the best way to beat this is to pull a sap off on the ret, if that should fail sheep him, while rogue just locks down the warrior, all 3 members of the RMP burst him.
This will effectively get him down to ~20%, forcing a shield wall.
Often after this point the warrior will be intervening, fully hotted.. This is when we go for a switch on the paladin who is fully dispelled by our priest. Sometimes a paladin uses Divine Sacrifice during the nuke on the warrior, making the switching even easier.
Reasoning behind this is that our priest can survive a Ret Pala or a DK on his own for quite a while, but a warrior constanly applying MS on him with the other “Cleaver” just assisting slightly is just too much for a priest to handle.
Comment by Verkku — July 26, 2009 @ 9:01 am
Hahaha! The blender picture from Blentec!
A mage-rogue-priest team, will it blend? That is the question.
Ta ta ta ta ta, lala lalala…
http://www.willitblend.com/
Comment by Bloedhoertje — July 27, 2009 @ 8:19 am
9/10 great post really insightful
keep making videos bro
you are the reason I got 2173 as my highest in 2s and 2121 as my highest in 3s
thanks
-Kalex of Dunemaul
Comment by kalex — July 27, 2009 @ 9:56 am
the paladin is look like a blender
Comment by Deadlycuts — July 27, 2009 @ 11:17 am
Do you plan on playing as heavily as you have in the past once summer’s over?
Comment by Aeth — July 29, 2009 @ 5:06 pm
Thanks, now I know what to do against RMP’s:P
Comment by Animal — July 31, 2009 @ 4:57 am
Sure yah do.
Comment by Babyfartzmageezacs — August 2, 2009 @ 9:39 pm
even if you do ‘know what to do against rmps’ (iam guessing you’re some cleave faceroll setup) what will you actually change? i’ve played a cleave setup on torny realm and got 2k as an utterly clueless dk pressing random buttons that i knew did damage, only thing i seemed to need to ‘co-ordinate’ was strangulate when my target was 60%ish hp. rmp takes one hell of alot more team work to be successful. i mean this is what we said when the gates rose or platform rised at the begining of a match as a cleave
‘right we’re killing this guy yea?’
‘ok.’ that was literally it, pathetic.
Comment by irpete — August 2, 2009 @ 11:35 pm