Edit:  I encourage anyone who reads the following to take what I have written with a massive grain of salt.  There are some formidable problems with the Warlock Heavy team that I proposed.  The biggest has to be the lack of escape abilities that Warlocks have.  While they have access to Fear\Howl of Terror\Death Coil, they have no ability that is a true panic button a la Ice Block or DS.  Granted they do have alot of HP, but when you’re wearing cloth, that’s not going to mean that much to a Warrior who is about to melt your face.
Remember, in the end, good teamwork will really be the deciding factor.  (Edited 3\9)

*WARNING: Massive Theorycraft Alert!*

My brother and I talk about WoW PvP quite a bit despite the fact I no longer play even half as seriously as I used to. We got to talking about arena team builds several days ago and what would make for a a strong PvP team build. After the conversation was over, I started mulling over this while leveling my mage.

(Yes, despite the fact I like talking about PvE most of the time, I have PvPed heavily and enjoyed it. My first MMO was DAoC, where I still have many fond memories of the PvP fights there. On WoW, the first server I rolled on was Frostwolf as the gnome rogue Cog.)

Most of the top PvP clans in WoW are running balanced teams. This makes sense, a versatile team should be able to handle most, if not all, situations. But the problem with WoW PvP is that these teams are chained to their healers. Should the healing support falter, the team will crumble before long. Previously, the solution has been to focus fire down the healers when possible, or just focus fire the DPSers and leave the healers for last.

I started thinking though, what if you simply overloaded the healers? Put out so much damage that it was simply not possible to handle it all?

I thought up a team first of a Warrior, Rogue, Priest, Affliction Warlock, and a healing hybrid. The team was built around the idea of stacking Wound Poison and Mortal Strike, while taking advantage of Unstable Affliction and the other Warlock DoTs. Of course after some fact-checking, I realized that Wound Poison and Mortal Strike do not stack, and it was likely that there just wasn’t enough damage occurring to do what I wanted. So I scrapped that team idea. But I still maintained that the strategy of overloading the healers was the right one.

It looks like I didn’t take the idea far enough.

There are reports of people running teams nearly full to the brim with Warlocks with one healer. The result? Teams are being utterly annihilated.

The problems are this:

DoTs Stack: Warlocks can layer as many DoTs as they please on enemy PCs. On top of that, there are fun DoTs such as Unstable Affliction which make it extremely dangerous to cleanse the DoT, or Seed of Corruption, which forces the healer to cleanse the DoT, or deal with a walking suicide bomber. This means not only are players taking enormous damage per second, but the healers have to be extremely cautious about dispelling or face losing the match with one misplaced cleanse.

CCs\Pets: Warlocks bring lots of CCs to the table. Fear, Death Coil and Howl of Terror. You can blow your trinket to handle the first fear, but even with diminishing cooldowns, there’s still another 4-6 second fear around the corner. That’s ignoring the utility of the pets as well. Seduce(Succubus) and the utility of the Felhunter should not be underestimated. Especially not when there are multiple ones out.

Massive HP Totals: Warlocks may wear cloth, but they still have an impressive amount of HP. This leads to issues, especially if they have a healer.

Direct Damage: Enough said.

By layering DoTs on the entire team, I can’t see how two healers could possibly keep up with the amount of damage flowing out, especially not with the amount of CCs and the Felhunters running around. Two paladins could cleanse the UA without fear by blowing their bubbles, but after that, what then? Once a DPSer goes down, there is going to be serious issues taking out the rest of the Warlock Crew.

This is not an very big issue right now, simply because a combination of a lack of realization and resources (getting enough players to build this kind of team). Ming claims that his balanced team will deal with oddball teams as they come. Quite frankly, I don’t see how any balanced team can deal with this. There is just too much damage flowing out onto the entire team. I really don’t see this becoming a huge deal until a month or so. Blizzard will probably have to institute a DoT cap on players to fix this.

It is possible I am wrong about how imbalanced this team is, but quite frankly with skill being even, I don’t see how that could be the case.

There are other problems with WoW PvP including the lackluster performance of rogues in 5vs5 PvP, which is somewhat ironic at first when one considers how strong rogues are in 1vs1 PvP (the converse is true for Warriors).