Welcome to the World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King PvP 2v2 arena team comp tier list! We will be ranking some of the strongest and most popular 2v2 arena team comps in the game, as well as explaining their position in the tier list.
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- Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin (S-Tier)
- Subtlety Rogue / Shadow Priest (S-Tier)
- Affliction OR Destruction Warlock / Restoration Shaman (S-Tier)
- Frost Mage / Shadow Priest (S-Tier)
- Retribution OR Preg Paladin / Marksmanship Hunter (S-Tier)
- Feral Druid / Discipline Priest (A-Tier)
- Marksmanship Hunter / Discipline Priest (A-Tier)
- Frost Mage / Discipline Priest (A-Tier)
- Retribution OR Preg Paladin / Enhancement Shaman (A-Tier)
- Unholy Death Knight / Holy Paladin (A-Tier)
- Affliction OR Destruction Warlock / Restoration Druid (B-Tier)
- Subtlety Rogue / Discipline Priest (B-Tier)
- Retribution OR Preg Paladin / Discipline Priest (B-Tier)
- Subtlety Rogue / Feral Druid (B-Tier)
- Retribution OR Preg Paladin / Subtlety Rogue (B-Tier)
- Unholy Death Knight / Discipline Priest (C-Tier)
- Retribution OR Preg Paladin / Unholy Death Knight (C-Tier)
- Subtlety Rogue / Frost Mage (C-Tier)
- Subtlety Rogue / Balance Druid (C-Tier)
- Arms Warrior / Restoration Druid (C-Tier)
- Marksmanship Hunter / Restoration Druid (D-Tier)
- Arms Warrior / Restoration Shaman (D-Tier)
- Elemental Shaman / Discipline Priest (D-Tier)
- Subtlety Rogue / Affliction OR Destruction Warlock (D-Tier)
- Subtlety Rogue / Restoration Druid (D-Tier)
S-Tier
The S-tier represents the most powerful comps in the meta. These comps are extremely powerful and have few counters, typically only really having weaker match-ups against other S-tier comps. You will likely be fighting these comps for the majority of your games.
Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin
Power: ★★★★★ (5/5) | Counters: ★★★★★ (2/5) |
Surprise Factor: ★★★★★ (0/5) | Difficulty: ★★★★★ (2/5) |
If you’ve ever played WotLK PvP before, or know someone who does, you’ve likely heard of this comp before. Simply put, this comp is THE comp to beat, as it is the strongest comp in the game. As many as 25 to 50% of your games will likely be against 
Arms Warrior / 
Holy Paladin, so you’ll need to be prepared for it, and your comp’s strength will likely live or die by how well it fares against it. It couldn’t be lower than the S-tier, and honestly, a good argument could be made that this comp belongs in the SS-tier, all by itself.
This comp is just incredibly powerful, combining the insane damage and mobility of an Arms Warrior, with the incredible healing, survivability and crowd-control immunity of a Holy Paladin. You’ll win many of your games in the first 30 seconds of the game, as many specs simply roll over and die when faced with an Arms Warrior buffed with Hand of Freedom. In particular, you will completely demolish 
Warlock teams, and maybe like very difficult for 
Discipline Priest teams.
Having said that, this comp does have a couple of weak points. The most obvious being that since it’s so ubiquitous, everyone is trying to counter you, and everyone knows how to play against you. Moreover, the comp doesn’t really take off until season 7-8, as Arms Warrior need a lot of armor penetration gear in order to do the ridiculous damage they’re known for. Finally, while it has very few counters, 2 counters are extremely popular: 
Subtlety Rogue / Shadow Priest and 
Frost Mage / Shadow Priest teams can focus down either of you, dispel your Paladin’s Divine Shield with Mass Dispel and then kill either of you. Climbing as Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin generally means avoiding Shadow Priests like the plague!
Subtlety Rogue / Shadow Priest
Power: ★★★★★ (5/5) | Counters: ★★★★★ (1/5) |
Surprise Factor: ★★★★★ (1/5) | Difficulty: ★★★★★ (1/5) |
This comp is the 2nd most popular comp in WotLK and for 2 very good reasons. One, it is incredibly powerful in general, and two, it is one of very few comps that can boast about countering Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin, the top dog of the meta. Undoubtedly part of the S-tier, this comp can best be described as the Holy Paladin and Discipline Priest killer.
This comp has crowd-control for days, as they can keep a single player out of the fight for what feels like years. You will get Sapped into Psychic Scream into Silence into Psychic Horror into Gouge into Blind — that’s 37 seconds of crowd control right there. This comp has so much CC and damage that it can kill anyone, at any point; they can choose to go for either the DPS or the healer in DPS/healer teams, which very few other double DPS comps can do. If you ever use your PvP trinket at the wrong time against this comp, you’re likely dead.
As far as weaknesses are concerned, the biggest one is that Warlock soft-counter you, as they have many tools to put themselves and their partner in combat, thus circumventing your Sap, which complicates your CC chain significantly. Furthermore, while this comp is excellent overall, it runs on a pretty short clock; Shadow Priests cannot reset very well as they lack mobility tools, and are surprisingly fragile. This means that you typically either win fast or lose fast, so teams with potent defensive cooldowns that can survive longer than normal can give you trouble, as you run out of steam.
Affliction OR Destruction Warlock / Restoration Shaman
Power: ★★★★★ (5/5) | Counters: ★★★★★ (3/5) |
Surprise Factor: ★★★★★ (1/5) | Difficulty: ★★★★★ (3/5) |
Warlock / Healer teams were among the strongest teams in TBC. This trend continues in WotLK, with 
Resto Shamans typically being considered the best healer in such teams. This comp can be played with either a Destruction or Affliction Warlock, and both are certainly S-tier, though this comp does have an extremely unfortunate weakness.
The Destruction variety of this comp has insane kill power and crowd control thanks to the Improved Succubus talent allowing you to very easily crowd control 2 players at once. This variety is extremely strong against caster-based teams, and double DPS teams in general. The Affliction variety meanwhile excels against DPS / healer teams, as the Warlock’s damage-over-time spells apply an insane amount of pressure to the enemy healer, which all but ensures that you win a mana game. Both varieties are amazing against Rogue teams, as you can make their opener extremely annoying and complicated.
However, both varieties also happen to suffer from a huge issue: a weakness to Arms Warriors. Simply put, Arms Warriors can destroy your pet, then run you over like a train. Given that Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin is the most popular comp in that game, that weakness is absolutely crippling. The Affliction variety does very slightly better against Arms Warriors, as Destruction struggles to even get a cast off with a Arms Warriors sitting on them — however it’s still not enough to say the match-up is decent, so you’ll generally have to pray that you don’t run into Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin all that much. On the plus side, you have extremely favorable match-ups against most other types of teams. The Destruction variant has an extra weakness, however; it can sometimes struggle to kill healers, with games frequently running very long. You generally won’t be losing, but a lot of your wins won’t be as easy as they would be with Affliction.
Frost Mage / Shadow Priest
Power: ★★★★★ (4/5) | Counters: ★★★★★ (2/5) |
Surprise Factor: ★★★★★ (2/5) | Difficulty: ★★★★★ (2/5) |
This comp is extremely similar to Subtlety Rogue / Shadow Priest, in that it’s a very powerful comp whose main claim to fame is having an extremely good match-up against Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin, the strongest and most popular comp in the game. That is enough to propel it to the S-tier on its own, but it cannot be underestimated that this comp is incredibly powerful even without that one specific strong match-up.
In many ways, this comp plays very similarly to the ubiquitous Subtlety Rogue / Shadow Priest: you take 1 player out of the game for an extremely long time, while killing the other player. However, there’re some slight differences: Frost Mage / Shadow Priest cannot CC people for as long as Subtlety Rogue / Shadow Priest can, having a maximum CC time of “only” 32 seconds. They trade those 5 extra seconds for significantly higher burst damage, which allows them to kill people at any time, with no warning, where Subtlety Rogue / Shadow Priest is typically more predictable. Furthermore, Polymorph is spammable, which allows this comp to reset the fight at any point — simply crowd control both players and go eat / drink behind a pillar. This ability makes it an extremely annoying comp to face, as you have very few chances to score a kill against them.
This comp’s weaknesses are also largely the same as with Subtlety Rogue / Shadow Priest; Warlocks unfortunately soft-counter you. Moreover, certain double DPS comps (mostly involving Ret Paladins) can give you trouble, as they can zerg down your Priest before they get a chance to do place their DoTs, which is an issue that Subtlety Rogue / Shadow Priest doesn’t suffer from to the same extent. Finally, the gameplay of constantly resetting the fight with Polymorph until your cooldowns are available again isn’t for everyone as it can be pretty repetitive.
Retribution OR Preg Paladin / Marksmanship Hunter
Power: ★★★★★ (5/5) | Counters: ★★★★★ (3/5) |
Surprise Factor: ★★★★★ (1/5) | Difficulty: ★★★★★ (3/5) |
This comp isn’t quite as popular as the other comps in the S-tier, but it is just as powerful nonetheless. This comp has one mission: kill every single Priest. And well, they do it really well, despite having an unfortunate weakness to 2 top-tier comps.
Ret Paladins and 
MM Hunters have some of the most absurd burst damage out there, so pairing them together is a no-brainer. They have so much burst that they can blow people up before they even notice they’re being attacked. This is one of very few double DPS comps that can truly target almost anybody, DPS or healer, and just kill them. This comp excels at killing healers in general, but more specifically, it has an unmatched ability to destroy Priests; both Discipline and Shadow fall prey to your insane damage, coupled with the Ret Paladin’s ability to bypass a Priest’s damage reduction effects with Sanctified Wrath. Given that Discipline Priests are the most popular healer, and that Shadow Priests make up 40% of the S-tier, that’s an incredible boon to have.
Having said that, this comp has a fairly substantial weakness: Holy Paladins are extremely resilient, and thus you have an unfavourable match-up against Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin, the most common comp in the 2v2 bracket. It’s by no means an impossible match-up, but you have to play extremely well to come out on top. Moreover, while you can absolutely slay Warlocks as they’re clothies, Warlock / healer teams can give you trouble, as they can crowd control you extremely easily. Finally, while this isn’t a “big brain” comp so to speak, Ret Paladins don’t really have many ways to reset a fight, which makes this comp surprisingly challenging to play. You typically cannot afford to make even small mistakes, as you only get 1 or 2 chances to get a kill before your Ret Paladin dies himself, though this becomes slightly easier if they are Preg spec.
A-Tier
The A-Tier represents very powerful comps with high meta relevance. These comps tend to be slightly less well-rounded their S-tier counterparts, typically having some very strong match-ups and some very weak match-ups, and are thus more highly dependent on the current state of the meta. You should expect to see these comps very often, so be prepared.
Feral Druid / Discipline Priest
Power: ★★★★★ (3/5) | Counters: ★★★★★ (3/5) |
Surprise Factor: ★★★★★ (2/5) | Difficulty: ★★★★★ (3/5) |
Feral / Disc is a very peculiar and polarizing comp. It has some extremely good match-ups, and some really meh match-ups. But for reasons that I’m about to explain, it cannot go any lower than the top of the A-tier, and many would even argue that it should be in the S-tier as well, and they may just be right.
This comp absolutely decimates Mages, to the point where many Mage / X teams will just straight up leave when they see your comp. Mages just can’t control Feral Druids at all, so paired with a Priest constantly dispelling the Mage’s shields and buffs, you’ve got an extremely one-sided match-up in your favour. Furthermore, it does very well against Disc Priest teams, as they struggle to peel your Feral thanks to Berserk’s fear immunity and quickly die to your outstanding damage + dispels. It tends to do pretty well against teams that struggle when they can’t create distance from your Feral, such as Hunter / Healer and Warlock / Healer teams.
As mentioned previously though, these great strengths come with some fairly major weaknesses. For one, Ferals don’t have a healing reduction effect, so your match-up against DPS / healer teams that don’t have a Disc Priest healer is miserable — you have a decent chance of winning, but it will be a long, annoying match where nobody can kill one another. Furthermore, as all of a Feral’s damage is Physical, you are unfortunately walled by Holy Paladins and their incredible armor; this means that you have a pretty bad match-up against Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin, which unfortunately is the most common comp in the game. Finally, Ferals do great damage, but they take a while to build up combo points and “pop off”, so you will also have a tough time against teams that can blow up your Disc Priest in a matter of seconds, such as Rogue / Shadow Priest or Ret / MM Hunter.
This comp is certainly worthy of its high spot in the tier list, but beware of these weaknesses.
Marksmanship Hunter / Discipline Priest
Power: ★★★★★ (4/5) | Counters: ★★★★★ (3/5) |
Surprise Factor: ★★★★★ (2/5) | Difficulty: ★★★★★ (4/5) |
If there is such thing as an all-rounder comp, MM Hunter / Disc Priest would be it. This comp doesn’t have any extremely strong match-ups, just a whole lot of decent match-ups, very few bad ones, and only 1 extremely poor match-up. Thus it finds itself in the A-tier, being an incredibly solid comp overall.
This comp has a lot of damage, and even more CC. Hunters do some crazy damage after a Priest has removed all of the target’s buffs, and the fact that traps don’t share a diminishing return with a Priest’s Psychic Scream allows you to keep players crowd controlled for 20-23 seconds, which is absolutely exceptional, as it gives you a lot of opportunities to get a kill. This strength is pretty generic so you’ll have a somewhat favourable match-up against many different comps, and DPS / healer comps in particular. Mage teams in particular will be pretty scared of you, as the Hunter’s instant ranged damage makes getting chances to attack pretty difficult.
Getting to the comp’s weaknesses, the biggest and most obvious one is that Warlock / healer teams are practically an automatic loss for you, as Hunters unfortunately just can’t do anything to Warlocks — though thankfully, Warlocks aren’t too common in 2v2. Furthermore, you have a slightly unfavourable match-up against Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin, the most popular comp in the game, and as Hunters don’t have the best peel tools, teams that can kill your Priest extremely quickly will give you a tough time. However, the real weakness of this comp is the sheer jankiness of the Hunter class — a lot of the times you’ll be ready to set up a kill after the opponents have used up their defensive cooldowns, only to have your trap resisted. Sometimes Scatter Shot just breaks on its own or it doesn’t last long enough for you to trap that Holy Paladin. Despite its very balanced match-ups, this comp is held back by a plethora of causes of annoyance, with so many small things that can lose you games, even when you’re playing perfectly.
Frost Mage / Discipline Priest
Power: ★★★★★ (4/5) | Counters: ★★★★★ (2/5) |
Surprise Factor: ★★★★★ (3/5) | Difficulty: ★★★★★ (2/5) |
This comp was pretty popular in TBC, and it continues to be pretty popular in Wrath for largely the same reasons. It has a lot of CC, and a lot of burst damage. It firmly belongs in the A-tier, though it’s hard to place it within that tier, as it largely depends on what the meta game will be like.
This comp is incredible at blowing things up. A Mage on his own can already pull off some crazy Shatters, but when you add in a Priest’s damage as well you have some incredible kill power, being able to kill someone from 100% in just 2 to 3 seconds. Both players have a spammable offensive dispel, so Mages, Disc Priests and Resto Druids are in trouble. Furthermore, as both players have CC abilities, when things get tough or when you’re losing the mana war, you can just crowd control the enemy team and reset, drinking to regenerate your mana etc. As a result, by just being patient, you have a very decent chance of winning any game, particularly against DPS / healer teams.
But of course, this team isn’t without its weaknesses. The most obvious one being the fact that you have a really ugly matchup against Feral Druid / Disc Priest teams, as they just destroy your Mage. Furthermore, while Mages have incredible peel and crowd control tools, Disc Priests are pretty fragile, so comps that can go invulnerable to your Mage’s spells / CC temporarily, such as Ret Paladin / Hunter, 
Unholy DK / Holy Paladin etc, can kill your Priest so quickly that you don’t get a chance to fight back. This applies to the extremely popular Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin to a lesser extent, though that’s not a particularly poor match-up for you by any means, you just need to play carefully during their immunities.
Retribution OR Preg Paladin / Enhancement Shaman
Power: ★★★★★ (5/5) | Counters: ★★★★★ (4/5) |
Surprise Factor: ★★★★★ (4/5) | Difficulty: Meta dependent |
This comp is a distant cousin of Ret Paladin / MM Hunter, in that they have a lot of the same strengths and a lot of the same weaknesses. It is an unusual spec that only picks up in latter arena seasons (7/8) once Ret Paladins can switch to the Preg spec, though it can work even with regular Ret. It’s certainly an explosive comp, hence its position in the A-tier.
This comp puts the “zug” in “zugzug”. You have one thing in spades, and that thing is damage. The gameplay is very simple: you run in, your 
Shaman pops Heroism / Bloodlust, you pop all of your cooldowns and you kill stuff. Healers who aren’t Holy Paladins just roll over and die to your insane damage, though you can absolutely destroy a whole bunch of non-healers too, like Frost Mages, MM Hunters and even Warlocks. While this would normally mean you need to kill something within the first 30 seconds of the game or just straight up lose, the Preg variant has surprising lasting power, particularly against DPS / healer teams, as many specs struggle to out-damage the Preg Paladin’s high healing output.
Unfortunately however, this comp has a really, really ugly time against Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin, the most popular comp in the WotLK meta. You can’t hurt Paladins, and attacking the Warrior just feeds him rage to kill you even faster. For that reason, it’s a full tier lower than Ret Paladin / MM Hunter despite playing very similarly, as the latter stands a decent chance against Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin. Furthermore, Shadow Priest double DPS teams, such as the extremely popular Rogue / Shadow Priest and Mage / Shadow Priest, also pose a major challenge, as they can lock down and kill your Paladin after Mass Dispeling his Divine Shield, which halts his healing output and severely limits your team’s damage output. This means that, despite this comp being legitimately very good, you have a somewhat troubling match-up against 3 out of 5 of the teams we consider S-tier, so it unfortunately cannot be higher than A-tier in our opinion. If you somehow happen to play in a meta that consists of other teams however, this team can steamroll its way to very high ratings, with very easy wins throughout.
Unholy Death Knight / Holy Paladin
Power: ★★★★★ (3/5) | Counters: ★★★★★ (3/5) |
Surprise Factor: ★★★★★ (2/5) | Difficulty: ★★★★★ (2/5) |
This comp can be best described as “poor man’s Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin”, as these 2 comps are very similar, with the latter unfortunately being significantly stronger, hence the position in the bottom of the A-tier. Still, it’s a plenty strong comp, which shouldn’t be underestimated, as it can sneak some very surprising victories.
Death Knights have exceptional damage, and the very powerful ability to become invulnerable to multiple types of crowd-control for a pretty long time. Pair this strength with a Holy Paladin constantly dispelling any crowd control that manages to stick and keeping them mobile with Hand of Freedom, and you have a very potent 2v2 combination. Discipline Priest teams in particular are extremely vulnerable to your DK’s ability to stick on them like glue, very often dying in less than 10 seconds of sustained uptime. Other teams that typically need to keep a distance from your Death Knight, like MM Hunter / healer and Warlock / healer teams, can also be pretty easy prey for you.
When it comes to weaknesses, this comp has a very clear one: Death Knights lack a healing reduction effect. This means that Holy Paladins, Resto Druids and to a lesser extent Resto Shamans, all get to tank you, shrugging off your damage as it is not enough to kill them. As a result, DPS / healer teams without a Disc Priest healer will be extremely painful to fight, as neither team can really kill the other, causing a stalemate. To make things worse, this comp has a pretty unfavourable match-up against Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin, the most popular comp in the game, as Warriors can kill Death Knights no problem, while the opposite is significantly harder. What’s more, a lot of the comps that give Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin trouble, such as Rogue / Shadow Priest and Mage / Shadow Priest, can also destroy you, which unfortunately solidifies the idea that this comp, while plenty good to take you to reasonably high ratings, is just a poor man’s Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin.
B-Tier
The B-tier represents some very solid comps that can hold their own in the meta. These comps tend to have a specific thing they excel at, which unfortunately usually comes with a fairly major drawback. Some of these comps are also a “budget” version of a higher-tier comp, though they’re still powerful enough that they shouldn’t be written off. You won’t run into these comps as often as S-tier or A-tier comps, but they’re fairly common regardless.
Affliction OR Destruction Warlock / Restoration Druid
Power: ★★★★★ (3/5) | Counters: ★★★★★ (4/5) |
Surprise Factor: ★★★★★ (3/5) | Difficulty: ★★★★★ (3/5) |
The B-tier consists mainly of comps that are not bad by any means — in fact, a few of them are surprisingly good — but they are largely outshadowed by a different, extremely similar comp. This is exemplified by Warlock / Resto Druid, which is a somewhat weaker version of Warlock / Resto Shaman in most meaningful ways. This comp is mainly ran with an Affliction Warlock, though Destruction can work just as well.
When comparing this comp to Warlock / Resto Shaman, it’s clear that there’s a direct trade-off here: this comp sacrifices some kill power by losing the Shaman’s Purge and Heroism / Bloodlust, for a far more durable healer in the Resto Druid. While Shamans are prone to getting blown up by double DPS teams like Rogue / Shadow Priest and Ret Paladin / MM Hunter, Resto Druids can usually survive fairly easily with the help of a Warlock peeling the enemy for them. As a result, this comp has an extremely strong match-up against most double DPS teams, particularly when the Warlock is Affliction.
But then the trade-off we mentioned kicks in: this comp loses so much kill power, that unfortunately the Warlock on his own will struggle to get kills vs DPS / healer teams. These match-ups aren’t unwinnable, they’re just prone to being extremely long and frustrating, as your team is extremely durable so you aren’t likely to die, nor kill anyone for the matter. The exception is Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin, which unfortunately destroys you even harder than it does Warlock / Resto Shaman, as you lack any way to meaningfully pressure the Warrior into switching to Defensive Stance and thus allow your team to go on the offensive. And unfortunately, having this bad of a match-up against the most popular comp in the game is a very debilitating weakness.
Subtlety Rogue / Discipline Priest
Power: ★★★★★ (3/5) | Counters: ★★★★★ (2/5) |
Surprise Factor: ★★★★★ (3/5) | Difficulty: ★★★★★ (2/5) |
Once considered possibly the best comp in the game, a series of nerfs has pushed this comp down to the B-tier. In reality however, this comp is very well-rounded, so even though it’s no longer in the highest tier, it can perform extremely well and even snatch wins from many higher tier comps.
Despite being a DPS / healer team, this comp plays very similarly to its double DPS version, Rogue / Shadow Priest. The idea is that you CC someone out of the game, and then burst the other player down — very simple. With a Rogue’s incredible damage during Shadow Dance and a Discipline Priest’s often underestimated burst, not even Holy Paladins are safe from you, with this comp having a surprisingly decent match-up against Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin, the most commonly encountered comp. The way you do this is fairly simple: you Sap one player then open on the other with Shadow Dance. This likely forces either player to use their PvP trinket in order to stay alive, so you simply hide behind the pillar until your Shadow Dance is ready again, with the enemy team no longer having a PvP trinket to save them. This comp resets constantly, until it can finally catch someone off-guard and get a kill.
On the weakness side, this comp doesn’t have a lot of them, but the ones it does have are pretty substantial. First of all, Warlock / healer teams are very annoying to fight, as Warlocks can prevent you from getting a Sap off on them by sending their pet to attack your Priest, thus getting in combat. As they typically play with a Resto Druid or Resto Shaman, you effectively cannot Sap anything, so you’re forced to just go in and hope for the best, which sadly works less often than you imagine it would. Furthermore, while Rogues have exceptionally strong CC tools to peel enemies with, certain teams — like Ret Paladin / MM Hunter and (ironically) Rogue / Shadow Priest — can kill your Priest too fast for you to be able to save him. But perhaps this comp’s most significant weakness, if you could call it that, is how repetitive its gameplay is. All you’re doing in most games is resetting the game over and over, until you find a chance to kill someone. At the very least, this is certainly not a comp for people who lack patience, as you need patience in spades in order to climb with this strategy.
Retribution OR Preg Paladin / Discipline Priest
Power: ★★★★★ (2/5) | Counters: ★★★★★ (2/5) |
Surprise Factor: ★★★★★ (3/5) | Difficulty: ★★★★★ (3/5) |
This is a comp you likely won’t run into very often, as it’s not all that popular due to a variety of factors that will be explained below. However, it technically counters half the meta, so it could not possibly be any lower than the B-tier, despite not being all that common.
This comp is known as the double DPS destroyer, as it has an outstandingly good match-up against most double DPS teams out there. Both players have a magic dispel, so it’s almost impossible to keep either of them crowd controlled for long, which makes things very difficult for double DPS teams. Moreover, Ret Paladins have incredibly powerful defensive cooldowns, like Hand of Protection and Divine Sacrifice, which allows them to save their Priest when things get rough. So most double DPS teams will futilely try to kill the Priest, while the Ret Paladin makes short work of them with his high burst damage. Double DPS teams will really, really not enjoy facing you — even more so if the Paladin is Preg specced, as he can then also heal the Priest out of difficult situations, though typically the Paladin will be Ret.
On the flipside, this comp has an extremely obvious weakness: Ret Paladins have no healing reduction effects, and while their burst damage is good, their sustained damage is just meh. This means that winning games against DPS / healer teams is a matter of praying that you crit a bunch of times in a row, as you have no reliable way of killing healers, except maybe Priests. Your lack of sustained damage means that you have a slightly unfavourable match-up against other DPS / healer teams with better sustained damage, and Warlock / healer teams in particular will be next to impossible for you, as will Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin, which is very unfortunate. This means you’re in a very bizarre situation, where you have an extremely strong match-up against half the teams you’ll meet, with extremely long and tedious games that you have a slightly sub-50% chance of winning against the other half.
Subtlety Rogue / Feral Druid
Power: ★★★★★ (5/5) | Counters: ★★★★★ (4/5) |
Surprise Factor: ★★★★★ (5/5) | Difficulty: ★★★★★ (3/5) |
Despite not being super powerful, this comp stole many people’s hearts in TBC, as it offered some very high adrenaline gameplay. It is not significantly stronger in Wrath, but it has enough good match-ups that it finds its way into the B-tier.
This comp players more or less the same as it did in TBC: you Sap 1 player and then blow up the other player, typically the healer. Discipline Priests and Resto Shamans are extremely susceptible to this strategy, and as the former are extremely common in the meta, this means you’ll have plenty of prey to hunt. It’s not just Disc Priests that need to be scared however; the fact that both of you start the game stealthed and that this comp isn’t too common gives you the element of complete surprise, which allows you to blow up a whole bunch of different classes before they can notice what happened. Death Knights, Frost Mages, Warlocks, MM Hunters, even Shadow Priests, nobody’s truly safe from your absurd burst damage.
That’s not completely true though; there is 1 class that is almost completely safe from you, and can in turn make their partner safe: Paladins. To begin with, the fact that all of your damage is Physical means that you’ll really struggle to damage them. Even if you do get them low however, their Divine Shield will save them. They’re very difficult to crowd control thanks to Hand of Sacrifice and Divine Sacrifice, and even if you ignore them and nuke their partner, their Hand of Protection will stop you in your tracks. You will struggle to get any wins off against Paladins, and unfortunately the 2v2 ladder is chock full of them, with Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin being the most popular comp in the game, and one that you have almost 0 chance of beating. Moreover, even against non-Paladin teams, this comp doesn’t have the luxury of resetting whenever they feel like it like other Rogue / DPS teams do, which means that you only get 1 chance to score a kill before things quickly start spiraling out of control.
Retribution OR Preg Paladin / Subtlety Rogue
Power: ★★★★★ (5/5) | Counters: ★★★★★ (4/5) |
Surprise Factor: ★★★★★ (4/5) | Difficulty: ★★★★★ (4/5) |
This comp has had its ups and downs, as a series of nerfs to both Ret Paladins and Rogues have shifted its power level significantly over the expansion’s duration. In the 3.3.5 patch that we’ll be playing in WotLK Classic, it’s certainly pretty strong, but it has a very common weakness that places this comp in the bottom of the B-tier. This comp is usually played with a Ret Paladin rather than a Preg.
If you ever played as or against this comp in TBC, you’ll likely be familiar with how it works in WotLK. You Sap one player, and nuke the other – simple stuff. You have 2 very powerful instant CC in Blind and Repentance, which do not share a diminishing return , which allows you to force someone’s (usually a healer’s) trinket, which in turn enables you to swap to them, stun and kill them. This strategy is simple yet effective: all healers bar one are easy pickings for you, and there’s practically no DPS class that you can’t blow up: Warlocks, Hunters, Shadow Priests, Death Knights — all very easy targets for you.
Just like it is the case with most other double DPS teams consisting of 2 physical damage dealers, this comp unfortunately flops when faced with other Paladins, and particularly Holy Paladins. Seeing how you’re likely going to be seeing a Paladin in 30 to 50% of your games, that’s a pretty substantial weakness — Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin for example will be an extremely uphill battle, though you surprisingly have a slightly better chance than some other dual physical DPS teams do, as 50% of a Ret Paladin’s damage is Holy, which bypasses Hand of Protection and thus allows you to occasionally murder the Warrior out of nowhere. On the flipside, compared to Rogue / Feral Druid, this comp has 1 fairly significant drawback; Ret Paladins cannot become invisible in any way, and so Warlocks can send their pets on them to enter combat, effectively disabling your Rogue’s Sap. This makes Warlock / healer match-ups pretty annoying, though they’re nowhere near as bad as DPS / Holy Paladin match-ups.
C-Tier
The C-tier is the a bit of a “limbo” tier. The teams on this tier are by no means bad; you can probably get a Gladiator title if you are an good player. However, in all honesty the comps here are just a straight-up weaker version of a comp in a higher tier, which means that you’re unnecessarily making your life harder by deciding to play these comps, if a Gladiator title is what you’re after. If you don’t care about titles, these comps can be very fun to play, however.
Unholy Death Knight / Discipline Priest
Power: ★★★★★ (4/5) | Counters: ★★★★★ (4/5) |
Surprise Factor: ★★★★★ (2/5) | Difficulty: ★★★★★ (2/5) |
WotLK saw a major nerf to the Priest Mana Burn spell. As a result, many Priests forgot it even exists, as there’re generally not that many chances to use it anymore and you’re usually better off just dealing damage instead of burning the enemy’s mana. If you’re playing this comp, you should get used to using Mana Burn a lot, because this is practically Mana Burn: The Comp, finding a solid niche in the C-tier.
This comp has an extremely simple gameplay loop: every 27 seconds, the Death Knight Death Grips the enemy healer to the Disc Priest, who then fears them with Psychic Scream and proceeds to burn their mana with Mana Burn. You repeat this over and over, until the enemy healer has no more mana, at which point you win. This gives you a very strong match-up against other DPS / healer teams, as you almost always win the mana war.
We say almost always, because unfortunately there is 1 healer that isn’t affected by this trick: Holy Paladins, who Blizzard in their infinite wisdom decided shouldn’t really need mana in order to heal. You simply cannot burn Holy Paladins, making the match-up against them very painful, and Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin in specific is pretty much impossible to beat. This comp has a further major flaw in that it tends to do very poorly against double DPS teams, as Death Knights and Discipline Priests are both very fragile and tend to die quickly. But the most significant weakness of this comp, if you could call it that, is that its gameplay is extremely repetitive and the games tend to be very long. This makes climbing with this comp pretty painful.
Retribution OR Preg Paladin / Unholy Death Knight
Power: ★★★★★ (5/5) | Counters: ★★★★★ (4/5) |
Surprise Factor: ★★★★★ (5/5) | Difficulty: ★★★★★ (2/5) |
Anyone who has a passing degree of familiarity with WotLK PvP can tell what this comp is about. A distant cousin of Ret Paladin / Enh Shaman, this comp aims to quickly destroy someone before they can even understand what happened. That’s usually easier said than done however, hence the position in the C-tier, 2 tiers below its cousin.
Most teams will see a Death Knight / Paladin team and assume that the Paladin is Holy. This comp uses this assumption against them, as you rush in and attack someone before they figure that the Paladin is Ret. A surprising percentage of the time, that results in a kill, as the enemy team is caught off-guard and doesn’t react appropriately. Ret Paladins can ignore damage reduction effects with Sanctified Wrath and Death Knights have an on-demand 5 second silence in Strangulate, which cannot be trinketed in WotLK and prevents several classes ( Disc Priests, Death Knights, Shamans, Druids) from using their defensive abilities, which means that if you successfully caught them off guard, you have most likely won. Disc Priests in specific are extremely vulnerable to this zerg strat.
Unfortunately, that strategy has a pretty glaring weakness: if the enemy team is aware that your Paladin isn’t Holy and use their defensive cooldowns before being silenced, your chances of victory drop significantly, as neither of you have a healing reduction effect and thus cannot straight up kill someone who is prepared for your damage. Furthermore, Holy Paladin teams will be very tough to beat, as they can remove Strangulate with Divine Shield and laugh at you — Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin in specific will be very rough.
Subtlety Rogue / Frost Mage
Power: ★★★★★ (5/5) | Counters: ★★★★★ (4/5) |
Surprise Factor: ★★★★★ (4/5) | Difficulty: ★★★★★ (4/5) |
This comp used to be one of the most popular comps of TBC. Rogues and Mages complement each other very well, which is why it’s still a very decent comp overall, but with a very obvious weak point, usually being considered a flat-out inferior version of Rogue / Shadow Priest or Rogue / Feral Druid, hence the position in the C-tier.
Just like it was the case in TBC, this comp wins this game with raw CC, as both of the players in the team have a seemingly unending amount of CC. You Sap one player, typically the healer, and then blow up the other player — a very simple yet effective strategy. Rogues and Mages both have so much burst damage that you can honestly pick either player for your kill target, as very few specs really are safe from your damage. This comp can even boast of having a pretty good match-up against the ubiquitous Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin; despite lacking the ability to dispel the Paladin’s Divine Shield with Mass Dispel like our superior cousin, Rogue / Shadow Priest, you can usually just keep resetting until you get a chance to CC one player and kill the other.
The most obvious counter to this team is Warlocks, as Warlock / healer teams in general will be very tough to beat, as you cannot really Sap anything against Warlocks, and they can dispel your Mage’s Polymorph with Devour Magic, or even interrupt your Mage’s cast with Spell Lock with their Felhunter pet while the Warlock himself is crowd controlled. But the real weakness of this comp is that it has a fairly poor match-up against many of the most popular double DPS comps out there, and Ret Paladin teams in specific will pose a very difficult challenge. As Ret Paladins are very common in the 2v2 bracket, this is unfortunately a crippling weakness.
Subtlety Rogue / Balance Druid
Power: ★★★★★ (4/5) | Counters: ★★★★★ (3/5) |
Surprise Factor: ★★★★★ (5/5) | Difficulty: ★★★★★ (5/5) |
I’ll paint a picture: you’ve just queued up some 2v2 arena. The game begins, and you see 0 players on the enemy team — they’re both invisible. One of them is most likely a Rogue, but what’s the other player?? A Feral Druid? Another Rogue? Perhaps a Mage using Invisibility?? Suddenly, a Rogue stuns you and you prepare for the worst… but this, you couldn’t possibly prepare for. A freaking 
GIANT CHICKEN OF DEATH appears out of nowhere and starts blasting you with a torrent of ★★★ STARS ★★★, causing explosions left and right. As you lay on the floor, barely conscious with your HP reduced to 0, you think to yourself, “what the hell just happened??”, as the chicken proceeds to do a vulgar dance in your face.
That picture is half-truth, half-fiction, as in all seriousness that’s largely what Rogue / Boomkin plays like. This comp has completely absurd burst damage thanks to Starfall, which will very often catch players off-guard and kill them right in the opener, before they realize what even happened. But the element of surprise with a powerful opener isn’t all this comp has: Moonkins are actually surprisingly durable in WotLK, and can do some decent healing. This allows this comp to constantly reset and try again for a kill. Starfall and Shadow Dance both have a pretty short 1-minute cooldown, which allows you to always be in sync with your burst damage, and giving you kill opportunities more often than enemies have a chance to use their trinket. Even the all-powerful Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin isn’t completely safe from your constant pressure and reset power, and you have a very good chance of beating many teams on maps that use the vertical axis, like Blade’s Edge Arena and Dalaran Sewers, as your Moonkin can always push the enemy off the platform with Typhoon and forcefully reset the game if things get ugly.
But with great burst damage lies great responsibility: besides this very linear loop of pop cooldowns, hopefully kill someone, reset if you failed, this comp has very little to brag about. Comps that have very durable classes, like Warlock / healer teams, will be very hard to beat. Furthermore, it tends to do pretty poorly against Ret Paladin teams, as they can counter your first Starfall with Divine Shield and prevent you from resetting with Judgement of Justice, thus causing you to most likely lose if you fail to kill them in the opener. As Ret Paladins are extremely common this is a major weakness, and thus this comp cannot really be higher than C-tier. Having said that, it’s an incredibly fun to play, so if the story from before piqued your curiousity, do give this comp a go!
Arms Warrior / Restoration Druid
Power: ★★★★★ (3/5) | Counters: ★★★★★ (4/5) |
Surprise Factor: ★★★★★ (3/5) | Difficulty: ★★★★★ (3/5) |
Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin is a completely oppressive force in the meta-game, to the point where you’d be forgiven for forgetting that Warriors can actually play with other healers, there’s no rule that says it must be a Holy Paladin. However, all Arms Warrior / healer teams are sadly essentially a poor man’s version of Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin, with Arms Warrior / Resto Druid being possibly the next best thing, all the way down in the C-tier.
To keep things simple, Druids are usually less durable than Holy Paladins, with one exception: they don’t roll over and die to Mass Dispel from an enemy Shadow Priest like Holy Paladins do, which means this comp has a better chance against the very common Shadow Priest / DPS teams, as Druids can surprisingly survive their opener reasonably often. Furthermore, this team has actual crowd control in Cyclone, which can occasionally allow you to get kills by crowd controlling healers, where Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin largely just do damage and hope for the best.
The benefits sadly end there, as this comp is just flat out weaker than Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin in almost every other way. Druids are far more vulnerable to non Shadow Priest / DPS teams than Holy Paladins, so you will lose a lot of your games against double DPS teams because your Druid died right in the opener. Furthermore, Paladins can disable your Druid’s Travel Form with Judgement of Justice, so you have a terrible match-up against them, which unfortunately includes Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin as well, making that match-up extremely one-sided against you, and Ret Paladin teams are also going to be very scary for you. For these reasons, this comp is significantly harder to get wins with than Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin.
D-Tier
The D-tier is the limit of teams that we’d reasonably consider viable. These teams are good enough to win a decent percentage of the time, and even climb the ladder up to the Gladiator range. However, they have very big issues that hold them back, and in general you will need to play significantly better than your opponents in order to win your games, with a very slight mistake often being enough to cost you the game. Very often, they’re just a weaker version of a higher tier comp. On the plus side, these teams are very uncommon, so you can occasionally win games just because the enemy team isn’t prepared to face you.
Marksmanship Hunter / Restoration Druid
Power: ★★★★★ (2/5) | Counters: ★★★★★ (5/5) |
Surprise Factor: ★★★★★ (4/5) | Difficulty: ★★★★★ (5/5) |
This comp was very popular in TBC, and caused many a sigh in its time, with its extremely annoying yet effective mana drain strategy. Blizzard swung the ban-hammer against it very violently however, as Hunters all but lost their ability to drain mana, with Viper Sting having been nerfed to near uselessness — most healers regenerate more mana than it drains over its duration. A host of nerfs to Resto Druids meanwhile causes them to be one of the worst healers to have in mana wars, and so this comp, unfortunately finds itself in the D-tier, despite having some legitimately good points.
With mana drain gone, this comp would be doomed were it not for the other major strength that these 2 specs have: crowd control. A Scatter Shot -> Freezing Arrow -> Cyclone x3 -> Silencing Shot -> Bash combo will keep an enemy player crowd controlled for 28.5 seconds. This is only 1.5 second shorter than Scatter Shot‘s 30 second cooldown, which essentially allows you to rotate your crowd control abilities and keep a player controlled almost indefinitely, in the best case scenario. This is a major strength against DPS / healer teams, which you generally have a decent match-up against. Furthermore, this CC chain isn’t limited to being used offensively; you can CC both players and force a reset at almost any point, which allows this team to recover from some very ugly situations.
However, this comp has several debilitating weaknesses. First of all, Hunters and Resto Druids are both very fragile, which unfortunately gives you a terrible match-up against most double DPS teams, as they can easily blow up either of you. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, these long CC chains represent the best case scenario — in normal situations, the extreme jankiness of the Hunter class can cause things to go wrong very often. For example, traps getting resisted and Scatter Shot randomly breaking are common issues that cause you to instantly lose a game. Finally, this comp has a bad match-up against every single S-tier comp, which means a majority of your games will be an uphill battle — which is not ideal, to say the least. It’s not so terrible that you can’t even win — it’s fairly decent in fact, with fairly balanced match-ups all in all, but MM Hunter / Disc Priest is just straight up better.
Arms Warrior / Restoration Shaman
Power: ★★★★★ (4/5) | Counters: ★★★★★ (5/5) |
Surprise Factor: ★★★★★ (3/5) | Difficulty: ★★★★★ (4/5) |
The second in the “poor man’s Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin” line, this comp is unfortunately just that. A very straight-forward comp with glaring weaknesses, it unfortunately cannot be higher than the D-tier.
This comp works exactly as you expect it would: the Warrior rushes in and the Shaman uses Heroism / Bloodlust right away, then begins spamming Purge on the kill target. The goal here is extremely obvious, you try to kill someone right away with incredibly high damage and pressure generated by constant dispels. Disc Priests, Resto Druids and to a lesser extent Frost Mages are all surprisingly weak to this tactic, which can allow you to end games very quickly against such teams. That’s one of this comp’s greatest strengths: other Arms Warrior / healer teams can have very long games, with Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin mirror match-ups famously being complete stalemates. Meanwhile, this comp has very quick games, so even if your win rate isn’t the best, you can climb the ladder surprisingly quickly.
This “strength” however works both ways: you win fast, but you also tend to lose fast. Double DPS teams will absolutely massacre you, as both of you are extremely susceptible to pressure from some of the most popular double DPS specs, like Ret Paladins and Shadow Priests. In fact, every single S-tier comp, with the exception of Warlock / healer teams, will absolutely destroy you — an extremely unfortunate position to be in. This comp truly lives in the shadow of Arms Warrior / Holy Paladin, unfortunately, having all of its weaknesses but barely any of its strengths.
Elemental Shaman / Discipline Priest
Power: ★★★★★ (1/5) | Counters: ★★★★★ (4/5) |
Surprise Factor: ★★★★★ (5/5) | Difficulty: ★★★★★ (4/5) |
This comp is a complete odd-ball, with very peculiar strengths and weaknesses. It’s actually very hard to place it on a tier list, because it’s extremely uncommon and thus hard to tell how good it really is. We believe that the D-tier is a reasonable guess, though it might be as high as the C-tier if the metagame is favourable.
This comp does one thing, and it does it well: Purge people of all their buffs, with both players having access to an offensive dispel. This gives it a decent time against specs that rely on magic buffs in order to do their thing, so to speak: Frost Mages, Ret Paladins, Resto Druids, Disc Priest, they all get really annoyed by you, having to play without their strongest tools. Moreover, both players having healing spells and anti-CC measure makes this comp surprisingly durable, giving it an unexpectedly strong match-up against double DPS teams that can’t simply kill the Priest faster than the Shaman can heal him. If the Priest survives, the Shaman has a decent chance of killing someone with his incredible burst damage, giving you an unexpected win.
On the flipside, while Shamans can boast having some of the best burst damage in the game, they unfortunately have little to no sustained damage. This makes games against DPS / healer teams incredibly painful, as you lack a reliable way of killing most healers without first Mana Burning them empty. That would be a pretty significant strength for this comp normally, but it’s pretty easy for many teams to simply have their DPS player “tunnel” the Priest, preventing him from casting Mana Burn at all. Meanwhile, your Shaman is also running out of mana over time, and has to keep drinking in order to stay in the game, which makes for some incredibly annoying and long games, both for you and your opponent.
Subtlety Rogue / Affliction OR Destruction Warlock
Power: ★★★★★ (4/5) | Counters: ★★★★★ (5/5) |
Surprise Factor: ★★★★★ (4/5) | Difficulty: ★★★★★ (5/5) |
Rogue / Mage is a “poor man’s” version of Rogue / Shadow Priest, and Rogue / Warlock is a “poor man’s” version of Rogue / Mage. That’s 2 levels of poor right there, which is why this once-beloved comp finds itself in the D-tier. Typically played with a Destruction Warlock, though Affliction can work as well.
This comp works exactly like all other Rogue / DPS teams do: you CC one player, and set up a kill on the other player. That’s not too difficult with a Destruction Warlock instantly bursting someone for 50% of their health pool, which is why it’s the more popular variant. This comp excels at killing people suddenly and unpredictably, and it’s surprisingly good against most comps out there, both DPS / healer and double DPS teams.
It has a fatal flaw however: it is extremely difficult to kill Paladins, both Ret and Holy specced ones. Warlocks just aren’t as tanky as they were in TBC, so Paladins can use their Divine Shield and cause all sorts of trouble for you; Rets will simply kill the Warlock, while Holy Paladins will dispel their Warrior, who will in turn kill the Warlock. With Paladins making up as much as 25-50% of your match-ups in an average day, that’s unfortunately a very ill omen. Moreover, while this comp doesn’t have weak match-ups against other teams per se, Warlocks being this fragile on their own means you have to play almost perfectly in order to win. Where other Rogue / DPS variants can afford to make a few mistakes and can reset the game if things start going south, Rogue / Warlock unfortunately only gets 1 chance to win; if you fail to make something happen in the opener, you have likely won, so this comp really demands perfection.
Subtlety Rogue / Restoration Druid
Power: ★★★★★ (1/5) | Counters: ★★★★★ (3/5) |
Surprise Factor: ★★★★★ (5/5) | Difficulty: ★★★★★ (5/5) |
If there’s a comp that can best describe the concept of teetering on the line between “viable” and “unviable”, this is it. A far cry from arguably the strongest and most popular comp in the game during seasons 2 & 3 of TBC, this comp struggles to really find a niche and thus finds itself in the very bottom of the D-tier, and it could be argued that it may in fact belong in a lower tier.
You could easily make a comparison between this comp and Rogue / Disc Priest, and surmise that this comp is completely garbage, as Disc Priests are simply better healers than Resto Druids in 2v2 and synergize with Rogues far better than Druids do. That wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate, but there’s one thing you’d be neglecting: Druids are typically less vulnerable to exploding in an opener than Disc Priests are, which means this comp has a surprisingly good match-up against double DPS teams, where Rogue / Disc Priest typically struggles. Mage / DPS in particular will struggle to beat you, as they cannot Polymorph the Druid. Paired with the fact that you both start the game in stealth, guaranteeing that you have the element of surprise, which greatly helps when facing double DPS teams.
What this comp gains in durability however, it unfortunately trades in damage potential, as Druids simply have 0 offensive pressure. Your DPS / healer match-ups are atrocious, as you lack a way to reliably kill healers — the element of surprise cannot help you there, unfortunately. Furthermore, even against the double DPS teams you do well against, you need to play extremely well in order to win confidently — without the great synergy that Rogues have with Priests, you cannot afford to make mistakes at all, as your chances to get a kill will be very limited, while chances to get killed will be plentiful.