Hey all, this is my first post here so hopefully I don't mess something up too terribly. My team in 3v3 has been running into trouble lately (last week we were 2100 and we've already managed to get down to 1960ish in the past two days). We run a disc/holy priest, BM hunt, and affliction lock...

The real problem we have is 2 healer teams... it doesn't generally matter what they are, as long as they are cross healing we are unable to drop one and lose due to mana reasons.

Our general strategy is to have the lock CoT the primary healer, dot up a dps that the hunter focuses on, and then dot up / keep the healer feared and spell-locked. With the hunter it's typically pretty easy to drop either the dotted dps or the dotted healer because full affliction dots on two targets usually puts quite a bit of pressure on their healer... except for when there are two!

Does anyone have advice or is our combination doomed at higher levels due to our class selection? Any help would be greatly appreciated, we're getting a bit frustrated.

Yeah I believe life would be much easier if the hunter was a rogue for blind on healer and stun on the dps when it gets out of LoS of the healers. We've tried the tactic of burning the dps but a NS heal or something always messes it up. The real problem is we have no healing debuff so one or two heals that get through to the dps we're focusing on and the fight is pretty much over... maybe respeccing to marksmanship would help so the hunter can contribute silencing and scatter to keep the healers off?

Get a Scorpid pet. Put it on a healer and spam Viper Sting.
(Scorpids spam a stackable 5/5 poison debuff that Paladins can't spam cleanse fast enough.. and once it stacks beyond 1, they get behind and can't get the Viper off.)

He'll be OOM very, very fast.

You also need to call out traps and make sure your team knows where they can run to for slowing CC. This will help your affliction Warlock greatly, not to mention yourself.

Biggest issue is, Hunters go OOM easily. Once you burn through a bar (and if they survive), it goes downhill when all you can do is auto-shot. That's where the gay Scorpid and Viper Sting comes into play.

While I don't have a lot of solid 3v3 experience, I think I can extrapolate from 2v2 & 5v5.

When faced with a 2 healer setup simply shift strategies to a mana drain one. Use delaying tactics like shattershot on their only dps class and he shouldn’t be able to kill anyone on your team quickly.

Then just drain their healers mana, don’t try to kill anything till they are drained, just conserve mana and drain their healers. You guys have an ideal 3v3 setup for this, viper sting + warlock mana drain + priest mana burn will destroy people’s mana pools quickly.

As you’ve observed one set of dots + hunter damage while very high isn’t enough to dps down two healers, but running them out of mana directly should be quite possible with your group makeup.

As mentioned above, a scorpid pet can ensure viper sting stays applied even against a cleanse happy Paladin.

In lieu of the pet, you can "plan" your mana burns. Viper Sting + Silence Shot + Fear on the other healer means a few seconds where Viper Sting won't be cleansed. Even one tick equals about 700-800 mana burned (tick + cleanse). If you can get their DPS under control, your priest can really go to town.

I don't think I would have the warlock focus on Mana Burning, but rather fear + CoT + DPS on their DPS class. Forcing heals from the two healers can further prevent them from immediately cleansing Viper Sting.

I agree with Gulaja, it is hard to focus mana burn as a warlock because it's a 5 second channeled spell, and unless the enemy healer is feared in all likelihood the warlock's channeled mana drain will be dispelled after the first tick, meaning the lock had to waste the global cooldown to drain 200 mana, which could have been spent casting a UA or DoT.

Edit: Which reminds me about your team setup, since your warlock is UA spec he could simply land the UA on the target you want to mana drain, then have the viper sting applied afterwards. Against druids they'll still be able to remove only the poison, but a paladin may or may not dispel UA when trying to get off the viper sting, and take a nice chunk of damage as a result.

I agree and should have added this to my post, a key competent of the mana burn strat is to have the warlock put up UA on all targets you're draining mana from.

That way viper sting & mana drain are very risky to cleanse / dispel. If UA is the only dot, the chances of getting it instead are high. Alternatively if you put up other dots you can lower the chance the mana drain/viper sting is removed, but this seems worse to spend extra mana to put them up when you know they're focused on just dispelling them (maybe use low rank dots?).

The number of Paladins who actually remember this spell and use it is slim though.

I think putting sufficient DPS pressure on targets will force the healers to actually heal instead of Cleanse.