Hey,
I'm currently doing some 3vs3 on my alt priest. The priest is specced shadow with about 800dmg, 9k HP unbuffed. The shaman has 9k hp, 1500 healing and 230 resilience I believe. The warrior is MS specced with full arenagear + sword.

My question is, would it be better with
Elemental or Enhancement Shaman
MS-Warrior
Discipline Priest

Or our old setup:
Restoration Shaman
MS-Warrior
Shadowpriest

This is what I think:
Disadvantages for current setup:
- Grounding totem is a pain in the ass as shadowpriest
- Low burst

Advantages for our current setup:
- Strong dots, easy to keep damage on all targets
- Instantheals from the restoration shaman

Disadvantages for elementalshaman+disciplinepriest+warrior:
- Mostly singletarget damage
- Shaman is easy to CC.

Advantages:
- High burst

So as you see I'm not really sure. We've been up to 2000 rating, but we need to improve our playstyle or talentspecs. Anyone else playing with a similar setup? or want to help me out on these questions?

I think it depends on what kind of team you want to run. Elemental shamans, if geared well, have the best burst in the game. Priests are obviously solid healers and can stand up through a beating. Your DPS will be very good with an ele sham + warrior bloodlusted. You've got grounding totems to act like a pain in the ass, dispells, MS debuff, & earthshocks as a pseudo-silence. All in all, seems good. On the other hand, you could try out the other setup and not lose much of anything... just depends on whehter you or you rpriest have better dmg / heal gear.

Id go with the Elemental shaman paired with the warrior, rather than enhancement. You would have major issues with teams that could snare kite you. Elemental has about the same amount of burst, and you diversify your team. Elemental can also backup heal somewhat more effectively in a pinch.

Shadow priests have fine burst. Without an UA lock they don't really shine, since their dots are dispelible. While Elemental has a higher burst every 3 minutes, Shadow Priests have a very nice burst every 16 seconds. Honestly, I'd go for shadow priest, elemental shaman, and warrior. Coordinate correctly, and play gib in 3s. Pop fears early, drop someone with a coordinated burst (MS HS Mind Blast, SW, Lightning Bolt, NS-EM CL, Earth shock), then your shaman can switch on to healing. Cycle totems properly and you can keep yourself out of CC fine.

Also, mace > sword in 3s, anyday. In fact, Mace > sword in all brackets, though it's debatable in 5s, it's no question that mace > sword in 2v2 and 3v3.

Enhancement Shaman get a bad wrap, but I'm enjoying mine in pvp. Never was rated enough to see serious competition. If you want to be 2000+, I doubt an enhancement shaman is the right way to go. It's fun to drop 7k openers, but it's inconsistent.

Vulnerable to CC against very good players who can handle totem juggling, uncontrolled bursts, no MS, bad healing capabilities when needed, no CC itself. If I was to consider an enhancement shaman, I'll probably just grab a warrior any day.

I would say hybrid Shaman, leaning towards elemental; Priest (pretty even holy/disc), and MS Warrior. I've seen Holy Paladin, MS Warrior, and hybrid Shaman teams do very well in arena, so I imagine a Priest with enough survivability can replace the paladin to an extent.

Gib is easier to play at lower ratings, and while still viable, much harder at higher ratings. You can 3 shot your way to 2100 or so and then respec resto, play outlast. There were many pally/holydisc-priest/warrior teams last season which relied on mana burn to outlast. I would imagine replacing the pally with a shaman can be just as viable. Losing freedom really doesn't hurt that much when windfury allows the outlast team to have a fair burst, keeping healers on their toes. Running with a shaman also gains rank 1 earth shock for clutch interrupts.

Still, the gib team playstyle is more enjoyable, just not so reliable against geared people.

elemental hands down (with some rest). An enhancement shaman gives you more physical dps but is subject to kiting and has gimp healing. An elemental shaman can heal damn well since all the +heal/damage stuff is still being worn. ALso, the use of magical damage allows you to offset come annoying targets like high ac warriors, dodge wacko rogues, and paladins. So the elemental shaman brings some healing with great burst damage and the ability to bypass physical damage mitigation.

A shadow priest is mediocre without a warlock to back him up. Elemental shaman/disc priest is definitely the better combo.

Yup. Huge burst from the shaman, (bloodlusted) mana burns from the priest, MS from the warrior make this a good team.

Short answer is that you will be healing and likely focus fired so PI and force of will aren't as important as blessed resilience is. The four critical talents as I see it are BR, improved mana burn, focused power and maybe martyrdom. Everything else you can suit yourself, I pretty much figure.

As the poster above me said, you're going to find Blessed Resilience much more useful than Power Infusion.

Well, we ended up making a new team. Both warrior and shaman (which rerolled to his paladin alt) moved to a server where I have my mage, we ended up making a frostmage, mswarrior and holypaladin setup.

After 2 days we're top 30 and won against #1 top ranked team + several other top 10-teams.

However, now we're going to try some 5vs5 at the same time. How does Warrior, Warrior, Frostmage, HolyPaladin, HolyPaladin sound? Should be able to outlast a lot, not too much cc, but i'll be around to silence/poly-break spells and create dps-gaps with frostnova etc.

Definitely not at the 8k life he was saying, I'd keep a deep Discipline spec until 9k life/200 resilience or so.

We recently formed a team with a Holy Priest/Elemental Shaman/Arms Warrior setup and had very little trouble absolutely decimating teams into the 1900 ratings. Mass Dispel is ungodly powerful when well timed (our Priest predicts the IB/DS and begins spamming MD accordingly, heh).

Pain Suppression is so-so. Every time we go against a Disc Priest, my Arms Warrior giggles as I chain Purge the Priest and he blows up.


Edit- We used to run 2xWarriors in our 5v5 with both a 1.5 and 2.5 healer setup and found ourselves way to susceptible to Frost Mages and Hunters so we pretty much scrapped that.