Hi, I'm looking for some help with a 3v3 team (obviously)

We have a 2 member "core" that plays nearly all games which is me, 41/20/0 UD Rogue and a Troll Priest, who specs Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft .

I have 10.3k hp/420 res and priest has 10.3k hp/382 res unbuffed. I'm using [Talisman of the Horde] (with anti-cc trinket as well), but I have access to [Renataki's Charm of Trickery] and [Bladefist's Breadth]. Would the timed burst of renataki outweigh the res+heal in the long run? (I can't stand PvE so bloodlust brooch is out). Currently I have trinketmenu swapping trinkets in the order heal->rena->BB, but I am going to have to choose 1 to stick with come 2.2.

The other 3 members we cycle through are:
UD Mage: 17/0/44 or 0/7/54 - 9.6k hp / 283 res
UD Rogue: Combat Maces - 10.4k hp / 350ish? res (has T3 crafted mace)
Tauren Hunter: BM - 11.2k hp / 324 res

Changing players/classes is not an option.

We finished S1 at 2001 and our highest so far this season has been 2080, but we can't seem to reliably hold anything over 2050. (terrible last week put us at 1978).

Our biggest weakness seems to be the oh so popular pal/war/sham matrix (not that I can talk, running mage/rogue/priest :P), and we just can't come up with a way to reliably beat them.

Usually I start on the shaman but we simply cannot kill him before the bloodlusted+wf warrior has decimated either me or the priest. This happens in all the matricies we run, especially if we are on nagrand with the hunter. That combo lost us 70 points in 4 games last week, simply as the hunter couldn't do anything while they kited round the pillar, even with me trying to stun the shaman in los of the hunter.

With the mage things go a little bit better but BoF + cleanse means he can still move around enough to put massive hurt on the priest, and once the warrior is immune to poly its pretty much over for his target.

Double rogue seems to go ok as well but the warrior just spams hamstring at us and once our sprint/vanish are gone the shaman can kite us to death. We're usually decent enough on dispelling targets that we are focusing, but other targets not so good, blinkered vision sucks. But even with BoP only lasting a couple seconds they can usually get off enough heals to top him off. (wound poison with 3/5 vile seems to be cleansed fairly easily, hard to build up a stack faster than they get removed against pal/sham.

Should I stick to going for the shaman and just attempt to improve my damage dealing some how? How about the CB mutilate, should I be using it early or saving it for when he's low? How does this change if the shaman is Restoration or Elemental?

Mostly I'm after pointers about that matrix, as it seems to be the hardest to beat (we must lose at least 95% of the time vs that), but any general tips and tricks we could be using?

It depends what matrix you want to use (are you asking for the optimal make-up out of your team?) and who they usually target first. For example if they go balls to the walls after the priest like a lot of teams do you can take advantage of that. Try to overextend the war (out of LOS if possible) while you keep the shammy busy by going for the sap and if that fails or he trinkets just keep him snared/stuned. CC the war as much as possible and bridge the DR with blind. Priest trys to sneak in a few mana burns on the pally if possible. You must keep the sham away from the priest b/c purge + war dps will demolish him. Always save the CB + trink + mut for a coordinated spike or when you can outright kill him with it. There's no way as a rogue you can wittle down a good resto shammy w/o dispels (which you won't have any b/c your priest is far away) but you can take down an unsupported ele shammy.

Also on Nagrand(?) running the entire team around the pillars is effective. Even if the war is on the rogue you can still usually stick to the shammy pretty decently b/c the war won't be able to charge you very easily. Make sure the whole team does its part to kill the important totems.

Just to mention it again although it could be obvious, dispells are going to win this game for you and you have 2 people who can do so when you use the mage as your third. Between paladins and shamans they can only put 3 buffs on the warrior at any one given time and one of them is the temporary bloodlust and the other two are fairly obvious, earth shield or any single blessing. This means any dispell you cast will count and make a big difference when you need it to the most.

Have your mage wand down any poison cleansing totems, attempt to coordinate a blind on the shaman with a stun/as much burst as you can on the warrior, and their paladin will be almost forced to bubble or their shaman will be forced to use his trinket, perhaps even both will happen at the same time and that's a very favorable position for you. Your mage can also attempt to control both at the same time although it will take practice it is do-able with skill. By waiting until one player casts a heal (in this setup the paladin is the main healer and the shaman's job is utility and to keep up the paladin), csing it, and then immediately sheeping the other player. This buys you several seconds of silence from their healers allowing you to spike the warrior and forcing them to either blow major cooldowns or let the warrior die. You may not be able to burst down the warrior at this very moment every time but what it will do is get the warrior to either go defensive or face an intense amount of incoming dps from you and the mage that his team will have to react to quickly. This insures that any micro-management they had in mind like re-dropping totems in optimal locations or recasting blessings get put on the back burner and you are getting very close to winning the game. You guys also have pets available as well, although temporary, to keep their players from escaping to drink which is a big advantage versus that combination which main strength is centered around the fact that those classes are hard to kill quickly by a single or even double dps.

Any of this gets pretty much tossed in the can when the warrior stunlocks and demolishes you, and thats why you have to make sure that never happens in the first place. So, kill totems, coordinate CC's between you and the mage, and cause them to have the oh s--t moment before you do by maintaining control of their only dps.

Priest should be draining and dispelling all the time.

He wont need to heal because the Warrrior will be alternately poly'd / nova'd / feared and frozen in rotation. Yes it can all be cleansed, but BoF can be removed and the pally will be being mana drained all the time. R1 (or other) Frostbolt is also a great snare on the warrior. He should only be in range when his intercept is up and out the rest of the time. As has been pointed out you can Dispel AND Spellsteal so the warrior should never have any buffs.

Most people tend to recommend Imp Poisons over Vile too. Builds and keeps the stacks better than vile.

Unfortunately daggers is really weak against plate teams. Maces would be better because the extra interrupts can make a big difference to keeping people in range.

Without a Mage, you probably have no chance. As I mentioned in the other thread - I run Rogue/Priest/Afflock in 3v3 and those Warrior teams totally destroy us. As do, today, Warrior/Feral/Paladin. 3 people in plate vs a rogue? GG, mostly.

You're kidding right? Read the other 3v3 thread where it's being discussed. You'd certainly be rather unique in that opinion.

All that happens is the Warrior utterly murders our Priest or Warlock and that's it.

We played only Warrior/Paladin/Other teams tonight and most weren't even close, 2 were Feral Druids, 1 was a Frost mage, the last was a uber Resi SL Lock who just kited me around (I was hamstrung of course).

The only successes we've had is with burning the Warrior down and CCing healers - being lucky basically. Any time we try something like a mana drain game the warrior has always killed someone before it becomes remotely close.

I'll admit things are usually closer when we have our UA Lock. This one is actually SL/Aff Drain spec, so I was being slightly misleading then. We did SLIGHTLY better with Warrior burns when running our full Afflock (we have both active in the team). He also dies much much quicker though. Our priest has 420+ resilience and still dies before I can get anyone to half health vs. a single Stormherald Warrior + Purge/ES/CS/Silence or whatever their 3rd member has. Remember, every member of those warrior teams can use all their control, all the time because there is no healing pressure whatsoever with a rogue as a DPSer on the opposing team, hitting on plate/being hamstring kited.

In contrast, without a mage, our priest has very little time to burn / mass / dispel because he has to do max HPS all the time- and when your team needs to chain heal, you've already lost.

I'm sure you know all this and maybe we're doing something really badly wrong (advice very welcome, and glad to have a rogue/priest thread to spazz out in . But we have huge huge problems with ANY opposing team make up with a Warrior/Paladin, which, tonight, for example, was all of them. The difference between a hamstrung rogue and an any-snared warrior, because of intercept, is night and day. Frustrating to the max !

The threads should probably be merged now I've gone back and re-read the last few posts in the other one!

Anyway, from the Gurgster's mouth itself:

Also, your observation in the other thread that lots of the top 3v3 areana teams were caster teams - if only! I don't doubt it's the case in your BG, but it certainly isn't in ours. We played only one team in 3 hrs tonight which wasn't fielding Warrior / Resto /Other (10% of them) or Warrior / Pally / Other (90%) as outlined somewhat in my post above.

I honestly don't think the BoSac nerf will make an appreciable difference in 3s like this at all. Those teams can turtle extremely effectively with two healers, earth shield, grounding, tremor, defensive stance and spell reflect, and they only need wait out until they're immune through DR to most CC anyway, unless you have tons of DPS and VERY coordinated control.

This is turning into a "woe is me" Rogue thing so I'll stop now. More constructive thoughts from others welcome though.

This is a big deal. If a warlock can't punish people for not attacking him, then it really hurts the strength of teams like this with three dangerous but squishy targets. Draintanks usually are only optimal in 3v3 when playing with two other hard targets like war/pal or war/dru.

We played a few games vs. lock/rogue/druid today and we went for the lock the first game and lost 20 pts, but noted he was drainspec. Then we beat them 3-4 times in a row by just murdering the druid while dealing with the rogue's DPS. Draintanks just don't work if there's nothing to tank.

yeah, there's not really enough time to mana drain. I don't think killing the warrior is too much about luck, since so much of it comes down to how effectively the warlock can control the paladin which can be done consistently. With tongues, spell lock, and death coil you have a lengthy period of time to burst the warrior down (our shaman is ele, but even as resto w/ tongues his HPS is going to be weak and he's still open to CC's). This should be enough to force the warrior to go defensive and usually force the paladin to DS, in which case you decide whether you want to continue on the warrior or swap to the paladin and kill him. The paladin can't kite when he's being dispelled and can't heal himself with tongue's and a rogue on him. Straight opening on the paladin might not be a bad idea either.

In regards to my comment about the top of the ladder being caster based, I actually just checked out the ruin 3v3 ladder and if we were to lump rogues in with the 2 dps casters, every top team is either full caster or war/lock up until us at 15 or so (no paladins before that point either). It doesn't even look like there's a double healer team in the top 20. Not that I'm really complaining (I might after bosac nerf) since we haven't played much and I know we can go higher, but that's the current ladder I'm dealing with when mentioning problems with warlocks and such. I fully admit I have little experience fighting double healer teams so this match could be significantly different with the shaman as resto, but I can't see it really being much of a landslide victory in their favor either.

Hey, we are very similar rating, and from the same server ;p If it makes you feel any happier, our matrix (resto druid, lock, shadowpriest) dominates the warrior/ele shaman/paladin teams, but we get utterly destroyed by double rogue teams - I mean, completely dominated with no chance of winning. We were at 2063 rating then fell to 1980 after meeting a lot of rogue teams.

In a way 3 vs 3 is very rock/paper/scissory - some match ups are exceedingly difficult, if you run a really skewed matrix like you are, you have to play superbly to beat warrior teams - we on the other hand are utterly fucked versus teams full of ice mages/rogues because they just shed our dots.

Clearly we just need to get high enough to play teams like yours Mearis

Kinda bizarre that me, Valentine, Depry and you are all posting in this thread too!

Thanks for the tips Crossbones, you're obviously right I guess - with UA on the Warrior we can keep poisons and DoTs on and it's obviously much better.

Our other lock went Drain spec for our 5v5, which we usually run as Mage/War/Me/Resto Sham/Pally, with me or the resto shaman swapping for our lock. Yes it's unfocused, but it's mostly a friends/guildies/ex-guildies team. Now, however, our Warrior has quit WoW, so we're going to try Mage/Me/Spriest/Lock/Pally for a bit, in which case it makes sense for the Lock to go to full Affliction again....

We got bored with our lack of arena play after our 5v5's last week since we're only playing 10 games and downranking to get a friend 30%, so we took some of our mains and plopped them on our former-alt 3v3 team. We ran the same setup (holy priest, rogue, frost mage) and ranked from exactly 1800 to 2201 in about 3 hours - the setup is very solid and its no surprise it's very cookie-cutter these days.
Why does the warrior have bloodlust and windfury? Their team has 3 buffs, bloodlust, earth shield and a blessing. ALL of these are excellent buffs, spell steal them. Worst case they get purged, but you have a lot more junk buffs for them to get through, and they're all worthwhile buffs to steal. Your priest should remove anything remaining that you don't spellsteal and everything from the other two.

Paladin as the only dispeller is weak against detect + poly on the warrior (and winters chill if you have it). Cycle nova and poly, use water elemental root + nova in combination when the warrior trinkets the first. Root AFTER intercept when possible. Freedom should be purged almost instantly by your priest or spell stolen as backup. I personally have a self-written UI mod that tracks important buffs to purge - download one or write one yourself if you're bad at keeping track of freedom. Your mage should be focusing on controlling the warrior, and can do it very effectively, but the priest still has to work to help keep himself alive.

Use LOS to pillar-kite, this is possible on every map to an extent. Be mindful of where your mage is though so you don't LOS his CC while getting beat on. Don't be afraid to blow your trinket simply to remove hamstring if it puts you in a position to pillar-kite and avoid getting caught. Watch the berserker rage/death wish timer (again, UI mod to track this is immensely helpful) and fear the warrior when he is vulnerable or outside bers stance. Trinketing intercept stun (also removes hamstring) and fearing simultaneously (being sure that bers rage isn't already active) is very effective and even if they react very quickly and bers out of the fear, you can often get out of melee range and begin pillar-kiting because intercept is down. Trinketing hamstring right as your mage sheeps the warrior is also very effective to get away and start kiting. Spam PW:S as often as possible to kill rage generation (and avoid LOS to the enemy shaman for purge when possible) - it is also the most efficient 'heal' when mortal strike is up. Mind control can be VERY effective especially if you're out of LOS of their shaman for shocks.

Do not let the shaman cast, keep wound poison up. Earth shield should never be up for more than a second or two. If the shaman cannot cast, the paladin HAS to heal at some point, taking away reaction time on cleansing the warrior. The better job you do with this, the more the paladin will have to heal, meaning he becomes vulnerable to more counterspells and drains his mana. A key fear or mind control on the paladin can force them to blow NS or cause the shaman to die if the opportunity presents itself. If the mage is doing his job, your priest will have enough pressure taken off to do things other than heal. The priest should mana burn the paladin, kill totems, and mind control/fear the paladin if the shaman drops low. Do not waste time and mana to burn the shaman, he cannot cast with your rogue on him anyway so his mana is meaningless.

Stay on the shaman. Worry less about improving damage and more about control; just save your burst for when an opportunity presents itself. Your job is to remove the shaman from the fight while gradually killing him. I recommend mind numbing/wound poison, although cripple/wound can work also (I'm partial to mind numbing but the rogue I pvp on is a gnome so it's harder to get kited). The only time you'd want to switch off is if the paladin is right next to the shaman and you can kick/blind/gouge a clutch heal (and still have an interrupt for the shaman) that will cause a death, or to gouge/blind the warrior if he is nearby and it's going to stop him from killing someone. You should not be going out of your way to do these things and should not be doing them if it's not a life or death situation.