My apologies if I missed the thread, but checked both pages of threads in the PvP forum and didn't find it. Rather than make this a 'personal' thread I'd hope to see a broader use for it, but will start off with my own situtation.

I personally enjoy this format the most - being a Feral Druid 5v5 never felt really comfortable and 2v2 is primarily a matter of rock, paper, scissors till you get out of a lower brackets.

Looking at my teams currently is pointless (my 2v2 consists of my Rogue alt and me, my 3v3 has been inactive after I had to replace yet another healer), but hoping to find a proper frost mage (or rogue or warlock, most likely the mage) for the 2v2.

Leaves me with the 3v3. Have been trying to figure out what would be a suitable setup that really would incorporate a feral. Last season I went with MS Warrior / Healer (Paladin or Shaman) / Me. It ultimately fell flat due to the healer(s) having very little resilience, thus dying very fast under focus fire or simply because first the Warrior and then (another) healer went AWOL for ages.

So far, most of what I came up with seems like simply a 'solid' 2v2 team with a Feral Druid tacked on. For some reason it doesn't seem all that appealing and one could effectively have switched in a Rogue (for instance) in the above team.

Resto Druid + Warlock + Feral Druid seems interesting but again, mostly a case of 'popular 2v2 with Feral'.

Any thoughts on a decent team build ? And tactics ?

While I normally go resto for arena (and have spent all my honor/arena points on resto gear, so my feral PvP gear has 0 resilience and consists of a mixture of my tanking and DPS PvE gear), I did a couple weeks of 3v3 as feral. My partner was a MS Warr with 3/5 or so Merciless and a Holy Priest with decent (150-200 resilience, 9k health, etc) gear. While not the superstar team, we pretty much won every game there wasn't a MS Warr and Holy Paladin in. With that combo + a CC of some sort, they just CCed our Warrior and burst down our Priest. The 2 piece T5 helped a lot in keeping up my priest buddy, and when he wasn't being focused he was spamming Mana Burn on their healers.

Basically as long as we could keep our warrior un-CCed, we could win. This just wasn't possible with a Holy Pally + MS Warrior against us... but other than that, we did pretty well for our gear, taking the team up to 1750 or so before meeting a ton of MS Warr + Holy Pally teams to bring us back down.

It was a fun team and I think we would've taken the team much higher if we had better gear and more experience working together (the warrior and I PvP together a lot, but the Priest just kind of joins us here and there).

I'm another who prefers 3v3 than the other brackets, it's got a nice balance in terms of being easy to get a group together, and games not being extremely long or short. A bit after season 3 starts, I'll be switching my druid over to Feral from Resto and trying a 3 DPS team composed of a Frost Mage/Mace Rogue/Feral Druid(me).

In this season, our team came across a Resto Druid/Feral Druid/Rogue combo that beat us a couple of times. It was a pretty fun team to fight, with no target being a really easy target to take down quickly. I think the damage a well geared feral druid can put out is a bit underrated, and with the gear coming in S3 they'll definitely be something to take note of. Not to mention that they can still do some healing / help with mana via innervate.

On the note of feral druid control, I have to say that a bit of thinking out side the box is necessary. With quicker combo point generation than a resto druid, strong damage, and quick shifting, there's quite a bit of control you can put out in the form of pressure. Starting with a pounce, moving into a maim, shifting to bear and bashing, back to cat to get a quick combo point or two, then a cyclone, and then another maim. Or change it up so that you spend less time trying to completely incapacitate them, but do some strong damage to put them on the defensive. Either way, you'll be dictating the terms.

While it sounds quite nice in thought, and it's the basis of my trial of feral / 3 DPS 3s team (not to mention being tired of taking 40 seconds to 2 minutes to kill a mob >_>), this'll probably fall apart if/when I'm focused. Should be fun to find out!


Something I'm interested in... what's the most annoying 3s composition any of you have fought? One team that we came up against was a Resto Druid/Holy Pally/SL/SL lock while I was running Resto Druid/MS Warrior/ Frost mage. Their druid was able to control our warrior enough that the lock was able to drain our mage's mana pool and then move on to mine and win the game. It was... interesting.

I just can't see a Feral Druid being able to do more than an equivalently geared Boomkin. The Boomkin can CC without shifting, has a larger mana pool, ranged damage, spell damage, and bigger heals...just seems superior to a Feral Druid in arena. Not to mention both Resto and Boomkins can use almost all of the Feral CC in arena as it is. :\

Sorry if this is a bit off topic, but given that the thread is about the 3v3 format in general and not just "tell me how to play with this class composition":

I really wish they'd balance for 3v3 instead of 5v5 and make it the bracket of choice. I used to be on board with their philosophy of 5v5 being the intended style of play and offering the most interesting matchups, but after 2 seasons of dealing with getting 5 people online together, replacing teammates that quit, and composition issues, I've gotten pretty tired of it. I just want to log in and play.

I also feel that 3v3 has the potential to be better balanced, especially in terms of burst survivability simply due to numbers. People can still die fast, but five players (typically 4dps) can put out too much burst for the amount of stamina/resilience players have. It also seems that there are more compositions that work well in 3v3 for many classes than 5s, but that can depend on the class as well. Do you think that blizzard will ever cave and abandon their "5v5 > *" mentality?

Not at all - I really didn't want to limit this thread to just me and my 3v3. That'd really be short-lived and rather pointless.

To me, it's favourite because there's a number of options available and Ferals are viable (not grand, but viable) in there. As I've said elsewhere - the more specialists you can fit into a group, the less desire there is for the hybrids.

I want to do Arena as feral because, quite simply, my gear is far better as feral and I do far better as feral. Am leveling a second (Balance) and third (Resto) druid specifically for not having to regear every time I want do something else.

The Resto Druid / Feral Druid / Rogue seems interesting, though it suffers a bit from lack of dispelling, but that might not be a huge problem.

So far I've found anything with a Paladin to be an automatic loss... but that could as easily be due to the fact that it's hard to get 'together' as team when you are lucky to even hit the 10 games per week.

I just can't see feral being viable in arena. It has such minimal CC (a 4 second stun that requires stealth, a gouge that requires talent points, and a 1 min CD stun that can be dodged / parried / resisted / missed / blocked?). Feral charge is great, but its very hard to combine it with damage, since it requires bear form, which means that really its usefulness is limited to interrupting casting or gaining / closing distance 90% of the time, the snare isn't useful enough.

I'd love to see feral gain more CC. Whether it's an 8th tier talent that reduces cyclone cast time by 0.5/1/1.5 seconds for 5 seconds after leaving a form (probably imba :\), or making maim a snare, or just ... something to allow a feral druid to combine some form of CC with some form of meaningful damage, which in my experience isn't something they're great at.

The other problem, I feel, is that they're melee and lack a healing debuff (as with all hybrids). Giving them one would be overpowered, of course, but really I think it does limit their choices for teammates to rogues, warriors, and now hunters. I'd be very interested to see how a hunter / fdruid / discpriest team went actually. Maim / bash could be used to line up aimed shots, the druid can help out healing in a pinch, two classes can mana drain, innervate on a priest, etc etc. It's also the kind of team where focusing the feral would be a big mistake. Which basically gives him a lot of time to shift out to CC, throw hots, innervate, run away to drink, etc etc. I don't really know enough about the specifics of hunters and priests to see how well this would work in the long run though, but I think it could potentially be brutal with some good co-ordination / execution.

On another note, how do people feel about the removal of +healing on feral gear? I always liked the idea, but it seems ferals are now being pigeon-holed into feral forms, whereas I always saw them more as versatile, adaptible players who could squeeze into whatever role was needed and perform it at ~50% capacity.

And finally, I don't really see Blizzard ever abandoning their 5v5-centric style of thinking. They've got too much invested into it. I also think that a lot of it simply stems from the fact that dungeons are done in 5 man groups.

I used to play warrior SL lock druid around the 1800s, supposedly a scrub-friendly setup. However we keep getting mage groups which keep the warrior CCed throughout the fight. Devour magic always hits the winter chill. As a druid, would you play more aggresively to interrupt/wear down the mage? Or coordinate cyclone and fears on it?

Context of mage teams:
mage/rogue/priest
mage/lock/druid
war/mage/pal

You don't actually need the Warrior to do anything other than land a hamstring every time he comes out of CC to win against those comps with Lock/Druid.

Compositions that in my opinion have good synergy with a feral in 3v3:

feral, rogue, priest
feral, warrior, paladin
feral, hunter, priest (possibly good with the new patch? might be worth testing)

I got the second setup to gladiator in season 1 but haven't been able to play it in season 2 due to time issues. I still think it might be viable though. Paladins are very weak to the current warlock infested metagame and being able to decurse and give them some breathing room with cyclone is crucial to letting them heal effectively. The only alternative in that role is a mage or a second healer. I feel a feral has more endurance than a mage in the longer battles (and war/pal based setups are likely to get into one) while still providing a good coordinated burst option (Which is countered by bop. Two physical dps and no offensive dispel is a weak point, but there are ways to work around that).

The key point though is that a feral druid is perhaps the most skill intensive class in the arena, there's a ton of things you can be doing at any given moment and each of them is very important depending on the situation, and in addition the timing is crucial.

Might want to change the topic title to specify feral placement.

I believe WoW China currently has a 2,700+ ranked Feral Druid / Frost Mage / SL/SL lock team, although I'm not familiar with the state of PvP over there so it's possible the development of thought/player skill doesn't match western realms. I've also faced a similar combo work with a top-100 Rated BG9 3s team consisting of Hemo Rogue / Feral Druid / Frost Mage (Link). In 2s, Feral Druid + Frost Mage has made it to 2,500+ (although Paladin/Warrior dominated high brackets at the time).

My inference from these teams:

In general, a Feral Druid both requires help in order to stay on a target, and can assist others in staying on or getting away from their targets. In that vein, a druid works well with a frost mage because roots/cyclone allow the mage to kite more effectively, and a mage's rooting/snaring abilities allow a cat to hold on to a target for a number of time. Both also have reasonable healer control in the form of CS/Cyclone. If you can't tell already, playing a feral involves almost having you and your partners almost function as though a single player were playing all three. Proper kiting and opportunistic burst is key to the combo. You really have to build the circumstances up to provide opportunity for a kill, unlike a rogue who will use their cooldowns to create the kill.

Hm, I think Frost Mage / Hunter / Feral Druid would have some interesting viability. You could cyclone/nova and wind up an aimed shot (MS), and you'd have a large number of tools to hold a target in place, as well as Silencing Shot / Scatter Shot / CS / Cyclone on an enemy healer to finish off DPS. I imagine the team would be quite vulnerable to good warlocks, though.