Duilliath

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 ?

 

Duncan

If i would go feral in arena: Only with people that can control the game on its own and give me the freedom to "do what i want".
Eg. Cyclone and Roots being not the only CC we have, but a possible/situational turnpoint of the match.

You need people that can't be focused down in a blink of an eye. Otherwise you would have to waste to much time/mana keeping them alive without doing damage.

And damage is what you want if you go for feral, right ?

I think feral is just not the right thing for arena. Even if you just compare the feral tree with the 2 other druid trees.

A resto druid is just awesome for arena, especially in the lower brackets. He can cyclone root, has plenty of mana and heal.

A balance druid can also root, cyclone, can take some beating, while maintaing more utility (and damage) than a feral getting forced into bear (due to being focused in cat). If you leave a moonkin alone, he can put out a LOT of damage from a safe distance, while cycloning and rooting. A feral can still be forced to switch forms a lot to burn down his mana.

A feral can take some beating in bear and put out some decent damage in catform. It's quite hard to CC him except for cycloning him. He still has to switch forms a lot if you force him to.
He can't cyclone/root on the fly. He can't heal enough to keep someone alive on his own. He can throw out a "support heal" or two, though.

It's basically not viable to bring a feral into an arena team OVER any other druid spec, in my humble opinion. It's like a Paladin going Retribution... might work sometimes, but doesn't feel right overall.

 

shiftycent

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).

 

Yaksha

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.

Alt Warlock - Yaksha

 

Loshiis

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. :\

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Siddown

Yet another person who likes 3v3s the best.

One issue you are going to have going forward is that everyone right now is geared to the teeth, so if you are bringing new players in (that are new to the arena), you will have an up hill climb with any team you make. But that's true for any bracket.

3v3 Specifically, we're running Frost Mage/Resto Shaman/Rogue, with only the Resto Shaman being geared properly. I've looked around for teams with the same combination, and there just doesn't seem to be any as the popular healers for Mage/Rogue seems to be Druid or Priest (probably due to mobility). So we're hardly what people would say is an ideal setup. Everytime we get to 1800 we get bitch slapped down by Warrior/Paladin/X teams, which is very frustrating for us. I believe most of our problem are due to the other teams Warrior. If he stays of the Shaman or Mage, we tend to win. If he switches to me as I take out/lockdown the Paladin, we lose because with my 225 Resiliance, I just can't stay up if he gets to me with anywhere close to full rage.

Anyone have any good strategies/tactics for this set up? It could very well be that I'm just a shitty Rogu, and I've got thick skin so if we should be doing much better then we are (currently 1755 or so at the time of writing), please let me know.

 

Juli

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?

 

Duilliath

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.

 

• Mex

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.

 

Caal

Ferals don't put out raw enough numbers to be viable in most cases. They're losing the + healing on their arena sets for that reason.

If you're going to play a feral in arenas, you've gotta be flat out incredible. Druids have an answer to most situations, it's true. The problem is you're going to have to come up with that answer every time it presents itself. You can't miss opportunities to remove poisons, interrupt heals, gouge, stun, cyclone, heal, what have you. In order to play a class that doesn't put out raw overwhelming numbers, you've gotta take advantage of every part of your class.

Uh, good luck?

I would say... resto sham/warr/feral druid? You would be an amazing assist for a Sham that gets assraped by curses. A very impressive boost to a Warrior with your +5% crit. Improved LOTP would also be tough to overlook. I think your damage potential would also be quite frightening. As a team, of course. If only they found a way to make windfury affect ferals...

 

Currylaksa

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

 

Caal

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.

 

gia

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.

 

AngryDwarf

3v3 has also become my favorite bracket, as a paladin no less. I think it is the bracket that seems to balance personal skill and group composition the best. I'm leveling a druid for season 3 with plans to go resto, so I can play a larger variety of comps in 3v3. Sadly at this point Paladins are pretty much locked into 2 healer setups (I run priest/pal/war), because of how easy it is to lock them down.

As far as ferals go, I did a little bit of war/pal/feral earlier this season, and I found it mediocre. As mentioned before, it really requires a lot of skill to play a feral effectively in arena. My druid was very proactive with cyclones and root, healing when necessary, getting out of combat to drink/restealth, but still it felt like an uphill battle. Against any team with a rogue or a warrior, they would get on my druid whenever he was ever in cat form. This forced him to go bear or shift out and CC. After several games I failed to see the point of him being feral at all. True, once in a while him + war would burst a target down in the first ~10 seconds and it would be neat, but more often than not him being in cat would leave him too vulnerable so he would spend the match either in bear doing subpar damage or CCing as a sort of gimped resto druid.

I guess I just can't think of a situation where a feral would be more useful than either A: going as resto or B: bringing a rogue.

 

Maynard

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.

 

Mem

I also want to chime in that 3:3 is really the most interesting bracket. For anybody who raids rather intensively getting a 5 man organized and keeping it running can be quite an ordeal if you don't have 5 really dedicated individuals. 3:3 on the other hand is much easier at least for us to get together. Its much more balanced than 2:2 and probably even 5:5 (I tend to agree with Juli here). Its still possible to burst a target down but in general this can be countered unless you encounter a real mismatch but those are far and few between if your setup is balanced.

Speaking on bursting: we play warrior/icemage/priest and are often pretty successfull in bursting down the enemy warrior. Its pretty funny to see them melt away (and I really have the impression that still a lot of warrior don't know how to act under pressure from enemy dps). One of our strengths is also that our setup allows for a lot of viable 2:2 combos if we trade the first kill (which is something to keep in mind when building up a new team) as well as the ability to switch from a burst to an outlasting mode if our priest manages to sneak some manaburns in.

 

◊ Greenexile

Does anyone have any experience running a resto druid / warlock / frostmage team? I've been told its really strong as it brings so much CC, but I'm not so confident when running it as it just doesnt seem to have any real punch and most classes have the ability to negate cc at least partially (via dispels and whatnot).

Is it an outlast kind of team? ie. CC the DPS and wear out the healer? Or is it a burst kind of team? If its a burst kind of team, what role does the warlock play - he says he cant dot everything up because he doesnt want to break sheep and so isnt really able to put out much offensive pressure.

Does anyone have any advice for running this makeup?

 

Loshiis

I played against many Mage/Lock/X teams tonight, and Mage/Lock/Druid seemed to be the strongest. It's a burst team, meant to kill a player without letting the other healer get off any spell with a cast time. Between Sheep, Fear, Spell Lock, Counterspell, Cyclone, Feral Charge, and Bash, you're looking at locking a healer up for a very long time, plenty time to kill a DPS if everything goes as planned. I run a Rogue/Hunter/Paladin, and unless our Paladin bubbled before trying to heal it generally resulted in a loss unless something spectacular occurred.

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drole

Like others have said you need a decent amount of surviveability on all persons in the group. Furthermore i personally believe you need a snare as well due to how shitty lag can be for melee. This brings up a new point; if you bring a snarecapable person to the group he needs some attention too. All in all this leaves you with a couple of possible partners:

Snareclass/dps:

Rogue/warrior. Not much to say here really although i would personally prefer a rogue due to the current state of ar/prep. Additionally both come with a -healing effect for added bonus.

Healer:

Paladin/shaman or to a lesser extent resto druid. It is rather easy to see who fills the role of support for your snare class the best and personally i would go with a paladin as he brings some much needed dispelling to the group as well.


Ideally something like rogue/druid/paladin would be near the best you can get. This combo is not far from rogue/druid/shaman witch Deep has used with reasonable amounts of succes.

EDIT: Thinking about it shaman might be on par with paladin to eliminate pesky priests. You'll propably see a lot of them as you rise in rating.

 

Malinor

The World of Warcraft Armory

This is a pretty decent Team on one of the best BG's in europe. I play the same setup with some friends sometimes and we can also hit 2k without much effort (If you look at my profile right now, 3v3 and 5v5 aren't serious teams, but to help friends gearing up, I am usually around 2,1K in all brackets).

In general, I would say that a Priest or Druid may be the better choice in terms of the healer but since you are going with the shaman you have to take full advantage of his skills, namely Bloodlust, Grounding and Earthshock. You can easily put a lot off pressure on Locks and Priests. Your Shaman needs to play agressiv: Interrupt the first Polymorph, ground an early cyclone, purge the hell out of them (this is a given of course).
Against a paladin: Purge BoSacrifice before sheeping him. Tell your mage when you got it. Another example: If there is a mage in the opposite team both your mages will most likely go for an early polymorph. If the Shaman interrupts theirs and your mate gets away with his, you have got a nice advantage from the start. Always pop up Bloodlust relatively early (you are by no means an outlasting team) but only in a situation when the oppopnents dispeller is under pressure. He has do decide: Heal or Purge, in both ways, it will put more pressure on him.


For you as a Rogue I would advise you to go AR/Preperation. I agree with your observation that your team is into trouble when the rogue is getting focussed. The Mana conservation of a Shaman Healer in normal PvP Gear is more or less horrible (a little better since 2.3 though). 2xEvasion and 2xVanish may help him to last a little bit longer.
And of course, get yourself maces. (EDIT: I just checked your armory and saw that you already have that. I guess what you have to do mainly is gear up)

 

Silver_Surfer

Agreed. I was feral and switched over to resto. Since then my rating has steadily climbed.

And the funny thing is, I am doing it in full S2 gear with healing gems/enchants (and I still have 1300 healing, haha).

 

Caal

In my opinion good Resto Shamans are going to outpace the other heals in the 3's bracket. Warlocks are never going to go away, and Hunters are becoming more popular. The current implementation of Water Shield is the most ridiculous shit ever. With a little bit of appropriate help you're just not going to outmana Shamans anymore. That's a pretty friggin strong tool considering that's one of a Druid's main strengths.

Anywho. I've got a ton of experience with mage/lock/druid. I'm the Druid from the WSVG shows that played against Pandemic. The strength of this team is the variety in ways to succeed. You can play mana drain, burst, lockdown, whatever. I feel it's one of the stronger combos out there. The biggest change in how you play your team is how your Warlock decides to spec. 27/34 is obviously your drain spec. 17/33/11 is the burst spec. UA DEFINITELY has a place in a few matchups as well, but I wouldn't worry about using it. From there, you coordinate what your goal should be against every comp out there.

The weakness of the comp is Rogues, Warlocks, and Druids(f you neilyo). Outside of that trinity, you can pretty much figure out a way to beat every other comp out there. It may take you a while, but not even the counter of Rogue/Mage/Priest that Pandemic came up with was the counter that they thought it was.

 

• Wodin

Shaman are very susceptible to lockout relative to priests and druids. If you CS a shaman and follow it up with a sheep or fear he can't break, one of his teammates will die.

 

◊ Vectivus

We tried running a Warrior/Hunter/Paladin 3v3 for kicks this past weekend, and did surprisingly well. The Hunter was running a full Survival build, which, while not necessarily 'optimal' for PvP, gave us the Wyvern Sting option for CC - between that and consistent trapping, he could almost always remove one target from our opponents' line-up. Our high combined physical DPS tore through cloth-wearers very easily.

I expect that in higher rating brackets, we'd start to get stumped. We hit a Warrior/Warrior/Shaman team that obliterated us (mitigating circumstances, Shaman surviving with 2% health, etc. etc. - bottom line, they won).

 

◊ Praetorian

Shamans are wonderful in a lot of long drawn-out matches where a warlock pet was previously used to keep healers from drinking. Yeah, if you put your pet on me you're going to regret it. But decent teams already have largely stopped doing this. Maybe I'm biased, but I think 2.3 put shamans above paladins (who need some help now, I think) but below resto druids and the new kid on the block, disc priests.

In 3v3 in particular, a resto shaman as the sole healer presents an incredibly appealing target in terms of CC and control. I know I can improve my positional play, but the lack of any instant heals other than NS (and Earth Shield, which most teams can negate somehow) means that I'm inherently terrible at playing the LoS game. Shamans are very, very easy to shut down. If I don't have a druid or mage partner, Tongues destroys me. A three year old could spell lock my heals when I'm Tongues'd, followed by a fear. The Grounding nerf makes it much less reliable since it'll often get killed by some ancillary effect even when you're dropping it reactively. Earth shock on a 6sec cooldown isn't a sufficient defense. If I shock someone's cyclone or mana burn, I buy two seconds with which to cast one LHW. If I'm casting on an MS'd target, that means absolutely jack. And then I either have to LoS the next cast or drop a Grounding (if it's cooled down) to bridge the gap until my next shock cooldown. But all of this means I'm not healing. If I have someone actively trying to CS me, cyclone me, mana burn me, etc., I might get off one amazing 900 point heal on an MS'd target over the course of 6+ seconds. That's not going to get the job done.

Obviously shamans have a fair bit of versatility, and absolutely shine in certain types of matches. Resto shamans are amazing in drawn-out 2v2s against warrior/healer or warlock/healer or the like, which is certainly welcome. But I have a hard time seeing the class/spec as top-tier in most 3s makeups, just because of how vulnerable you are. Obviously this applies much less in a 2-healer 3v3 matrix, and shamans can function much better there.