Mineisbigger

Your druid needs to use cyclone more, can't emphasize that enough. A druid is basically able to keep 1 opponent out of the game for the entire duration of the game, unless he's focused, in which case they should be unable to kill anything. If your druid starts cycloning dps straight away, then their dps will be cut in half for the first 20 seconds or so, giving you the upper hand straight from the start.

 

Ravager

I'm a feral druid in full S1/Vindicator's gear and I joined a 3v3 with a similarly-geared warrior (with a Stormherald and the typical arena spec) and a resto shaman.

We've gone 11-3 so far although we started out at 1500, so now we're at around 1600. Hardly high enough to be considered anything but mediocre for now.

Our strategy so far has been to zerg any squishies like priests, rogues, or resto druids right off the bat. Most of the time the other team went after our shaman (the only other options being a druid who can shift into bear or a warrior in plate) who was able to comfortably LoS and kite with earthbind and frost shock, with my roots for support if there was a warrior on him.

Between mortal strike, feral charge, bash, cyclone, frost shock, and earthbind we seem to be very good at controlling most compositions as well as DPSing them down. While our warrior goes after the squishy targets I'm mostly on the support side. I'll typically open on a squishy and get as big of a mangled rip on them as possible, then start watching the paladin/priest for heals (if the healer is a resto druid we just open up on him). It's not too difficult to feral charge a heal from them since they're mostly preoccupied with trying to keep a cloth/leather target alive that's afflicted by MS and generally getting beaten with a Stormherald. I usually follow it up with a bash, and if it gets trinketed, immediately shift to a cyclone. At this point I keep spamming cyclone on the healer until my warrior's target is dead, which at this level with his weapon doesn't take too long.

We did get destroyed a few times by an MM hunter/subtlety rogue/disc priest combo. They were actually able to effectively zerg down the warrior thanks to wound poison. I think our error in this situation was not dropping a poison cleansing totem (our shaman was busy trying to LoS the hunter) and me not throwing up abolish poison on the warrior or a cyclone on the rogue quickly enough. I think had I done exactly that our warrior may have lived long enough to bring down the priest, at which point we would have been able to dedicate our attention to the rogue while our shaman would comfortably heal outside of LoS.

Other than that, I recognize our advantages against teams with squishy targets in terms of damage and against teams with hard targets with my ability to lock down a healer (for example if a paladin bubbles, I throw cyclone on his healing target, repeat the cyclone as long as possible, and then throw it back on the paladin).

It's not a very serious team. Although we all like to PvP, we usually play for the 10 games per week. If we're on a winning streak, we'll do an extra few until we lose one. I'm in a very poor battlegroup (Emberstorm) where I see people with the Challenger title running around in 1700-1800 rated teams, but with some more honing in on my skill I hope to see our team hit around 2000 as I fine-tune my ability to keep healers and DPS locked down with bash/cyclone/feral charge/roots.

 

Meursault

There's a lot going on here to improve upon, and a few things to touch upon in Chirality's post. I've played both Rogue/Hunter/Druid and Warrior/Hunter/Druid around 2100, and they tend to play similarly. The first thing to work on is the Hunters' survivability. Chir mentions 0/45/16, but I would 100% completely swear by 0/41/20 if you're speccing for 3s. 3/3 Entrapment, Surefooted, and Improved Wing Clip are incredible in this bracket. You can trim down entrapment in 2s and clip in 5s, but in 3s you *need* both for personal defensive purposes as well as protecting your healer from melee zerg teams.

Here's the one thing I would tell my Healer when WRD teams would fixate on me: You get rid of the warrior and give me abolish, and I'll do the rest. This is true in 2v2 too: played well an MM hunter should basically *never* get touched by an ShS rogue. The hunter needs your druid to help you out initially- abolish and a cyclone on the first KS - but after that it's 100% on your hunter to keep that rogue off of him. Scatter shot shares a cooldown with ShS, but unlike the rogues' one-time-use Deadly Throw, frost trap + Abolish can keep him off for sustained periods of time. In short, tell your druid that it's his job to keep warriors off the hunter- if rogues are the issue it's the hunters' job (with abolish) to lose them.

Play for the long game. Viper Sting is the inevitable clock working in your teams favor, so make sure you're setting it up right- if your warrior is on a warlock, for example, to lock down fear, you'll need to protect him from CC from the Druid with silence and scatter- this both functions to keep your dps high and get the druid into defensive healing mode. Nothing ends a game faster than healers forced into healing within a hunters' LoS. Unlike the typical 2v2 strategy of "just viper sting then silencing shot so they can't dispel or have to shift", you'll often be viper stinging one target (mage, paladin, priest, whatever) and having to protect it with a silence on another target- the shaman/druid/paladin. Also, forcing a druid into bear form to avoid viper stings can set up some devastating cc chains- viper sting followed by a scare beast puts them into a nasty bind- risk a scare beast-scatter-trap-cyclone-cyclone chain, or shift right back out and eat stings.

Perhaps I'm egotistical, but playing this comp always felt like it came down to how well I performed; a few examples illustrate options your hunter has. if the warrior got caught in a cc chain with no reflect, could I have stopped one with a cyclone while his SR cooldown came up? If a warrior/rogue/ret got ahold of me, could I have kited better? Was there a better burst window when my warrior had so-and-so down to 45% and I had silencing shot up?

A lot of this stuff will just get better with practice. The ability to not just know people's healths by staring at proximo, but roughly track where all 6 people are in arenas at the same time (and what they're doing) is important - especially for what amounts to a drain team. As you point out, attention is a lot of it. If your warrior gets caught tunnel visioning and misses a great fear opportunity, or a timely spell reflect, it can be bad. Similarly, your hunter should never be missing chances to get off a viper sting, even if he has to dance all over a frost trap while he does it. You'll get a better feel for when you have to bail out the hunter with disarms because your druid is csed as you play more. While it's not a full cc team like blind/fear/poly, you get a lot of control out of frost/freezing traps, cyclone, roots, scare beasts, pummels, 2 spammable melee snares, and skillfully timed mace stuns. It's important to remember that in almost every matchup you're the control/outlast team - even 2 healer teams.

 

Mr.Bob

WOW Meursault, that was really awesome thanks a lot.

I think it basically comes down to one big starting error...

Every match we went like "ok, so who do we kill?" and would focus one person to (try to) kill him.

I think that if we all get that we don't need to kill fast our game might improve a lot.

To me just knowing that staying at 0-0 kills is better then trading one for one in our comp reliefs me of tunneling someone with MS and frees me to help my mates out. I think were just too damn new to this and thought things would go smoothly even thou we have only 5 hours or less in arena experience =P

Well, as far as specs go, so definitely MM improved drain + scorpid is the way to go over BM/ravager right?

And for me (warrior) in this defensive play I should focus more on reflecting CCs and keeping everyone spamstringed with the burn target MS'd rather than wasting rage on Whirlwinds and such? Also since I now realize this is an outlast team, I'm thinking of going enrageless to get endless rage and 3/3 TM to be always ready to pop anything when needed. Your thoughts?

Again, thanks a lot for all feedback.

 

Chirality

I still prefer Deathwish / Slam / Weapon Mastery / Flurry over anything 41/17/3 has to offer. Tactical Mastery is nice for clutch Spell Reflects but it's easy enough to manage your rage better anyway and stay in Battle when you think it might be needed. I pay close atttention to my swing timer for when I want to change stances. For example, Switching to Battle right before I swing if I think I need to Reflect, switching to defensive only right as a swing if I need to disarm/Intervene.

To Meursault: When you play Hunter/Druid/(War||Rog) do you normally have the warrior chasing the druid in a dru/melee/melee team or trying to help control a rogue or warrior?

I've typically approached it by trying to control other melee and wait for an opportunity to burst someone when their healer can get cycloned, but I've found Druid teams to be extremely frustrating due to root--I'll tell my hunter to focus on interrupting CC more. And perhaps vs. a Druid it's better for me to simply chase the druid around, thus preventing more CC, than the nominal amount of control via Improved Hamstring and Intercept I can exert. O, how I wish I had bought an S3 Mace instead of an S3 Sword--which got replaced by Cat's Edge quite quickly, too.

 

Meursault

Bob, it's important that you keep your pressure on healer mana high somehow. How you do this is adaptive- if you're getting cc-chained by a Druid that's standing out of line of sight of the hunter, then some spell reflects would certainly help. Just being a drain team doesn't mean all your kills come when the healers are oom, but your kills *will* be set up by healers protecting their mana bars. If you can force a healer to jump the bridge in BEM or run too far away at Ruins, a quick target change will often net you a kill. Look at your DPS as more of an attrition on healer mana and time. If they start getting low on mana, that attrition is going to quickly open some kill windows. As such, your job is to do what it takes to keep the healer's mana going down - often this will mean split dps- you chase the druid, forcing him to spamshift and try to cc you (which you make him waste mana on by reflecting. In any case, MS *is* important even if you're not trying to burst down a kill. Healers have to heal through it, because if they DO fall behind and you suddenly have an MSed target sitting in the open at 50%... trinkets+death wish+rapid fire can bring a quick end to the game.

Chirality: Your strategy against RWD is depends on theirs. A lot of these teams try to blow up the hunter, which is in my mind the easier win. Druid locks down warrior, hunter kites and dpses rogue, tagging the druid whenever he's in LoS to heal. Warrior chases druid, calling for help on offsilences when needed. The harder teams just try to zerg the druid- especially the warrior/ret/druid teams. On these we still tend to use the warrior on the druid, only switching off to intervene/disarm if needed. This is also the matchup that I insist Hunters get both 3/3 Entrapment and 3/3 Clip on. Your hunter HAS to protect your druid or it'll be a fast loss. They also need to output significant enough DPS for this to matter. Spam clips, Viper down the ret if possible (once OOMed do NOT focus dps the ret, as I'm sure you know), dispel BoFs, and single-trap or frost trap depending. A well timed single-trap/disarm combo will buy 10 (!) seconds of free healing, so sync your timers like such if your druid needs them.

Putting the warrior on an evasioned rogue/ret is a huge loss of DPS and pressure on the druid, letting him often just go bear form and further complicate traps/kiting as he does full cc rotations on your warrior, cyclones your druid whenever he gets full hots up, etc. Generally speaking, your warrior needs to be able to pick his own angle of approach on their druid, and not be forced into chasing melee around and *hoping* they don't pull him into LoS of cc chains. Throwing the warrior on the ret/rogue could work, but you'll have to tell the hunter that he has to use his cc solely on the druid to protect the warrior- burning scatter shot on a shadowstep only to have your warrior spend 25 seconds in roots/cyclone while you no longer have scatter to set up freezes isn't a good tradeoff. Because of that risk I prefer protecting the druid myself, and hoping my warrior has his a-game on the druid.

And yea. Maces are pretty much a must in this composition, it's not like having a BoF and/or dispelbot. In terms of warrior spec, I wouldn't suggest losing Weapon Mastery, and while I tend to like 35/23/3 over Flurry builds, you split dps regularly enough that BF is expendable and if you think you can stick to your target Flurry will probably generate more Rage than SW, so an argument can be made for flurry. But as Chirality says, you still need to be on top of reflects even without tac mastery.

 

Sorcerer

I wanted to share my new team comp that we tried for 2nd time for past few weeks but it seems its gonna really shine with shaman changes.

Particular line-up is, Mage 0/5/56, Resto Shaman with not best desired spec and Muti rogue 41/20. Me and rogue are geared in S3 and shammy mostly S1.

We swap out priest for shaman becouse simple he was not available and it turned out quite strong team.
Starting from 1500 to 1700 we went 20-1 with stupid loss and than triple revenge. Not many double melee teams in that bracket in our quite strong BG.
Caster teams were a total joke with rank1 earthshock assist and earthen shield on mage(me) giving me really nice edge with less interrupts. Triple dps/hybrid teams like Elemental/SP/Lock were tight but never lost.
Above 1.7k we reach a brick of wall in a double melee teams, we shouldnt lose however our shamman is fairly undergeared, he cant speak/use vent and he is just 'good' player so we were kinda screwed at that point.

I'll report lateron when my friend's shamman is back on server around 4th april and we give it a serious try to this team with full S3 and really skilled shamman.

Some of the tactics, versus PMR for example we were able to play either long games training mage or just simply finishing priest quite well. Spliting DPS with muti on priest, me on mage and training all CC with counterspell/earthshock or just interrupt heals we were able to clear them without much trouble. I just wish we had much better shamman and i would probably never play PMR.

Versus lock teams we were able to kill them in no time. Bloodlust, shatter combo and muti burst nothing that PMR can come up with.

Double melee teams were tricky with shamman being trained so he was focusing on himself too much not interrupting healers/warrior which we often were able to drop if he was just able to earthshock/purge.

Any teams without hamstring were a joke, poison cleaning / cure and im kiting rogue out to hell or shammy just ghostwolf if he is focused. Being pretty much unable to drain us made hunter teams much easier also this way we beat quite some double/triple drain with hunter/lock and druid/priest. Something that was always my nightmare playing PMR.

From my mage point of view, earthenshield giving me much less pushback is insane. I even feel like i was playing with 2xT4 for 100% non-interrupted frostbolts during S2. Maybe not significant but u can really feel it.

 

ThaEzzy

Edit: Turns out I ended up in another combo. If anyone could elaborate on whether Mage/rogue/resto shaman is possible to do? We tried but so far no major success to be honest.

 

Sorcerer

No tight strat vs PMR.

Keep CoT on mage/priest, keep pet on mage and dispell him. Rogue trains mage.
Cyclone rogue/priest, fear rogue/priest keep dots up and banish mage pet, or kill it fast.

Collect free points if rogue is not muti and u play good enough.

 

Supermassive

Could Resto Druid + Feral Druid + Elemental Shaman be a viable option? The lack of an MS style debuff is a downer, but theoretically it seems to have a survivability edge. 2xinnervate, all 3 classes can heal, bear form if focussed by melee, cyclones, roots, bashes, charges.

We're going to try this combo from next week. Any possible tips/strats to use? Or is this combo going to fail hard and fast.

 

Pointyleaf

It might work, but you have limited cc and limited burst. No real drain to speak of, so I see (even with 2x innervates), you guys running out of mana from trying to heal through the other team's damage.

 

Shkarn

I recently heard people talking about this combination, but I'm having a hard time seeing it overly strong assuming the priest gets focused. Does anyone have experience with this setup and what the strengths and weaknesses are? I haven't done any serious arena since mid-Season 2, so I'm a bit out of touch with the current 3s teams. The biggest pro I can see is there's a massive amount of damage, but it seems really susceptible to high-melee teams and high-CC teams. What are your thoughts and comments?

 

Bunnyz

May I have some advise from people running a PMR teams against this setup: Priest Rog Mage Fire (basically PMR but the mage is fire mage - he has PoM as well I think). My team was at 2180 and today when we fought that team we got stomped down to 2078, the score was 2-6 I think.

When the game started, as usual, we try to get opening on them, spam dispel the mage, SWD to break sheep, try to fear nova etc. and they do the same to us, but the problem is the buff Blazing speed of the mage - no matter how fast I dispel it the mage still able to get away from my rogue while got all his poison cleansed and in the end, my mage was forced to IB x2 and died right after (or some fights, before) their mage did.
Is any one have any idea how to fight that setup? Was we missing anything? (we are very inexperienced against that setup since this is the first time we met a 2k+ team like that, usually mage = frost)

Thank you in advance,

 

Wierdo

I'm looking into starting a 3v3 and was wondering which class would suit me and my friend perfectly. I play a Shadowstep Rogue with 352 resi using fists and my friend is a resto druid.

I thought that an MS Warrior would work quite well but im not really that sure, any suggestions?

 

ThaEzzy

If you play it right it might work, since there's a lot of double melee teams out there, however I'm not sure about a warrior in a setup without a priest, but being shadowstep, if you're good at "annoying" people enough to keep your warrior from being CC'ed too much against mage teams and alike.

Additionally you can also go with a warlock, but that's kind of an old setup. I tried it earlier to great success, but that was kinda before the appearance of double melee teams became excessive.

Another possible option is a combat rogue, since they do good amounts of damage and then you control the targets to make sure they take that damage, but to be honest I think it's slightly sub-par to a warrior against a good deal of setups.

 

malthrin

While Druid/Rogue/Warrior is under discussion, anyone care to chime in some advice? We've been fluctuating between low 1600s and low 1700s, particularly having a lot of trouble with various Shaman/Paladin/Warrior double melee comps - sometimes the Shaman is the healer, sometimes the Paladin. We've had limited success with putting our 2 melee on their Warrior while I take the other one away, but other games I'm not successful at avoiding JoJ or staying out of Intercept range and then it's not long until I'm dead. Should I be using my trinket on JoJ to escape after a Feral Charge out of melee range? I've been holding it for Hammer of Justice. We haven't had any success attacking the other dps (retadin/enh shaman); with the Warrior on me I can't reliably Cyclone during BoP/Bubble and Feral Charging the healer to try to prevent heals on our target just results in me taking JoJ and dying soon afterwards.

 

Deload

Recently a few friends and I started a War/Ret/Rshaman comp and have been enjoying it alot. This week we broke into the 1700-1800 range and started drawing nothing but PMR. While I understand the natural disadvantage we have against the PMR, I would still like to hear some strats to counter them in the hopes of taking a few games from them.

We quickly identified the good PMR's from the bad ones. Overall we're probably only at 20% win rate against them as a whole, but we can beat the teams that either play poorly or make a mistake. The thing that separated the good ones from the bad ones was who their focus target was. In all the matches that we lost, I (warrior) would always be the focus target. We were able to take one game from a PMR that focused me down by getting the rogue out of stealth, but that was luck more than anything else.

I'm at a loss for how to handle a PMR that targets the warrior first. Typically the match starts off with a sap on the paladin, or if they can't get the sap, they open with cheap shot on me. My shaman is always the CC target, and with their priest stomping totems, it doesn't take long for a CC chain to start; sheep, fear, blind, CS, gg. I am unable to apply any pressure between frost nova, cheap shot, kidney shot, slowing effects, etc. When I get Freedom, it is either Spell stealed or dispelled off instantly. My paladin is doing his best to cleanse me and keep me mobile and my shaman out of CC, but in doing so, he isn't able to apply any real dps pressure. I'm forced to sword and board and at that point that match is already lost.

We tried so many different approaches, but to no avail. By taking me out of the equation with stuns and roots, the game is almost always a loss because the lack of pressure on anyone, and with my paladin on cleanse duty, he's unable to really dish out the damage as well. We tried just going all out with reckless abandon, but the good PMRs just dropped us before we could react. Then when we tried to play defensive and pillar hump and stay out of LOS, but we still got stomped because we weren't putting out any damage. The only glimmer of hope that we found is starting off with split dps in hopes of getting some stuns, crits, something to slow down their assault until they've used their cooldowns, and then do a hard switch on the priest.

I know that my shaman needs to stay out of CC and get some shocks off, but good PMR's just find a way to CC him every time. It seems that as soon as I switch to zerker stance to pummel a sheep or bolt, I immediately get KS'd and down I go. But if I don't go zerker and try to get some pummels off, they just cast at will and we arrive at the same outcome. Hopefully with more practice we can improve our positioning and LOS some of that CC, but by far, the PMR is the most difficult comp to come with a good strat against.

Any help you guys can offer would be awesome. Thanks in advance.

 

Klaerth

I'm currently running a team of Warrior/Resto Shaman/Moonkin with relatively good success at 1800 (we've gone about 26 and 8 this week), but the one 'common' team tends to give us a few issues...that being Mage/Rogue/Disc Priest.

We're never quite certain who to target first. Generally, the Rogue is my roots/cyclone target of choice whilst we beat away at the priest. Our DPS is incredible whilst Bloodlust is up, and we've found that so long as we rush them the majority of Disc. Priests will be too busy healing to even attempt a Mass Dispel (and we stay away from eachother, so normal Dispel'd typically be better for them). It seems to depend mostly on how they play...if the mage isn't good at preventing damage to his priest, we'll tear the priest to shreds. But if he and the rogue attack anything other than our shaman, we tend to have issues. Any suggestions for us, mayhaps?

As well, with other teams, they tend to attack our shaman...which is great. It lets me do my damage uninterrupted. When they attack me, however, we tend to have issues with some teams. I'm the moonkin here...and relatively poorly geared. I'm using Vindicator's, the Heroic Magister's mace, and the blue balance set. About 860 spell damage and 260 resilience. I'm attempting to gear up, but I fear I'm the weak link of the team defensively (whilst by far putting out the most damage in almost every game).

I've a few other general questions..how do moonkin fare in the higher brackets, 3v3-wise, and particularly with a team such as this? Bloodlust is crucial; we can oftentimes kill an opponent in 10 seconds if I'm left unmolested and MS is up. The gear I wear is focused for initial DPS...I use the Spell Haste metagem, Quagmirran's Eye, the exalted Shattered Sun Neck, and so on. Things that'll give me short procs almost immediately to help...and it works quite well. But as most of these have 45s internal cooldowns, it means that they can only be up once for the Bloodlust, and my DPS falls when such is gone. Will I typically be attacked first in a setup such as this, or would the resto shaman be the more common target, as we've seen in the lower brackets?

My apologies if this is a bit incoherent; I'm rather sleepy at the moment. =>

 

Zavior

That comp is one of the worst possible matchups you can have. Unless they make a blatant mistake, I cant see a way to beat them. Seems the best way is to stick on the paladin and interrupt every heal and force the bubble, after that hope for an oppoturnity to gib the paladin. All this while hoping your druid surviving/they not gibbing your rogue. We've been hovering around 2.1k-2.3k, mostly held back by these teams.

 

Humbaba

I really like how the strategy posted for this combo on Arena Junkies is immediately contradicted in the first comment.

I'm playing the warrior on Travian's team and we had no success with starting on the paladin. He was using BoF on himself to stay on Travian and then when we'd get him low he'd bubble and heal himself. With JoJ on Trav and the paladin and warrior working him over with bloodlust and windfury we couldn't keep him alive long enough to kill the paladin twice. Our limited success came from killing the warrior. It was two weeks ago when we did these games, so I don't recall the exact order of events, but I think this worked better for us because we had rogue stuns and mace stuns on the warrior and it allowed Trav to CC more effectively. I think the ideal order of events is that we pound on the warrior and cyclone the paladin, the warrior gets BoPed, we cyclone him and pressure the paladin, then we switch back to warrior and chain cyclones onto the shaman after BoP expires. Does this seem reasonable?

 

Angeron

No that's a terrible strategy. Stick the shaman with both melee after sapping pally, force bubble(s). Cyclone warrior until dr is up, cyclone shaman when he gets bop-ed (no free heals). I've killed resto-shaman in less than the time of a sap before when running dub-melee, it's the only way to win unless the paladin lets the warrior sit in roots the WHOLE GAME (which won't happen).

Though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours, and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable; I simply am not there.

On your server, causing econo-trauma.

 

Cathmor

I play a Ret paladin (full s3 minus shoulders) in the arena, and am trying out different combo's for all brackets, trying to find something that I like and can find a groove with. I