There is really no incoming damage under these conditions from the warlock and I'll explain why:

As the match begins, our rogue is in stealth and I am on the lock, the felhunter is either hitting me or our priest. Rogue just saps their healer then does a quick combo on the felhunter to kill it while I'm keeping the lock busy with sheep, counterspell or by using instant damage spells with my elemental hitting it. Most warlocks would try to banish my elemental at this point or cast either fear or howl of terror, so I save counterspell for that in order to lock down his shadow tree, then i can use some frostbolts or scorches to keep pressure on him. Our rogue (combat maces spec) can literally kill a felhunter in less than 5 seconds - they have very high spell resistance but are vulnerable to physical damage. After this, rogue uses sprint to run to the wounded warlock and use a burst combo along with a shatter combo from me to kill him off, while i'm focus-sheeping or focus-counterspelling their healer and our priest fears or mana burns their third player depending on what class they are.

I also use Grid and click2cast mods for decursing quickly anyone on my team without having to change my current target. Grid highlights any friendly units who are afflicted with a curse I can remove and click2cast allows me to remove that curse by hovering my mouse pointer over that unit in Grid and pressing my thumb mouse button (configurable). This means the longest CoT would last on anyone is about 3 seconds, provided you play smart and maintain range and line of sight to your mage any time you get a curse on you. Our priest uses the same technique to dispel magic debuffs, which means a warlock really can't do much damage at all against us. If he tries to use anything with a cast time, he'll get sheeped, kicked or counterspelled. If he uses any instant DoTs, we'll either decurse or dispel them.

Quickly killing felhunters whenever you see them can be key to winning against certain setups. They really play havoc with priests' and mages' casting (I imagine they'd interrupt the heck out of any pure caster class).

Some general rules we use: If there is a warlock, priest or resto druid on the enemy team, we always kill them first. Our reasoning is as follows: A rogue does his best damage on cloth and warlocks have two kinds of fear and priests have mana burn both of which can lose us the game if left unchecked. Also, I can't control or shut down a druid's heals with sheep or counterspell (lifebloom is so strong these days), so they must die ASAP if we are to win. If you need to quickly figure out what spec your enemies have, use the Arena mod called Proximo.

Adding to that, most mages don't notice the Curse of Tongues until halfway through their Icebolt cast, meaning they lose two GCDs. Obviously decursing is the best thing to do, but CoT is still a nuisance and time-wasting thing that warlocks can do to cut down on mage dps or priest hps.

Why is that losing 2 global cooldowns? Frostbolts that are already being casted are unaffected by newly applied CoT.

I think he means if you cancel your Frostbolt to Decurse you would have wasted the GCD you already spent on Frostolt.

I'm not quite sure, but it's what I see a lot of mages do.

Btw - it seems to have completely blown over my head, but how exactly is (dru/priest)/lock/hunter a hard counter to PMR?

Unless they do something like drop dots and viper sting and literally hide behind a pillar the entire game, I don't quite see how it is a hard counter.

Hunter + Felhunter slaughter the Mage, Priest can't remove Viper or get OOC because there's a pet on him too, Rogue gets CCed to hell by Fear, Frost Trap, Roots, and Cyclone. A couple friends and I started playing Druid/Lock/Hunter recently (our team is cleverly named Priest Rogue Mage), and we've ruined every PMR team we've seen. A 2k rated PMR team would probably rip us apart, but because they're better/more experience players than we are, not because the combo has some advantage over us that we're not seeing at our rating. The only real chance they have is for an early gib on the Hunter (difficult, since the Warlock will break up the burst with Fears) or Warlock (difficult, since killing a Warlock is well, killing a Warlock, but probably a better option), but if the match doesn't end quickly the Rogue runs out of cooldowns and spends the rest of the match CCed and the Priest/Mage run out of mana due to Viper Sting.

I'm not sure if this has been said, but for the opener you describe 3x polymorph, frostnova etc you have a few possibilities..

1: Felpuppy spell locks first poly, then he will probably frostnova you which you can use your trinket for (which then is used and you canot trinket the rogues blind :/) and then you will have him hamstringed and blink cooldowned for a few secs atleast

2: Feral charge the mage as he polymorph, this will trigger his counterspell and blink cooldown and you will be able to cyclone him, or you could stay on him while your druid is then free to cyclone their priest before he can drain your druid, and then throw a few hots of warlock before jumping back in form/start to LoS drains.

3: charge defensive stance bloodrage macro your spellreflect so you equip shield and reflect in an instant reflecting the mages poly right back at him :p (he will probably know this and not attempt to cast poly while youre in defensive stance but then he will frostnova you instead, keep shield on and reflect potential frostbolts icelances or sheeps..) now frostnova is on cooldown, you intercept while hitting esc so you dont get slowed, walk backwards to catch him with a pummel on his sheep, on the spot he blinked to and chop him to pieces!

or combine it all! Just keep that mage locked out, but ofc it is still a problem that you have a rogue doing damage on your warlock while you have almost no damage output, so basily you have got to heal... while the priest can just fool around dispelling and wank behind pillars.. this is ofc not an easy combo for you, and facing extremely skilled people like must really be a pain, but i like to belive that anything is possible, it just about discovering which way to go and keep trying out new tacs!

How about warlock go for the mage, fearing him while kiting the hamstringed rogue with poisen abolish?

if you play 2500~ 3v3 you probably know all this, but maybe some other people will get something from this..

Posting to see if any advice can help us further in our crusade to top of the battlegroup! I have been playing RMP since halfway season 2 and after gearing up we made it to about 2200 in s2 and been floating around 2050-2150 constantly this season. The problem with our battlegroup is the lack of competition (since the cyclone hype) and the number of top teams contending on 'any' day really. For example on a given sunday we played 30 games: 10 times we faced the same team, 5 times we faced teams that eiter lost us 28 points or gained 2. 10 times another team which owned us pretty badly so we stopped playing for the night. None of you can probably help us with that, but what I want is to improve against the teams that we just cant seem to beat. (just clarifying the situation).

First team we always seem to lose is druid/priest/warrior: We have tried numerous strats from zerging priest, controlling warrior and fear/blind/silence on druid to pressuring warrior while sheeping priest and manaburning druid. First tactic it seems the priest never has to heal with a druid backing him up and thus can quite often dispell the warrior making full control on him impossible. Especially since the warrior intercepts the rogue every cooldown to slow him down and stay in range. Whatever we do it seems our pressure on the priest just isnt big enough and thus losing control on warrior. Manaburn tactic worked somewhat but after our initial burst they just started getting fear/cyclones off and we lost the outlastgame anyway.

Second team is; hunter/warrior/druid: Tried killing hunter, warrior and even druid but we just seem to lack the dps with proper silencing shots/traps from the hunter. We do pull wins of very rarely but thats pretty much at the mistakes of the opposing team.

Let me end it by saying I have tried a arc/fire spec for now to have a better chance of killing druids, normal spec is 17/44. Our rogue is ShS with no access to pve gear. Me and priest are in full s3. Any help or strats appreciated.

versus druid/priest/warrior u rogue should stick to priest, mage control the warrior all the game and help with dps on the priest. Good mage should be able to lock the warrior totally, play a kite game. Only hard part would be a very good druid with feral charge and bash on the mage during very sensitive moments.

Whole team should work on positioning also, avoid cyclones as much as u can with pillar humping.

On the other hand u should be able to drop the priest easily. Just have your priest chain dispell their priest so he takes a lot more dmg from rogue. Mutitate spec is much help here compared to ShS if u consider the dmg output and burst potential.

versus hunter/warrior/priest or druid u should just go all out on hunter. Priest PI mage or himself (depending who is focused) and zerg the hunter and try to burn him with 3 dpsers. If its druid instead of priest they lack dispeller, mage can lock the warrior but also u should force the druid to use NS as fast as its possible on hunter. Improved counterspell is a must. Also if the rogue sticks to hunter and druid goes all out on healing while hunter is getting low, mage can try to chain sheep druid so he cant put new lifeblooms, rejuws on hunter. He will waste mana and GCD also on shapeshifting.