Diao

Is there any way to defeat PMR without having a druid on your team as a warrior? It just doesn't seem like any setup I've tried can beat it. I've tried disc priest and holy pally, holy pally and lock (both felguard and sl/sl), priest and lock, rogue and priest/pally and we keep getting absolutely destroyed by PMR as long as the priest is disc. We had no trouble beating PMR when the priest was shadow as they always go for me being the warrior, and once I survive until they're oom we can win, but with a disc priest we just get completely locked down and unable to stay on the priest to prevent mana burns. Either they go straight for me (as they usually do) and I can't interrupt the priest from burning, or they burn down our priest when running priest/pally, or they keep chain ccing us while burning down the other dps or healer. It just doesn't seem like there's any way to beat them unless they make a mistake even if we play perfectly.

 

◊ Praetorian

Going on the priest seems like the wrong call to me there. I'd think hamstringing the rogue and pressuring the mage would work better. Ideally you want to force the priest to heal while your healer(s) focus on LoSing mana burns. Kite the rogue around as he burns his timers to keep on his target, and keep some pressure on the mage so he can't poly. It varies, though. With pal/lock/war, as noted earlier in the thread, if the lock is felguard, putting the felguard on the mage and having your warrior control their rogue seems like the way to go.

In any event, trying to kill a discipline priest while leaving a mage and a rogue to run relatively free seems like a bad idea.

 

BrTarolg

Hey guys, recently I've decided to get a lot more into PVP, and I was thinking of doing a PMR team, seeing as one of my best friends is a very skilled discipline priest (does lots of arena) , and naturally im a frost mage(does very little arena until now :P).

However, i'm relatively new to arena, and I honestly have no idea what to do in 3v3.

After reading the thread a few times, I (think) i've managed to glean this much -
The general idea of PMR is to have the rogue take on and stun the other clothie (either a lock, shadowpriest or holy priest or the likes, or maybe a shaman or something), for the mage to CC the enemy melee, and to burn the enemy healer's trinket so that you can use blind on him + polymorph and counterspell to lock the healer down whilst you burst down the rogues target.

Right? I'm sort of looking for the general idea of what to do, and i reckon i can figure out the finer details myself via practise in arena.

Also, does anyone know what the most common matchups are in 3v3 arena to come against? I can see from the thread that with lock+warr+druid have the rogue go for the lock and have the mage CC (poly+nova) the warr and burst the warr down, but i honestly don't know much about many 3v3 setups (i'm told that it's similar to 2v2 but with extra person, so things like Priest/mage go with mage/rogue to make PMR, or resto druid/warr and lock/druid to make lock druid warr).

Am i right on this? Or am i just going horribly wrong?

 

Zure

You generally have the right idea. The mage and rogue should burn the same target, however. Here, it will be the warlock.

Priest should pressure the druid with mana burns and fears to keep him from standing still and should use dispel aggressively to cut the warlock's dps/healing to nil, while keeping abolish off the burn target.

Mage should reposition while casting instants to always be in CS range of the druid to block his CC, while watching out for feral charge on a polymorph. Polymorph can be used as an emergency interrupt on the druid.

 

Vuldoo

I too believe that the analysis here was skewed because the original analysis was written by the warrior, who is obviously most concerned (and bothered) by the mage.

There are two aspects in my opinion which prevent you from beating them.

a) you let them dictate the game

b) your druid commits suicide because he is afraid of death.

The chain reaction goes like this: The rogue puts immense pressure on your warlock, which leaves the frost mage free to deal with the warrior, which gives the priest the chance to put pressure on the druid. You want to get into a situation where the priest needs to heal.

If this would have been written up by the warlock, most people would probably have focussed on dealing with the rogue. And indeed that seems to be the way to go. Put pressure on the rogue early. Use the druid's bash on him, piercing howl, hamstring. That way you will alleviate the pressure on the warlock, giving him time to take the attention of the mage of you.

Your druid loses his most useful abilities simply due to a threat, the threat of a counterspell. I would strongly advise him to risk it. Even if the counterspell is successful, with more pressure on the rogue and the mage and subsequent pressure on the priest to help his teammates you should easily survive those seconds and will have cyclones at your disposal after it wears off.

 

sprinkles

My PMR made it quite easy to Gladiator but I think we still have a lot of room to improve. On the subject on druid teams and offensive dispel: I always try to wipe all buffs from the called assist target (or targets if we know the group and have to switch to surprise them), but I (the priest) and my rogue often argue about getting Abolish Poison off or not. With constant Lifebloom heals after the purge and the difficulty of actually hitting the dispel vs the 30% resist talent, I wonder if my mana would be better spent elsewhere (pressure the druid with mana burns, dispel the others etc).

 

• Tiiki

Well even if you ignore Wound, keeping abolish off keeps Crippling on, which keeps the target in LOS and keeps the rogue on him infinitely more easily.

Then again, I am biased

 

Nerull

Im thinking of creating a warlock ( me, going felguard ) , Hunter ( not sure if BM or MM is best nowadays ) and disc priest. It seems to me this combo is rather strong againt PMR even , anyone who has this setup and can comment on it ?

 

Maynard

I think it's worthwhile if the rogue has a full wound stack up (usually following an extended kite while AR is up, or, if I'm sloppy, an untrinketable fear/blind) , but otherwise I wouldn't bother. When a full wound stack is up, it's important that we get rid of it ASAP and we'll likely attempt to roll lifeblooms rather than keep a single one on. In a PI-shatter combo/AR situation, single lifebloom procs are not sufficient to keep a target up, so even if you're proccing them every 3rd dispel or so (considering it'll hit abolish half the time, and when it hits lifebloom, it has a 30% chance to resist), it's not going to turn the match.

Offensive dispel on my abolish when full wound is up has been a key factor in many of my warr/dru/lock team's losses.

I've been debating getting my hunter in to a hunter/warr/priest team to try and compete with PMR. Frost trap should aid against double sprint, two high-AC targets (incl. Hunter w/deterrance through AR) forces them to go for the priest, who with pain suppression should hopefully be able to survive offensive dispel spam. Meanwhile the warrior could beat on the enemy priest, and the hunter could put the pet on the mage and use silence/scatter to prevent sheep on the warrior.

Pure theory, of/c.

 

Shade

MoB used warlock/hunter/priest to beat Pandemic's PMR in the Dreamhack 3v3 tournament yesterday, handing Pandemic their first loss ever in tournament pvp.

I don't know enough about any of the classes to know exactly why this is a good matchup, but you can't argue with the results.

 

Nerull

3 players who can burn mana is a lot vs a team with 1 healer, the games I saw where all with the mage and / or priest being oom after 20 seconds tops, which means you effectively cut down their dps in half or no healing at all and not too long after even both. The priest just couldnt keep the mage up.

Rogue went on lock, but thats fine, the hunter can force the priest to spam the mage and effectively drains both their mana. Warlock can survive some time vs rogue which buys time to throw in a mana burn for the priest also. Dont know the spec of the warlock, thought it was felguard.

 

• Tiiki

Well rogues can survive quite well against warlocks, especially drain/suvivability specced ones.

Isn't the answer there for the rogue to go on the opposing priest, priest to assist with dispels - priests die VERY quickly with dispel spam - and you only need 2 on average to remove pain suppression? - whilst the mage sheeps the hunter and counterspells the lock. The mage and rogue can both shrug off the first round of DoTs with CoS/iceblock and there are some LOS games to be played too...

The main problem I see with this strategy is Bestial Wrath will probably kill someone on its own, if the hunter was specced that way (and he probably should be)...

 

• Tiiki

The next question is of course, if Hunter/Priest/Lock is the PMR's anti-team, what's THEIR anti-team. The meta-game normally moves pretty fast so once you have lots of HPL and PMR in the top ranks, a third corner to the triangle will normally emerge...

Warrior/Rogue/Paladin perhaps ? Warrior/Rogue is a weird combo but I've seen quite a few of them recently- they can insta gib clothies at the start pretty much regardless...

 

malthrin

I'd say Warrior/Rogue/Druid - good luck mana draining that. Roots and Feral Charge will do more to keep targets in melee range than one Freedom.

 

Solitair

So, had some logistical questions. I've played the PMR combo for quite some time but I'm recently running into an increasing number of Rogue/Sl Lock/Druid teams, specifically prep rogues here lately. My team got worked by this team pretty hard last night, combination of a prep rogue harassing me + warlock dots and CC + druid CC on the priest and abolish being a general nuisance and undermining a lot of my utility = headache.

We tried killing the rogue initially, but with him as prep spec, found him pretty difficult to burst with all the outs a prep rogue, druid always managed to get off a timely heal and priest was being CC'd plus I was taking heavy damage, limiting his ability to spam dispell on abolish. Tried killing the warlock but again, more or less the same issues. Basically, the strategy we had that came the closest to succeeding came down to trying to burst the druid down on the initial opener (I'm human, so attempting to find him via perception before they detected me with paranoia), but if this gamble failed, and I got feared or stunned long enough for the druid to outrange me, he'd heal to full and I'd never be able to close the gap again with all the CC on me + the rogue nipping at my heels. After swapping to the rogue out of necessity to limit incoming damage on me, our priest would get spell locked into cyclone and this would give enough time for dots + wrath spam from the druid + rogue dps to kill me usually.

Really unsure how to beat this team as PMR unless you can manage the initial burst on the druid, and that's a huge if. Any insight would be greatly appreciated, I never used to have such a big problem with this combo in season 2, when most rogues werent prep and they were a more viable constant dps target with a few less outs.

Edit: This is with me as 41 combat rather than prep spec, I'm sure prep would afford me a bit more staying power on the druid, but I'm trying to avoid hopping on the bandwagon just yet since I do 2's with a disc priest and find prep spec lacking in staying power in a lot of the matchups we play.

 

Mirya

And what is your mage doing all this time? You mention what you and your priest are doing, as well as what all 3 of the enemy team's players are doing, but you make no mention of your mage. IMO, the key in this matchup is how well the mage plays. The weakness of druid/warlock/rogue is no dispelling ability. If the warlock has a felhunter, he can dispel once every 8 sec, but that's it. A single dispel on a 8 sec cooldown is not enough to dispel the multitude of frost novas, freezes, and sheeps that are protected by Winter's Chill debuffs. Try to have your mage summon his water elemental immediately, and make judicious use of water elemental freeze, frost nova, and sheep to disable the enemy team's rogue.

 

Solitair

If I recall correctly, mage was doing just as you said, attempting to control the rogue off of me. Problem would come when sheep would come on DR. The novas and other snares are easily broken by the plethora of snare breaks that a prep rogue has.

I guess the only option is to kill the pet and focus the warlock while the mage CC's the rogue as best he can.

 

Kaber

I don't know about that. You are left with two classes that are, aside from cooldowns, easy for a mage to CC. Personally, I do not find rogues and druids to be as good of a match as warriors or warlocks because rogues have a tendency to be fairly burstable, which druids just cannot handle.

 

Kaber

My Warrior/Warlock/Druid team beat a full drain team. It took some time and good LoSing, I do not know if it was just because they were bad or if we were actually the counter to their team, but I would be interested to hear other people's experiences.

 

Falcore

I've really been looking for a good 3v3 makeup to join. I had heard about this makeup but never really had the people to run it.

Made this team makeup the other night and did pretty well before our rogue started to DC constantly so we stopped. A very fun combo to play with and just wanted to shout a thanks to those that detail some strategies to use against different combos.

 

Safid

Any tips on how to beat this cookie cutter team as a lock/dru/rog? I can't seem to figure it out. The rogue just destroys our lock every time, and I am literally unable to contain the mage in any effective way because of being kited once my cooldowns are up, and the priest runs out druid OOM.

I have no ideas. Can someone offer me suggestions? My team was fine last season, we even hit 2000+, but this season we are struggling and struggling hard.

 

Perilous

We ran warrior/druid/rogue last night for the first time and we absolutely destroyed every PMR we came up against. It sounds kinda dumb but if you can keep the mage from sheeping you can pressure them so much that the priest is in heal lock. I went shadowstep just for fast target switching and staying on the mage. I dont need to burst, I need to stop him from getting cast time spells off. And shadowstepping to the rogue to help finish or to the priest to blind/gouge is pretty valuable.

Not sure if its just the other teams being bad or not but a couple of them were gladiator 3v3s last season.

In fact I think our only losses came vs some really weird combos that dont seem viable at all but have some insane melee burst and just jibbed the warrior. Like enhance shaman, ret pally, warrior.

We are trying alot of combos out this season that are designed to beat the PMR and Druid/lock/rogue powerhouses.

Priest/Hunter/Lock seems solid vs PMR but there are very few good druids hunters or priests on our server.

 

Emary

Encross you were cool before you went maces.







PMR should only lose to War/drood/lock when the rogue or mage's control chain is broken allowing another member to be freed up to cc. Against good teams, that's pretty difficult. =x

 

Emary

Rogue should be able to keep himself from being CC'ed with one set of cooldowns long enough to force the mage to block, during the block you need to break off and blind the PMR rogue as he should have already trinketed, hit prep and with your warlock's help with dots and fears on the priest you should be able to kill the mage before the hypo debuff is gone.

 

Ramesz

I'm playing in a druid/lock/rogue setup aswell, lock is fg and rogue is muti/sub. The pmr seems to overpower us aswell, when rogue is on mage, its really hard for lock to do any damage(my occasional cyclone isnt enough to help him get away, when i get cs-ed we're quite doomed). Also when both rogue and lock were on the rogue it didnt seem any better, cause mage now did more damage on rogue's account, still summing up the same amount of damage.
So should the rogue still be on the mage? And what should the druid do? especially in the beginning.