Inoko

As a mage that's quite new to "Seriously" arena'ing, I'm actually wonder if anyone can give me some advice on this. I generally end up personally flustered and quite maddeningly useless in a lot of fights. My HP/Resilience are lacking right now, which is a major barrier (170~/9.5K Unbuffed) but I keep reading about how PMR should be mid 1600's in just "of Stamina" greens, and it's somewhat saddening to find us fighting hard to hold 1550~ish right now.

Basically, I was wondering what advice I can get from mages that play a PMR (RMP? :P) set-up, now, on how they deal with getting focus-fired? I end up getting too caught up in trying to always keep one thing sheeped, and then I'm dead or iceblocking, and my WE Nova is on cooldown or my WE's out of mana and I'm sort of sitting there going: "What just happened?"

I think I may just suck at Arena, though. Years of fire-PvE may have ruined me.

 

Abakus

Your rogue should be able to put out enough damage on the warlock to pressure the druid into healing, so cyclones aren't happening that often.

I think your main objective is to stop the warrior (sheep, sheep, shepp, nova, nova, sheep etc).
If he is not able to dps a clothie, your chances go up quite a bit.

 

◊ Greenexile

I'm no expert on arenas but what helped me the most with my mage is setting up a few /focus macro's and learning how to use them. Set up a macro that will sheep a focus target without changing targets. Set up another one that will counterspell your focus target without shifting targets. This way you can keep dps'ing your target while watching a giant focus bar in your UI that can tell you whether the warrior is out of sheep, or the druid is about to cyclone something or whatever.

Other then that, perhaps try to work on knowing what your strategy is to counter each composition before you go in. I find our team is really struggling at the moment because once we find out what we're up against one of us always says 'so what should we do?' whereas last season we just kind of knew and acted impulsively - probably because we ran the oh so complex strat of 'OMG kill the warrior now now now!!'

 

crimsonsentinel

This is true of all arena teams, but especially CC based teams: good communication. Always know when cooldowns are up for not only you but everyone in your team. Always know everyone's diminishing returns. Know who is CC'ed and who isn't. Know the position of every teammate and every opponent. Finally, know when to do your burst and when to focus on CC. Coordinate with your rogue on laying all your cc together, and all your damage together. Alot of it is experience and playing together, so don't expect to get it within the first week. Just keep going at it.

 

Diao

Update on RMP teams from a perspective of mswarr/dpri/hpally:
We encountered some more of these teams today as we were pushing our rating and ended up losing over 100 rating to these teams. We were able to beat a few but I believe it was due to their mistakes and not CCing us as well as they could have. The better teams completely dominated us in terms of control. We used fear/stuns/arcane torrent liberally, but even with 2 dispels I (warr) was constantly getting sheeped/novaed while the rogue locked down our priest. I attempted to control their mage by killing the WE every time it was up, and pressuring him with consistent damage as often as I could (plus lucky mace stun procs etc). Our priest would get a freedom from the pally and run by me so I could PH the rogue but that left the opposing priest open for mana burns. With so many escape options as a frost mage, I couldn't put enough pressure on him to force their priest to use anything aside from bubble/PoM/renew to keep him up. Everytime I got close, I'd get nova->sheep or frostbite procs and even when it was dispelled immediately I had trouble staying on the mage. Add in the lack of rage generation from bubble and I was basically spending 80-90% of the match completely useless. We also tried target swap to rogue quickly to force an early evasion/prep but that didn't work. Our best matches came from me focusing on their priest as ours tried to MB the mage with the rogue beating on him. Our original theory was to force an early IB/PS on the mage, MD it and the mage would be easy to kill without any defensive CDs, but we were never able to actually put it into practice. Maybe it'll just take some more practice for us to get the rhythm down.

 

malthrin

You'd probably do better with your Priest as Holy - Blessed Resil is much better for mitigating Shatter combos than Disc.

Travian - Resto Druid
Malthrin - Priest

 

Trazhenko

Well this is going to depend on the relative gear and skill levels within your battlegroup. My team started doing arenas late last season, late enough that we thought it made sense to just save 5K points and not buy any S2 gear. By the end, it seemed like everyone around our relatively low rating (1650-1750) was wearing a full suit of S2/honor gear.

Now that S3 has started, everyone has even more gear. Also consider that everyone had their rating reset, so there are plenty of experienced and geared teams at low ratings. The really dominant ones will break out into high rating quickly, but the ones that are only "pretty good" may get mired at low rating for a couple weeks just by getting matched up against teams just like them: teams they were playing against last season at 1800-1900.

Don't let week 1 of a new season get you down .

 

Clockwise

Completely agree. This week was a real bear to get points in. Last season I was a 2100+ player in all brackets. This week we couldn't get our rating in any bracket much past 1750, due to hitting Gladiator teams that just couldn't break higher than 1850 or so (not enough teams to win points from). There's just not enough time yet to separate the teams out that far. I had tougher matches at 1700 this week than I ever had at 2000-2100 last season, I can assure you.

 

Inoko

First of all, thanks for the advice everyone. I forgot to clarify that my armory is my PvE Stuff, not my Arena stuff, since I end up respeccing 3-4 times a week. No one mentioned "Go frost," but I Figured I should say it. =]

I've tried this (I have a focus-sheep macro for PvE, and a Focus-CS Macro for Arena) but I find that I end up sheeping a warrior, say, and then if I used my focus-sheep, I can't CS the priest, because I end up CSing the warrior by accident. I think more practice with multiple buttons for CS And Sheep will be needed, so thanks for the advice.

And yeah, we really noticed that this week was a bear. Getting to 1535~ish (our closing score last week) was a major bonus for us. We ended up getting slaughtered by rivals/gladiators and people with 3/5 S3 already a lot, but in the end managed to make our win-loss ratio even, and still be up about 10 points, so I think we did pretty well... I just felt like I was doing something wrong.

Thanks again.

 

◊ forostie

We ran as Priest Mage Warlock (just for points, not thinking we would actually do well) and we did fine against all teams except the PMR. The one thing I found defensively against that combo is that each class equally counterbalances at least 1 or 2 of any other class you'll come up against, and that, I believe, is it's strength.

 

Maynard

Amen to this. My team used this first week as an opportunity to face 2300+ teams so that we could see for ourselves what it is Gladiators are doing that we (Duelists) are not - and it was a great learning experience. I suggest for the first few weeks you don't worry about points, as the reality is that we're probably all going to be capped well before the end of the season anyway. Just push as hard as you can and don't stress too much about where you end up.

 

Calantus

Agreed, the first week was fantastic. We were hovering in 1800s in our 3v3 team last season because we were carrying alts with massive bad luck with the queue (only one week did we lose 45 points or less, it loved putting us up for 20 point losses) and we won roughly 70-80% of our main games. Then this season we got stomped by a few teams, thoroughly stomped, and we finally realised we had been making all these mistakes that the 1800 crowd was letting us get away with. Our positioning and co-ordination was pretty terrible but it never really became much of a problem for us because the bracket we were in nobody was really positioning/cor-ordinating well or punishing flaws in the same. Pretty eye-opening and fun games overall.

 

AngryDwarf

Hello, I run your same makeup, we ended at 2367 last season, and I don't remember the last time we lost to rogue/mage/priest (that is not to say there aren't some very close games).

In my mind there are 2 ways to run this, and the decision is really where to put the freedom. Either you can pressure their mage and run freedom on your warrior and sacrifice on your priest, thus making the opposing priest have to decide to either spam dispel your priest or try to get the freedom off your warrior (use this strat vs priest/mage/war), or you can get on their rogue and try to spamstring him, and let your priest kite him with freedom.

It sounds like you are on their mage, and if so you should have freedom. Also it's worth it for your priest to fully dispel their mage, to not only strip his priest buffs but ice armor as well. This will help you stay on him while freedom is on cooldown. He'll probably recast ice armor a few times. Even 1 manaburn on their mage will also help immensely, have your priest try when he's kicked on holy spells.

Honestly we run a different strat vs this comp, the "kite the rogue" strat, and if you are having trouble on the mage it might be worth a try. It's a little more difficult with all the AR/Prep rogues running around, but you just have to run him out of cooldowns and you win. A few tips for running this strat are: HoJ and/or intercept stun when the rogue pops evasion, a stunned rogue can't dodge. If he has evasion up and you don't have a hamstring on him, piecing howl. Demo shout or piercing howl immediately after vanish and reapply hamstring. Judgement of justice nullifies sprint (though their priest can dispel it). BoP out of a 5pt kidney that your priest can't trinket. And finally, be careful of them swapping targets to your warrior after freedom is on your priest.

 

Engali

Iono, when a pally throws BoF on a war my mage just sepll steals it and becomes un-hamstringable. Is there something Im missing? The only really decent pally/war team that stood up to my mage/rogue team didn't put up BoF at all...I think for this reason. I know adding in a priest on both teams mixes things up, but...is there something Im missing about the strat?

 

• Snowy

In that case, I use BoF as a gaurenteed cleanse -- i.e. I cast it and immediately rebless with something else.

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah

 

Criteris

I've personally been trying a PMR combo for about 100 games yesterday, but we managed to lose about half the games, even with fairly decent gear, around 400 resilience for everyone, rogue was daggers but ended up with s1 maces for the second half of the games. We generally lose when either, I (the priest) get's taken down in like 4-5 seconds, like from a 3 dps team like rogue/lock/spriest where I don't get out of stun/dcoil before dying instantly, or their 2 dpsers manage to eliminate my rogue or me before I can really do anything. Any general tips on playing the combo, or against the majority of combos we will have trouble with?

 

AngryDwarf

Obviously in 3v3 the warrior has full priest buffs, where in 2v2 the warrior has exactly 1 stealable buff - the blessing. Usually a mage trying to get the freedom is an exercise in him oom-ing himself. I suppose in theory it'd be possible to fully dispel the warrior with your priest then try to steal the freedom. But I've honestly never seen this happen with libram buff, pws, renew, pom, etc flying around. The only team I've seen even try to spellsteal a freedom was a rogue/mage/druid team, and that was a last ditch effort because they were losing and (obviously) had no other dispel.

If for some reason we were on the mage and he managed to steal the freedom, we would just switch to the rogue. But as I mentioned before, we usually play spamstring the rogue from the start.

 

Inoko

I've found that spamstringing our rogue is generally what gets a team killed versus us. (Of course, this is in the lower brackets, so skill isn't always at its peak...)

Generally speaking our priest has pre-dispelled the buffs off the other team, and I (As the mage) focus on CCing, CSing (Including using Imp. CS as a pre-emptive lock on instant abilities (BoP, BoF, etc.)) and, because it's easier than having the priest switch targets, I spellsteal BoP/BoF when it gets on our DPS target. This has a double bonus, in that I'm generally unstoppable for the duration against these teams, because BoP = complete melee pushback resistance, which means sheep go off in their cast time, and shatter combos are trivial to set up.

Obviously it doesn't always work out "perfectly" like this, and the risk with spellsteal is ALWAYS going OOM, but with some pre-dispell work by the priest, I've found that it really helps our rogue out (and he does most of the damage at our level, since I'm generally set up around CC/CS and kiting/keeping people off our priest). Take it with a grain of salt, since we were only 22-18 on tuesday when we played, of course. (Yes, we play a lot of games each week, for more practice. :P)

 

Diao

Angrydwarf, Thanks for the comments and tips on how to beat RMP. We were able to utilize it somewhat effectively. What do you do if the team immediately starts out by focusing on your warr? I find myself dying very quickly even spamming spellreflect/def stance for tclap and demo shout, trying to apply MS whenever I can.

 

Emary

The mage has 2 wele's, outside of that they're not going to have the damage to kill you, just los and communicate with your healers and utilize intervene, there's no reason at all why you should ever die running double healer warrior.

 

Amera

We've been running the Pal/DiscPst/war setup also and have ton pretty well against the PMR teams. The only real danger that this team presents is their "nova" or cooldown explosion. You need to be very aggressive and clear with your defensive cooldowns to win. I'd say about 80% of the time they focus our priest. We actually use freedom on the priest to kite the rogue (protected with fecundity buffs if possible), stuns, BoP, Pain Suppression, or bubble (for big uncounterable heals) during those. You do have you keep your warrior on the mage as much as possible, though, which means your priest needs to be aggressively dispelling offensively and defensively, and doing almost nothing else besides instant heals and opportunistic mana burns. If your warrior is on the mage, he won't be able to do an effective shatter combo because he won't be able to cast, which is really the key.

 

Zest

Pandemic's PMR dominates the World CGS 3v3 tournament going 9-0 and winning the first place prize of $5,000 and 3 WoW Dell laptops.

 

diospadre

Did anyone else's heart break when they ressed their rogue during that game against EG?

 

kraj

It absolutely blows my mind that these teams who've been playing Pandemic's PMR makeup forever the vast majority of the teams failed to cs/trinket/mitigate in any fashion the FIRST shatter combo that, in almost all of the games, led to an early death.

When finally EG got in a spell lock on the initial shatter it led to a double kill which ultimately put them in a vastly better position that they promptly let slip away with such an awful mistake. I can't see how with one person dead, and only two people up to watch 10 seconds of rezzing slipped by.

It's simply amazing how poorly people countered Pandemic.

 

Stolidus

If you stuck around a bit after the final match ended, pandemic's rogue actually revealed what went down that let the res go off: their mage CS silenced the druid before he could moonfire apparently, allowing the res to go off.