Guidance needed with 3v3 arena 3dps

[Deleted]

Well hello there!

I'm looking for the few good tips for particularly our own fuzzy arena 3v3 team!

Don't be hasty - I know, mostly you share your common knowledge amongst all the pvp specs and so forth but now I personally am searching for tips and a good guidance for our pvp 3v3 arena team. If you have something good to contribute, please continue forth!

And maybe most importantly, I am not searching tips to achieve the gladiator status of any kind, I'm just searching good tips to get us through the low levels of the arena - And as low, I mean the rank being under 1000 and just starting! From there on we can surely figure things out for ourselves if need.

Here be our team of scrubs:

BM hunter
MM Hunter
Destruction Warlock

Now heed this: We are just starting our way in the arena (again) and would like to hear some good advice on what to do and what not to do.

Well - We are a 3dps strike team so on today's low-ranked arena what should we do to achieve great victories? I do appreciate all wisdom from top to bottom, both individual "use CC" and "kill whoever" first. What do you have to contribute on this matter? How can we get to higher ranks than our 266 ranked with 5 games at the moment? What should we concentrate in? Should we take on to killing healers, should we concentrate on CC or should we just rush in with 2 stampedes and mash everything until we hit the wall of too-well-and-well-comped guys?

Every tip is helpful and thank you for your consideration.

-Opa

PS. And to clarify things! 2 of us have just started playing after few years and I myself have not played properly PvP in ages! So we are searching for the most general tips after all for the 3dps team! Every bit might be helpful and thank you for even reading this!

[Snuggli]

First and foremost, the biggest barrier to your success is going to be your comp. Even the absolute best players at this game wouldn't be able to have even reasonable success playing double hunter / lock. Now if you don't mind losing a lot of games and you guys can only play those 3 specs, then I'm not going to say you shouldn't play it, but if you're looking to gain any rating at all then you should seriously consider one of you swapping to a healer, and even then Hunter/Lock/Healer isn't that viable either.

As far as general tips in Arena go, you should nearly always be looking to chain CC the healer, with 'spare' CC on the second DPS target while you kill your primary target. You should always be looking to minimise the incoming damage as much as possible while also bursting down someone as fast as you can, this means disabling 2 people on the enemy team and effectively 1v3'ing. With two hunters, you can both Wyvern Sting -> Scatter -> Trap -> Silencing Shot a target each, and if at any point they trinket a CC it leaves them open to eat a full fear from your Warlock.

Good targets to kill for triple DPS comps are generally any class that doesn't have an immunity, meaning you can pop all your CDs straight away and go for a kill without having to worry about Ice Block etc.

[Deleted]

And this is what I really expected, thank you Snuggli!

The thing is at this point, we are standalone fuzzies show won't swap the comp in an instant. Surely there will be changes soon as we get first 2 hunter dps + 1heal and after that maybe even more balanced.

But I'm mostly grateful about your last comment about triple dps comps, I think that will help us out most of all. )

As the most MoP friendly player of us I realized our comp was far from optimal, let alone even further away from good. I know this one is really not good - not even for "average ratings" but still I would like you all to tell what would make us a "good 3dps team" with what we'v got on at the moment.


And what at the low levels I personally am most confused about is the targeting of enemies. What should we really do? We have good communication and we can swap targets on flight - only problem is that the matches are, at these levels, really short. Whom should we go on first, should we swap targets on cue or just keep spamming the one (...non paladin with immunities...) with all we'v got!? Should we really just try too CC-chain the 2 players and then go for the one - In my honest opinion keeping 2 targets CC'd enough is quite a job in 3v3.

Thank you again with your tips!

PS: We know our comp is far from optimal. Can you help with our current comp to gain few more wins and get further in to 3v3 before changing the comp properly?

[Snuggli]

(I've posted the abbreviations for some comps at the bottom)

As far as playing the comp to get experience goes, I would even recommend against that. Playing triple DPS can really get you into bad habits, and it'll take you much longer to adjust to playing a normal comp (2 dps and a healer) if you've learnt while playing triple dps.

The entire strategy for playing triple DPS is to run in and blow your entire load (of cooldowns) as fast as you can, because the longer the game lasts the less you're likely to win. This entire playstyle shifts as soon as you add a healer to your comp, because now trinket usage, positioning, setting up burst, peeling and playing defensively and aggressively are all aspects you need to be aware of, and honestly, I don't think it's worth you getting experience as triple DPS because you'll start assuming that these things don't matter... and then when you finally get round to playing a traditional comp you'll be at a severe disadvantage.


If you're stiiiill wanting to play Hunter/Hunter/Lock, then to answer your other questions:

As with any comp, to get better the main thing you need to do is learn your comp inside and out (it's strengths, weaknesses), apply them to games, learn your CC, learn your DRs and after every game spend a couple seconds thinking about why you won or lost that game. Reflection is really important for when you want to improve, both as a player and as a comp/team. "What could I have done better when x?", "Would we be better off hitting X target?", etc.

As triple DPS, you don't want to be swapping targets if you can help it. There is very few situations where it will be a benefit to you to hit one target, then swap to another, because you wont have the survivability without a healer to drain two people of their defensives. You want to force the defensives out of 1 person with cross CC on the other two players. Then once it's in a 2v3 it should be a lot easier. Swapping only really applies to very few comps (mostly mage comps) because it is very often better to drain someone of their defensives with CDs, then use more CDs to kill them. It is not worth it (for a lot of comps) to use CDs to force an Ice Block, then swap target and use CDs to force a dispersion... when they could've just kept on the Mage after Ice Block and killed him... if that makes sense.

As far as cross-CC'ing, it'll become easier with more practice. Try get a nameplate or arena addon that lets you track CCs and DRs on multiple frames, not just your target and focus (Gladius does this). Once you can see the CC that is on all 3 players it will become easier to coordinate that. It can be as simple as saying "Your fear is nearly off, i'll trap next", or "I've got no more CC for this paladin", or "My CC is DRd on the Druid, i'll CC the Shaman". It's up to your partners to then reply with "Ok, I can fear off" etc.

And looking into viable comps, there is some people who run Hunter/Warlock/Healer to high ratings, but it's not fantastic and you may struggle against some of the top-tier comps like RMD, WMD and KFC. It all depends on who doesn't want to swap class. There is only really a few good Hunter and Warlock comps and they both involve warriors (KFC and WLD). Still, Warlock/Hunter/Healer is better than Warlock/Hunter/Hunter!


DR = Diminishing Returns
KFC = Warrior/Hunter/Healer
WLD = Warrior/Lock/Druid
RMD = Rogue/Mage/Druid
WMD = Warrior/Mage/Druid