3v3 Arena – Hunter/Mage/Priest

I jumped into 3v3 Arena last night with Zubu (my old 2v2 partner if you’ve been reading the blog for a while) and a Mage I’ve never played with before to see how the composition would work out. And after 30 games or so we had mixed results. First let’s take a peek at the strengths of the composition.

On paper we have great burst damage. Half of it physical, half of it magic letting us tear through *most* of our targets. The Priest, coming in as Discipline, had Mass Dispel to help get rid of the ever annoying bubble. And for the most part it worked. I would wager a guess to say that 80% of the teams we faced had a Retribution Paladin which quickly became our first target. It was safe to say we could force a bubble within the first 10 seconds depending on the teammates he had. If our priest could get the dispel off quickly we were generally golden. There were still plenty of times that the dispel would resist or the target would move more too quickly and the dispel would miss.

Double Bestial Wrath obviously has its strong points. In conjunction to Bestial Wrath, having 2 Intimidation’s, 2 Disengages, etc comes in handy. Being able to double Intimidate the Rogue who jumps our Priest is a lifesaver. Add in a nice Master’s Call macro and there are strong tools to help your healer.

But this isn’t to say we didn’t run into problems. One particularly intelligent Rogue Dismantled me and then joined his Ret Paladin in beating on the Priest. He was dead before my ranged weapon came back. Easily the most common composition was Holy Paladin/Ret Paladin/DK and|or Warrior. The games either went short due to our ability burst the Ret before a bubble would go off or the dispel would hit. If the bubble went off and got healed, we would focus back on the Warrior until the bubble ran off. Killing the Holy Paladin was too much of a pain. It was easier to eliminate his DPS folks then try to deal with him while they did their thing.

This obviously goes bad went the Ret Paladin roflstomps the Mage for 8 or 9 thousand at a time. The weakness really came down to survivability. Our Priest was definitely squishy and died quite frequently. In hindsight, having him with Spirit of Redemption under the assumption he would inevitably die seemed plausible. The extent of our “Oh crap” buttons were Iceblock, Deterrence, Bestial Wrath kiting, and that’s about it. The Priest didn’t have much to keep him alive once the crap hit the fan.

It was our first week playing together and went 17-13. Not amazing, but it was a learning experience. My guildies feel that the Priest is a very desirable healer in this type of set-up but only one that has somewhere in the 900 resilience area and can survive a bit. And our Priest doesn’t have that yet. I found myself rarely targeted in this bracket and decided to only wear 200 resilience in favor of DPS gear.

Tonight I am looking at 2v2 with Lunchmoneyy and see how it works out for us. He has great gear and I think the disparity will play to our advantage for at least the 100 or 200 rating.