Battling the Cancer of PRM … Strategery and Outlasting
For the first time since I started playing WoW, I actually have the ability to see what it’s like to be on the receiving end of what I deal on my Warrior. I did a couple of rounds in 3v3 on both my normal team and one of my several “alt” teams yesterday with some interesting results. It’s like being able to experience the “Grass is Greener” on the other side analogy.
There’s alot of beef listed below, so you can Skip to the Chase if you’re just looking for a cut and dry conclusion.
Priest PoV
First, I ran 3v3 with a Priest (me)/Rogue/Mage (PRM) combo. The Mage and Rogue are pretty poorly geared, while my priest is a combination of S1 gear, S2 gear DPS gear, and S3 gear. We did something like 9-4 or something in the end. Our high for the night was something like 1650. I’d say at least 50% of the teams we played were a mirror setup (no surprise there).
I must point out that of any team setup I’ve played so far, this has got to be one of the cheesiest combos. This combination has a high amount of CC (Poly, Fear, Blind, Sap, Stuns, Novas, etc.) along with a high amount of damage avoidance (Shields, Ice Block, CoShadows, Evasion, etc.). It’s no wonder this team excels against many other teams.
I’ve mentioned to my team mates that there are really only two ways to approach this sort of team (Feel free to throw in your response.) Pressure the Mage so he can’t do shatter combos or Poly-chaining, or eat their priest quickly after he blows Pain Supression. Neither of these options are easy to do because of the above mentioned avoidance skills.
Any team that had a Paladin was really really really easy to reck because we could DPS down whatever (Warrior, Rogue, Mage, you name it!) while keeping the Paladin out of the loop. Go go offensive dispel spam.
Warrior PoV
We did Resto. Shaman/Paladin/Mace Warrior and this (as usual) is a struggling battle to win. Whether I’m sword or mace, all the incoming CCs and lack of DPS other than myself, the fights are always a war of attrition. In alot of cases, we come out on top, but it’s still rough against the above mentioned PRM combo.
My main observation and assertion is that the Mage will make or break a PRM team. If the Mage is not CCing properly, or DPSing at the right time, a PRM team will be weak. A priest can be dead on with healing and the rogue can be dead on with stuns and DPS, but without the Mage doing the right things at the right time, it might as well be a 2 vs. 3.
I’ve had matches where pressurizing the mage ended up unravelling the other team quickly. The priest couldn’t take the time to mana-burn, the rogue wouldn’t be taking down one of our two healers quickly enough, and the mage spent much of his time trying to get away from me.
Skip to the Chase
Stay alive, pressure their CC, dry out their mana pool, open up the taps, drown ‘em in a fury of Mace Stun DPS. At least that’s the theory.
Tonight, we head into another long night of long battles. Here’s to hoping we can get to 1800.
-ERP-
December 7th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
Boy do I hate Rogue+Mage or Rogue+Warlock teams. I play with a Warrior+Mage+Priest team, and we lack control and survivability compared to what a Rogue+Caster has.
When we faced a PRM team tonight we couldn’t ever go on their Priest, as ours always would die sooner. Going on the Rogue for any length of time is also rather pointless as he has multiple survivability options that can easily buy him 45-60s worth of nearly guaranteed life. Hopping on the Mage hard from the start seemed like the most reliable solution as it cut down his DPS drastically and most times would keep their Priest in a defensive healing role.
One big boost is to kill the Mage’s water elemental, as often times we noticed it was doing more overall damage to our Priest than the Mage himself, and also gave this team even more control over us. The difficult part about this is that if you fail to apply enough pressure to the Mage, then their Priest gets full rein to mana drain our Priest or Mage completely dry in short time, while ours is locked down. Being a gnome Warrior it’s much more viable for me to pressure a Mage than any other race.
Some of the little things that greatly affected the outcome of this fight were pummeling sheep attempts on our Mage, kiting their Rogue past me so I can Howl/Demo shout, and applying CS or Sheep to their Priest just at the right times to either kill the Mage or at least put major strain on their healing when he pops back out. Finally, after 2-3 minutes into the fight, if we haven’t yet killed their Mage or Priest yet and our casters are losing the mana fight, we pretty much need to hop on the Rogue and burst him down fast.
December 7th, 2007 at 12:46 pm
Playing that PRM combo on my rogue makes me kinda annoyed at how easy some matrices are after running Priest/Warrior in 2’s and war/warlock/priest 3’s last season, since both are much harder to play right.
And I’d have to agree that shutting down CC greatly diminishes the team since usually expect priest to be the one taking the damage.
December 7th, 2007 at 1:56 pm
Im running PMR atm on my rogue, with i have to say some of the best players on the server atm (Nightwatcher / Nitross) and you are pretty much dead on at how the Mage makes or breaks the team. With my job as the rogue being pretty simple and the priests job to have some good dispels/mana burns and whatnot. We got to about 1980ish, and dropped some games because of some dumb mistakes on our part and not switching it up on teams that we have been playing the whole night.
We havent lost to any mirror yet, Gladiator PMR teams that pretty much get stomped on. It is pretty much “lets see who can drop the mage first” game when it comes down to mirror matches, this can be fairly easy if your mage is gosu at kiting or when he kites the opposing rogue to me and id switch to Shiv and try and peel the rogue off of my mage. Its also not about focusing mages though, if we see a window of opportunity and the mage starts getting a good kite off, we will usually make a quick switch on the rogue and chain an assload of CC’s towards the priest and usually drop the rogue pretty quick considered he has used his CD’s and whatnot to try and keep the mage locked down.
But I have to agree that this combo can be extremely powerful if you have great players that know how to communicate with there CC and play there class well. If you dont mind I will write a PMR article if you want =O.
December 7th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
Amelio - Oh yeah! Great point. I’ve discovered that mana draining the mage (even in 5s) is even more effective than going after their main healer. A mage with no mana (and a countered Evocation) is really dead in the water.
Degausser - Yeah, it’d be great to have someone familiar with that sort of team setup actually speak about strategy and the sort of fights you typically go through.
December 7th, 2007 at 4:39 pm
ooh….I’d like to see a PMR article as well since running it on my mage and rogue, lol
December 7th, 2007 at 5:55 pm
I’d like to see a “How to Beat” PMR article imo. What I have found with my PMWarrior team is that because we don’t have quite as much cc, or lockdown, or cooldowns, is that we need to have steady force on the other team or we get behind and lose. If at any point one of us goes too defensive, we never really recover. Beating heavy lockdown,cc teams requires us to have swift pressure right from the start to force them to react defensively or just plain slow down.
December 7th, 2007 at 6:33 pm
I think part of the trick always hinges on the playstyle of some enemies with the PMR setup.
Some teams tend to be a little more CC oriented, while others seem a little more DPS oriented. I definitely think you’re onto something, Amelio. Keeping a steady stream of pressure has worked very well when we come across these sort of teams.
December 7th, 2007 at 10:04 pm
So does this “PRM” team ever include a spriest instead of a disc priest?
Also, did you spell it: “Strategery” on the purpose? If so: Kudos. If not: Kudos.
December 8th, 2007 at 2:53 am
have yet to see it but then again haven’t seen a ton of 3 dps teams but imagine it would be sp/lock/rogue
December 8th, 2007 at 10:44 am
We’ve come across several of those recently. They’re quite tricky because the game turns into a defensive game until their SP and Lock have tapped out alot of their instants.
December 8th, 2007 at 11:39 am
PMR, the best bet I can think of for countering that is pressuring the mage as much as you can and control rogue. You cant really stop a rogues damage by putting pressure on him, but if your priest is on top of dispels and you can pressure the mage enough to have him do less damage and less CC I think you should be good, this might be pretty mana intensive since you have a priest but try having him drink every chance he gets.