The following is an excerpt from Noktyn's 'Chat With the Pros' blog hosted at our partner site, DellUniversity.com, from earlier this May. For more blogs from Joe or your other favorite Team Pandemic members, visit the site and click the 'Gaming' tab - they're updated each week.

Since the online qualifiers are going on right now for Blizzard’s first “official” 3v3 tournament, I figured I’d take the time to write a blog about how our team plays the 3v3 bracket and why we were so successful in the past with the mentality we have. Currently, there are only a few teams still playing in the 3v3 scene that have been there since the beginning: Team Pandemic, Fnatic and MoB Gaming come to mind. Our teams all went through a lot in every tournament we’ve been to, we’ve seen what people do when money is on the line and how they handle themselves in a competitive environment. What I’m talking about, of course, is “counter comping” your opponents to achieve victory. What is “counter comping” you ask? It is, very simply, running a class makeup that counters another class makeup. This has won us tournaments in the past and I feel it will continue to do so in the future. Our team is a team that strives to win, we play winning strategies, and the very first thing we learned was that picking one comp to play and only playing that comp is not a very effective way to go about 3v3. I know a lot of people want to pick one class and play it over and over, but this is not how you play 3v3; you have to learn multiple classes and how to play all of them at high-end arena play. A lot of these new teams think we only won these tournaments because our competition was bad, but I laugh because MoB is a team that has been in the top 5 since the qualifiers began. The new teams can continue to think that running one comp is the way to go and that they can’t get countered, I’m fine with that, because I know that not only is that not playing to win, it's just very unintelligent. Every class composition in WoW has a counter, and if you know all of them, your chances of winning at LAN events will be extremely high. Winning always comes first with our team and will continue to come first until WoW is no longer a competitive game.

Enough about counter comps though, let’s talk about a specific comp: rogue/mage/priest (or “RMP” for short). Currently, RMP is a very strong comp on the ATR (arena tournament realm) because of how it works. Subtlety buffs to rogues put them over the top, with cheat death, shadowstep, and prep they are basically unable to be kited now. Couple this with the fact that the ATR has a very large selection of tier 5 items to wear and you have every rogue running around in 200 resilience with over 2100 AP thanks to double evasion, cloak of shadows, vanish, and cheat death. Mages also received some changes with Icy Veins and their mana gem. In the past, a lot of comps and a lot of strategies to beating RMP revolved around knocking the mage back and running him out of mana to win. This is very hard to do now with Icy Veins providing 100% pushback resistance and the new 3 charge mana emerald. Rogue/Mage synergy is already extremely powerful as both classes are self-sufficient for such a long time, so what healer better than a priest? A priest’s strength in healing doesn’t even lie in the fact that he has prayer of mending and power word: shield; the true strength of a priest healer in rogue/mage/priest is the harass ability the priest has with mana burn, dispel, and fear. The priest is the one healer in WoW where if he is left alone to do whatever he wishes, he can make a very strong impact on a fight either by running an enemy healer/caster out of mana, landing a clutch fear, mashing dispel on druid HoTs, pain suppressioning himself or a teammate dying, provide power infusion for quicker mana burns or mage casts, or mass dispel a mage out of ice block to ensure his death. Let's compare all of that to a healer like a resto shaman; sure he has harass tools with purge and shock, as well as providing his team with tremor totem, windfury, and grounding, but at the end of the day he will still have to sit in one spot and channel heals over and over. In a game where instants are king, you don't want a healer like this, you want a druid or priest to be your healer because they can harass as well as heal instantly, without the need to channel and open themselves up to lockout. All of these things are what make rogue/mage/priest such a strong composition on the ATR and I expect it’s popularity to only rise, not fall.

In closing, I’d just to like to say to remember that WoW is a game of counters, and although the ladder may not reflect on this very well, tournaments will. Strategy and second-guessing your opponent are what win WoW tournaments, not individual player/class skill. If more people had this mentality, you’d see a lot more top teams, but sadly people like to stick to the mindset of “I’m a shadowpriest, I only play shadow” or “I’m a slow arcane mage, that’s all I play.” Even rogues who refuse to spec deep subtlety because it’s a “lame” spec; I’m sorry but if being lame wins me and my team tournaments, then I’ll always be lame. Winning comes before everything: being “fair” or having your tactics “respected” always come second to success.