Best 3-Man Group for Farming/Dungeon/Group Quests?

[Generalbrock]

I'm thinking of rolling a 3-man group for Classic, but I can't decide on the group composition. I want to be able to run lower instances for gold and also be able to farm mobs in the world.

These are my groups ideas so far:

Priest/Paladin/Warrior
This group should be able to handle just about anything into the world but melee can get annoying when you drive from the healer.

Priest/Warlock/Mage
This group should be pretty easy to handle and the big blueberry makes a solid tank from what I remember. And the mage would be very useful with portals and water.

Druid/Rogue/Druid
This group would be great for stealth runs and just skipping annoying mobs. It would probably take a lot more work with all the stealthing and stuff, though.

Any thoughts on these groups? Any suggestions to make them better? Any compositions I haven't thought of yet?

[Lanser84]

Priest + Warlock + Mage sounds great for questing to me. Warlock and Mage each bring great utility.

Priest + 2x warlock is also highly attractive. (It's what I would do if running 2 or 3 characters purely for the pleasure of leveling/grinding.) You should be able to get zero downtime while questing by using a standard affliction lock playstyle* (x2) and casting renew with a mostly-passive priest.

*In TBC and Classic, afflication lock was my favorite solo-PvE class. You can get near-zero downtime even solo. It's a fun game of maximizing use of 3 resources: your health, voidwalker health, your mana. You decide how many mobs to pull, where to send pet, whether to fear, when to drain life, when to drain soul based on how high each of those 3 resource bars are. It's great fun using 2-4 hotkeys (cast-sequence macro is key) and you often zig zag around dotting up everything in sight only stopping ocassionally to drain life or wand (and eat/drink/re-summon if things didn't go to plan). Mbox version could be almost the same (2 DOTs per lock rather than 3, and cast refresh from the priest rather than drain life with the warlocks) or could add complexity by separately controlling voidwalkers, or by taking advantage of hellfire to gather+AOE. 1-4 warlocks + healer will be my 2nd PvE team because of all the above.

[Generalbrock]

Priest + Warlock + Mage sounds great for questing to me. Warlock and Mage each bring great utility.

Priest + 2x warlock is also highly attractive. (It's what I would do if running 2 or 3 characters purely for the pleasure of leveling/grinding.) You should be able to get zero downtime while questing by using a standard affliction lock playstyle* (x2) and casting renew with a mostly-passive priest.

*In TBC and Classic, afflication lock was my favorite solo-PvE class. You can get near-zero downtime even solo. It's a fun game of maximizing use of 3 resources: your health, voidwalker health, your mana. You decide how many mobs to pull, where to send pet, whether to fear, when to drain life, when to drain soul based on how high each of those 3 resource bars are. It's great fun using 2-4 hotkeys (cast-sequence macro is key) and you often zig zag around dotting up everything in sight only stopping ocassionally to drain life or wand (and eat/drink/re-summon if things didn't go to plan). Mbox version could be almost the same (2 DOTs per lock rather than 3, and cast refresh from the priest rather than drain life with the warlocks) or could add complexity by separately controlling voidwalkers, or by taking advantage of hellfire to gather+AOE. 1-4 warlocks + healer will be my 2nd PvE team because of all the above.

I never thought of the priest and two warlocks group but that does sound powerful. And with two tanks it gives a certain amount of cushion if something goes wrong.

Great, now I'm considering four groups. Lol

[Apatheist]

two tanks

It's really only one tank because of the way threat works. If you're fighting a boss and your voidwalker dies, the threat it had generated transfers to the warlock so the boss will attack the warlock, rather than switching to the second voidwalker as you might think it would.

Priest + warlocks is a strong group in PvE and PvP but without /focus I'm not sure how we'd manage a pet group. You need some way of managing individual targets.

Actually, it just occurred to me that you could keybind 4 individual assist keys to acquire separate CC/pet targets (or one key on round robin) and then use @party1target for your DPS rotation. That could work.