3 shaman or 3 frost mage?

I'm not sure if i wanna go with the 3 shaman or the 3 frost mage, im thinking id like 3 shaman because of chain lightning, totems etc but frost mages are also good. Also open for anyother class suggestions that may be good for 3v3.

If youre willing to, I would like to see the effectiveness of a resto sham, ret pal, and ms war would do tri boxed if you found a good way to mitigate the melee issue

I play both teams : 3 elems shamans which is good and also 3 mages : one is frost for the control and 2 are fires for more dps. The 3 mages have also some points in arcane : the frost up to improved iae and the 2 fires up to POM. So, when Im questing, if I find a good place, I cant do some aoe grinding. Also for pvp, the fires have POM pyroblast under their sleeves.

All in all, 3 mages are more squishy but the pve play is perhaps more dynamic, with more options. The 3 shamans are levelled for pvp later and will be joined by another duo healadin + another shaman.

3 elemental shamans, because:
- They have mail armor (very viable for PvP)
- They can heal each other (if any of the 3 die, the other 2 can still heal too!)
- They can all resurrect
- They have wipe recovery('reincarnation') so any of them can recover from a wipe and res the others
- Very decent DPS
- LOTS of buffs through totems

Some mage benefits I would think of:
- portals
- better crowd control (sheepx3)
- better DPS
- free water and food

Mage DPS will be superior, but imo there are a lot more useful benefits to using shamans.

ok thanks guys :D

3 shaman >>> 3 mages.

I love mages, and they can work with a healer, but without a healer, res, wipe recovery, etc., I think you'd a sad panda down the road a bit. ymmv.

I run 2 fire mages and almost never die. Most mobs are dead a good bit before they can ever reach me.
2 sheep works pretty well for those slightly larger groups. The only thing that usually kills me is some ganking 70 rogue.


I tried frost/fire first and it was alright. But scrapping frost for 2 fire mages was well worth all the extra damage.
I don't need nearly as much cc, if the mob never has a chance to touch me.

I think he was asking more for pvp purposes. I think with the 3 mages I would go with one frost and 2 33/28(my favorite build) that way when you 3v3 arena you can soft up on guy then POM pyro x2 which would be insanely awesome. I usually use my pom when the enemy is at 50% but you wouldn't even need to wait with 2 mages.

I would pop out hit a scorch, pom pyro x2, fireblast, blink, blastwave, AE( if not dead yet) That would kill about 95% of players, if you don't count Pallys(bubble), mage(iceblock), shammy(grounding totems, but that's why you scorch).

Let me count this up, (estimate) I hit for about 1000 scorch(no-crit), 4000 pom pyro+ arcane power+ icon of the siver crescent, fireblast 1600, BW 1500, AE 900

1000(1800 crit)
4000(6500 crit)(instant)
1600(2500 crit)(instant)
1500(2200 crit)(instant)
900(1400 crit)(instant)
9000 non crit then x2 = 18000 NON-CRIT

if you take out the scorch it's 16000 DMG over 4.5 seconds of global cooldown.

try healing through that.