WotLK took my shammie-love away (and misc. 3.0.8 thoughts)

[Rin]

Apart from hunters being 1-button friendly (not really, but more so than elemental shammies because of the flame shock thing), they also bring a good amount of utility through their pets (stun, castspeed debuff, interrupt etc.), not to mention feign and with HKN's very nice mousebroadcasting feature even decent AE damage:-)

Sorry for the late reply! Yes, I would agree that Hunters are nice because of their pet abilities, but they're also nice b/c of the instant rez that you get on your pets (Heart of the Phoenix)... While I don't often end up using this talent (something would be wrong if my Hunter pets could out-tank my Warrior and DK....although, they did for a bit until I created new macros), it's still a godsend if you need to bring your guys back quickly. For instances, they've been great. I haven't ran into any content that I couldn't handle (messed up in the Underbog in my early 60s while trying to coordinate the movement around the spore boss, and never went back there since... I'm sure it would be overkill now at 69.7/70 though). I'll report back here once the team tries out Utgarde (will probably be late this evening or tomorrow), although I can't imagine any problems having watched videos of the fights and looking at the overall damage produced by the bosses (again, my hunter team is 2x hunters, 1x dk, 1x warrior, 1x priest; my B team is 1x shaman - bloodlust, 1x pal, 1x druid, 2x mages... 10 man instance runs, win or lose :P ). I believe there's another person, Bolyson, who may have some additional thoughts to contribute to this thread too - he's running 4 hunters and a druid as the healer. You really can't go wrong when rolling with Hunters though... tankage , heals + great pve dps = Heroic instances become managable / even easy in some cases.

The only annoying part was rolling the hunters up from nothing. Dropping 3 shaman in order to build a new team/add on to my pve damage wasn't an easy choice... although, I'm suprised at how quickly I've managed to raise them up. 2-3 weeks into it and now my little ones are about to hit 70 (tonight). Cheers!

[Fuzzyboy]

The only annoying part was rolling the hunters up from nothing. Dropping 3 shaman in order to build a new team/add on to my pve damage wasn't an easy choice... although, I'm suprised at how quickly I've managed to raise them up. 2-3 weeks into it and now my little ones are about to hit 70 (tonight). Cheers!

Yeah, I'm surprised as well. I just opened another box of RAF-goodness and started levelling my moonkins (inspired by evilseed), mostly for kicks and giggles, since I'm unlikely to level them past 60. I'll use the gift-levels to make a new hunter team, and dreading 60-70 a bit. Did you just quest all the way from 60-70?

[Prepared]

The only annoying part was rolling the hunters up from nothing. Dropping 3 shaman in order to build a new team/add on to my pve damage wasn't an easy choice... although, I'm suprised at how quickly I've managed to raise them up. 2-3 weeks into it and now my little ones are about to hit 70 (tonight). Cheers!

Yeah, I'm surprised as well. I just opened another box of RAF-goodness and started levelling my moonkins (inspired by evilseed), mostly for kicks and giggles, since I'm unlikely to level them past 60. I'll use the gift-levels to make a new hunter team, and dreading 60-70 a bit. Did you just quest all the way from 60-70?

You're doing exactly what I'm doing. I'm working on a new RAF'd 4 box druid team since I already have one druid at level 70 now. Just started them today and they are all level 19 so far. My shaman are on hold until Blizzard fixes the DPS for elemental shaman. If they don't fix it, then I won't be playing the shamans, but will be playing my alt mages and priests along with my druids and other classes such as the death knights and warlocks. I was also inspired by the post made by Evilseed.

[Toned]

I'm using Pal + 4 shaman atm and doing fine in heroics and what not. Currently I have a priest/dk/druid at or over lvl 60. I'm toying around with restructuring my group to this:

Unholy DK Tank
Boonkin
Ele Sham
Resto Sham
Then Mage/Lock/Ele Sham/shadow priest maybe ? in the last slot.

Then I'd use my shamans for pvp. Pre WOTLK I was working on a 10 box setup with 2 tanks, 2 healers, 8 dps .... Dunno though PVE was boring to me in TBC but once I started running Kara/ZA every week I started to like PVE again. With WOTLK I'm liking the PVE a lot so the above group would be purely pve. Anyone know if earth and moon + curse of elements + ebon plague stack ?

I'm still awaiting on 3.0.8 changes before I do anything... however I'm about 99% sure I'm dropping 1 ele sham for a boonkin as it stands now.

[Hachoo]

I still love Shamans, and the closer I get to 80 the more I love them. The few issues I have will be fixed shortly anyway.

IMO Even if say Shamans do less DPS than other classes, the synergy you get by not having to do weird complex cast sequences with multiple classes makes the DPS equivalent if not HIGHER than other classes when multiboxing.

I also like the utility of having multiple shamans that IMO makes them better than having mixed classes or multiples of any other class. (Fire totems for AoE, mana or healing totems for mass passive healing, tremor for free, grounding for spell, earthbind for kiting, etc, bloodlust, earth eles and fire eles for extra tanking or DPS, etc). IMO you just can't get anything close to that flexibility with any other class.

[Rin]

The only annoying part was rolling the hunters up from nothing. Dropping 3 shaman in order to build a new team/add on to my pve damage wasn't an easy choice... although, I'm suprised at how quickly I've managed to raise them up. 2-3 weeks into it and now my little ones are about to hit 70 (tonight). Cheers!

Yeah, I'm surprised as well. I just opened another box of RAF-goodness and started levelling my moonkins (inspired by evilseed), mostly for kicks and giggles, since I'm unlikely to level them past 60. I'll use the gift-levels to make a new hunter team, and dreading 60-70 a bit. Did you just quest all the way from 60-70?

Yeah, I mostly quested from 60-70... it really didnt take much longer than 8 casual days tops.

60-64 : Just do all of the Hellfire Peninsula quests (minus the *really* long collections -- one that comes to mind is the gather 30 sprockets... but the other collections should go by quickly) + the instance based quests (Ramparts and Blood Furnace)
You'll probably end up about 1/4-1/2 through 64 by the time you do this
64-66: Zangarmarsh... theres a lot of quick kill quests out here; I skipped most of the collections in this zone.
66-68: Nagrand -
68-70: Blades Edge Mtns / Netherstorm

My guys dinged 70 last night in Netherstorm, and I kept going there... after you get through some of the bull$hit quests, a lot of good/quick kill ones open up. I think I ended the night at about 16% into 70 (170,000 exp earned), and that final 16% was earned in less than 1.5 hrs (again, once the quick kill quests open, you can maximize on the exp)

Some other super fast (less than 5 minute) ways to gain loads of exp:

- Swearing to Aldor or Scryer (I did Aldor b/c of certain kill quests that I wanted to complete) + turning in both the marks of Kil'jedean and Sargeras will net you a quick 25k exp (you can buy the marks on the auction house for like 50 marks ... 20-25 gold - its an easy 25k xp for virtually nothing)
- If you can get your hands on a Fel Armanent (Aldor) - turn that bad boy in.. 15k exp
- Ring of Blood is a definite must while you're in Nagrand... the exp yield is insane for the time it takes to complete

Other thoughts too:
- Grab the Eyes of Skettis quest when you go to Shattrath -> it opens up a chain that yielded 60k+ exp total for probably 20-35 mins of running around.


Cheers

[Kicksome]

I was messing around on the PTR checking out the new shaman changes. I have about 1700 spell power without totems.

1) LB spam is still almost as effective as the lava burst rotation. I think I did about 2.4K dps with just LB spam, I did about 200 more dps with FS+LB rotation on a single target
2) Magma totem was doing about 650 damage a tic, critting for around 1200-1300 or so. This is about double the damage it is now, and I'm pretty happy about it. Vs. 2+ targets I think it'll probably pretty much always be more effective to throw down magma as far as DPS goes. It's not as good as druid hurricane, I think my hurricanes crit for around 1500. But it's probably our best single change. 3 or 4 of these is going to hurt really quick.
3) It looks like my 3K spell power shaman with the old hybrid ele/enh spec is doing about the same damage as the new ele PTR shaman. The hybrid spec probably still is up dps by about 10%, but I'm not totally sure.