Playing 5 Shamans in arena (no dedicated healer)

[heyaz]

It won't work. Against good teams, the second I lose my healer it's downhill from there. I've had many games get down to 1 melee and a healer, all four of my shaman with decent mana, and they just drop 1 by 1. It's even worse they have a warlock + healer - that will annihilate your whole team and grounding totems just won't save you.

Shaman just don't have good survivability. Even with my healer, I need massive heals and often pain supression or I will lose a shaman within 1 global, especially against wizard cleave (which is most good teams).

Sometimes I manage to gib 1-2 more targets after my healer dies, but what you're left with is the two that are hardest to kill - usually a priest and warlock, or rogue, and chances of winning from there are very slim. You will spend most of your time healing trying not to lose shaman.

The other issue is AOE. Without any healing at all, a geared team could just spam aoe's until you're dead. It doesn't work when you have a healer (I laugh when I get volley or blizzard against my team when my healer is up - it's just not enough damage). Even lolstorm can be healed through effectively, especially if my shaman heal themselves as well. But that ability alone could drop all 5 of your shaman to <50% hp even with gear, and from there they get picked off.

The other issue is that the 5th shaman is not really necessary. Against full relentless teams, your nuke macro, especially on a hidden focus target, will kill pretty much anything but a warlock unless a big instant heal goes off right in the middle of it. You would just get a lot of overkill damage from the 5th shaman especially against less geared teams.