Quote Originally Posted by Vyndree

They did have this pre-BC. BC brought Lightning Overload, an improved (and constantly tweaked) clearcast, Heroism, ToW (which is rarely taken by the PvPing shaman), and 2 elementals that can't be used in arenas.
I'm no expert on shaman, nor on WoW. I'm not even sure if I understood you correctly here, but Lightning Overload and Wrath totems is what gives the multi-shaman crew its power, yes?. The amount of focus fire a shaman can do with these abilities can trump 4 mages.

Anyway, the rewards from PvE content just wasn't there for a box crew pre-expansion, compared to PvP. This means (at least in my case) that it makes more sense to make a mage group. Someone else here said it that you get more of an "all around" group with shaman.

Quote Originally Posted by Vyndree
Perhaps the one change that brought Shaman to the forefront was the addition of arenas (primarily due to heroism and heroism alone), but I struggle to think that 4 multiboxed dps classes couldn't perform at the same ability as 4 shaman in the same situation given the same amount of skill.

The reason why Ellay does so well may very well be because of the amount of group coordination he has in order to efficiently focus fire. Especially considering mages are getting a free iceblock, why wouldn't they be able to perform just as effectively? Or warlocks? Or even hunters now that they've got the utility of traps + arcane shot dispells and the deadzone update?
Well, I think a big tipping point is that a shaman group has 5 healers, mages have 1. Therefore people quickly realize that they have to take down 1 character to cripple that group. In a shaman group you can easily obfuscate that, or at least have extra healing (albiet not as great as a holy priest individually).

-S

-S