Shamans in Arena - week1, my thought

[Alemi]

A team did exactly that yesterday, while you cannot target into the smoke cloud, you can make their lives hell for doing so. Immediately dropped healing rains and treants for passive healing and then hurriquaked into their smoke bomb. While I cannot target them directly, you can AOE. I have hurricane glyphed for 50% movement reduction to anyone affected & earthquake x4 with the chance to knock down is pretty damn nice. Effectively ruining their 3 minute cooldown and putting their healers at a massive healing deficit across their team. Soon as smoke bomb ended I was still over 60% health on all my guys and their were under 60%. Immediate em/lava burst and then it's 5v4, hexed the hell out of them and then spiritwalkers graced and ran away from their melee while nuking down their priest (mana burns hurt a TON). 5v3. Then mop up.

Enhancement is a pita imho. Roots will effectively kill you. While it's hard to peel a shammy off because their can remove snares and/or ghost wolf. They have 0 defenses against roots. A single frost mage will make your life a living hell imho. I much prefer elemental.

I'm mostly in PVE/Heroic/Justice gear and had a whopping 500 resilience yesterday. After the conquest reset, I'll bump that up to about 900 tonight.

As an FYI - I fought a warrior with 150k health, 1.9k resilience (20% damage reduction) and had him completely dead with the initial volley (fs -> lvb -> lb -> thunderstorm) in a number of matches. I fought them about 7 games and went 2-5 against them. Prot Warrior/Ret Pally/Feral Druid/Arcane Mage/Resto Druid. The single deciding factor in that game is the damn feral druid. I couldn't take the time to nuke anyone down because I was constantly having to deal with his bleeds ticking for 6-9k while being arcane blasted when groundings were down while the resto would toss a few heals and then wild mushroom spam.

Most of my losses were to this team, a double feral druid team, or another team with a feral. I'm just having a hell of a time dealing with their damage and balancing that and focus fire. As I get more resilience to manage their bleeds, I think it'll be a ton easier - not saying easy, but better than it is now.

[remanz]

Good stuff, that clarifies the "smoke" problem for me. I was having a bit of doubt due to the smoke bomb for shamans.

As I also mentioned in another thread.

Feral is broken. It almost counts as 2 persons. When you focus burst him, you better kill him quickly. Or he comes back with that 40k Mangle in bear.

[Alemi]

Good stuff, that clarifies the "smoke" problem for me. I was having a bit of doubt due to the smoke bomb for shamans.

As I also mentioned in another thread.

Feral is broken. It almost counts as 2 persons. When you focus burst him, you better kill him quickly. Or he comes back with that 40k Mangle in bear.

And if you keep attacking him in bear he'll barkskin/survival instincts/frenzied regen while you feed him rage while attacking him.