I may have gotten the WoW itch, tell me what's happened in the past 2 years.

[Kromtor]

As far as 4 and 5 boxed PvP goes, I've found everything Shodokan has said to be unfortunately true. 5's arenas are definitely not gladiator viable for 5 boxed melee and I'd have to guess the same will be true for ranged. Mass CC and peeling is far too effective that any smart team will devastate you. One of the biggest new issues that Shodokan brought up was the fact that in arenas the opposing team can see your team make-up from the very beginning and they have plenty of time to change talents to maximize their classes AoE capabilities. 5's in general just suck, they are so underpopulated they are ripe for off-hours win-trading. The logistics and politics out of the arena perhaps play a bigger portion than inside the arena. If you want to get to the top that way you might be able to but that's lame. Maybe play 3 and get two friends but that doesn't interest me at all.

The PvE is fun, but it's essentially the same old stuff. The heroics are just very easy compared to other expansions. I thought the timed instances might be fun (they at least are quite hard - far harder than heroics) to try to get some competition going, but I'm afraid that's mostly going to be a kiting competition.

[heyaz]

So I hadn't boxed since wrath. I had the 4x ret + dk team at the end of wrath as well, and my four shaman. Shaman looked so good on paper (especially with ascendance) in MoP I went with them.

I leveled 4x 90 shaman and a druid (pve tank) right when the expansion came out. It became clear very quickly that elemental was weak in pvp, in fact the weakest I've ever seen it (worse than beginning of wrath). I tested enhance on one shaman and decided not to box it. Anyway I continued to gear them thinking they'd hit critical mass as some pvp power percentage but they didn't get much better. At the moment I mostly play them as 4x resto, just healing - that spec is actually quite strong and stacking them has significant advantages: huge passive healing, no issue with fears (4x tremor totems a minute or 8x with the talent), raid-wide freedom-like totem (windwalk), 4x spirit link and ascendance resto duplicates all healing across the team. it's fun but, it's healing... not blowing stuff up.

I'm leveling 5x DKs (almost 89 now). They're fairly strong in PVP, have their share of aoe-cc (check the 90 talents), can death grip twice in a row, and have several other benefits. With tech being so cheap I'll be building out a new machine and add in my other guys for a 5x DPS 3-5x healer comp I'll use in world PVP and battlegrounds.

Arenas - I'm not planning anything serious this season. If DK's stay strong I'll probably go with 4x DK + dedicated healer or try the method of leading with the healer; if neither my resto shaman nor resto druid are viable I'll bring up a paladin.

I'm also considering swapping in a warrior for one of the DKs to add in shockwave, AOE fear, skull banner, etc. as it would probably add more to the comp than a 5th DK.


tl;dr
-I have 4x shaman + 1 druid at 90, and the shaman suck
-leveling 5x DKs to add to them
-adding in a warrior later

[Kromtor]

I've really only been playing about 10 days. The first group I've messed around with is my tried and true 4 ret 1 blood dk. They are very strong. The rets heal like crazy and it's easier than ever to multibox it since you slap on the glyph of battle healing and let your seal of insight heal efficiently just as a percentage of your damage. In the past I sacrificed a lot of DPS for the healing when playing rets but now it's actually a bit less. You lose a good chunk from having to use seal of insight (especially hurts your single target DPS), but it's not as much as I lost before when I rarely could use a templar's verdict since HP was always was used for word of glory.

The blood DK is a great tank that self heals/shields like a beast, and his DPS is incredible. He will often out DPS your rets even on single targets simply because he gets so much extra atk power from taking damage.

The fact that they're not really viable for top tier PvP is simply due to lack of magic removal from cleanse (but that nerf happened a long time ago) and the plethora of AoE CC and damage that's now available to every class.

I'm probably going to test 4 DK 1 ret/prot, simply because DKs have a bit more in the way of getting out of CC without sacrificing DPS and have some interesting delayed burst stuff. I still don't think it'll work out in arenas and it'll a bit harder in PvE since DKs can't really heal each other like they used to, but I'm sure it'll be fun and easily heroic viable.

[Kruschpakx4]

I do suggest you to play quad enhance, sustain damage and healing is really good, the oneshot macro is like those from elemental shamans back in bc, no travel time, no gcd between and a guaranteed kill, I'm currently always lurking around between 1,6 1,7k , for sure I need either a good resto shaman or druid (currently have neither), some major problems are getting fixed with 5.1, maxing out gear will ofc also have a big impact on the comps performance, once I'm not getting oneshoted within the first 2 seconds of the fight by bm/war/war/x/x comps then quad enhancement is high rating viable due to retarded amounts of healing+stacking healin stream glyph, ofc mastering primal elementalist is necessary

beside that its also incredible strong in small battlegrounds, like ele shamans in s8, may not as strong in 40 bgs as elemental because ... well because melee..

[Shodokan]

I do suggest you to play quad enhance, sustain damage and healing is really good, the oneshot macro is like those from elemental shamans back in bc, no travel time, no gcd between and a guaranteed kill, I'm currently always lurking around between 1,6 1,7k , for sure I need either a good resto shaman or druid (currently have neither), some major problems are getting fixed with 5.1, maxing out gear will ofc also have a big impact on the comps performance, once I'm not getting oneshoted within the first 2 seconds of the fight by bm/war/war/x/x comps then quad enhancement is high rating viable due to retarded amounts of healing+stacking healin stream glyph, ofc mastering primal elementalist is necessary

beside that its also incredible strong in small battlegrounds, like ele shamans in s8, may not as strong in 40 bgs as elemental because ... well because melee..

DKs will also be much more viable as soon as BM/Warrior burst gets fixed

But honestly warrior damage is so dumb that you can play wheelchair cleave in 3's once again (rshaman/hpal/warrior) and wait for a 5 stack of Taste For Blood and kill someone in a single heroic strike. If that doesn't show you how dumb this expansion is then I don't know how else to explain it.

5's have high representation on bg9 but every other bg seems to be super prone to win-trading (my old bg shadowburn as a perfect example, when i queued above 2200 i'd get ddosed by the r1 team if they were playing because they straight lost 100% of games they played me last season)

If you want to do 5's I'd highly suggest a multi-class comp. Enhance and dks will be okay especially if you GRIND with the mmr changes next patch. But with that said... higher rated players who play more will always out-scale you.

[heyaz]

i'd get ddosed by the r1 team if they were playing because they straight lost 100%

How exactly are these teams getting your IP address to DDoS you?

And not to mention, people are serious enough about this now to rent time on a botnet to perform a DDoS? That kind of thing used to be expensive and was used for taking down websites for either financial gain or to make some kind of protest. I didn't realize it was so commoditized that some wow jerk offs can rent one to ddos a someone at will.

[Fat Tire]

How exactly are these teams getting your IP address to DDoS you?

And not to mention, people are serious enough about this now to rent time on a botnet to perform a DDoS? That kind of thing used to be expensive and was used for taking down websites for either financial gain or to make some kind of protest. I didn't realize it was so commoditized that some wow jerk offs can rent one to ddos a someone at will.

Skype was the easiest way, but now there are more advanced ways and really its pretty common knowledge. Tech has really come along and you dont need very much at all to cause someone to disconnect from wow, even if they log right back in by then you will have killed their team. You dont have to flood an ip with packets from a shit load of bots the way people do to take down large websites.

[heyaz]

but now there are more advanced ways and really its pretty common knowledge

indulge me then

Tech has really come along and you dont need very much at all to cause someone to disconnect from wow, even if they log right back in by then you will have killed their team. You dont have to flood an ip with packets from a shit load of bots the way people do to take down large websites.

You could take down a host with 1 packet 15 years ago, it's not "tech"
again, specifics?

I still feel like they probably obtained the IP prior when you were on Skype, Vent, visited their web site, or whatever. Not through wow directly, but again since it's common knowledge maybe someone could share it with me.

[Kromtor]

I haven't looked into enh so Krusch may be on to something, especially if they have a reliable insta kill shot - I didn't think anybody had that anymore at least not at range. Another grind to 90 followed by an honor grind I suppose.

[heyaz]

I haven't looked into enh so Krusch may be on to something, especially if they have a reliable insta kill shot - I didn't think anybody had that anymore at least not at range. Another grind to 90 followed by an honor grind I suppose.

The reliable insta kill shot is within a 3 minute window when you are in Ascendance and not CC'd. Stormblast (stormstrike under ascendance) hits for about quadruple and is all nature damage, bypassing armor. Correct me if I'm wrong but outside of that, enhance damage with stormstrike and lava lash is like auto-attacking compared to other melee. The kill shot with elemental back in BC was CL + ES. In wrath it was 4x lava burst + 4x FS/ES and or CL to connect at the same time - but this could be repeated every 10-15 seconds or so, you didn't need to wait for elemental mastery to come back up although it helped.

How do you kill anything quickly outside of ascendance every 3 minutes? You need a lot of uptime (not something you get often these days) to get kills after that is over. You need lucky windfury procs, stormlash, and some big stormstrike/lava lash hits to put out any real damage and it's not reliable. Correct me if I'm wrong but that was my limited experience with enhance, they've always been a CD, 2-3 minute cooldown class with mediocre damage in between.

As far as I can tell, elemental just doesn't have an insta-kill, period. With maxed pvp power and high spell power you may be able to get a good 200-250k hit with ele blast + earth shock but players have 350-400k and ele blast has to be hard casted unless you took Ancestral Swiftness. It's not a guaranteed crit and shaman have negligible crit with good gear (around 12%)
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...s/Novoz/simple

Ascendance + lava burst in ele can score a kill but that's just because you can rapidly launch wet noodles for 15 seconds until something dies. But you get cc'd the second you pop it and need a good 5+ seconds (an eternity in arena) to get off that many lava bursts.