[Enhancement Shamans] Preperation for 5v5, macros, talent build and other partly useful stuff

[Kruschpakx4]

In order to help out and motivate the remaining shaman multiboxers doing 5v5, I'm sharring all the stuff I've thought of in the past days about how to play my shaman team in 5s in the upcomming weeks. I've been inactive for some time now and dont have full tyrannical gear but I've done double enhance 2s to catch up in points and now I'm sitting on 490 ilvl which is not that bad. Since we cant do bgs properly anymore, its time to focus more on arenas, if you think arena is not fun, then make it fun!

However I'll start with my talent build for 5s

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Talents

To be honest I dont think there is much room to experiment, perhaps stonebulwark once it recieves its 33% buff but for now nature's guadrian is better since you dont lose the extra health anymore. Windwalk totem in combination with call of elements is extremely useful in 5s because it makes your team pretty much snare and root immune for the entire game, chasing a mage while beeing root immune is probably the most fun you can have in this game, you negate his damage and his healers eventually go oom because of the insane amount of damage you bump into him (no dps cooldowns required).

So therefore I got a windwalk/coe macro which is

/castsequence reset=5 windwalk totem, call of the elements, healing stream totem

The earthbind totem is just for the gcd because windwalk and coe dont have a gcd and sometimes I mistakenly triple press the macro and then I would immediately drop the 2nd windwalk which is obviously not useful.

Then we have Ancestral Swiftness, I use it together with hex in order to land a kill, tactic explained later.

Healing Tide totem is much better than ancestral guidance, you should drop them in pairs of two but the last time I played 5s with bad gear I had to drop them all at once because some classes had too retarded burst, which is mostly fixed now. If healing tide becomes baseline and the other (new) talent will be shit I'll take ancestral guidance and use that together with ascendance, since its off gcd it gives you more time to focus on kills in ascendance rather than wasting globals for htt/heals and other stuff to stay alive.

Now Primal Elementalist. Note that this talent requires a couple of macros to work out well, you dont want your earth elementals running amok and stunning the same guy 4 times.

Therefore we got

/cast [@arena1, exists] pulverize; pulverize

If arena1 is is dead or doesnt exist because your not in arena, then it will pulverize (well...stun) your current target. The earth elemental doesnt do a lot of damage (6,5k noncrits) so I'd suggest to use reinforce until pulverize is ready again (40 sec cooldown). Reinforce decreases your damage taken by 20% and healing done by 10%. I'm using

/cast reinforce
/cast empower

for this (empower is the similar ability of the fire elemental). Reinforce has about 45 yard range and once channeled you can also break los to your elemental and the effect still applies. Before your elements expire use the pulverize macro again. You can also use taunt against pets but not that useful anymore (since stampede got fixed)


Glyphs

Healing storm and lightning shield are a must have, then you can choose between healing stream totem (against caster teams) or hex against melee teams anything else is pretty much useless. Note that healing stream totem effect stacks, so if mage/ele shamans decide to blow their cooldowns then drop your healing stream quadruple and enjoy watching them doing no damage, with lightning shield glyph and 4x healing stream a 100k lava burst does 100k *0.9*0.9*0.9*0.9*0.9 = 59k, if you feel like your toon could still die use shamanistic rage then its 41k per lava burst. Also note that healing stream only reduces fire/frost/nature so it wont help much against lock/shadow (I hope this gets fixed one day to reduce magical damage).


Cooldown Management

So here is the difficult part, pretty much every shit is on gcd where I believe grounding and stormlash should not but however I'm no game designer. When the gates open and you run to your first pillar, the first thing you do is dropping earth elementals and press the arena stun macro, slowly but surely they will run across the map to stun their targets, be aware to stay within 45 yards of them or they will run back to you like crazy (seriously its like an evading mob). Now the enemy team usually tries to dodge or attack the elementals, in both cases you start to run in and the first thing you do is blow spirit wolves, they feel useless but still little heal and little damage is better than nothing. Then of course keeping grounding on cooldown, healing stream on cooldown (except ele shamans then better wait for ascendance before dropping HS) and searing totem is also very important for dps. If you feel like the elementals did their job use reinforce, then drop stormlash totem and then its time to land a kill. The two macros you need to land a successful kill

/use 13
/cast ancestral swiftness
/cast [@arena1] hex; hex

to remove cc and hex 4 targets

and then

/cast ascendance
/cast blood fury
/use 14
/castsequence reset=2 stormblast, earth shock, lava lash
/cast solar beam
/cancelaura hand of protection

in case of playing with druid or paladin you should use that, although I mostly use solar beam on a healer before but for example against resto shamans who cant drop spirit link in blanket silience then its very useful

Its also sometimes a good idea to wait until you get aoe ccd for example you got a warrior with shockwave, then you trinket out of shockwave imediately hex and then oneshot someone. If you're about to kill a caster wait until he casts something then wind shear together with oneshot so if he survives the main blast you lock him out for 3 sec and you can finish him with shock/auto hits (works great against mages). Note that frogged targets can still dodge/parry so it makes no difference if you oneshot a frogged or nonfrogged target but it prevents others to immediately cc you when blowing ascendance, there is also a good chance that people trinket the elemental stun, thats why its important to rush in when the elementals engage otherwise they'll more likely save their trinket. And dont forget stormlash totem before you hex/burst.

Also note that stormblast is a physical attack that ignores both bop (on enemy target) and reflect, it can be dodged/parried so dont necessarily try to oneshot a warrior with Die by the Sword up (100% parry and 20% damage reduce over 8 sec 2 min cooldown). You could, although its a bit hard to coordinate, oneshot together with capacitor stun but for example drop capacitor wait 3 sec then trinket-> hex, capacitor goes off -> oneshot, anyway its much easier to oneshot stuff that doesnt have 15% dodge/parry.

Stat priority

According to vanguards guide

3% Hit>3% Expertise>Agility=Resil>Mastery=Haste>Crit>PvP Power>More Expertise>More Hit>Other

From a multiboxer perspective I'd say its mostly correct, Mastery>haste because we rely on oneshots and mastery makes every single attack in our oneshot, except windfury, stronger. Perhaps also More expertise>pvp power since in full pvp gear you have already enough power to oneshot everything. I'm not sure what to think of getting more crit instead of haste, crit gives you a higher chance on flurry proccs (which means more haste) and also a higher chance for more stormblast crits seems nice but I prefer staying with haste (for now).


Which healer to take?

Basically everything ... except shaman.


Some Random Thought

Just theorycrafting here, sometimes I think back to season 7 where kromtor got his team to 2500, his was the most successful multiboxer ever in 5v5 and the irony he didnt rely on an oneshot macro. I'm really thinking of something similar with melee shamans, rotation with dps/healing cooldowns to have constant high pressure. Or lets say otherwise, basically I'm "wasting" all major damage cooldowns to kill one opponent and then you got 4 opponents with all cooldowns and you have nothing offensive left. Thats something I want to try out in the future especially when htt is a baseline talent and I can take another healing talent from the 75 tier.

I think we got another s7/s8 ahead, just with enhancement shamans now.

Conclusion

So tomorrow I'll do some 5s with a pally healer, I did 14-14 at 1,9 mmr 6 weeks ago with old gear and no preperation, now I got gear and preperation, will see how it works out. And good luck everyone else playing 5s, I hope this thread helps out.

Not sure when I upload videos but I'm planning to fraps games tomorrow and eventually make a second I have no friends cleave with 100% less bg and 100% more arena.

More stuff and grammar fixes comming later.

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