5 Enhancement Shamans

[Apatheist]

since shaman tanks are a thing in vanilla

Shamans can hold agro on one mob at a time by spamming earth shock every time it's up but they can't maintain threat on multiple adds. Every video you see with people trying to shaman tank involves them tanking one mob while the healer carries the party as everybody else just DPS's through the rest of the pack with no tank.

You also need a specific talent/gear setup to make shaman tanking viable once you get into the harder hitting dungeons and that setup is useless for everything else. It's no good in PvP, you can't heal with it and it does poor DPS.

I just don't see the point of trying to make shaman tanking a thing. Paladin tanking has issues too but at least paladins have the advantage of being heal with holy/prot and having awesome AE threat generation so you can AE clear dungeons fast with a good group. Druid and fury/prot warrior are both more survivable and do more damage than a shaman tank. There's just no advantage to it I can see. Especially as a boxer where you can choose your group composition.

[Kruschpakx4]

I wouldn't bother with the actualy shaman tanking spec that is meant to substitude tanks in 5 mans, with the toolkit shamans have by default its already enough to grind through trash with 5 of them maybe not as fast as with paladins, mages or whatever but you can certainly clear dungeons at a slower pace.

[Apatheist]

I'm not so sure. Unless you outlevel or outgear dungeons significantly some of the mobs hit pretty hard.

Even with a paladin or druid while you're gearing up the mobs in all of the 55+ dungeons can drop your health super fast. Without the extra block value, parry and armor from the enhance tree you'll have a rough time. There's no way you'd be able to 5man DM:N or UBRS as an all shaman group with no CC.

[Kruschpakx4]

There's no way you'd be able to 5man DM:N or UBRS as an all shaman group with no CC.

you probably have to see it to believe it, but the limited utility of a single shaman turns out to be a form of cc if you have 5 of them. If I go DM north (i tested 5 enh a while ago on pserver and streamed it) the hardest trashpacks are 3 orgres consisting of 2 melees and a caster. If i predrop 5 groundings and place another 5 groundings midfight that caster is spending 20 seconds doing absolutely no damage. One of the two melees is spending 15 seconds on stoneclaw totems party because he got a slow swing timer and has a 50% chance to get stunned for 3/1,5/.75 sec, the limiting factor here is actually the lifetime of the totem. Meanwhile the mob i focus down gets pulled with two volleys of lightning bolts which eat about 30-40% of his hp before he gets into melee range. The gameplay is also easy to pull off since alot of the damage comes from auto attack and imbues, you have alot of time to play around with totems and heals between shocks and stormstrike.

Regarding heals, if you go full melee dps you will have little to no spellpower but lesser healing wave does around 880 base healing (flash of light got like 380 untalented) so while mana intense its amazing burst heal. So yeah you have to drink after every pack, but i can guarantee you unless you wear cloth and get oneshottet that you dont die at trash in DM:N.

So after all if you go for elemental later on I'd still use the enh spec to farm the gear in pve because it takes a while until you get enough mail spelldmg gear. Personally I go for a mage/priest combo first so whatever I play afterwards i can make food myself which is going to be amazing


edit: to round this up a little, I know that the mechanics I use will work but it comes down to 1 melee mob not being able to 1 shot me. Of course same goes for bosses.

[Peregrine]

Personally I go for a mage/priest combo first so whatever I play afterwards i can make food myself which is going to be amazing

And I'll be rolling 4x lock 1x priest alongside Krush so I only need water for priest, tho even that is not needed due to lifetap/drain life! Hype Hype!

[Curryman]

(i tested 5 enh a while ago on pserver and streamed it)

Cool to hear you tried it already and thanks for the breakdown. Do you have any vods of that by chance?

And I'll be rolling 4x lock 1x priest alongside Krush so I only need water for priest, tho even that is not needed due to lifetap/drain life! Hype Hype!

Are you going to try doing dungeons with that team or just levelling through quests? Thinking voidwalkers would have trouble with AoE threat or perhaps not with Suffering on round robin.

[Peregrine]

Are you going to try doing dungeons with that team or just levelling through quests? Thinking voidwalkers would have trouble with AoE threat or perhaps not with Suffering on round robin.

While that may be true to certain degree, don't forget that as this comp I'll have access to but not limited :

15% stam from talents (I'll only miss 10% shadow mastery), I'll have access to Imp stamina buff as well as Priest Fortitude plus Shadow protection which pairs up with UD 10 shadow resistance. Then again, when it comes to trash: I have seduction plus banish plus shackle plus voidwalker tanking plus fear plus 4x coil (that is 12 sec of hard cc) and rng priest stun plus extra 15% dmg which equalizes the loss of shadow mastery for hp scaling (should end up roughly 6-7khp with bwl gear on a single lock). Then, there is a power world shield to negate some dmg. And, then there is 4x soul stone just in case of emergency plus healthstone plus health pots. You are looking at solid 10-15k hp of dmg before I even need to worry on a single lock.

For usual boss fight, the concept will be mostly to send all void walkers, put the coe/cos debuff plus armor reduction so void can get extra dmg. From there wait 10 sec or so to get inital aggro and pew pew.

While mostly at low levels, the dungeons will not be that successful later on I'll be able to steam roll through any content. Don't forget that in world pvp I don't need to face my target for dots and for shadowburn as well (as much as I recall that is). Plus, the engineering net is incredibly op on all 5x cuz I can simply root 5x people and let em rot. There are various concepts that I am loooking into with Kruscpak for teaming up so if anyone is up for it, once they announce the realms we will be rolling pvp realm,horde so you're more then welcome to join us.

One thing I forgot to mention is that ,one locks reach certain treshold they will simply stomp on everything (fel puppy + some items for stealth detection>rogues won't stand a chance. With that amount of health pool, it will take even Naxx warrior 4-7 hit to even dent you severly (4x puppy means 4x silence). Before any caster can do anything, they will get silenced for 10 sec minimum (by that time you're dead).

Still, remains to be seen what the world will be

[sethlan]

And I'll be rolling 4x lock 1x priest alongside Krush so I only need water for priest, tho even that is not needed due to lifetap/drain life! Hype Hype!

That's why i'm adding 1 mage into my team, To make food/etc. and as frost to slow the target down.
3x locks, 1 priest, 1 mage - priest will be disc, all undead because of forsaken~~~

[Apatheist]

edit: to round this up a little, I know that the mechanics I use will work but it comes down to 1 melee mob not being able to 1 shot me. Of course same goes for bosses.

Seems super sketchy to me. The more damage you're taking, the more you have to stop and hard cast a heal, which means the less damage you're doing and the longer it will take you to kill things.

I guess it could work but I don't see the point over just going with a proper tank and 4 shamans.

[Peregrine]

Seems super sketchy to me. The more damage you're taking, the more you have to stop and hard cast a heal, which means the less damage you're doing and the longer it will take you to kill things.

I guess it could work but I don't see the point over just going with a proper tank and 4 shamans.

The main point of 5 shaman is that you actually need 5x shaman to make this work properly. Any number of shamans lower then 5 impacts this setup greatly and will make it much more vunerable exponetially. The main reason for this is :

a) 5x grounding! Incredible as it alllows pretty much to ignore casting mechanics (the usual cast time being 2 sec or so *5 = reset grounding cd> repeat)

b) 5x ns/instant CL for massive dmg (we are talking about 15/10/7k)

c) searing totem ( adds nice dmg overtime)

d) stoneclaw totem (pretty much ignore extra melee adds)

e) there is a build with ele/resto with 5x mana totem which means with some times and mana pot you can rotate your mana 10 mins before required to drink

f) 5x ele just stomps pvp as well vs casters and vs melee (it's really effective vs melee, just requires a bit different approach then Burning Crusade)