5 Enhancement Shamans

[Peregrine]

Well, given that shamans have 5x grounding with 5x stoneclaw and with 5x searing plus some crazy weps such as hand of eddward the odd plus rings that can stun when hit and shield from aq (you remeber krush that can silence for 3 sec, then again chest piece that has 30% of absoring that school of magic 500 dmg with ofc plus some incredible trinkets and some other tricks you can do amazing stuff. Shaman is only class that can utlize all wep/shield/tricks that are simply god like. Imagine having 5x shield mage casts aoe >get's silenced instantly dead.

Imagine warrior rushing to you>hand of eddward the odd>>puff>insta CL. Pure chaos

[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.

[Kruschpakx4]

I dont save those runs and I couldn't share them here, but the conclusion that I made is that mechanics wise the comp is very interesting because no other setup offers that weird playstyle that works for some reason. Of course 4 warriors with windfury cleaving through pve is more effective in terms of items/(time spent).

[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

[Apatheist]

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.

A single voidwalker has trouble holding AE threat. 4 Voidwalkers can each focus on one mob and most packs are 3-4 elites. On single targets, they actually do a reasonable amount of threat if you give them a few seconds to cast a second torment before you start casting. You don't even have to assign a pet to tank non-elites because they'll be dead in like 2 seconds.

I set focus to a different mob on each warlock, send the pet in and then I have suffering, hellfire and prayer of healing on one hotkey. This uses the AE "taunt" to ensure all of your voidwalkers have some threat on everything before you start AoEing and even if the pets lose threat, you do so much damage with hellfire*4 that most stuff is dead in seconds (in earlier dungeons, at least.) I prefer the soul link build myself. 40% Physical damage reduction means even if my warlocks pull threat they can just tank through it.

While mostly at low levels, the dungeons will not be that successful later on I'll be able to steam roll through any content.

It's actually the other way around. 4 Voidwalkers trivialize low level dungeons when you're comfortable with pet management. 15-50 dungeons are super easy. Once you get to UBRS, Dire Maul, Scholo, etc. it's much more difficult because your voidwalkers HP/armor don't scale at all with gear. Some of those mobs hit very hard and have a lot more HP. As your gear scales, you do significantly more damage while your pets threat stays the same as it was when you first hit 60 so you have to be a lot more careful about pulling agro.

Pet tanking means you have 4 targets to heal rather than a single tank -- as well as having to top off your warlocks HP from hellfire and lifetap. The most efficient way is just to generally spam downranked prayer of healing once you get enough gear to sustain it. Since you can lifetap to full mana on the warlocks and one prayer of healing is generally enough to put them back on full HP, you really only need to buy water on your priest which is pretty nice.

All in all, it's not as good as a proper tank but it's still a fun comp and it's great for world PvP. Players inevitably focus on your priest first, which is fine because when your priest dies you get 10 seconds of free, uninterruptable healing and then soul stone res. If you macro accept resurrect with a hotkey to round-robin cast soul stone on your priest you can generally reapply soul stone before it dies again and spirit has no cooldown so you get another 10 seconds of free healing every time. Just don't apply all of your soul stones at once, because they'll all be consumed when you accept the first resurrection.

I always have a felhunter out when I'm PvPing. 30% Reduced damage from all sources plus 60 resist to all magic schools makes the warlocks super tanky and you can round-robin consume magic/dispel to completely negate AoE fear -- so you can pick orc instead of undead for the superior racial.

[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)

[Apatheist]

The main point of 5 shaman is that you actually need 5x shaman to make this work properly.

I disagree. A tank focuses most of the outgoing damage in PvE onto a single target so you'd spend more time DPSing and less time healing.

I also don't see a lot of difference between 4 or 5 DPS in PvP. 4*LB/CL will kill pretty much anything. Having a druid or even speccing one of your shamans resto and spamming chain heal would be more useful IMO. Adding a priest to the group would make enhance sort of viable since you could dispel slows and your shamans could frost shock to peel for the priest.