All stealth vs All casters vs Balanced Group

[Apatheist]

The DPS increase from shamans is a lot more than from paladins. You really can't beat windfury totem in a PvE cleave party.

I just like paladins better for world PvP. Freedom is amazing. Even with 5 boxes, trying to fight a single half decent mage is a nightmare unless you're willing to spend 6g+ preemptively using 5 FAP's every fight.

I've been playing my warlocks a lot more lately. Mages are strong but I just prefer the warlocks for end game dungeons and general world PvP. There's something so satisfying about stacking 8+ DoT's on a player and watching them melt.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Not a lot of unique input over the above. My WWWWS team stopped at 57 and I switched to MMMMP. I will say that the first ~20 levels were a LOT faster with the warriors but after that the mages being able to just AoE stomp everything made them far and away the easiest team to level. The mages are now 56 and starting to slow down a little as things are hitting harder. I notice as an Arcane/Fire setup, the longer the fight lasts the more likely you are to die, whereas the warriors never slow down until the shaman runs out of mana. They are also much more susceptible to cleave death and getting double-crit by bosses. (Yes, even moreso than DPS warriors.) I may fiddle with specs when they hit 60 but for now they are pretty straightforward. I'm by no means the most efficient player at it, but it's looking really good for just general farming. I'm not flush with loot but I got mounts at 42 on the first group and 40 on the mages, and if I need to go farm money or cloth, they are super easy.

As a comparative anecdote, my warriors had a lot of trouble with Uldaman on the four golems in the pedestal room due to the fire AoE, and a lot of trouble handling the adds on Archaedas. Things got a bit better with some strategy changes but the warriors require(d) a lot of micromanagement with positioning and saving rage at times. The mages were stupid easy by comparison. The golems were just a long single-target fight. Archaedas was single-target spam (he has a lot of health but hits soft and slow) until the adds and they just died in a couple of Arcane Explosions. This has generally been my experience with everything so far up to the Shade of Eranikus in ST, which I tried last night and died with him at about 25%.

My hunters are level 22 but they have real issues with deadzone, especially in boss fights where adds happen. The really bad part of that is that the healer usually gets aggro when that happens and things go to hell fast after that. They are superior for straight-up single-target DPS fights or where keeping aggro on the pets is easy, and for just general run-around sparse-spawn farming.

It'll be interesting to see how the mages do at 60 but based on other folks and my past experience, I don't anticipate anything being too terribly hard to farm once I get some gear. My instance level cap will be a bit lower perhaps just due to them being generally squishy but it'll be fun to see how far I can get with them.

[nodoze]

Not a lot of unique input over the above. My WWWWS team stopped at 57 and I switched to MMMMP. ... The mages are now 56 and starting to slow down a little as things are hitting harder. ... It'll be interesting to see how the mages do at 60 but based on other folks and my past experience, I don't anticipate anything being too terribly hard to farm once I get some gear. My instance level cap will be a bit lower perhaps just due to them being generally squishy but it'll be fun to see how far I can get with them.

It sounds like you will have the best of both worlds and have both MMMMP and WMMMP options.

Interested in your thoughts if you try both groups. I know some folk like Soc on the ISBoxer discord has both and both configs have high DPS & crowd control but adding the tank makes things more relaxed with tank and spank and high DPS...

[Ughmahedhurtz]

It sounds like you will have the best of both worlds and have both MMMMP and WMMMP options.

Interested in your thoughts if you try both groups. I know some folk like Soc on the ISBoxer discord has both and both configs have high DPS & crowd control but adding the tank makes things more relaxed with tank and spank and high DPS...

Having the tank does help with some things, though the level of micromanagement needed when e.g. the fight requires a lot of movement increases dramatically the more roles you have in the group. It's one of the reasons that hunters do so well in many areas (automatic, revivable pocket-tanks).

[Carca]

I have both of the teams you are asking about in Classic. I started with Warlock + 4 mages which was great to level. I used them for a while to farm BRD but after dying a lot in phase 2 PvP I decided to try a 5 x NE rogue team. This was a great decision and wish I had done it as my first team. Leveling was so much fun and I got to 60 a month from when i started. Then i went crazy with world PvP including sneaking around Ogrimmar killing horde.

I got a lot of my pre-raid BiS from stealth running Mauradon and have lately been doing lots of BRD stealth runs (Angerforge and Coffer runs) I've killed angerforge 70 times so far and got 3 HoJ. I've also been raiding with my master rogue so he is very well geared now which helps.

Now i'm starting to get interested in my mages a bit as well as i'm liking the idea of farming trash in ZG. I only wish could target blizzard and flamestrike on all of them at once rather than being restricted to FN CoC and AE.