Paralysis by analysis (TBC decisions)

[nodoze]

I personally don't like TBC for many reasons (it is the start of WoW not being an MMO for one thing). However I might give it a go with 5-man.

If you go PSSSS don't you miss a lot of utility? No priest buff, mage water, portals, summons. (Plus I hate playing shamans

Wouldn't PWWWPr be top dungeon clears with felguard/seed spam/priest buffs?

Summons, since no more world buffs, I could probably do without, but no portals/water in team would be rough.

I have a horde WMMMPr and ally WLMMPr so I guess I would be pretty flexible with char boots. There should be no difference between horde and ally anymore, so I am thinking ally for the aesthetics (horde models/skins are terrible compared to ally and human spirit regen/rep gains.

I tried many teams in TBC including Pa3LPr as well as Pa4S and 5S and though I like like all 3 I found Pa4S the best overall balance for farming for me. 5S could be faster but often when farming I am semi-distracted and just find snap-agro taunt and Paladin mitigation & aggro-management nice to make things more forgivable. While Warlock pets can be nice in some scenarios Shaman have 2 Elementals to help in hard situations. Pa3LPr is fun but I just found everyone being able to DPS and everyone also able to Heal and the ability to have pets when I really wanted them to be better overall...

After I take Pa3LPr from current cap to new cap I will likely then level 5S and use the Warlocks to summon around give health stones. Having the Mage on the 6th accounts lets me portal the whole party at once even without a mage in the 5man group in addition to making it easy to pass out food/water/etc.

Note that when running Shaman you don't necessarily need to miss out on long lasting buffs depending on what else you have in your stable... For example, with a Mage on the 6th account, in addition to party-wide portals/water/food, I can give everyone in the party long lasting Mage buffs and the Priest can give long lasting Priest buffs on all but one Shaman as well. I guess having a priest on my 6th/mage account would allow me to also buff that last Shaman but likely I won't bother for that.

Edit: I haven't looked at TBC Talents for quite some time but likely for most of my Shaman I would do something like Unknown's above build or a standard 41/0/20 build. I like to take Healing Focus on all of my Shaman so that if things get chaotic/dicey I can switch to Concentration Aura on my Paladin and anyone/everyone can pump out healing with no push-back. I also like to initially make one Shaman at least 41 in Resto for Earth Shield until everything is on full farm and really easy from a survivability standpoint and then switch all to focus on DPS.