• Playered

Well regardless of the spec they bring;
30% increased casting/attack speed for 40sec (any boss where DPS is an issue +) per boss.
80Str~ + Windfury (or 80agil~) or 30-35 MP5~ + 100~ damage/healing (generally)

Ontop of that;
Enhancement (solid single target DPS); 10% AP (aka Battleshout v2) for physical.
Elemental (again solid single target DPS); 3%(4% Alliance) Hit & Crit for casters.
Resto (amazing raid healing); a free mana potion to his group /5min.

I mean its not that the other classes are bad, but Blizz have made shamans provide awsome group benefits that are really hard to pass up.

4 rogues or 3 rogues 1 Enh shaman?
4 mages or 3 mages 1 Ele shaman?
Healing wise... well the general shaman boni' ontop of the awsome healing, its a choice of great healer, or great healer with some pretty strong group buffs, not a hard choice.


You'ld be mad to turn down bringing any of them to raiding, especially MH/BT for various reasons (token slots for Enh/Ele, any healer spots for Resto), its essentially a +1 Tier of gear for their group which helps alot on learning and performing content your not completly geared for.


We've been unlucky and never really had the option to field many good (or many at all) shamans, we've struggled getting more than 1 per raid.
DPS-wise, we've generally had above average melee DPS, casters... generally ok, and healers again, on Alliance its hard to find many good Resto shamans for us (Horde simply have a years more experience) and we've been lucky on having mostly pretty good healers in general.

You can get by in most content without them, but given the choice to bring in 4 shamans instead of 1-2? would do it in a heartbeat for anything except overfarmed content.

 

Zifna

Or pretty strong class buffs, like the Paladin? Or a combat rez, like a druid? ^_^ Not to denigrate what Shamans bring to the table in any way, and we certainly do bring multiple Restos to raid most of the time, but aside from the poor Priest, who brings only himself or herself after you've got one in raid, I'd say that there are other things non-Shaman healers bring that make them equally attractive choices. Having, say, 3 Resto Druids in raid, +2 Ferals, as we did for a while, added a ton of forgiveness into Vashj and Kael that I don't think can be ignored. And on the nights we can only bring two Paladins, the general level of frustration people have about needing to forego one of their top three buffs is palpable (though I suppose we could leave them out of the stacking equation, since if we end up with 4 Paladins in raid for most things we will want to replace one if the option becomes available).



As far as the "added value + personal dps" equation, I certainly see your point, especially with regards to Enhancement Shaman, but I don't know that I agree with regards to Elemental Shaman.

Certainly Elemental Shaman are hurt by the lack of upgrades in T5 instances, and from my perusal it seems that dps does begin increasing again as people make progress through BT/Hyjal... but I'm not sure that, given a chance to do it all over again, that I'd do it all the same and keep an Ele Shaman in the guild (i.e. that I would spec the way I have). I've seen several meters where Enhancement Shaman make the top 5, but few where Elemental do (aside from stuff where numbers are skewed, like Supremus). Not only that, Enhancement provides significantly more group benefit than Elemental does.

 

Vohbo

But only to a melee group. Taking two enhancement shamans is pretty much a waste, while taking an elemental as fourth or fifth isn't. I like both specs, and I have always seen the elemental do really good damage.

While it is true that other healers provide good buffs (blessings/innervate+combat rez), you can keep adding shaman healers and their abilities are always useful. A fourth paladin is pretty much pointless. All the druid abilities are pretty much meaningless on stuff you can farm well. They are useful, sure, but they rarely make the difference between winning and losing, especially combat rezzes 3 4 and 5. This is not the case with shamans. You bring more shamans and things will just die faster, no conditions on it, no questions asked.

 

◊ Praetorian

Tell that to Blood Legion. There are certainly merits to having an enhancement shaman for your MT group.

 

Nuveena

I would like to add a word in favour of protection paladins. We have one and 3 ferals, but would probably have prefered to have 2+2. With the current favour for zerg-style encounters (Morogrim, Solarian, 4/5th of Hyjal, BT trash..) we have come to depend heavily, too heavily probably, on our protection paladin. Nothing quite beats them for AoE threat building. Having a protection paladin also makes it easier to build those minimal healer groups, when you don't feel forced to bring 3 holy paladins for every raid.

 

Vohbo

Advantages sure but small ones compared to those provided by the resto shaman you bring anyway. But this is more a question of how your raid setup has "grown" than about which is absolutely ideal. If you traditionally have two enhancement shamans in raid then you can easily justify their spot by the extra threat production. If you traditionally bring 3 resto shamans you can justify their spot by the utility and healing potential they bring.

Either way, if you underestimate the enormous potential shamans bring to your raid you will only make it harder on yourself.

 

• constantius

There's also a school of thought that sticking an enh shaman in a hunter group together with your feral druid can provide some reasonable performance upgrades. I haven't done enough theorycrafting to decide if it's more than sticking him in the tank group for WF, but when your hunters are consistently pushing your rogues, they deserve just as much love.

As a gauge, our hunters are pushing 1000-1500 dps atm [depends on fight] (Kael down; starting on T6 content this weekend) while our rogues are doing 1050-1400 dps [again, depends on fight and buffs].

Obviously the first enh shaman goes to the melee. You'd be stupid to not do it that way. But if you have two ... and you typically run with 3 hunters ... a group of:

- enh shaman
- BM hunter x2
- survival hunter
- feral druid

is actually pretty kickass. All of the pets and the druid get the benefit of SoE and UR (which I believe *does* work for them?); the hunters and the druid get the benefit of GoA; the hunters get Mana Spring, which, while kinda weak, does help ... and the entire group can get a heroism. Hunters with heroism is fun -- we typically give two heroisms in the first phase of Solarian - one to our hunters, one to our rogues. They've earned that right through consistent dps output.

But ... as Gurg mentioned ... giving an enh shaman to the tank group means all your tanks have SoE and WF ... which in the long run probably pushes their actual "dps" closer to 500 ... which pushes their TPS up above 900. Which increases the entire raid-wide dps by some quantifiable margin.

Maybe play it by ear. Any fight your dps are riding the threat line, tanks get the shaman. Any other fight, the hunters do.

 

• Shabadu

A resto shaman can do all of this nearly as well since they get improved water totems and can easily also spec improved GoA. You must be thinking of Mana Spring, since only resto shamans get Mana Tide.

 

Sedation

Current progresion is 3/5 MH, 2/9 BT


The raid set up we usually use in BT/MH:

1 ferla druid
3-4 warrior (1-2 prot, 1-2 fury)
2 rogues
1-3 priests ( 1-2 holy, 1-2 shadow)
4-5 shammys( 3 resto, 1 ele, 1 enh)
3 pallys
3-4 mages (1-2 arcane, 2 fire)
1 balance druid
3-4 warlocks (Aflic)
2-3 hunters (BM)

For Naj we usualy bring an extra resto shammy due to the heavier healing.

And we usualyl bring a little more melee to Hyjal then normal due to the silences and mana burns form Kaz and Azgalor.

For our melee dps grp we usually run:
-Fury War
-Rogue
-Feral Druid
-BM Hunter
-Enh Shammy

 

Buiden

You're better off making your 2 groups:

Hunter x3
feral druid
fury warrior

fury warrior
enh shammy
3 rogues

Reason being feral druid gets no benefit out of windfury, neither does the hunter, kind of a waste. Hunters get more use out of 5% crit on than the other classes as well IMO.

 

• Latito

That is one lucky rogue... does there happen to be an Arms warrior and Survival hunter somewhere else in the raid? :P

(But yea, you are better off using the groups suggested above me)

 

• constantius

I'm not sure why you'd throw the fury warrior into the hunter group, unless it's for a lack of a better spot. And on that note ... isn't that an awfully melee heavy raid? I think if we had every single melee dps in the guild online and in the raid, it'd just barely have more than you've mentioned there.

 

Buiden

Battleshout on pets and the feral druid. If those hunters are beast specced that is also 9% damage to the warrior, he'll do as well on dps as the warrior in the shaman's group with that setup. We generally have that setup except a rogue (4 total) instead of 3rd hunter in that group. I don't think that is very typical of most guilds though, so yeah you might see it as strange

 

Illundai

We run 1 Enhance, 1-2 Ferals, 2-4 rogues, 1-2 dps warriors as well.

 

Sebudai

Filthy hunters have no place in the brave and noble melee group. Put that trash in group 4, where it belongs.

 

Dawme

Well, my opinion is that the word "vastly" is a bit too much, or is used too much. Yes, some (let's say up to 5) fights in the game are really easier ou harder with some specific lineups but for the majority of raid bosses in BC, it's just wrong. Off course, things will be a bit easier or harder but don't tell me everything behaves like gurtogg with 6 healers vs gurtogg with 9.

It's definitely not my opinion. I did kael'thas (and vashj) with very different composition (healer stacked, melee stacked, ae stacked...) and I didn't really feel it was SO easier with one versus others. Maybe it's just different for everyone, I don't know, but for example, many people claim that kael favors dps stacked raid and that you can bring 6 healers to make it easier. Well, we did kael once with 6 healers, it was one of our hardest kills to achieve (and it was a long long time after our first kill).

Gurtogg is obviously one of the fights which favors the most raid stacking, with Archimonde. Now, do you really think there are many fights like gurtogg where adding 2 healers (or rogues, or mages, or whatever) dramatically changes the way it feels ? I don't think so.

Off course. I'm not against raid stacking, we do it sometimes, my point was more to say that in most cases, raid stacking is comfort and guilds should not avoid fight X or Y just because they heard it's way easier with 8 healers and they have only 7. For 90% of raid bosses, the "easier" does not mean "insanely hard" without this 8th healer. Then again, you have some fights like archimonde, gurtogg, shahraz where it does effectively mean that. But they are the exceptions, not the rule.

I'm just a bit tired to hear some stupid statements like "omg we need to completely change our guild roster between tier 5 and tier 6". That's just wrong. Maybe you'll need to recruit a healer if you did run tier 5 instances with 6, that's all.

 

Whiteknight

For reference, we were taking 6 healers to most stuff in T5. Before we made our first serious push into BT/Hyjal, we recruited up and keyed so that we could bring 9 healers to fights if we needed to (based primarly on feedback from other guilds in this thread).
I definitely don't regret taking the time do do that.

And yes 6->9 healers marks a fairly significant shift in the raid roster.

Yes, we don't put 9 in on every fight, but we do have them available when needed, and the difference is noticable enough that I wouldn't really want to do it otherwise.

 

Dawme

Well that's nice for you if you can find 3 good healers so easily, but that's still "comfort" in my book. I don't want to brag or something (excuse me if it feels like that, english isn't my native language) but what I just want to say to guilds beginning or near T6 is : if you can get 8-9 _good_ healers, then good for you, it will ease a bit some fights but if you can't, then just try the fights and play good, it will also work. We did not recruit anybody between t5 and t6, mostly because we didn't care so much about lineups, so we did full bt + hyjal with mostly 7 healers and 1 shaman only, and we killed archi + illidan in the top 20 euro or something. Off course, some fights were harder (gurtogg with 7 healers / 2 sp and archimonde with 1 shaman / no fear ward were not pretty) but we're very far from, say, 4 horsemen without 8 warriors or sapphiron with less than 6 priests.

 

◊ Quigon

You just stated yourself Dawme that group composition changed the difficulty of a fight for you - and well in tune as it sounds with the word "vastly". I said clearly matching the strategy - I didn't say less healers for Kael, or more. From what I understand EJ ran 6 healers until BT/Hyjal, and then did indeed have to change their raid roster for T5/T6 (getting 3-4 more healers). I suppose this could be wrong, but you do need more healers generally for BT/Hyjal.

We probably change 30% of our raid between Akama and Bloodboil - not because we have to, but because I value my time.

 

Whiteknight

@Dawme
I didn't mean to imply you were wrong or anything. Obviously the fights are possible - your guild is part of the proof of that. And nobody should let a non-ideal group stop them from trying the fights.

Simply we found it easier to recruit a little before pushing BT/Hyjal - due to the possibility of making some fights easier, and anticipation of attrition with keying blocking recruitment.

And yeah finding 3 good healers is certainly no easy task we were somewhat lucky and we really looked pretty hard to find them. If it were up to me I'd have recruited one more even - another shaman seeing as we're typically low on those.
Our raid group isn't ideal either.

As an anecdotal story, our first archimonde kill we took 4 shamans. Our second kill we only had 2. The difference was very noticable - and measurable too - we did almost 15% less dps over the entire fight just because people were feared longer and had to be more careful of the doomfires.
Yes people played their top game, and we got the kill - but it was very definitely harder.

The same seems true of many fights; healers for gurtogg, brez/soulstone and physical dps for teron, aoe (tanking and dps) for hyjal trash, etc. The ability to switch to an ideal (or closer to ideal) group on the fly will definitely speed your progress.


I guess my point really was; yes it's doable with less, but if you have the opportunity to recruit up a little, it really does help a lot.

 

◊ Praetorian

Basically for most t5 content we ran with a roster of ~8 healers and fielded six for most raids. 4-5 of those 8 were 100% attendance, and the others were more like 60-70% so we were fine for all the t5 content. But when we hit Gurtogg, Archimonde, and Shahraz, we really really wanted to be able to field 8 (or even more) and that meant having the stars align in terms of attendance. We skipped Gurtogg for a couple of weeks after killing him because I thought first Hyjal and then RoS learning would be a better use of our raid time than trying Gurtogg with 6 healers. We invited 2 shamans and a druid with very high activity, and now we have ~12 active healers and the flexibility we need. We run with 7 healers as a default t6 composition, 9 for Gurtogg, Archimonde, and Council, and 10 for Shahraz. Usually 8 for Illidan.

 

Kargoroth

Since it seems that many fights in t6 (and some in t5) content require raidstacking, most of the time healers, i do wonder whether it is really is necessity or merely perfectionism to really bench people instead of making hybrids switch gear an role for one fight or so? Perhaps this is the reason Blizzard made some fights quasirequire much more healing than the usual setup? Another way to make hybrids viable?

We do change groups during a raid, because we can i suppose, but when we were learning Karatress and were short on healers we just made the enhancement shaman put on his healing skirt and spam chainheals and it worked well enough.

We are working on Kael at the moment so obviously i have no idea how it would fare on those stacking encounters in BT, but when i read 10 healers on Mother Sharazz and 9 on Guttorg, could those not just be done with the "standard" raids when the hybrids just heal? Or maybe some of them? Yes you'd lose some efficiency but how much is the efficiency loss of having many geared attuned people on the bench? Correct me if i'm wrong but if you just need more raw hps power on some fights, these things a x-specced hybrid can do just as well if he's got the gear?

 

• Playered

Gurtogg should be ok... depending on the class/spec, we have a feral druid healing on him each week, granted its only on bloodboils.

 

Sebudai

We have one or more of our feral druids respec to restoration for a few encounters pretty much every week. Archimonde, Mother Shahraz, maybe a couple of other fights depending on attendance that week. It's pretty easy to gear the hybrids up with situational healing gear these days.

 

Whiteknight

It's entirely possible that this is what bliz had in mind. However - as long as pure specs are significantly better than hybrids in an offspec role, it'll be optimal to simply swap in more pure classes or respec hybrids so that they aren't 'off'spec. As Sebudai said, respecs are pretty common. All of our hybrids have really good offspec gear and are totally willing to respec. Sometimes just for a fight or two.