With only a week's worth of stories and no hard data, I wanted to ask whether other people's opinions. From the little research I've been able to do, I've seen support that a Holy Paladin, a Holy/Discipline Priest and a non-Restoration Shaman core is the winning hand right now in the 5v5 bracket.

With this combination, your enemy will have a near impossible time of taking out your healing capacity with crowd control. With two possible sources of healing, focus-fire on any one healer isn't likely to go as fast as it needs to be an effective tactic. You have two sources of both offensive and defensive dispels. Finally, you have the Shaman's Heroism/Bloodlust which increases melee, ranged and casting speed by 30%.

The nature of the DPS varies. Clan Hex has fielded DPS in the form of a Warlock and an Ice Mage and had an Elo rating somewhere north of 1900. Other teams field dps involving Warriors and Rogues due to their healing debuffs and the greater advantage they can take from the aforementioned Heroism/Bloodlust.

World of Ming and the experience of the people who have posted there provide the support for this idea. As his site is currently down, I'll have to to provide links later.

So my question is, do you have any Arena experience to support or contradict this assertion? Have any of you seen any very successful teams (Elo > 1900) without this class compositions?

I think the consensus is to only post one thread at a time?

There are teams being successful with druids abusing the fact that cyclone is undispellable and if cyclone is cycled through several people the immunity timer never pops (that and it's virtually impossible to train on a druid in bear form).

But yes by and large arena is being dominated by either that group or priest/pal, shaman, and 3 dps. The problem right now is elemental shaman are putting out an excessive amount of burst damage. You can see more burst out of a shaman than out of a mage, which is a huge problem. Ideally what would happen with that group is the shaman would be providing some burst, but inferior to a primary dps class, and they'd be trying to win by outlasting you in a mana war, and dropping CC's on your healers like fear, HoJ and earthshock to strategically kill someone.

Realistically the way it's playing out is the war gets on someone, windfury procs, he drops an MS, calls for the assist, the shaman and other dps class (typically mage) timer, and the person gets gibbed.

I'm expecting Bloodlust/Heroism to be nerfed for Arena purposes. It's ridiculously powerful. My team (2x War, Shaman, Holydin, and either Ret or Holy Paladin in the last spot) went into the arena with minimal practice and no time playing together before that day and won most of our games due to the sheer output of Heroism stacked on top of Windfury and Light's Grace.

The tri-healer team, as Ming calls it, is somewhat difficult to burst, but it's doable. The trouble comes when it is down to a 3v3 from the initial burst, and one team's healers are all dead while the other team still has a healer left from having an extra safeguard. That's primarily why teams often run with 3 classes capable of healing (though not necessarily all specced pure healing).

Elemental shamans are amazing, and honestly there is no comparison with how well their spec/gear synergizes with both healing and damage (nature's swiftness + deep elemental). A holy paladin is in almost all cases superior to a resto shaman, unfortunately. I'm still skeptical about the value of a holy/disc priest in the arena due to their susceptibility of getting insta'ed. Blessed resilience is nice, but the 60% proc chance can hurt if the crits all land at once and it doesn't proc.

I've closed the other thread for you.

I'm really not in love with the non-resto shaman in a 5v5, I'm heavy enhancement at the moment and I just don't think that I'd be able to pull my weight in a 5v5 and at present elemental shaman do not have the staying power in a prolonged match.

I'd love to be proved wrong, but I'd take a rogue/warrior/mage over a non-resto shaman at the moment.

Well enhancement have other problems, but I'm not really seeing the weakness of 40/0/21. Yeah, you'll have mana problems in a minutes-long stalemate, but with lust and the burst you'd design that team around, that type of match isn't likely to transpire.

What is the burst capability of an elemental shaman based on specially that puts them over mages? LB, Chain Lightning + Shock?

Obviously Bloodlust is clutch, but that is spec independant.

I have an enhancement shaman, and I'd love to see their desirability / viability in PvP increased. However, I really do think elemental shamans just do it better. Even in a long match where they do run into mana problems, they can just spam rank 1 earth shock on the opposing team, and at the beginning of the match where burst is king, they far outshine enhancement/resto.

For that reason I think it is true what some have observed: take out the shaman first. Letting them live means any healer of yours that uses a casting timer will be interrupted every other heal, your team will be purged and you're just giving them the match. Here again is where elemental shamans have an advantage, since they are at range and can more easily avoid certain damage types (earthbind/frostshock kite some classes), as opposed to an enhancement shaman who must get into melee to deal damage.

The combination of NS and elemental mastery, with a lightning overload proc possibility. Also since you're running a priest the shaman can also be catching PI. Even at level 60 deep elemental shaman were bursting something on the order of 5000 dmg in a sub 2 second window without the benefit of LO or NS.

Honestly, the best teams we've seen have almost exclusively run:

Warrior
Rogue
Shaman (Resto)
Druid (Feral)
Paladin (Some form of Holy/Prot)

Enhancement shaman will never be viable in a competitive PvP setting because they are too easy to train on. The low mitigation caused by not wearing a shield combined with the lack of avoidance of a rogue or hunter, and the inability to mitigate damage through magical means like mana shield or soul link, and the lack of any true defense mechanism, eg. frost nova, blink, vanish, even death coil means they simply take too much damage too fast.

Priests are super important because of Dispel Magic. The ability to dispel offensively and defensively is huge in the arena, because there's just so much you want to remove. Paladins are the most durable healers, and the tools of Blessing of Protection and Blessing of Freedom eclipse anything else other healing classes offer buff-wise - in fact, those two spells are two of the key reasons Dispel Magic is so important.

Shaman are weird. The have purge, but no dispel for their own team. They have totems, which aren't dispellable, and they have better DPS potential than the other healers. They don't offer anything as powerful as BoP or BoF - Bloodlust is great, but doesn't stay on long against savvy dispellers, and isn't useful if your team is CC'd - which you can't stop. I think priest/paladin is the best healing combination by a wide margin.

This might seem like a better variant on the tri-healer team. In this case druid cyclones and removes an opposition to turn it into a 5v4. I'm still not convinced though that the resto shaman is a good choice since all the healing in this party has a casting timer.

defensive dispell isn't that important anymore really. Warlocks top stuff off with UA, so you'd better not dispell it, shadow priests now spam so many buffs you'd be too busy dispelling. I cleansed far more often at level 60 PVP.

I don't disagree, and that to me seems like the major flaw of shamans, lack of survivablity, not lack of CC or anti-CC.

In practice though, what then is difference between an MS warrior and an Enhancement shaman for ease of training? Plate without a shield isn't that much more mitigation than mail. Other than intimidating shout, what prevents warriors from getting trained down just as fast?

Fear, seduce and sheep come to mind as being the most important reasons to have defensive dispelling.

Hitpoints as well, and the fact that assist training a warrior that is getting spamhealed is by far the fastest way to lose, as he'll spam HS MS WW to no end.

true, but with PVP trinkets and whatnot it's still not as important as it used to be

Really? Because I tend to think that Dispel Poison and Dispel Disease fit that description.

They have 5 health, you don't need to dispel them, just hit them once.

I'd love to see priests get an instant cast disease debuff so that dispel disease is actually worth ANYTHING in PvP. Or give us the ability to dispel poisons like paladins can. -.- But I digress.

I find it odd that no one has mentioned how mages/warlocks seem to be sidelined by physical DDs in arenas. Can a team composed of 2-3 healers and magic DDs fare well against an onslaught of physical damage?

Shamans also have, potentially, the best spell cast prevention spell. Earth Shock is ranged, has a short cooldown (5s with Reverberation talent) when compared to Counterspell, Silence, and Spell Lock, and has a 20 yard range. Rogues may be able to stop more consecutive spell casts, but Shamans have the benefit of doing this from range and adding damage on top of that (whereas a Rogue using Kick wastes potential damage from the Energy spent). The only thing a Shaman forfeits when interrupting a spell is global cooldown. If mana is a factor, rank 1 ES can be used as well.

Edit- But I'm also very interested in hearing how Elemental Shaman are faring in both raid and PvP settings. I'm going to be rolling one soon and it's been about two years since I played a Shaman (I was 23 Elem, 7 Enh, 21 Resto) and I'll most definitely be using an Elemental / Restoration build, but I'm unsure which tree I want to focus primarily on.

Dispel Poison and Dispel Disease don't remove Entrapment, Polymorph, or Freezing Trap.

And I'm quite aware that totems are easily killable once you target them - the issue is spending the time to target them and the attack timer to kill them. In the arena, time is your most valuable resource. If I spend my time hitting totems, I'm not hitting my opponents. I have a /tar (list of totems) /petattack macro that i mash against teams with totems, because I can't afford to spend time killing them myself.

As for the other post saying defensive dispels are less important because of UA and shadow priest debuffs - Shadow Priests and UA warlocks are two of the most outright vulnerable classes in 5v5. I have yet to see an effective team that uses either. Competant assist trains almost immediately hit warlocks, and if they're not soul link, they pretty much just die.

Enhancement shaman have huge burst potential. Two hard hittting one handers can wreak havoc on a caster. To start off with a stormsrike - you will hit with the stormstrike, two white damage hits, and most of the time four windfury hits, followed by an earth shock. Although the high end on a two handed weapon will be more damaging, the extra weapon to windfury makes a huge difference.

On a 3 v 3 team or a 5 v 5 team with proper support, they can be more effective than an elemental shaman. All mana can be used towards purging constantly, and when oom the ability to heavily burst doesn't lessen. Also the elemental shaman is too easily removed by effective counters- the vast majority of their damage is nature based. One counter spell is an 8 second silence that includes heals - making the shaman effectively useless.

There are some slight mitigations, such as grounding totem and earth shock, but the class does suffer from survivability. Tremor totem works, but not well, and the shaman trinket only removes stuns and immobilizes - not fear or sheep. For an enhancement shaman the big problem is closing the gap - there is no charge, there is no stun to stop them. Using frost shock limits your counter abilities with earth shock, and using earthbind makes you much more vulnerable to fear. In 2 v 2 ranged damage will typically tear apart an enhancement shaman before they are a huge threat.