The 5v5 team I am currently in also run a shaman(elemental)/paladin/priest/2xwarrior setup, and have found it to be very successful in the first week, getting 2k rating pretty easily, with us easing up for the last few days since the risk vs reward of going any higher with the disconnect bug was not considered worth it. We lost 4 games out of 60, 2 being to disconnects, 2 due to bad play by us to a similar setup but with a druid instead of a priest.

The windfury/heroism warrior train of death (espically with 2 gnomes who dont have to worry about the first frost nova or whatever they encounter) seems unstoppable in my eyes on any cloth/rogue/mail user, with tier 2 blacksmith hammers, mortal strikes and sunder armours being applied quickly even plate goes down extremely fast. The weak spot in the team is definately me (priest) and the shaman, and we do get focused on nearly every game but with decent cross heals/bops/bofs and stamina/resilience you can survive it while the warriors smash up the other sides healers.

Imo elemental shamans are amazing, and they certainy bring some really nice dps to the team, as well as the option of healing and offensive dispelling. The only really big decision is 2 paladins, or a priest/paladin and again imo the paladin/priest works better. I may be slightly biased since I am the priest :p but I totally agree with you need 2 offensive dispellers, since people have so many damn buffs! 1 person dispelling will likely not get that bop removed intime with the other 8-9 buffs hogging up the dispels. Purge and dispel though totally cripples priests and paladin buffs. Same if the shaman is being focused on, there is still a class who can offensive dispel and heal. I feel the priest is more of a hybrid than ever now, with dispel/heal(poms mostly to not get counterspelled)/shield and mana burn all being the bread and butter spells , while leaving the heavy duty healing to the paladin with his bubble + on demand crit heals. Fear ward is nice too

We also have a rogue in the roster, who will play some games this week-but decided against a warlock or mage due to their squishy nature, and getting little benefit from totems. An ice mage is certainly deadly, and can keep himself alive well however, so we might get 1 of those in at 1 time.

I think the biggest counter to this team is the druid cyclone, its really powerful. Chain sheeping the priest, while cycloning the paladin + focusing the assist train on the shaman is very hard to stop, and what we are currently working to figure out how to beat.

Warrior have more base hp than shaman, to start. Then realize when you train on a warrior not only is he going to toss a shield on, he's also going to go into def stance to further reduce damage and can then pop spell reflect. Combine this with spamming an AoE slow, and the ability to intervene to a far away target to remove himself from harm, and it's much more difficult to train down a warrior.

Enhancement shaman do not need a buff in pvp any more than fury or prot warriors need a pvp buff.

edit: On the topic of X vs priest. The biggest bonus of priest dispelling is it hits 2 debuffs. Which deals with the sheep + detect magic etc. Burning less globals becomes highly important and it's quite a pain to have to watch that paladin spam dispel 5 times just to remove the sheep.

Not to mention hitting a warrior gives him rage, which fuels all of his abilities. It's almost universally correct to NEVER hit a warrior with anything but snare/stun/CC effects simply because you don't want to boost his damage output - if I could toggle my multishots to miss warriors, I would do it. If you take too long to kill him, you just powered MS/WW/HS and then some on whoever he's attacking.

I'm not going to say this will make or break it between the two, but he has DEF stance/shield swap (shared)/intervene. Not to change the subject away from the comparison to the Shaman, but it is certainly a calculated risk that may be worth taking to take down the Warrior first.

A lot of teams will run the warrior as MA, simply due to their lack of CC (anything to do) and the nature of charge. Knocking out an MA can be huge in the middle of a fight, especially against a team that is not ready to lose the person calling targets (and has no backup).

It's really a testament to their healers and the warrior in question. Dump on him, and if his healers are fast enough, and he is quick enough, he may live and you will have wasted a lot of time. Personally, I would never risk it in a Hybrid (melee/caster) team. In a full caster team, I'd probaby be more confident to do it as a sort of trick play against a team I've been facing again and again.

Actually, bursting warriors is sometimes effective exactly because it's generally considered a bad idea. We've had a few losses to our warrior getting a massive burst early on, which was really hard to defend against due to neither him or us healers expecting it, and him being in the middle of the opposing team. It's generally more of a problem in Blade's Edge than in Nagrand, due to players spending more time and effort on positioning.

I'm also curious if people without two offensive dispellers are actually able to do significant offensive dispels, or if you're just theorycrafting. In 150 games, I've yet to find a challenging matchup where I could afford to spend global cooldowns on offensive dispels past the first few seconds.

We usually have our warrior pick the target as we run in and I do my best to get at least a few dispels on the target before damage starts flying around. From then the only dispelling I've done has been when they yell BoP or Freedom on vent and I take my chances at taking it off. There just isnt enough time to spend global cooldowns dispelling offensively without letting someone on your team die.

Of the three rogue trees, 2 are viable in PvE right now(Assassination and Combat), with an annoying requirement for heroics in the third. If all you do is raid and arenas, you can probably get away with Combat Fist/Sword or 41/20 Mutilate, but you're still going to be making several tough choices. A spec that's based around PvE vs. a spec based around PvP are going to choose radically different talents within those trees(and rogues have the most possible options within the trees), so whichever arena you pick you'll function at about 80% in the other one, and the difference between a PvE and PvP spec will be starkly evident on the DMs or when you kick a shaman and they nuke you for 2k with the frost shock because you didn't have improved kick.

I think he meant it doesn't matter when they cast UA, but yeah, any way you put it if the target has UA on it... don't dispell.

In 5v5s, there's not a lot of free time to go cleansing a billion DOTs anyway. If someone is completely disabled (Fear, Sheep, Seduce, Root on melee) and can't trinket or otherwise escape, I'll Cleanse, but otherwise it's more time efficient just to heal the damage.

I wonder when Warlocks will start hitting targets with Fear + UA and nothing else? That would be irritating. Guaranteed silence on Priests who dispel it and 50% on a Paladin.

So 2/3 are PvE viable. 3/3 are PvP viable. And an 80/20 balance for effectiveness for PvE and PvP seems like Rogue's could be considered as a ideal example of well designed trees. Obviously, you should have the ability to focus your tree on PvP/PvE to some extent.

In regards to the combat tree though, there seems to be enough filler in there to get to 41 that picking up the 'PvP' talents never seemed particularly determental to damage meters. I.e. Improved Kick and Improved Sprint. Something like http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=wZGcqbrVzx0hot

The shaman, as a hybrid, has a lot of problems. I was disappointed in the enhancement shaman as a whole when I played it. Part of this is by design, because DPS + ability to heal (means getting a quick assist train) + relative lack of defense (AKA escape options; mages are less squishy than shamans in this regard) makes for a very gimp character in PvP but relatively nice in PvE (see the current shadowpriest; who's playing one and NOT getting creamed in 5v5?).

There are a lot of very craptastic talent trees out there. I can look at my own class and find two 41 point talents that are absolute jokes (circle of healing and pain suppression), and the one 41 point talent that priests would use often (vampiric touch) is worthless in PvP as well. The 41 point talent in the shaman enhancement tree is awful, but at least you can skip it and pick up nature's swiftness for a tiny bit more survivability.

Having played a paladin as my first character, I can definitely see a ton of problems for hybrid "offensive" healers in PvP. We have some small bits of utility, but druids/paladins can already cover this area well. Among the only reasons to bring priests and shamans is offensive dispel, and even that is difficult to pull off. The problem here is the baseline class, which has virtually no survivability. For the priest, fear is it, and fear has been nerfed to hell and back due to warlocks. On top of not having snare protection/removal like druids and paladins, priests cannot even get out of slowing poisons, being the only healing class that cannot dispel poison. For the shaman, which has no true CC, it's even worse.

P.S. This is Blizzard telling you that unless you are a pure melee class (i.e. have a rage bar / energy bar), don't melee (note that druids got all three bars).