[Shaman] Resto vs. Elemental
 

I'm currently on a 5v5 team with a warrior, rogue, resto druid, holy paladin, and myself (resto shaman). We're a fairly fresh team, predominantly PvE spec'ed (aside from the warrior, who is a PvP-only alt). The druid and warrior have a pretty good PvP kit going, but the rest of us are fairly new to arenas and are in full/near-full Kara gear (RP server, so low progression) with a few battleground pieces. We've been moderately successful so far at outlasting the 3-/4-DPS teams' initial bursts, but we've occasionally had trouble pulling down their healer(s), especially when they're able to down our rogue early. In light of this, the team has suggested that I consider switching to elemental (would be for PvP only, my guild is like most and needs as many solid healers as it can get).

Would this switch make sense for us? I've been weighing the pros and cons, but I'd love some opinions.

Pros:
* Increased DPS/burst damage, adds ranged DPS to the team
* Pew-pew is fun! (and provides grinding gear)

Cons:
* Reduced healing ability (would lose about 800 +heal, plus the tasty buffs at the bottom of the resto tree)
* Reduced survivability (no more Nature's Grace/Earth Shield) while still being the most likely target focus-fired first (druid/rogue stealthed, paladin and warrior less "crunchy"). I would gain the 6s immunity to pushback after a crit and reduced chance of being crit, however.
* Loss of mana tide, although it rarely sticks around long enough to be useful
* Arena gear obtained isn't helpful in my PvE role (2 pieces of season 2 healing gear are (minor) upgrades to my PvE kit, 3 pieces of season 3 likely will be upgrades) and would require fresh grinding of battlegrounds for Veteran's gear.
* Respec fees

The amount of "work" required to obtain a solid kit is somewhat daunting (I switched before starting Kara, so it's mostly blues), but the dual role is also somewhat intriguing.

Any thoughts?

I think that if you have a rogue in primarily pve gear with a pve spec, you switching to elemental is not going to fix the problem of him dying quickly. If anything he will die even faster now because he will have less healing.

On the other hand, from a strategic standpoint, I like having an elemental shaman in an arena much more then a resto shaman for a couple of reasons:

- They should be targeting the main dps target making it easier for them to get purges off when necessary.
- They are often a team's first target to dps leaving your other teammates free to use their cooldowns and attack unobstructed for usually quite a while.
- If geared well elemental shamans can be tough to bring down as they have a good amount of armor with a shield on, talents to avoid interrupts, and can eat magic burst with totems.
- Their wf and bloodlust totems are still extremely powerful regardless of spec.
- With an elemental shaman on the team and 2 pure healers that gives you a 2.5 healer 2.5 dps alignment which is very sound. The shaman is able to support dps or healing, whichever is needed more at any critical moment. If your team loses 1 healer early the shaman can switch roles, extending the game and giving your team more chances to even the odds and eventually win games from behind.
- They have great burst damage when they want to use it if they use it properly along with very short cooldown cast interruption.

As far as re-gearing, if the other players on your team are interested in playing to be competitive they should be going after the veteran's gear as well. So, do battlegrounds together when you have free time instead of doing an extra daily or farming herbs and eventually you'll all be very well geared.

As far as in-game strategy goes since I see you mentioned a bit. When you face a 4-dps team, taking out a DPS, not their healer, needs to be your primary goal. The DPS you choose to take out should be commensurate with that classes ability to exploit your teams biggest weakness, I think. Your weakness here would likely be crowd control/snares on your rogue and/or warrior.

Stay resto IMO. When the rogue starts capping out on pvp gear he will be much harder to kill. Arguably harder to kill then your teams warrior. 3 healer 2physical dps teams are very powerful.

Just pick a cloth wearer on the other team ( priests are best usually ) and have assist the rogue/warrior with offensvie purges from the shaman. With blood lusted heals no one should be dieing.

Once you guys start getting geared out you will do much better.

I second Levidian's comment. With two mana-free sources of damage and three healers, you have the potential to outlast nearly every other team out there.

A friend of mine played on a tri-healer setup (Resto Druid, Holy Paladin, Holy Priest) and they played the mana war. Healing through unsynchronized damage is trivial and you have two sources of very heavy mana consumption: Wounding Poison and MS (both effectively reducing healing-to-mana efficiency by 50%). Utilizing that, a drinking rotation, and mana-free damage, they simply won games by draining their opponent mana pools.

If your Rogue is dying too early, particularly to ranged damage, teach him how to use obstacles to break LoS of ranged aggressors. Also, sychronizing a BoP and Cloak of Shadows on the Rogue makes him nigh-invulnerable and he can easily Vanish out to safety. Finally, a pure PvP spec will help increase survivability vastly (e.g. Prep'ed 2x Evasions vs. melee).

Edit- I didn't realize you had a Druid. Innervate and Poison Cleanse will nearly gaurantee you victory over the mana war (as long as you're mindful of LoSing Mana Burns) and the Druid can cheese the shit out of drink + Shadowmeld since he's NE.

Seriously, you should all walk in with 2 stacks of Star's Tears, each get behind a pillar, and mash drink at every opportunity. :)

Edit 2- If you need to drop a Mana Tide totem and you absolutely cannot drop it behind some LoS obstacle, drop the totem and stand on top of it. You'll be surprised at how long they last, especially if you're a huge Tauren.

Thanks for the replies! We actually had a second holy paladin come in to replace our druid, so while we lose a bit more CC, we gain more staying power. We did surprisingly well considering the 2nd paladin is undergeared and relatively new to PvP in general, so I have hope for the future (my sights are considerably lower than most of the posters here, however).

I've decided to stick with resto for now, especially since at least two season 3 items will be guaranteed upgrades to my PvE kit. In the meantime, I plan to stock up on as much honor as I can before the new season so that I can pick up most or all of the season 1 elemental gear. It'll be behind the curve gear-wise if we decide that's the best way for me to go, but at least I won't have "wasted" precious arena points on items if resto turns out to be a better fit after all.

If you're using that set up, you should really go elemental. 3 healer teams truly only work when you have two good dps classes -- rogues aren't a good arena dps class for the most part; they're more annoying than anything.

Another thing you might want to consider is staying Resto while using Elemental gear. Our Resto Shaman starts in Resto gear, pops trinkets and Earth Shields someone. He then switches to Elemental gear and mostly heals, but watches out for when he can help burst someone down with an NS Chain Lightning + Earth Shock.

It seems quite well suited to a team with two other healers to help you keep everyone up, while giving you some decent burst when it counts.

Taking down a 350+ resilience rogue is harder then a warrior.

I like rogue/warrior better then war/war in a 3 healer but whatever works.

A little off topic here -_- but I was wondering with the new changes in healing gear where healers get 1/3 of their healing in spell damage will it be viable for elemental shaman to just wear full +healing gear for the arena with maybe a spell damage trinket? With 2000ish healing (I would assume this wouldn't be a problem with season 3 gear) would give roughly 667 damage, that would probably be a little bit low but it would make them effective healers if both of the other healers are CC'd as well as moderate dps.

Or, be resto spec and have the same base spell damage plus the int to spelldamage conversion talent and 2.5 sec cast lightning bolts.

Deep resto will be able to put out some very respectable DPS come 2.3.

You can't really do a lot with resto spec regardless of spell damage. I guess with 2.5 sec lightning bolts that will help some, but really without the talents to support them, most offensive spells are junk. This applies to all the other healers as well.

Both resto shaman I have played with in 5s hate being resto, and seem to think they would be much better off as elemental. We've had decent success with the resto sha + pal + 3 DPS setup (21xx usually), but they generally complain that there is "too much to do." They need to be dropping totems, chain purging the kill target, earthshocking a healer/caster, and healing. And the problem with healing is that it isn't something you can just do "when you get around to it," whereas damage is a bit more flexible in that regard.

So from their perspective they could do everything as elemental they could do as resto in terms of support, with the ability to unload on someone when they get low rather than healing when needed.

This needs to be revisited in the context of 3v3. At lvl 80. Elemental has always had problems if focused, and has been somewhat squishy if locked out and dropped, but it seems as though blizz has tried to help with this. The snare added to earth bind, the 30% reduced damage taken while stunned, feared, charmed or something like that, and thunderstorm being usable when stunned. This combined with the fire nova totem stun and the change to elemental mastery all seem to be pointing towards a possible resurgence of elemental pvp. Are there any elementals out there. Which spec is really the best from a 3v3 perspective for the shaman. I guess lets even toss enhance into the discussion ... do They need to be considered when looking at 3v3. This all comes to mind due to the current state of things in arena. 2v2 is being phased out, which can be seen in the patch notes. With this change coming the new focus of arena will be 3v3 and or 5v5. That being said its important to revisit spec questions and what role fits best, or even which roles work for our new context. Also what comps do we see being viable for us in 3v3 as the various specs. Thanks in advanced.