Spellshaper

With the rogue, if there's a healer he saps him, otherwise simply grabs a target and starts stunlocking it. If the sap runs out / gets trinketed, he uses blind.

I've had the most fun and success with a retribution paladin, BoF, BoP and SoJ help me to stay ahead of what I'm supposed to be kiting. Add a Cleanse when he can spare the GCD, and I can stay ahead of non-Sh-S rogues for a long time. Also, the blessing helps against heroism-stealing mages. Disc priests and other paladins were our strongest enemies.

With the soullink warlock, he DoTs them up, I shock something, and we run. He usually has to save the fear for himself. Against any double dps team this seemed quite viable, but add a healer and the fight will drag on, usually resulting in us going oom first.

My current warrior partner keeps pressuring the healer, or the clothier opponent against double dps. If there's a melee on me and I'm running low on health, I try to get close enough for my partner to intercept, then hamstring. I try to keep earthshock free for these moments if his former target is a caster.
Our biggest downside is our vulnerability to any kind of cc, we can't even reliably get to 1500 every week.
I've talked with him a bit, and he agrees that there isn't much synergy besides windfury, heroism and commanding shout.

I've recently obtained the engineering caster rocket boots and the nigh invulnerability belt, and so far it looks promising, even if I lose a bunch of stamina and resilience, simply because people just don't expect it. Too bad the belt backfires sometimes, but I pop it only when I'm about to die anyway.

And yes, being pushed into the role of the healer, I've tried using a macro to swap to my healing shield and mace. I don't have any points to spare on arena restoration equip yet.

/edit: I may also try to grab a moonkin for a few test matches. Double crit burst dps with cc and roots sounds like a good idea to me.
Another word on imp ghostwolf: It may increase your survivability against melees a bit, but I found I have to sacrifice too much (5% crit, 30m range on totems, pushback resists on healing spells) for it.

 

xarg

Using a rogue or a warlock is going to be your best bet. Other hybrids like moonkin can sometimes work too. Teaming with a healer will never work due to your reliance on mana, and the ability for someone to lock you down.

Throw in some burst dps with shocks and your NS EM CL to try take someone out.

Either way, an elemental shaman's worst bracket is 2v2.

 

Spellshaper

Thanks for the input.

I'll try some variations and post my results.

 

Praxagora

I'm thinking a BM hunter might be a good partner for a Shammy in 2v2. I'm gonna try it

 

Dawning

I've been watching some shaman 5v5 videos to figure out what seemed to work the best, and what was the difference between the elemental and resto playstyles.

I watched several resto shaman 5v5s, and it seems like they are mostly:
-dropping totems
-purging buffs
-interrupting focus targets with ES and well timed grounding totems

If they are not being crowd controlled, they are being focused, so they tend to spend a lot of time kiting and healing themselves.

Specifically, I watched some of Kollektiv's videos for Elemental pvp, and he spends most of his time:
-dropping totems
-purging buffs
-interrupting focus targets with ES and well timed grounding totems

Honestly, he tossed only the occasional lightning bolt or chain lightning. He cast half as many healing waves. Granted, the times he did choose to dps were critical moments (paladin's divine shield just ran out, for instance), but he provided little to no sustained dps. I understand that's often the way it is with casters getting focused in 5v5s, but it seems like the bulk of what a shaman brings to a 5v5 is shared between the resto and elemental specs: Totem buffs, kiting, and interrupts. Elemental shamans drop most of their healing effectiveness, but when lining the two up, it seems that all they get in return is the occasional burst damage potential (assuming they are completely free to cast).

 

Duncan

The same goes for all hybrid classes. Restokin for example plays most of the time like a full resto would. However, there is some burst potential and most than that damage that counts up over the whole match (DoTs and ocassional Wrath/Starfire casts) that can and will make a difference.

Sometimes you do only 5k damage and have both kills - not because you "stole the kill", but because your "DD(s)" got CC'ed when the target got low and wouldn't have been able to finish it. A full resto is still more gimped in those situations and hardly able to finish something when necessary.
What i'm trying to say is, it does matter in critical situations how you are specced. Even if you do 90% of the match the same things your CLASS can do best no matter how it's specced - well, leaving out melee specs for hybrids here, as they are gimped compared to the effectiveness of caster/healer specs, as of right now.

I would go double DD for 2vs2 as Elemental. Most likely along with a BM hunter for controllable and uninterrupted burst.

 

whave

Usually when I did 5v5 arena, I didn't even talent for faster LB/CL... used those talent points for survivability/reduced silence etc. And I was always surprised that bracket leaders DO have shorter CL/LB...

 

doogless

You don't think talenting for faster LB/CL had anything to do with WHY they were bracket leaders?

 

xarg

I can't imagine trying to provide burst at the right time without those talents. We were discussing crit vs haste earlier in the thread, to the point where haste would make 0.05 of a second's difference or so. And you'd be playing where every damage spell you cast takes an extra half a second? Cast two lightning bolts followed by a chain lightning and that's a massive 1.5 seconds later that your spells land. Plenty of time for a healer to get some big heals off.

To be honest, survivability in 5v5 really isn't that much of an issue as a shaman. When you play as a team and watch out for each other, it's hard for the opponents to take you down. This is much better to rely on than taking big tanking talents and gimping your damage output. You might take 5% less damage but if the opposing team is casting on you uninterrupted, you're still going to die anyway most likely. While shamans are easy to shut down by hopping on them, we're not particularly squishy.

You'll probably notice a lot of top level shamans throw in a bit of PvE gear to the mix, also. Not as much as some classes, but a good 2-3 pieces rarely goes astray. Rings are the number one contender here.

 

• Juice

You're the exception then. All the good elemental shaman in pvp have faster LB/CL casts.

 

ofancow

1 What do your keybindings look like? I am a heavy 10-key user

2 What's the best variant of 40/0/21 for 5v5? 33/28/0

3 How do you prefer to gem your gear? Pure +damage gems are nice. What enchants do you use? +damage. What trinkets? Depends on the group, but with a priest and warlock the shaman rarely gets targeted so often they can get away with not wearing PvP trinkets (and often can sheese in a lot of pve gear underneath their pvp main gear).

4 What spells do you downrank? FS and ES rank 1 mainly.

5 When is the best time to heal, and when is the best time to DPS at all costs? Depends entirely on group composition.

6 If focused, what do you do to continue being productive? Stay in LOS of 1 or more of my own healers, try to LOS their offensive caster (without breaking LOS of my own healer(s)), often will put some defensive totems down and use the duration to regen mana via Mana Shield.

7 What mods do you find helpful? I actually dislike mods, as bad players use them as a skill-crutch to win matches that they can't win via talent.

 

whave

Yes, I noticed they DO talent for fast LB/CL and I noticed they ARE bracket leaders.

BUT, all the videos I've been watching were about purging, totem deploying, focus interrupt, and kiting.

Just as Dawning wrote:

So I still don't get it.

 

doogless

Spending less time on each LB cast also allows you to do more of the other things.

 

Dawning

Haste rating also decreases the global cooldown (to a minimum of 1 second, down from 1.5), allowing you to purge, shock, and drop totems faster !

 

Calantus

When you're only bursting during a small window of opportunity, you want to make sure you actually hit in that window. That's why they spec for faster LBs.

 

• Juice

If all you're going to do is shock, totem, and purge then spec resto. If you want to do that stuff while you balance applying 3k dps, then spec elemental. Specing elemental and then playing utility seems silly. If you aren't improving your ability to do damage, what are you doing in the elemental tree at all?

 

whave

I tried survivability, something like this:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Basically I had _some_ ele PvP gear, no resto at all, and was doing arena-fun, mostly for the few hundred weekly points, no aim for serious goals.

Elemental Shields, Elemental Warding, Eye of the Storm for surviving, Fire totem stuff cause hard to get into deeper tiers w/o the LB talents and an instant fire nova can do wonders, and Focused Mind from resto side.

I'm quite sure you can show me lots of more powerful builds, I just had some fun with this.

 

• Juice

Only commenting on the spec, not being critical of your play style, how you like to enjoy arenas, or the role you play in your composition.

If you had to find a way to put points in stuff without picking call of thunder, etc - then ok. But convection and call of flame are significantly less valuable. Convection really doesn't make sense. Utility shocking is rank 1. The only reason to use a max rank shock is when you're going for a kill. Since you don't DPS for kills (obviously), then you don't need convection.

Imp Fire totem is devastating to mana supply. It'll be great in Wotlk due to the stun, but until they damage is much more effectively delivered via lightning bolt.

Focused mind is great - it's just a luxury eles don't get due to point limitations and the importance of lightning overload.

 

whave

Thanks for the feedback, gonna try it a different way next time. I have used the firetotem points only for fillers to get into deeper tiers, but now I see all those points can be put to the LB talents.

 

rehtonAesoohC

It might have been an oversight on your part, but just for clarification, totems are already only a 1 second global cooldown, so spell haste does nothing for totem dropping.

 

Dawning

I did not know that, thank you very much for the correction . I'm an old player, but a new shaman, so I'm still learning a lot of the ropes (trying to skip as much "learning it the hard way" as I can by researching on forums like these).

Some questions about hotkeys and UIs:

I have been switching back and forth over the last couple of months over the way that I hotkey my totems. I'll find really nice utility mods that provide drop down menus for each element, and then other times I'll simply bind all the totems I deem important to be somewhere within reach. God knows it's stupid to be navigating drop down menus in the middle of pvp, but this one mod I have (the name escapes me at the moment) allows you to set each element to a semi-permanent totem, and then hotkey each elemental "default" totem in this manner. In pvp/arenas I find earthbind to be the only earth totem I use, fire nova to be the only fire totem I use, and poison cleansing to be the only water totem I use. Air is the exception, since I have grounding totem and a grounding/WF twisting macro. So I guess my question is, just how many totems do you really need hotkeyed in pvp?

Another question, more of a general pvp UI question than an ele shaman specific one: my philosophy with hotkeys and UIs is first, to try to keep my screen as free and uncluttered as possible, and second, to never have to "click" on anyting. As such, I have recently tried out something new. Every single ability that I had mapped on my keyboard or mouse, I put on invisible hotkey bars. The exception, of course, is any said ability that has a cooldown I need to be monitoring. Between 8 mouses buttons, numbers 1-6 on the keyboard, and any combination of those and shift or ctrl, I have a shitton of abilities mapped to my keyboard, and 95% of them are memorized. Has anyone tried something similar, or have any thoughts on this idea? At first it was decidedly clumsy, as I forgot where several newly mapped abilities were. But once I got the hang of it, the only downside I could see was that someone else sitting down to play my toon would have no idea how I cast almost any of my spells (lightning bolt included). Aside from my consumables bar, I literally have only 10 abilities currently visible on my screen.

 

Ninjerk

Your UI philosophy is fairly common. I can't tell you how many PvP videos I've seen with two bars of oversized icons with OmniCC or some other such mod with the same functionality. I can't say that it is most PvP videos, but there are enough to see a trend.

 

Dollar

Hey I haven't pvpd much at all since early-middle s2 and not really ever in 5s but I am going to start doing a 5v5 with me (the elemental shaman) a moonkin, holy paladin, MS warrior and sub rogue. This is the spec I was thinking about:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Does anyone have any specific tips that would be useful? For 5v5 or 4dps teams or my comp in general? I figured things have changed things s2 a little bit but I'm not really sure what specifically. Thanks in advance.

Edit: If it matters I have about 1000 + damage, 30% crit and 135 haste and I'm hitcapped with the above spec, also I have 10.7k health and 400 resil.

"Oh he's a sad little man? He's thrown a kettle over a pub, what have you done?"

 

Praxagora

So what is the consensus on haste for us in PvP? Some people say it's good, some say crit is better? With all the resilience stacking I would imagine haste is better than crit point for point, right? We have the guardia haste neck, the new guardian ring is haste instead of crit, and there's the haste pvp cloak too, oh and the BM trinket, which is kinda fail imo. I guess to even make haste worthwhile you kinda have to swap in a piece or two of haste PvE gear *shrug*.

 

• Juice

Speaking in absolutes, 1% of haste does more to enhance your pvp damage than 1% crit. Even without the impact of resilience, this is true statement, though resilience makes haste even more valuable than crit on a 1 to 1 basis. Additionally, faster spells are less prone to interruption, LOS, pushback, etc...though in a chain cast situation there's little difference.

I think Haste is well worth stacking in pvp. It's not particularly valuable in small quantities, but if you can stack to 100+ I think it's more valuable than a corresponding amount of spell crit.