I had fun playing an elemental shammy during vanilla. My friends got me into healing, my first healing run was RFK and I did that as elemental.
Play to have fun…don’t mind the details.
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I guess you could run up and beat it up with a Staff or 1hander while you regain mana because if you’re not casting after 5 sec you regain mana? I just been watching videos I dont remember that far back
Ele shamans, as far as I remember, generated a lot of threat so running into melee range would make you likely to grab aggro unless you were either holding back or waiting for it to go down.
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I was saying to run in and do white damage swings to still put out damage while regaining mana
With Flametongue Weapon, your melee damage is pretty comparable to wand damage. And you need to be relatively close-range to get Searing Totem to work right anyway.
(Wand damage was terrible.)
Ele shamans generated normal threat for damage dealt. They didn’t have any threat drops, but neither did mages or warriors.
The reason why ele shamans tend to be thought of as threat problems is because of potential massive burst damage, which if used too early in the fight can rip threat right off the tank. But averaged out over the course of the fight, threat isn’t an issue.
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Bringing an elemental shaman to raid is 100% fine… people WAAAAAY overestimate the amount of dps needed for raids.
Plus, you have another shaman that can buff people without taking a healer slot.
The only people that are going to be Sea-cucumbers about it are the extreme meta-gamers who are going bring 13 warriors 4 mages 2 rogues 2 warlock 2 hunters… and you probably won’t want to group with them anyway.
the DPS checks in vanilla raids are not the difficult part lol
I find it really fun to have underdog specs in Raid… it makes it slightly more challenging. Which vanilla needs, because it’s relatively easy.
Regardless… the below is always the case…
Consistent player that shows up and follows directions>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Meta-class-spec
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My reasons for bringing an ele sham are as follows.
-Better totem coverage without overhealing an encounter.
-Better dispel/purge coverage without overhealing.
-Only one of two classes able to bring nature damage to an encounter.
-Part of the gear spread so mail loot doesn’t go to waste.
-Back up healer for emergancies when a healer is sick/off for the raid night.
The only real downside aside from lower damage I can see too an ele sham is they don’t bring anything a resto sham doesn’t.
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Better totem coverage without overhealing an encounter.
At the cost of being much more useless. Unless you are bringing 15 healers, you aren’t overhealing an encounter. It’s the only decent reason if you ignore the “overhealing” nonsense.
Better dispel/purge coverage without overhealing.
There’s downtime on healing. There’s no downtime on dpsing. You are hurting your DPS by dispelling and by purging. Healers aren’t skipping out on their job when they dispel. There’s 0-1 fight per tier that need purges anyways.
Only one of two classes able to bring nature damage to an encounter.
This is never needed. The only boss fight in a 40-man raid where that is not a disadvantage is Chromaggus, because of the elemental weakness that come and go. It’s a disadvantage in every other fight, and a big one at that. At least druids can use Starfire and don’t rely on Nature damage.
Except the only mail gear that would go to waste isn’t even good for elemental shamans. The MC mail offpieces are hunter/enhance gear. Ditto for the BWL mail offpieces, aside from the legs off Firemaw. That’s 1 item over two tiers, and even then, you’re assuming it will “go to waste” instead of going to any of the resto shamans that would want it for PVP.
Back up healer for emergancies when a healer is sick/off for the raid night.
That’s what backup healers are for. Or respecs. Or healing full-time as 30/0/21if you really don’t want to go full resto for raid nights because you can’t afford the respec fee to respec back to elemental for PVP.
You can bring an elemental along for the memes, because they’re a great guy to play with or because you aren’t serious about raiding. You shouldn’t try to justify it. The only decent reasons apart from the one I just mentioned are “we could use another set of totems” and “we were missing a warm body”.
Again… You vastly overestimate the need to push dps.
Talents, Dps and gear is so much more optimized now days you can bring a half a raids worth of ele shammy’s no problem…
I also don’t see pointing out the advantages of bringing an ele shaman as worthless O_o
Just simply having a guy that has access to reincarnate is nice. It can prevent a wipe…
Same with being a ret paladin… having more LoH is always a plus, it’ll save stupid. THat’s what vanilla raids are… preventing stupid lol.
You act like dps is everything, when in this game it really isn’t. Who cares if an ele-shaman is doing half the dps of the top rogue? The amount of value you put on dps is not scaled right.
Whether you down a boss 10 seconds quicker means nothing when it gets down to it. It is mechanics that wipes people.
I find it actually kind of stupid, people want to meta this game so hard they don’t even have to do any mechanics at all…
And once again you show you don’t understand the difference between viable and optimal. If you think people are going to need a min-max set up to get anywhere you’re sorely mistaken.
Just remember when decent guilds want dps, they aren’t looking for Viable not Optimal Vance, Casual Cathy, or their friend LFR Louis from Retail.
When you join a raid guild (and you will, make no mistake) you’ll be joining a guild that accepts meme specs and is just trying to fill a roster. It’ll be enhance shammys, ele shammys, multiple shadow priests, feral druids and boomkins…and they’ll all do well on the meters too compared to others in the raid.
The reason they’ll do well is because all the higher dps mages, rogues, warriors, and warlocks will be elsewhere or be leaving shortly. So every fight will take the maximum amount of time and allow for the maximum amount of problems. Don’t expect “beating the enrage timer” to be sufficient either, because your healers will run out of mana before then. All the people using tryhard consumables along with all the better geared healers will have gone to better guilds.
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This right here. Guilds will start falling apart when they get to harder content like AQ40 and there’s a divide between the players that want to play casually and the ones that want to clear all the content. It doesn’t even have to be the “tryhard min/maxer using full consumes”, just someone that wants to clear all content at some point and realizes that the guild they’re in isn’t going to get to that point.
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This combined with the better guilds needing to replace roster burnout and the best place to do that is from the second tier feeder guilds, because the better guilds can offer them a better situation , and the guild they go to doesn’t have to waste their own drops gearing them up.
The higher level the raiding you go, the more and more people are filtered out and condensed down into a few elite guilds.
My server wasn’t super crowded but it still had like 10+ guilds capable of clearing mc each week. By the time AQ40 and nax rolled around it was down to 2 guilds either clearing or mostly clearing (neither of us fully cleared naxx) the raids… Between our two guilds we only crafted 3x thunderfury swords, and yet had a combined 7 of them on raid nights. It was a bit of a running joke that getting a thunder fury crafted basically ensured you’d get poached within a week.
Beyond tanks, the good /geared dps classes are always at the front of the line for getting poached, too, and it’s a major factor in so few hybrids making it into naxx. The top guilds aren’t ever hurting for applicants, and given the choice between the good mage and the good enhancement shaman, every sane vanilla guild is going to pick the more more productive class /spec… Repeat that a few times and what happens is that hybrid class ends up being stuck in a dead end guild where everyone else of any value gets stolen away.
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One issue with trying to get a spot as one of the bad DPS classes/specs is that DPS is not hard to get for raids. You could bring a DPS shaman/paladin/druid, or you could take one of the hundreds of rogues/mages/warlocks/warriors/hunters that are looking for a raiding guild.
As others have posted, Elemental has some mana longevity issues. You’ll have to put in more effort to get worse results.
Viable, for sure. Optimal, unfortunately not. Great PvP burst damage though.
You overestimate the difficulty of Vanilla raids.
The only issues would be C’thun, Twin Emps, and half of Nax… where you need people to be maxing their character.
Even then it doesn’t mean ele shamans can’t be there, but the ones who are need to carry more of their weight… like farming runes, equipping all the potions/flasks they can, etc.
Anything before that can easily bring on as many underdog specs as you want no problem.
It’s funny how people want to game the raids to the point where you don’t do any mechanics… you just speed dps down bosses in order to skip mechanics. That doesn’t sound like fun to me, other than if you are speed running world first.
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That’s the content that matters though. MC, Ony, ZG, and BWL will be pugged. It was pugged in 2006 and it’ll be pugged as soon as the content is available when classic is released too.
Also you absolutely want to game the raids to avoid mechanics. Why wouldn’t you? To make things harder? I imagine even casual players want to win in a way that is easiest. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t want gear upgrades. Gear upgrades make things easier by nature.
IDK about you, but I actually like raiding. I like the mechanics. I like taking a group of 40 people with their own playstyles and we all try to strategize a way to complete it.
Going out of your way to only recruit warriors and force everyone to min/max their character, is lame to me.
To each their own…
But in the end, it is NOT a big of a deal regardless to bring an ele-shaman. And in fact there are SOME advantages of doing so(some disadvantages as well). What the biggest contributor of a successful raid and not, is whether your people in the raid are paying attention and came prepared… NOT dps. You can complete ALL the content with an ele-shaman or two in your guild, without a problem.
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You’re supposed to pay attention and come prepared, AND ALSO do dps. People at the character select screen don’t choose mage and then decide “well since I chose mage, I’m going to stand in the fire”.
You do everything, not pick a few things and skip others. A good dps will do the mechanics properly and hit things hard.
You’d be surprised… Do you actually raid? O_o
Yeah, they seem like really basic things xD but 70% of the population can’t do it.
And yes, that is a good dps… that is more important than anything.