Melee as shaman

[HalasHermit]

Originally Posted by brecon [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Depends on the level range. Again remember, in what I described, a lot of your actual DPS comes from procs on the Barb Spiritists Hammer (250dd). That procs at 35. Assuming max dex, you are only going to do 500damage/minute from that. Pet is probably like a 35 damage / tick dot, so like 850 damage a minute plus whatever melee damage you deal. When mobs have like 2k hp, that's competitive: 2 minutes for a solo kill. When mob HP steps up to 6khp, you're looking at a 6 minute solo kill. But at that point if you have an epic, a 6-minute melee kill makes no sense.

The problem with grouping in this is that procs are very unreliable. Maybe you get two right away and steal aggro from the tank. Maybe you get none until the mob is at 1%, in which case you waste most of the damage. Because of the variability in procs and the aggro issues, most DPS classes don't rely on proc weapons. At 50 Rangers get a proc weapon that is a 1-hander and does 688 damage per proc. But I don't see rangers use that, because (1) procs are unreliable, and (2) because of aggro problems, and (3) I'm assuming someone has parsed it out and found that a solid ratio 1-hander is better, but I'd need a ranger to chime in here.

Again, where this works is if you are a group tank. Slow is going to give you a lot of initial aggro. From there you can attack with the Hammer and hopefully generate procs. With a mob shaman slowed, a wizard could tank it. You can canni a bit during the fight and get topped off by the healer if mana runs down. And if you have a JBB, you can corner cast, spam JBB, and still get procs off the barb spiritist hammer. I don't see nearly enough Shaman tanks and I kind of think it's a shame, but it's understandable why.

Barb Spirit Hammer procs at 30 unless they have changed it since winter/spring '15.