Ertai said:
"My thinking comes from an FC perspective" that might be your problem here. Deeps and CC on an FC isn't what gets kills at 19s, CC on an FCs support is. An amazing Shaman will interrupt a Mage on either a poly or a Frostbolt and seriously impair their ability to CC. Your D would have no Priest on it, so an Shaman would be double effective with Earthbind being a full 5 sec tick.
I'll take the CC they can slap on a mage, but I think this also points out your limited perspective as a mage because, as I pointed out, their ability to deal with the Defensive shaman is nullified by resists. Wind shear only knocks out one school. If he silences you in poly, throw in a frostbolt and vice versa. The only thing he does is share GCD's with you. And you can't have your cake and eat it too. Except when going around fence, earthbind won't be affecting the druid, hunter, or shaman on D since they have speed increases since you said your shaman would purposely be staying back out of GW.
And despite me having a D hunter, I recognize most defenses still run with a priest. With this aside, the fact earthbind is a magic ability that is dispellable makes it innately weaker than hamstring since it is a physical attack. And of course hamstring lasts a full 15 secs, 3x longer than EB and it can be spammed repeatedly with low rage cost. I would argue a warrior charge puts a mage out of commission faster than a wind shear + earthbind. It both interrupts spells, stuns, and followed up with an immediate hamstring, slows for 15 secs. This of course also implies that warriors are much better at closing range gaps than shaman are.
A Hunter pet isn't going to keep any Warrior with half a brain in combat.
I disagree. And hunters are the only class that can get off a range attack before charge range as well.
I prize a ranged interrupt on a short cooldown. No good defense is going to cast a heal or Poly in range of a Shield Bash or Psychic Scream. Being able to Purge keeps the Priests free to focus on friendly dispels, during fights a Priest isn't going to be able to full dispel both his team and the EFC.
Charge is also a ranged interrupt. The range interrupt can also be supplied by bat pets or warlock fears. And I don't see what purge is good for anymore. You going to purge my MotW? Damn, that hurts, lost a total of 15 health. Most defenses don't have HoTs and speed pots are no longer dispellable. Only thing it's good for is AGM.
And if the mere presence of a warrior or priest in melee range prevents a mage or shaman from even attempting a spell cast, then I would say that's a better 'interrupt' than a Wind Shear, lol.
Earthbind gives you an AoE snare that can 50% a whole defense in the tight corners of the base. Taurens have a 2% extra chance to be missed by Nature spells, not resisted, so you can hit cap that out of the picture.
When will the shaman be in range in the base to pull that off? He can't use GW to catch up. And my D would have a hunter for tracking for the very purpose of avoidance. I'd like to see an O shaman geared for that hit cap.
Where I come from offenses play together, so a Shaman is not going to be sprinting ahead of his team like a moron. We like to attack as a group instead of being random heroes. You make a bunch of points about why a Shaman is better on defense than offense but that's not what we're talking about so I'm not going to touch on them.
Shaman staying behind with their O negates the usefulness of Ghost wolf, so I fail to see the point being made. My point on shaman being better on defense is to show how badly D shaman
counter O shaman. Not to mention, O shaman have no counters for some of the CC they will encounter while on O.
If your Warrior and two Hunters can't handle keeping three support slowed by all means bring another Warrior. If you're bringing it for more damage hell just bring a 3rd Hunter instead. If it's for another Shield Bash a Shaman does that better over the long run even factoring in resists.
This works both ways. If your warrior, hunter pets, and lock can't handle CCing a single mage and need a shaman's wind shear just to scrape by, then by all means bring a shaman. But why the shaman? Their damage is terrible and is outpaced by warriors, hunters, and warlocks. And their CC and snares is no better than a warrior's, hunter's or warlock's. And I disgree that hunters are better dps than warriors. Rend alone makes them better. Any retard hunter can go to a premade and top damage charts by tab targeting random targets. Warrior dps is more precise and there is no equivalent to rend. And I would argue charge coupled with shield bash is a better interrupt than wind shear which is only going to be primarily effective against the mage.
Edit: And maybe it's just me, but it seems when you add more than two hunters to the mix, all three become less efficient. Like in economics when you add so many workers they begin to become less and less efficient, so I think it is with hunters after the second one; they don't pull their own weight.