5-Man specs

So, I've read up on the threads here and those linked, especially the archived EJ raiding compendium. All of it is focused on raiding, though, and that's not really relevant to where I am right now, which is mostly pugging 5 mans.

So, I'm wondering if some of those bad talents for raids might be pretty useful in pugs? Like Shadowfury and Pyroclasm that are stuns, or Aftermath for the daze effect? I've been in a lot of dungeons with warriors and even bears who had trouble keeping aggro on large mob packs so I couldn't Seed, and they sometimes even had problems picking up everything on the pull so we ended up with 2 or 3 loose mobs running around. Or, you have a situation where an undergeared tank plus an undergeared healer means the healer is spam healing the tank just to keep them up without any time to throw heals at anyone else, and needing to drink after each pull. I'm thinking AoE stuns would be handy in those situations.

What would a build like that look like? Destruction has the stuns and dazes, besides Affliction is too little burst for 5 mans and I don't want to micromanage a pet. But what to do after you put 41 points in Destruction for Shadowfury? You can't get demonic Sacrifice, but you can get Nightfall in Affliction, so maybe do something like 20/0/41? That might play like 38/2/21 where you Curse + Corruption then spam Shadowbolts on single targets.

Alternatively, since we're talking about low gear levels and short lived enemies, maybe Fire Destro? Something like 0/17/44 giving you Improved Imp and Demonic Aegis out of Demonology? Shadowbolts seem to take too long killing adds in fights like Nethercurse in SL, I wonder if Immolate + Conflagrate would do the trick?

(Note that I haven't experimented with either or these specs or even spent much time tweaking them. I'd love to know of better ways to get the utility talents I'm interested in with more efficient DPS talents.)

These definitely wouldn't be useful specs for anything beyond 5 mans, I wouldn't even try to pretend that I could find a better use of talent points than what got worked out on the EJ forums (and I've got dual specs to shift into a conventional spec if I do end up in a Kara or Gruul group somehow.) But you run into some completely different problems in 5 man pugs than you do in raids, so I'm wondering if there aren't some options in the talent trees that might help with those? If there's other resources for this kind of thing that I've missed, please point me in the right direction.

I'm interested in seeing the response to this, as I'm pretty much in the same boat as you, casually pugging 5 mans for a bit until raiding at a later date.

Affliction sucks in dungeons because mobs die to quickly to make all your dots really worth it. Personally I would go with a Demonology spec (Felguard or Succubus). It has the most survivability due to Soul Link and a significant part of your DPS comes from your demon. This means that all this damage is not your threat, but your Demons threat. In 5 mans this is quite significant because you'll notice with Destro that you pull aggro quite easily (2 back to back Shadowbolt crits is usually enough), Demonology doesn't really have this problem because your threat is split. An additional benefit is that if things go south your Felguard can tank stuff pretty decently if it gets healed.

be advised that you should get your pet masters license first or every1 and their mothers will hate you because your pet just pulled the entire instance
:^]