After briefly rolling the original version of my paladin main on the wrong server when I first started playing WoW, my college roommate was playing Horde-side, and so I rolled up a different character. At the time, Paladins were Alliance-only, so I made a Tauren Shaman, a class that was Horde-only.
Shamans are one of WoW's really iconic classes, but they also occupy a niche in fantasy RPGs that you don't often see represented. So, within 5th Edition, how would you build a character that fits with the Shaman vibe?
First off, let's identify the defining traits of the shaman. This is not going to be mechanical, but more lore and flavor-based. Shamans in WoW are deeply tied to the natural world, but while Druids focus on "nature" primarily in the ecosystem of living beings, Shamans are all about the primordial forces of nature. There's certainly some overlap, but while a Druid might call upon a general wrath of nature and use shapeshifting to mimic bestial forms, Shamans are all about calling upon storms, lava, and earthquakes.
There's also an element to Shamans that is deeply spiritual - real-world Shamanism, which is found in practically every part of the world, typically revolves around the belief in invisible spirits that surround us at all times, and often a shaman is a person who can enter an altered state of awareness (sometimes through psychotropic drugs, though also through meditation and other practices) that they claim allows them to commune with these beings. In WoW, the spirits that Shamans commune with are both of the elemental spirit type as well as ancestral spirits.
The assumption in WoW about player-character shaman is that they are of the good or at worst neutral variety, who derive their power by calling to the elements for their power. However, within the lore, there is also "dark shamanism," with which the shaman forcibly extracts power from the elements. This tends to use the element of "decay" that corrupts the elements, which tends to manifest in kind of polluted elements being called forth - smog-filled air, dirty water, greasy fire, and corrupted earth.
Now, mechanically, Shamans have, like most WoW classes, three specializations (somewhat akin to D&D's subclasses.) Elemental Shamans are all about launching elemental magic from afar. Enhancement Shamans are melee fighters who assault their foes with elemental magic. Restoration Shamans are dedicated healers, using soothing waters and rain to restore allies' health.
D&D makes less sharp distinctions, so I think you might find that an Elemental Shaman and a Restoration Shaman translated into D&D could be of the same subclass.
Shamans are also somewhat better armored than Druids, using "Mail" armor, which is WoW's equivalent of Medium armor. (WoW has 4 armor types: Cloth, Leather, Mail, and Plate, which correspond decently with D&D's unarmored, light armor, medium armor, and heavy armor, respectively.)
Without just building a new class whole cloth (which is something I've toyed with,) I think the most obvious class to swap in for Shamans is the D&D Druid. Druids in D&D have a broader portfolio of nature magic, and subclasses like the Circle of Wildfire or Circle of the Land fit quite well with the Shaman vibe. Circle of Dreams has a feywild connection, which might skew more aesthetically toward WoW Druids, but also has some Shaman-like flavor too. Circle of the Shepherd actually has totems you can set, which is a big mechanical thing for WoW shamans, and is focused on summoning creatures to fight for you.
But that's a bit too easy.
Clerics in D&D are not quite the same as Priests. While they're the pigeon-holed "healer" class, they tend to be more heavily armored and can mix it up in melee. A Nature or Tempest Cleric could stand in for a Shaman as well, focusing on the spiritual side of the class. Both of these are heavy-armored Clerics, and at level 8 they even get to add some elemental damage to their melee attacks, which is a bit like Enhancement. Given that Shamans tend to act as spiritual leaders of their communities, the Cleric works quite well as an equivalent class.
If you really want to focus on the melee aspects of the Shaman, there are two subclasses for the Barbarian that I think you could take a look at. The Storm Herald Barbarian naturally fits quite well with the Shaman, turning you into the heart of the storm, with arctic, desert, and sea storm flavors. If you want to lean into the spiritual side while swinging a big axe around, Ancestral Guardian Barbarians work out pretty well, even having the ability to cast some spells that involve you going into a kind of trance.
The final thing I'd consider here is the Storm Sorcerer - primarily because it's a caster that focuses on lightning and thunder spells, and gives you the ability to speak Primordial - the language of elementals (which has four dialects - Ignan, Aquan, Auran, and Terran.)
I think you can do a decent job of approximating the Shaman with these classes and subclasses. Naturally, D&D and WoW work in very different ways, so you'll never get a 1:1 correspondence. But as someone who loves WoW's Shaman, I'd be happy to see characters based on that show up in D&D.
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