Normal FoS cleared with 5 shamans

[Maxion]

Decided to dust off my shaman team today and cleared normal FoS.

Enjoy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YfdR0ZdrDs&hd=1

Comments are welcome and encouraged

[Powerwar]

Not bad. It's also doable in heroic, but you have to abuse the hex spell a bit.

For the first boss I always prefer fire elementals. Just run to where he is in the center and drop your usual totems + fire elementals. Pop heroism and burn him down to death. Remember to have two tremor totems in heroic for phase 2 and that's it

Also on last boss I always have my group stacked together and just strafe when he casts the aoe.

[gitcho]

Not bad. It's also doable in heroic, but you have to abuse the hex spell a bit.

For the first boss I always prefer fire elementals. Just run to where he is in the center and drop your usual totems + fire elementals. Pop heroism and burn him down to death. Remember to have two tremor totems in heroic for phase 2 and that's it

Also on last boss I always have my group stacked together and just strafe when he casts the aoe.

have you done this on heroic? unless you had a dedicated healer spamming heals on at least one rock elemental, he would eat through them long before you could burn him down. Would love to *see* someone do it on heroic ... think it too tough though.

[Bloodcloud]

grats. Inspiring vid. I need to try it with my team (shammy still not 80

[Powerwar]

have you done this on heroic? unless you had a dedicated healer spamming heals on at least one rock elemental, he would eat through them long before you could burn him down. Would love to *see* someone do it on heroic ... think it too tough though.

It cost me about 500 gold in repairs, but yes, its doable. Of course, I don't plan to repeat the experience because it was next to a nightmare suicide shaman party. Had to set things quite different than how I run them usually to ensure team survival. Instead of pushing 5 DPs I made it 2 healers + 3 DPS using a relatively "smart" rotation.

Instead of a dedicated healer I just put chain heal on rotation and it was more like 3 shamans dpsing and 2 shamans spamming chain heal. The DPS is practically the same as with one dedicated healer and tank, but the resulting raw healing is more. The downside is that there is no burst healing when you need it and it's boring.
Shamans 1 and 2 spam heal, the rest cast some dps spell, then shamans 2 and 3 spam chain heal and the rest dps, then shamans 3 and 4 spam heal and the rest dps etc... The chain heal is cast on the shaman that casts it and not on the aggro shaman. Found it to be better when aggro bounces around.
This grants that all shamans will have very similar mana usage instead of a dedicated healer going oom. If a single shaman dies it wil not result in a wipe like it usually happens if your dedicated healer dies and you have no tank. Also maximizes DPS because all the shamans are running with their elemental specs.
I have my emergency everyone spams chain heal button that is usualy abused in boss fights.

The first boss is more a matter of DPS than healing because I always brute force him and ignore completely the soul fragments. During phase 1 you just need to stay topped because an exploding soul + a hit from the boss will nearly kill the shaman that has aggro at the moment. You will need to burn him to phase 2 before heroism ends, if you don't it's a wipe because you will be unable to cast heals fast enough. Other than that it's just a heal and spank fight that lasts a bit more than normal.

The second boss is a nightmare without a tank, even with full T9 gear. If you stay stacked the chain heals will jump to the elementals. Unfortunately the fight in my case lasted more than 3 minutes and I got aggro after the first lvb, so the elementals were more than useless and just drained healing power for nothing. Also they died very fast on the aoe. Using fire elementals on the 2nd boss resuls in a wipe after he starts casting the mirror image. Without elementals and using a staggered taunt totem worked ok. Took me about 15 wipes to figure out how to do him properly.
His melle damage will hit for about 70% of a fully T9 geared shaman with shield equipped. Had to fix the healing mode a bit for that too.
My rotation was more or less the following:
1 ) LB + CL + FS + LVB start with all the shamans from max range. That's about 100k damage or 10% of boss HP before he reaches your shamans. No more fire shock from now on. Use frost + earth shock instead. Also have wind shear on cast to interrupt his shadow bolt spell. Not sure if it works correctly, but he seems to cast quite less of them if you do.
2 ) drop taunt totem and hit him with some spell
3 ) let him hit one shaman after the totem gets oneshoted.
4 ) stop DPS during the soul link and spam chain heal on all the shamans. This will top your group.
5 ) move out of aoe when needed. I strafe because it's faster and you don't give your back to the boss.
6 ) go to point #2
Using fire shock usually ends in a suicide for the shaman that has aggro if he turns to be mirror imaged too. It's bad luck, but yet it has 20% chance to happen.
Taunt totems timing and mana coneservation are the keys in this encounter. You need to stagger them in a way that he oneshots a totem, then hits once or twice some shaman, then taunt totem again. The totems are oneshoted, but during that time you can heal properly. Use thunderstorm as soon as it gets out of cooldown and no shaman is soul linked. Also had to use a mana totem instead of the usual 5 healing totems when I finally managed to down him.
For healing, had to have different rotation with a LHW on the aggro shaman + chain heal instead of 2 x chain heal.
Used gift of the naru x 5 (draenei racial no mana instacast relatively strong HOT) as a life saver at the end of the fight when I ran oom and with TS and mana pots on cooldown. If I didn't have that racial, probably it would be a wipe with the boss at 100k HP left. Then I sacrificed the shaman with aggro that also had soul link and just repeated the opening DPS sequence + thunderstorm.Granted I killed one of my shamans deliberately, but the boss died with him. Let's say he took one for the team

You will have to abuse thunderstorm and I had to drink a mana pot x 5 when I finally managed to get him down.

What I found hard in the heroic version was the trash packs before the first boss. They tend to center attention on the same toon. The first time I was wondering if someone was not multiboxing focus fire on me. Grounding totems help, but the pull into the big cyrcle place is usually a wipe and reincarnation without a tank. Even with hex that specific trash pack is very hard.