3 moonkins vs 2 moonkin & mage vs 2 moonkin & ele shaman (pally tank, shaman healer)

[Owltoid]

I'm seriously struggling with my 5-box composition and if I should have:

Pally, moonkin x 3, resto shaman
-or-
Pally, moonkin x 2, mage, resto shaman
-or-
Pally, moonkin x 2, ele shaman, resto shaman (edit: combo added late)

That intellect buff sounds nice, and free food & ports would be very useful, but the complexity of another class could actually decrease DPS. Thoughts?

[Riault]

Crit synergy: Paly (or DK really) disc priest, ele shaman, firefrost mage, boomer albeit far from simplistic.

I am by no means an expert but I tri-box and my friend dual-boxes and we run warrior,priest,shaman,druid,mage ... it is quite fun and I think good synergy. Lava burst, frostfire, living bomb sure are nice eye-candy.

[emesis]

I'm seriously struggling with my 5-box composition and if I should have:

Pally, moonkin x 3, resto shaman
-or-
Pally, moonkin x 2, mage, resto shaman

That intellect buff sounds nice, and free food & ports would be very useful, but the complexity of another class could actually decrease DPS. Thoughts?

I still struggle with this - bottom line is there is no way to max/min as a boxer anyways; you should create a class composition that sounds fun to you and recognize that there are any number of viable combinations. It isn't necessarily about maxing dps.

Case in point, you're running boomkins - chances are you're never going to maximize their dps anyway because of the complexity Eclipse adds to managing a rotation. So, you're more or less stuck with a fixed castsequence or castrandom - which is still pretty good. If you add a mage, you're probably not going to be able to use the proc-based DPS increasers in that class (e.g. Hot Streak).

Ports are amazingly usefull, and free food is very nice. If that moves you, go with a mage. On the other hand, 3x starfall, 9x treants, 3x tranquility is a lot more impressive than 2x starfall, 6x treants, 2x tranquility. ;-)

[Owltoid]

Right now I'm struggling with if 3 moonkins are viable for many heroics. Really I'm struggling with if anything but a shaman team is viable. Shamans have many passive survival abilities that other classes don't share which I'd assume makes many encounters much easier. I'm sure any team of 5 boxing is challenging, but I'm not sure I'm up to the challenge of having 3 moonkins (which does seem one of the easier combinations when compared to truly mixed groups or classes that require more babysitting). You're definitely correct about the eclipse procs, emesis, but I think a castrandom macro could take advantage of at least 50%. When I'm single boxing my moonkin I feel like I don't get all the benefit since it often procs at the end of a fight, or I've wasted one spell that started casting before the proc went off (due to spamming), or targets are dying too quickly to even bother with starfire.