Heroic Trash

[Darm]

I've watched a lot of videos of Heroic dungeons being cleared, virtually all of them do not show anything about clearing trash. I know that the boss fight is what most folks are interested in, but I'm interested in getting trashed cleared efficiently too.

I'm runing a DK + 4 shaman, and I'm wondering how people handle pulls when they get 3 or more elite heroic trash mobs. Two mob pulls aren't really a problem. Three mob pulls seem like I'm healing quite a bit, and in some cases my DK tank will die. The obvious solution to that is to get good at using Hex and keeping one mob CC'd, or at least I think that's the obvious solution. The other possibility I suppose is that a DK tank with better gear might be able to handle 3 heroic trash mobs without that much difficulty?

Any help or thoughts would be appreciated, thank you.

[Starbuck_Jones]

I don't have any videos to show, but I had a fairly large problem when I got to BC and started to hit the instances. I play a Paladin and 4x druid group. Bosses were going down easy, but it was taking forever to grind past all the trash mobs. Several hours per instance when it should be taking 40-60 min tops. Other than out leveling and out gearing the instance what sped it up the most for me was getting away from structured castsequence macros to all 5 toons runnnig cast randoms. I still use the castsequences on bosses, but just pulling and spamming increased trash kill efficiancy by 100 fold.

Its still not as no brainer or fast as my first group. 4mages and a priest, But I can get through an instance now and not have to take a break half way through for lunch, dinner, or a government holiday.

[Gares]

Well considering your setup I will offer my advice cause I run the same thing:

Use Hex as often as you can (Even more then one target when you can).

Use your DK Bone Shield Proactive before large pulls and it also helps if you know what the mobs actually do (comes with time of running it so often). I know with my DK there are times I use Ice Bound Fort (Glyphed) when pulling 4+ trash mobs. Most of the time I burn one of them down the moment they reach my DK so its usually not an issue but never the less. Also don't be afraid to use TS on Round Robin. If you drop DnD and all the trash is inside of it, they will stay aggro on your tank for sure. Use TS to get some breathing room and get some extra heals on tank/dps whoever needs it.

[Siaea]

I was running a DK + 4 ele shaman, but this weekend I respec'd one of my girls to resto, and now a lot of fights I had problems with earlier are a joke now. Bone Shield and Earth Shield = a lot of damage the tank can take before a heal is needed. I had issues with mana on my new resto shaman, so I removed lightning bolt and chain lightning from her keybindings, and just throw a riptide whenever it's up, and it's pretty nice. The only thing I miss is the big DPS with 4 shaman, but I'm actually finding boss fights are a bit easier.

Edit: I've never used Hex in a heroic, I find that I'm too uncoordinated and the range is too short to really make it useful with my death knight's AoE.

[Hachoo]

I've watched a lot of videos of Heroic dungeons being cleared, virtually all of them do not show anything about clearing trash. I know that the boss fight is what most folks are interested in, but I'm interested in getting trashed cleared efficiently too.

I'm runing a DK + 4 shaman, and I'm wondering how people handle pulls when they get 3 or more elite heroic trash mobs. Two mob pulls aren't really a problem. Three mob pulls seem like I'm healing quite a bit, and in some cases my DK tank will die. The obvious solution to that is to get good at using Hex and keeping one mob CC'd, or at least I think that's the obvious solution. The other possibility I suppose is that a DK tank with better gear might be able to handle 3 heroic trash mobs without that much difficulty?

Any help or thoughts would be appreciated, thank you.I've never had to use Hex before (I run DK + 4 ele shaman). The bottom line is, the better gear your tank has, the easier instances will be. You're better off spending everything you can just overgearing your tank before working on your shamans at all. However, if you're interested in a video that shows some trash, my Heroic Culling of Stratholme Timed run video shows the entire 25 minute run. Its in the movie forum under "This thread is a collection of my videos" - however, my web host is down right now so they probably won't be accessible again until tomorrow.

Aside from that, As a DK your cooldowns are almost available every single pull, so going into a tough pull just make sure to use bone shield first, and then use icebound fortitude shortly after pulling. At this point for me, if I use Bone shield + IBF on my DK, I can actually take down a pack of 4 heroic mobs without even healing my tank at all.

[Darm]

Thank you everyone for the helpful thoughts.

Fursphere -- I'm running everything myself, using the DK as a "main" so to speak as that is onmy primary display, and the 4 DPS shaman are all secondary. I decided to see what would happen if I spec'd one of the shaman as resto.

If I can get Hex to work, this makes things more manageable, although it takes a little bit more micromanagement. But, if I have 3 heroic elites beating on my tank, it's a touch and go situation, and I'm in a little bit of a bind it seems like. I have to heal him an awful lot, and so naturally that means I'm not DPS'ing the targets down which naturally just leads to the need for more healing.

Perhaps it's my DKs gear. He has 23k hit points unbuffed in frost presence, and his defense is 538, with 12.7% dodge, 13.8% parry. Perhaps that is really the problem and he is just plain undergeared?

[ghonosyph and the moocrew]

yea darm, it seems that your dk is pretty undergeared for tanking effectively. Might i suggest getting in on a couple pug runs of heroics for tank gear. Gear up your tank solo for a bit, as this helped with my team quite a bit. check out the tank info at elitistjerks.com in the dk info, there's a "pre raid" gear list for gearing up to start raiding. Try to pick a couple instances that have upgrades, and just run them solo and try to get the items you need, gem and enchant em up and then go back and try with your box toons after you get a few more upgrades :D good luck!

[Hachoo]

If you want something far less painful than pugs, just run 5x dailies for a few days and buy your tank everything he'll need to be good. The first time I set foot in a heroic my tank was already geared well and I'd never even been in a level 80 instance yet. Some BoE items you can easily get:

Titansteel Helm (the +def one)
Titanium Earthguard Chain (necklace)
Titanium Earthguard Ring
Daunting Legplates
Tempered Saronite gear (bracers, gloves, etc)

That should be enough to get you to 535 def, a high health level, and other decent stats.

[mmcookies]

You need better gear and (perhaps) tanking tips, but really most of it is about picking the best gear.

After getting all your characters "good" gear, it should be your top priority to get your tank the "best" gear you can get your hands on.

I blew about 10k gold getting all the best stuff for my pally tank ASAP.
After that, trash was no problem, although I still had occasional issues with DPS boss fights.
The DPS fights became trivial once my shamans hit around 1800SP unbuffed

[Hachoo]

Fursphere -- I'm running everything myself, using the DK as a "main" so to speak as that is onmy primary display, and the 4 DPS shaman are all secondary. I decided to see what would happen if I spec'd one of the shaman as resto.

Switch one of the Shaman to Resto and gear him/her that way. Then setup some extra keys for dedicated tank healing.

That alone will make the difference. Heroic trash hits really really really hard. You need heals on the tank, no matter how geared you are.See my post a few posts up about tanking 4 heroic mobs without needing a single heal :P

[Siaea]

Like other people said, do a lot of dailies and buy BoE epics. The way I did it was skip epic flying for now and do these quests:

(This is assuming you're Horde)
Set your hearth to Conquest Hold, do the Blackriver Brawl (50 gold in 3 minutes)
Four quests in Venture Bay (200g in about 10 mins)
Four quests in the Logging camp..even the collection, it's pretty fast (200g in about 20 mins)

Hearth back to Conquest hold (if you don't have epic flyers, that is)
Fly to Ebon Hold, pick up those 3 and complete them, but fly on down to the one on the hill and do the one where you turn the corpses into ghouls and kill the guys on the flyers. I usually only do the gathering information one on my main. Fly back to Ebon after you turn those in, turn the Ebon Hold ones in, and then go to the airship and pick up the slaves to saronite, kill the 20 vrykul, and that elite one where you contaminate the cauldron. Also there's one down at the bottom of the hill where you escort the Horde troops to the gates, and those kills count to the kill 20 quest. All those add up to around 700g for about an hour's work, and all the quests I mentioned are multiboxing friendly. There's also tricks you can do where all your toons get credit, such as burning the buildings, just park your toons at one building, use your main to hop on a dragon, and spam "3" on the same building till you get 8. With the planting the banners one, make a macro like "/target Main's target, /use Ebon Banner", and you get 5 credits for one banner.

So in total, there's around 1200 gold in less than 2 hours, not to mention selling the drops and disinchants. Boom! There's an upgrade. I did that a couple of weeks, and my tank is well geared in blue and epic defense gear, and my shammies have nearly all spell dmg epics.

[puppychow]

there is imo definitely a "curve" to heroics, and especially important in choosing which ones to step into first. Gundrak and Draktharon and CoT (ignore timer) are great starter heroics, UK/spiders/VH is not. Even still expect a lot of wipes as you learn positioning, which mobs do what, etc. After a few days of going at it though you will find you can really crank through heroics like crazy, my last heroic run I did 7 heroics in 3 hours!

When you first start out specing one shaman as resto is definitely helpful, have him only heal and never DPS. As you gear up everyone (esp tank) you can have him start to DPS, and eventually even just respec him back to elemental. Just specing a undergeared shaman into resto and glyphing turns him into a powerful healer. glyph lhw, chain heal, (and i forgot 3d lol) and always keep ES up on tank and spam LHW whenever he dips below 80%. Of course if your tank is pretty heavily geared you can just skip the resto part and do x4 elemental, but its really a personal playstyle thing, if you find yourself having trouble with x4 ele try x3 ele and x1 resto.

Don't forget also to focus on maximizing DPS on your shamans, if they are each only doing 1500 dps then you definitely need one as resto. If they are each doing 3k dps however you may not need one as resto. Look around for posts on using /click or castrandoms and training dummies and such to test and maximize DPS efficiency. Remember, gear for hit (to 80), then spell dmg (infinite), then haste when you can't choose spell dmg (haste > crit).

[Darm]

I very much appreciate all the replies. I'm sure that I will struggle some once it comes to the heroic bosses in each dungeon, but I guess I needed to get the first part settled -- just handling multiple heroic melee mobs.

I have switched a shaman to resto, and am now working on my gear. I've been practicing a little bit using a foot pedal to control the resto shaman. I now feel like I'm driving a car with a clutch. We'll see how tonight goes.

[Niley]

foot pedal? :O That sounds kinda interesting :P
Anyway, I don't box anymore, but I do still play on my main shaman, and my dk tank had become my main alt, with the gear that I will link in the armory, he can pull 3-4 trash pulls at once and not die( I pulled all 3 pulls and the boss in gundrak and while it wasn't the easiest to heal, we all lived), I only do heroics for guilds alts now, so usually the healer is still in few quest items, and still have no problems with healing.
Basically its all in Your gear, Gem it correctly, enchant it correctly, manage Your tanking stats well, don't spec into useless talents, and all heroics become easy(too easy if You ask me).
Anyway heres my tank, Ive used the same spec for boxing, I still use it now, I can pull steady 9k-12k tps on fight like patchwerk, and aoe fights Im a threat god, every mob sticks to me and doesn't want to let go :P I was aoe tanking ads on faerlina last week, and somehow my aoe threat pulled the boss of main tank.....DKs aoe is godly. I'm probably logged off in my threat set( I have avoidance, and hp one too), and remember that armory doesn't count Your presence, so its base hp, not the one in frost.
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Antonidas&n=Lowpass
(I had sex change :P)

[Kicksome]

I just manually earth shield my tank before each pull and have my resto shaman chain heal my tanks target's target
/cast [target=focustargettarget] chain heal
every time I hit the attack key the resto shaman spams that macro.

It's too hard to try and manually heal IMO. The chain heal spam works great. I use it all the time in raids and heroics.

I can do an entire fight by just doing 1 manually death and decay and spamming my 1 attack key.

[Multibocks]

I agree with Fur, if you are just starting out the smart way to go is one shaman resto, you will have far less deaths. Once you start getting good stuff on the tank(maybe a piece of T7), switch over to all of them elemental.

[Coltimar]

I just manually earth shield my tank before each pull and have my resto shaman chain heal my tanks target's target
/cast [target=focustargettarget] chain heal
every time I hit the attack key the resto shaman spams that macro.

It's too hard to try and manually heal IMO. The chain heal spam works great. I use it all the time in raids and heroics.

I can do an entire fight by just doing 1 manually death and decay and spamming my 1 attack key.Don't you have mana problems doing it this way? Especially on bosses?