Questions about totems

[Phanes]

So I am thinking about dumping my crew and just using my 80 DK to boost 4 shamans. Playing the mixed classes is making Heroic farming kind of tough.

I can scope through the fourms and find out an instance leveling guide and my other 80s have the tailoring, enchanting, jewel crafting, blacksmith, and leatherworking all maxxed out so I can make whatever I want once they hit 80.

My basic plan is.

Manual Play to 10 then do instance pulls with my DK and AOE the mobs down. Once in the 60s I may do some questing but I have to be honest I am fried on questing. I will probably instance my way to 80.

That being said what types of spells/totems do you guys use with multiple shamans? I realize it probably varies based on fights. It looks like from the research I have done I will make 4 elemental shamans. I am just curios about your spell rotation/totem set ups.

Mainly I need to figure out what stacks and what does not. Like can I have 4 mana totems or 4 healing totems or 4 armor totems? Or do I need to mix up the water ones and have like a dis, pos, heal, and mana one going?

Thanks in advance for your time.

[Phanes]

I found a great website to help with totems.

http://www.twentytotems.com/2007/11/stackable-totems-guide.html

So I am just curios about your spell rotations.

[emesis]

OK, don't get me wrong - I run a DK + 4 elemental shammies and I love it - but you have a full group at 80 working on heroics and you want to more or less start all over again?

Tank + 4 shammies is a solid combo but not a magic ticket to easy badges, it's going to take some time gearing them up, tweaking macros/movements, and learning strategies before heroics become EZ mode. Even then, not all heroics will be EZ mode with this combo.

I think heroics are eminently farmable with a mixed group as evidence by the reports of boxers in these forums. They just get a lot easier at a certain level of gear + experience regardless of your class combos.

If you want to have a group of shammies, that's great. They're very solid for PvE/PvP combined play, for instance. But I would think twice about doing it just to facilitate running heroics.

On to your questions about totem stacking. The twenty totems site is retired and quite a bit out of date. Totem of wrath no longer stacks, but mana spring totem currently DOES for instance.

Patch 3.1 will be bringing significant changes which aren't fully finalized, so it's probably premature to get too far into this. But, we know that mana spring totem will go back to no longer stacking.

Most of us multishaman groups have -

1. A general use /castsequence macro to drop a totem farm on all toons. Some of us have PvE versus PvP macros.

Mine look something like (off the top of my head)
Shaman 1. /castsequence Totem of Wrath, Mana Spring Totem, Wrath of Air Totem, Strength of Earth Totem
Shaman 2. /castsequence Tremor Totem, Mana Spring Totem, Grounding Totem, Magma Totem
Shaman 3. /castsequence Mana Spring Totem, Tremor Totem, Grounding Totem, Magma Totem
Shaman 4. /castsequence Magma Totem, Mana Spring Totem, Stoneskin Totem, Grounding Totem

2. Keybinds to drop a collection of particular totems, e.g. 4 fire nova, 4 healing stream, 4 groundings, etc


The totems that do NOT currently stack (only should drop 1 of these) in
Totem of wrath
Resistance totems (fire, frost, nature)
Stoneskin
Strength of Earth
Windfury/Flametongue totems (irrelevant totems for a caster DPS shammy group regardless)

Most other (relevant) totems stack. Mana spring will go to the list of non-stacking totems with 3.1, so the default totem farm that most of us use will transition to 1 mana spring/3 healing stream for the water totems.

[Siaea]

I found a great website to help with totems.

http://www.twentytotems.com/2007/11/stackable-totems-guide.html

So I am just curios about your spell rotations.That was good at one time, but a lot of totem changes have gone through since this was written. Basically as of now, 4x healing or 4x mana stack. Nothing else stacks. So, (I'm talking about 80 here, or whenever you get stuff like ToW and such) have a totem from each element out on each toon. It helped me to make a little chart when I was writing out macros...something like

toon Fire/Earth/Air/Water
_________________________
toona ToW/SC/GoA/Healing
toonb Searing/tremor ...etc etc (I'm at work and can't possibly remember all the totems we have)
toonc...


Basically, when it's all said and done, each shaman has 4 totems out and you should have pretty much every buff up that a shaman has available.

EDIT: Lol, Emesis beat me to it and did a better job :D

[Phanes]

Actually I have been giving this some more thought and I realized I would miss too many things like Ports, Food, etc etc. I am going to stick with the mixed party aspect but dump the hunter and level a druid for more buffs, heals, rez and dd when needed.

There is another reason for this. The hunter is not my account it belongs to my brother. While Blizzard has the direct family sharing rule at some point someone is going to /report me and they will see different last names, John and I have different fathers, and while I can have them contact my brother who will verify it is ok for me to use his account I would just assume avoid this.

I figure I will RAF a new account then boost the vet account and RAF account with my DK since the vet account and RAF account will be leveling together then they will get triple xp to 60 making 1-60 easier just doing instances. Once they hit 60 I will probably still instance them until the mobs are green to my DK then just incorporate the druid into my group.