Have I been dying to the following bosses because...

[knopstr]

I'm Stupid (flame away lol) or because I didn't throw down the proper Totems?

Drak'Tharon - Novos ---> Frost Resistance and Magma and Grounding?

CofS - 2nd Boss (after Meathook) ---> Grounding and Magma? Usually get overwhelmed by zombies and panic...thereby resulting in over-healing.

Gundrak - Last Boss (Rhino) ---> Magma and not healing through the rhino phase 'cause I think I'm Hachoo and can burn him down as fast?

I've been too lazy to setup a bunch of totem macros that swap in things like grounding/magma. Guess I need to bite the bullet.

[Taliesin]

Novos - Frost resist and grounding are about all you "need" here. Are you spacing out enough (about 5-10 yards) so that a single blizzard is not over-extending your healer?

Salramm (CoS 2nd boss) - Grounding and Magma are probably the best you can do here (only saying magma so you can ignore the zombies spawns, otherwise use flametongue or totem of wrath if you have it). If you have a pali tank, use shadow resist aura; if DK, use anti-magic shell (edit: if you have it, of course); if warrior, the best you got is spell reflect; if druid, just grin and bear it (get it?). Otherwise just focus on tearing him down as fast as you can to reduce the number of ghouls you have to survive through.

Gal'darah (Gundrak final boss) - Recommend flametongue or totem of wrath instead of magma. You should get more DPS out of the group if you are primarily caster DPS based and this helps your healer put out bigger heals. And healing, healing, and more healing during rhino phase. Oh, and don't forget to heal in case I forgot to mention that. Mana totem might be best if you think you may have mana issues. The damage comes so fast that a single healing totem really doesn't get many ticks in per damage received. Use all the tricks you have on your tank to minimize damage during the rhino phase: shield wall, divine protection, racials, etc, etc.

[Siaea]

Well, I haven't beat Novos yet, but here's what I do with CoS and Gundrak, and I'm not near as well geared as Hachoo.

Gundrak:

Keep him away from your casters while in humanoid form. I don't have a seperate totem farm either, so every boss gets the same totem farm. When he goes into rhino form, move him closer to your casters and that's when I pop bloodlust and trinkets. He will impale your casters, but I've noticed they always land still facing each other (just move the boss so he's LOS of all your casters), so I usually chain heal like a madman when one's impaled and DPS when everybody's healthy. He'll pop back into humanoid form, and for me it's just a matter of seconds before he drops.

The second boss in CoS:

I set up my totem farm, park my shammies, and tank n spank away from them. Blow bloodlust and trinkets early and just burn him down. Sometimes it seams like I'm chain healing every 3rd cast, but he goes down like a prom date.

hope that helps :)

[Taliesin]

...but he goes down like a prom date.

What?!

I knew I should have gone to my prom. :(

[knopstr]

Thank you guys.

Siaea,

Noticed you were in Austin. I live in S. Austin myself. I looked up a couple of your toons on the armory and they out gear mine quite a bit.

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Wildhammer&n=Imprue is my team shaman leader and all the others are similarly geared. Presently, I'm 8 badges from the barricade of light.

My tank is a DK. I don't have a dedicated Resto Shaman...though I'm thinking about it more and more until I finish getting geared through heroics.

I'm going to definitely build one more "tree" farm macro with grounding and magma and report back when I have success.

Thanks again.

[Siaea]

Noticed you were in Austin. I live in S. Austin myself. Oh nice, I work in Round Rock actually, but our other location is on Brodie, so I'm down there a lot as well.

When I get home, I'll post my totem farm, but definitely don't call it final, I'm sure other more experienced 'shamanizers' have better ones. I didn't even play a shaman before I rolled 5 :)

On having one resto, I did that when they were lesser geared, and it seemed to help. Earth Shield/Bone Shield on my tank helps a lot. I've been thinking of going back to 4 elemental, but I just got used to having a Riptide every few seconds and earth shield. My resto still dps's, but I unbound her regular lightning bolt to help save mana. I only chain heal when the shaman are taking damage, the tank gets a riptide whenever the others cast lightning bolt (if it's up) and regular heals on the tank all 4 cast lesser healing wave (full health in around 1.5 secs).

[Hachoo]

You're missing a ridiculously important totem farm on Novos - full set of healing stream totems.

For Salramm grounding is very important - be sure to refresh. Magma for the zombies or put thunderstorm on round robin and use it every 5-10 seconds, 4x healing stream counteracts the zombie damage or if you can handle the zombies OK use 4x mana spring to keep your mana up.

For the last boss in Gun'drak, yes you really need to just heal when he's in rhino phase unless your tank is uber geared or you can drop him before he transforms ;)

[Taliesin]

Just a suggestion, you may want to include your group composition in the future when requesting strategy tips, since it makes a big difference. If you're also running 4 x Shaman, I would suggest 4 x Healing Totem for all three of these encounters then. One healing totem usually isn't enough to help my priest enough, but 4 of them ticking away can add up to a lot of healing pretty quick (roughly 1k+ hps to group every 5s at 80?). If I recall, they also factor in spellpower on the healing totem.

My tips assumed you had "at least one shaman" in the group, since it was just a totem question.

[knopstr]

Tali,

I certainly hope you understand that I appreciate any and all help passed my way. You're right, I should have posted group composition, I just assumed that because my original question had the plural totems that you would all assume that I was running DK+4 shamans...lol...my bad.

Hachoo,

I do throw down healing....again, I wasn't clear. I meant in swapping out some of my other totems to include magma and/or grounding. I'm at work usually when I have questions and generally only have a couple of minutes to throw down thoughts. I'll be more diligent when asking questions in the future. Thank you specifically for the tip about being able to buy unwanted valor badge gear from people. Someone in my guild sold me the wrists last night.

UPDATE:

I started out the day needing 8 badges for my 1st heroic reward, so I headed out to Gundrak. With the healing advice I was finally able to beat the Rhino boss. Woot! Of course, the guild channel got spammed with like 15 achievements all at the same time. I think I can take him down every time now...but that remains to be seen.

5 badges down 2 to go....forgot that Gundrak was the daily from a couple of days back so I turned that in and had 1 to go. Ended up downing Meathook in CoS and ported back to Dalarn to get my X4 protective barricades of light. I'm going to go back and try the 2nd boss tonight in CoS and then head to Drak to try out Novos.

Thank you again for any time and consideration you put into helping me on these forums.

[Catamer]

Novus.. try a frost resistance aura on your pally if you have one. magma's for trash on the team.

CoS, I do everything in CoS from the room where you can get repairs prior to the whole thing starting and have my pally avenging shield mobs and running back to the room.
litterally nothing is a problem from inside of the room, magma's + pally concecrate kill everything.

Drak Thraron.
my biggest problem there is keeping up avenging shield. I have a macro with several attacks + shield and once in a while the shield is down ( not good ).

[Taliesin]

Tali,

I certainly hope you understand that I appreciate any and all help passed my way. You're right, I should have posted group composition, I just assumed that because my original question had the plural totems that you would all assume that I was running DK+4 shamans...lol...my bad.

No worries. I wasn't trying to be critical of you. Once I started seeing comments about "totem farms", I realized that you likely had more than one shaman, which changes things a bit (can stack magma with flametongue/ToW on Salramm). Specifics about the group means the rest of us can tailor the strategy to best fit your needs.

Many times I've wished I had multiple shamans, though I run with mixed groups just because I like the added complexity. Keeps the game more interesting for me.

[Taliesin]

CoS, I do everything in CoS from the room where you can get repairs prior to the whole thing starting and have my pally avenging shield mobs and running back to the room.

What? A room with a repair vendor? Why doesn't someone tell me about these things!

Shouldn't really need it, just surprised I never noticed anything like that before. I get caught up with just following the story that I honestly haven't looked around very much in there. Shame on me.

[Iceorbz]

I put my shaman on the stairs for novos, use healing stream and nature resist. Normally dont have to even heal the shaman group now.

[spuik]

Hi this is my first post.

What I do in Gundrak (not doing heroic yet but the same goes) last boss is park my 4 shamans in one of the little corners to the left and right just before the boss. With their backs to the wall they won't be thrown around and I can just concentrate on playing the tank and spamming macros for shamans. I use 1 mana spring, 3 healing stream, 4 ToW, Str of Earth, Stoneskin, Wrath of Air, Windfury (which is my default farm).

I've only done Novos once (on normal also) and it was pretty hard. The way I finally got him down was keep shamans on follow after the summons stop coming and when he casts Blizzard I just move the guys to his back and maybe a little extra so they won't be hit by the Blizzard. I had to use Fire Elementals because of how much I needed to move. I'm probably not going to use this tactic on him again and it might not be viable at all on heroic, but just something to think about. I have a pally tank so I used Frost Resist Aura to free up fire totem for elementals/ToW.

[Multibocks]

If Im not mistaken, grounding does nothing on Novos.

[Tizer]

If you are too far away he will cast nukes at you, i generally just setup just outside his shield so i dont have to move far once all 4 controllers are down. Just let the magmas kill the shitty adds from the stairs while you focus on the 4 controllers individually. As soon as the 4th controller is dead, run up close, drop 4 x mana tots, 4 x grounding, 1 wrath and 3 magmas, pop BL, pop trinkets and rape his ass dead. Pop off a couple of Chain heals around 50%, wont need much more (i dont even direct heal the tank at any point) followed by Thunderstorm. Its a 40/50 second fight once your half decently geared. If your not, then do the same but include a couple more chain heals. I still drop 4 x groundings when im close to him, but i cant recall if they get eaten up or not. As soon as i ignored tactics re: trying to straffe out of the blizzard, he died with ease. user FR aura to help combat some of the damage.

If you do the above same tactic to CofS - 2nd Boss & Mal'ganis (end boss) in CoS you will have them dead too, although the last boss will includes a lot more chain heals.

In all honesty, i think i do this same tactic for a lot of the bosses in the heroics. Unless they have some form of AoE damage that you cant out heal.

Mind you my pally tank got pretty well geared up in a couple of naxx runs, i do recall it being a little harder prior to that.

http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Twisting+Nether&n=Tilce - Tank
http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Twisting+Nether&n=Tilc%C3%AA - Shaman. Most of the others are near identical.

Keep on trying!

New changes might make it all a little easier too....who knows :x