Why are Shaman so popular for multi-boxing?

[Yixum]

I was wondering if someone could explain to me (with some detail and examples) why Shaman seem to be so popular for multi-boxing. I see a lot of refrences to either 5-man shaman teams or 1 pally/4 shaman teams. I tried out a shaman once (only to level 10 though and I was solo, not multi-boxing) but I didn't care for it.

Thanks!

[Bot]

very flexible class that brings a lot to the table. nice buffs. pretty nice party heals. wears mail so a little more survivability. just an all around sweet class imho.

also totems are pretty

seems like people have also been rocking all druid and pally teams a lot lately too with i think great success.

[Zaelar]

Copy cat factor and easy to use factor combine to form the ret paladin for boxers.

[Ellay]

Shamans are not really fun to play until 70+ when you start getting the gear.
They have a lot of abilities / spells that work well together when stacked and make them more multiboxing friendly.

[Marathon]

I like thier survivability and the fact that they have a good ranged attack. Also if you ever want to not multibox and remmeber why you started most parties I have played with like having shammies in thier groups :)

[Gomotron]

IMO

When starting MB'ing, it is easier to have as many of the same class as possible to ease the setup of macros and spell casting sequences. Shaman are one of the hybrid classes that bring a lot to the table from the standpoint of doing a lot of things well (healing, DPS and even some tanking). Druids are a close second, but the whole shapeshifting thing gets a little inconvenient when you can't cast healing spells in Moonkin form and so forth, at least for me.

[stoat]

Survivability, ease of quality castsequence dps, and by far the best synergy of running 4x of the same class. Additional bonus of being able to use most non-plate drops.

[jag989]

Tremor totem.

[Fat Tire]

Aelli,Veronika and Vyndree

[unseen]

Why has no one mentioned Bloodlust? Huge damage increase on every boss encounter? Yes please!

[David]

4x fire elemental 8o

[Tdog]

Honestly it goes back a bit to when 5x Shamans could just annhilate everything. Yes today 5x shaman are still completely viable but they aren't quite the OMFGWTFPWNJOONOOBS powerhouse they were in BC.

Also if you only tried them to a low level like 10 then yea they would suck at that point as they don't really have any abilites, I would imagine most classes would suck at level 10.

[Fat Tire]

Their ability to do caster type DPS while having the ability to heal. The DPS/utility buffs they bring along with easy management without having to micromanage.

[heffner]

If you run paladin/DK and elemental 4 shaman you can have 4 awesome DPS and "1" satisfactory healer. It's like having a party of 6.

No procs to manage therefore you will always get the best DPS just by button smashing macros.

They are easier to gear up. They can use mail, leather, cloth.

Great utility through totems + bloodlust.

Too bad I only have 1! I'd probably put at least 2 in my group next time.

[Momo]

yeah its the hybrid factor in my opinion.

Being able to spec heals...no worries.
Being able to spec ranged dps...no worries.
being able to spec melee dps..no worries.

Can get a lot out of the toons so you really do get bang for your buck.

My shams are only babies but they are freakin awesome.

[Tonuss]

This is what I had posted on my blog in December of '07 about shaman teams. This covers the entire leveling experience, not just the higher levels.



Armor: Shaman start out able to wear leather armor and eventually mail armor, but they can also use shields from the start. This allows them to mitigate a fair amount of melee damage even at low levels and with less-than-ideal armor ratings from the rest of their gear.

Damage: Shaman can damage mobs from a distance via spell-casting, or up-close with melee attacks. With a group of five shaman whose actions are synchronized, you can unload a lot of damage before a mob reaches the group, and can continue to do decent damage once it gets within range. They have weapon buffs that add to their melee damage, as well as instant-casting damage spells.

Heals: Shaman can heal both via spells and with their Healing Stream totem after level 20. What's more, the Healing Stream totem's effect stacks. Five of them on the ground at level 20 will return 30 health to the group every two seconds. At later levels they can cast Chain Heal, which is great for dealing with situations where more than one character in the group is being damaged (multiple mobs attacking, or casting AoE effects).

Totems: Shaman totems provide lots of utility. With five shaman in a group, you now have the ability to stack totems of the same or varying types. As I said above, Healing Stream totems stack. While many other totems of the same specific type do not stack, you can place various totems of the same element for a very useful synergy. For example, you can place your five Healing Stream totems in order to provide health regeneration. Or you could place four Healing Stream totems and one Mana Spring totem, to provide both health and mana regen. You could place a Stoneskin totem (to reduce melee damage taken by the group), an Earthbind totem (to slow the movement speed of mobs), and three Stoneclaw totems (which cause mobs to attack it instead of you, and can occasionally stun the mob that attacks it). The Stoneclaw totems "stack" in that the mobs will destroy one of them and then move on to the next one. Searing totems also stack, and can provide a nice bit of added DPS during a battle.

With the recent change that allowed items with +healing to also provide additional +spell damage, a group of shamans in gear that is primarily itemized for +healing can also do respectable spell damage as well. The extra healing will make their Healing Stream totems more potent, while the extra spell damage will allow their fire totems to do more damage. This is in addition to the obvious benefits (more damage from spells, more effective heals).

I don't know if all of this applies today, what with changes to the class. But the flexibility that they have gives you lots of options for dealing with many different problems. As someone else said above, druids have probably surpassed shaman since they can do all three group roles (tanking, healing, DPS).

[Duese]

Stacking Healing Stream Totems... basically a perma-renew on everyone in your party throughout the whole fight.

[Owltoid]

All have been mentioned before, but in my opinion the biggest reasons (in order) are:

1.) Protection from fear - guarding against the biggest threat to multiboxing, losing control of your toon and becoming disorientated
2.) Healing w/o sacrifice - druids/shadow priests have to shapeshift, shamans have the ability to AoE heal while being a pure DPS spec, healing totems for passive splash damage

There are other great abilities that shamans have, such as grounding totem, but in general their ability to heal and protect themselves from fear are the biggest reasons.

[KvdM]

Historical reasons probably. Most people here probably made their shaman team during the time that most totems still stacked and bloodlust only caused a 2 minute debuff.

[Toned]

People still multi-box ?? I stopped after naxx 25 been focusing on 2v2 and ulduar (YOGG MUST DIE THIS WEEK!). BC shamans were amazing... WOTLK shamans are free kills especially with all the cleave teams that just zerg you down. However, if I were not raiding I'd probably still be multi-boxing. TBC was awesome because there was no bloodlust nerf, Totem of Wrath Stacked, earth elementals were viable tanks for bosses, etc... 4-5 ele shamans in pvp is just too much fun I'd like to try druids if I get back into multi-boxing.

The ability to PEW PEW and Heal = amazing...

[Yixum]

Awesome feedback guys, thanks! One more question. Most of the feedback seemed to focus on 5-man teams of Shaman. Would this still apply if I was only dual-boxing? Right now I'm working on a Mage/Mage duo (I tried Pally/Mage and didn't like having to manage two different ability sets). I like the damage the Mage duo puts out. I'm only 15, but most stuff doesn't reach me. Would the experience with a shaman duo be the same? I'm a ranged-attack player by nature.

Also, My goal is to get "something" up to level 60 quickly and then use it to also get up a Priest to level 60 (via RAF). My end-goal is to have a Hunter (already have one close to 60), a Pally, a Mage(or maybe Shaman) and a Priest all at or above 60 on one account and then to rotate playing those solo (raiding and such). I don't plan on dual-boxing past my 90 days, just to use it to get up a versatile set of characters to play quickly. Which character (at level 60) would be the best for boosting others? I was thinking the mage for the AOE, but I'm not sure. Thoughts?

[Spook]

... SNIP .. Also, My goal is to get "something" up to level 60 quickly and then use it to also get up a Priest to level 60 (via RAF). My end-goal is to have a Hunter (already have one close to 60), a Pally, a Mage(or maybe Shaman) and a Priest all at or above 60 on one account and then to rotate playing those solo (raiding and such). I don't plan on dual-boxing past my 90 days, just to use it to get up a versatile set of characters to play quickly. Which character (at level 60) would be the best for boosting others? I was thinking the mage for the AOE, but I'm not sure. Thoughts?
Just so you don't fall into a trap, you do know that you can't boost with a character linked with your RAF low-by and still get RAF experience, right? To RAF boost, you'd need at least three accounts, the booster, and two linked toons (low-by toons need to be within four levels of each other, and in the same area). If you're only going to use two accounts, RAF quest, OR boost non-RAF.

For a level 60 booster, I prefer a paladin. Using retrubion aura, you can round up a bunch of melee mobs, and the reflected damage will keep the agro going to round up a huge bunch, and the plate armor minimizes the damage to your booster. The paladin's weak point is dealing with mobs of ranged mobs that won't pull, for these a mage works a bit better (counterspell brings them right to you), but mages are VERY fragile! Boosting with a level 60 will get very slow at some point, depending on how well geared he is

[Yixum]

Just so you don't fall into a trap, you do know that you can't boost with a character linked with your RAF low-by and still get RAF experience, right? To RAF boost, you'd need at least three accounts, the booster, and two linked toons (low-by toons need to be within four levels of each other, and in the same area). If you're only going to use two accounts, RAF quest, OR boost non-RAF.



Thanks for looking otu for me Spook! I did take that into consideration. Here's my plan (tell me if I'm nuts for thinking it will work):

Both my hunters are almost 60 now (thanks for the awesome guide btw), so I've put them aside for a bit and I'm working on dual mages. The plan is to get them both up to 60 as well. Hopefully well before my RAF is up (8/7/09). So I'll have 2 recruit characters that should have 30 levels each to gift. At this point, I was going to start a 3rd account via the RAF system and link it to my main account. I was then going to use the 10 days of the trial to get a Paladin/Paladin and a Priest/Priest set of duos to level 30 via RAF(main acct and new recruit acct) and boosting using the Mage from the original recruit account. Then I'd use the hunter and the mage on the original recruit account to gift the paladin and the priest to level 60.

Does this sound feasible or am I smoking crack? :)

Also, would a Shaman be better than a Priest, just in general if I plan to raid with them (individually) at some point? Which is more in-demand in general?

Lastly, since you've been so helpful to me in the past, can you suggest a decent "route" to take as far as quest zones and instances to use for boosting those chars to 30 quickly?

[heyaz]

- Only heavy armor caster
- Only stationary caster (always good to kite of course, but when multiboxing you can survive even if you don't)
- Totems as group buffs, or stacking buffs. Especially tremor and grounding
- Instant cast spells, and guaranteed crit abilities
- Only way to get constant fear protection without a cooldown
- Hybrid

[Tasty]

I lold. After being invited to a WG raid some guy decided to mention that I was lame for rolling five locks and that I should have made five shaman :p

[Sam DeathWalker]

You know shaman sure bring a lot to the table but I should have done what i did in EQ and make healers to heal and dps to dps, obvioulsy priests are better healers and warlock/mage is more dps. In fact with felguards I am thinking that warlocks is a better choice then mage.

[Tasty]

obvioulsy priests are better healers and warlock/mage is more dps.

Obviously you don't' know what the hell you're talking about (big shock there huh?).

Shadow Priests are one of the best DPS classes in WotLK. And by the tone of your post it sounds like you're implying that Shaman are "best" at healing - while they are great healers, they are also great DPSers in either Elemental or Enhancement.

Please stop posting on subjects you know so little about.

In terms of larger scale boxing I'd have to roll locks. My current lock teams immolation aura does 5000 damage every second for 15 seconds to everyone nearby... now 40 locks... 40,000 damage a second... you could pretty much run through a geared ulduar 25man raid and watch them all just collapse lol :D (600,000 damage over 15 seconds)

/sigh at least I can dream :)

[Diwa]

Question:

In terms of Totems: Is 1 resto shaman enough for 5man and 10man group?

What are the useful and normally use Totems that are still stackable in the next patch?

[KvdM]

In 10 mans it helps to have 1 cleansing totem per group.