What's your 5 shaman healing strategy?

[shaeman]

I'm running 3 shaman at the moment and at 80 I'll be running a 5 shaman team for BG's perhaps some arena.
I wanted to setup a healing strategy now, so that I can get used to it for when I'm level capped.

Currently, my healing strategy is woeful. it consists of each shaman popping a chain heal on themselves.
(for a start this should really be popping chain heals on each other).

it copes in a lot of situations, but I'd rather get something better. Initially when I started thinking about it I was coming up with all sorts of healing to cope with every situation, but don't think it would be workable in the heat of battle.
I also wanted something that wouldn't require a main character targetting the shaman to be healed.

So I came up with the following.

1. 5 macros on each shaman that cast lesser healing wave on a specific shaman.
Bound to my numpad. Perhaps with a modifier that if I press ctrl they just self target
( I could have a sixth macro that self heals).

2. a chain heal macro that has each of the 5 shaman target another shaman and chain heal them.

So if one shaman is taking damage I pop a lesser healing wave from the other shaman on them.
If 2 or more shaman are taking damage I can either top them off with each shaman casting a lesser healing wave
on themselves, or have them each chain heal each other for bigger damage.

Looking for advice from those running 5 shaman teams for pvp - is the above adequate, is there something I'm missing?
What have you found works for healing?

[heyaz]

These are my healing keys:

F! is bound to heal self

U is bound to everyone heal the main, since people like to tab target or announace in chat that "Zoobox is the main, kill him and they can't do anything!" - suckers.

T is bound to everyone assist main, so I can heal other people or shaman that are getting focused

F2 is a cross chain heal, every shaman heals another shaman. Also nice for making cool designs in towns.

Y is bound to everyone assist main and chain heal. This is a gimmick to be honset.

Don't use chain heal if you're dying fast, it will never finish. I use it if I'm being slowly aoe'd, or against a paladin who has bubbled. For one trick pony arms warriors I use F1 to heal self, if my elemental mastery is on CD

Also get used to playing the softest class in the game, and don't stress over your healing strategy - there really isn't one. Shaman have more armor than plate (w/o shield) and drop like pre-bc priests. It's ridiculous.

Healing is necessary sometimes, but the quad box shaman strategy in this expansion is kill dps as fast as you can, and heal up after. You simply cannot keep shaman alive with healing, and if you do stay alive a bit longer you're just delaying the inevitable. Find a balance between a quick heal and your nukes to eliminate the DPS that are going to ultimately wipe your whole team.

[heyaz]

Macros for healing specific shaman would be nice, but I don't have x-keys or any of those fancy things, I'm pretty much out of keys to bind at this point.

I have F1-F12, Q-\, A-L all bound
Plus: Z X V < > / : ' Home Scroll Lock Pause

[shaeman]

Love the idea of the assist heal.... purely for those moments when I want to heal someone else. I've been making do with my chain heal - my main would heal someone, the others would chain heal themselves, very inefficient.

I know what you mean about feeling extremely squishy.... Those pesky Arms warrior getting in amongst me and bladestorming. Ouch. Reminds me - must get glyph of stoneclaw on all the shaman.

[mrmcgee21]

I have LSW bound to 5 on each window, Chain heal bound to 6. I already have ways in place to target any of my shamans at any given time or my lead shamans target, if I want a 4x healbomb on somone specifically.

[Multibocks]

Dont bother with glyph of stoneclaw, just have one key that makes all shaman AND paladin heal themselves. That way with 4 healing totems + lesser healing waves you shouldnt die to one arms warrior. Now arms warrior + another AoE'r, well good luck. You are pretty much dead on that one if you cant escape. I try to be proactive, when I see an arms warrior coming I try to get a pre-emptive thunderstorm off. If they arent too smart they wont have activated IWIN button yet and you can pewpew them from a distance.

edit: of course I will be using +sta items where possible to keep the health of my "tank" high. Like +sta trinkets.

[Siaea]

I just use F1 to all lesser heal my 'main', and F2 chain heals all. I can also hit 7 to have all lesser heal my main's target. That works well if I want to heal an ally, or to click on one of my slave's portrait and heal them (since it seems like they're in a different order most of the time).

[Gares]

I ended going with F1-F5 for all shaman to heal each char in order. F1 heals main, F2 next one etc. My F6 key is my chain heal.

[Ualaa]

To the person complaining of running out of hotkeys...

You can use modifiers or nomodifiers in your macro's.
For example:
/cast [mod:alt,ctrl, nomod:shift, target=ToonA] Desired Spell

So every key imaginable has three potential modifiers.
Each of these modifiers can be in an on or off state.
The potential combinations look like this:

000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111.

That's 8 sets of modifier conditions possible, for each and every key on the keyboard.
I can see running out of macro's, within the warcraft client.
But not running out of keybinds.

[Clovis]

All of my shamans assist my main shaman and use a /castsequence macro with delays built in.

I target the main shaman and start spamming "5", which causes the main shaman to cast chain heal, a half second later the second shaman does, a half second later the next shaman, ect.

The reason for this is I noticed when they all heal togather, they heal for less because the chain heals don't all jump.

The macro is simply

/castsequence reset=1 chain heal,,,,,,,,
/castsequence reset=1 ,,chain heal,,,,
/castsequence reset=1 ,,,,chain heal,,
/castsequence reset=1 ,,,,,,chain heal

the two commas adds in the delay.

[Multibocks]

What? Are you sure that chain heals together dont jump? I just thought they didnt because the person they hit were full health.

[shaeman]

That was my understanding of chain heal also.

Thought I would just post an update.
After implementing a lot of what I described earlier my survivability has improved drastically.
I'm surviving through being focused a lot more now. Even if i'm doing no dps, folks are so focused on trying to kill me
that they get whittled down my teammates.

I've also seen a minor change that will help massively.
I need to add /stopcasting to my healing macros. i didn't think it was that important but there were enough times that I died because my team were finishing off a lightning bolt cast before healing.

I'm also going to change one macro that has everyone heal the target my shaman has.
I'm going to change it to heal the main's target if friendly, if not friendly then heal the target of the target.
(I'll take a search for that macro when I'm at home - I know it's on here).