Shaman button/macro setups and thoughts?

[Mith]

This is primarily for those of you multiboxing shaman. I have started to level a trifecta of shaman and each level i'm realizing more and more buttons are incoming to clutter my bars. I'm new to the shaman class, but not to the game (been playing since shortly after release). So i'll get to the point, instead of reinventing the wheel, would you shaman boxers please give me a layout or even a SS of what your action bars look like? I know a lot of it boils down to personal preference, but i learn best by wrote (essentially copying) so your input is invaluable for me. I'd especially appreciate what your seasoned shaman multiboxers have to say. Thanks again!

[Contents]

...I'm not exactly sure how one learns from being handed everything, but I'll let that go.

With 5 shamans you will have a lot of button spaces used, but 60% of them don't need to be macroed. Totems all you have to do is place which ones you want on the same spot on the shamans, for me I have 4 shamans drop healing stream and one drop mana stream all on Ctrl+3.

as for various spells we use...lightning bolt, CL, 3 shocks, and a few healing spells...

[Mith]

Thanks for that Contents,

Its not that i learn from being handed everything, its just that after setting up actionbars for more than 7 characters over lvl65 or so i'd just like to see how the already experienced players set theirs up. My action bars evolve a couple times from 1-70 and the less i have to change the bars along the way, the more i will know them and thus the better i'll play. These tweaks happen as a result of natural use patterns emerging, like when i first got Judgement of justice on my pally i had it bound to a key adjacent to WASD since i thought i'd be using it often enough. As it turns out, the spell sucks and i removed it from the bar several levels later. This sort of thing happened with numerous spells so this time around, especially since the whole process is 3x more complicated w/ 3 toons as opposed to just one, i'd like to skip as much of that as possible.

[Contents]

So it's not necessarily placement that you're looking for... it's more of; what are the primary spells we use?

Everybody is going to have their own setup and they are all different I'm sure, but TBH I think its safe to assume that all shamans have lightning bolt, CL, earth shock, and frost shock as some of the first buttons. But the tweaks are inevitable, it's all part of learning the ins and outs of the class.

[Mith]

Yeah exactly that, i should have specified i was lookin for a summary of the essential spells =P



I've seen a couple vids (Aelli and Vyns) and their setups are very clean, thats what i'm shooting for. We'll see tho, i have much digging to do yet in the macro forums but i thought i'd see what others thought before i go and start my own layouts.



For reference, my shammies (currently lvl 12) are set up like so:

"big button" assist focus/follow/stopcast = F

Earthshock rotation = E

/assist main + LB = 3

Group heal = Shift3

/assist main + heal = shift 4

and random buffs/totems remain yet unbound, as does flame shock since i just got it last night and was too blitzed after 5 rushes through RFC to think about where/what to bind it to.

[roddo]

It really comes down to your playstyle. I play an enhancement shaman solo, his spell lineup will be different than a resto or elemental shaman. (I rarely use lightning bolt for example, ele shaman live by it) Some shaman probably pull with flame shock, while some might prefer to just burn with only lightning bolt. So basically like contents it boils down to playstyle, do you map spells to keys or just use your 1 to = bar for spells etc.

[Mith]

I map everything i can to something i can reach with my wasd fingers, so basically

1234

qwert

asdf

zxc



with the red letters being the ones i bind for movement or other purposes, all the others i try to bind, then bind the shift and alt varieties if i'm running out of room. i play almost exclusively toons that can heal and damage (priest, pally, now shaman) so if my focus is dps, then damage spells get the vanilla binds, healing gets pushed to shift binds. my right hand pretty much stays glued to my mouse, so aside from mapping mouse clicks to buttons (which i plan on doing) those are the buttons i use. Buffs, eating, non-essential totems i plan on binding to the right side of my keyboard since they are lower priority.

[maqz]

I don't multibox shamans, but I have played one solo.

There are some excellent addons that help organizing totems. Basically give you a button for each type (earth/fire/...) and a popup menu to preset the totem for each. It saves a lot of buttons. :)

I currently use enhancer for timers and numen for buttons, both from wowace, but there are many others.