Melee team

[katsurahama]

This team was 60 but it was so much fun i kept going unti the rest bonus was gone. Its 63 now.

Blood dk tank
Combat rogue
Combat rogue
Combat rogue
Resto druid (wtf is up with taking away healing touch???)

I wanted to use a druid tank but i only had three rogues at 60 and the two accounts without rogues, the druid on one of them was already 62 in another group. Make sense? Anyway, i kept reading about melee teams on here and wanted to try one. Why combat spec? I dont know. Back when i quit almost two years ago, combat rogues were great. Remember mace rogues? God i hated those as a priest. /afk Am i dead yet? K thx. Anyway, i did no research. I didnt even level them, they were all raf'd up. Im not going to position them so i figured combat would be the easiest. At 70 i may swap out the dk for a bear tank so they can all stealth.

Nice things about this group:
Its simply fun to play.
I can look like a lone toon if i want to.

Bad things:
Basically no aoe (change rogue spec?) :confused:
No wipe recovery (yeah i can vanish, big deal)
Only one class capable of healing and rezzing

[Ualaa]

Fan of Knives, at 80th is AoE.
That can be Wounding Poison, Deadly Poison and Crippling Poison, plus physical damage.

The DK has Death & Decay, or will anyway.
Plus Blood Boil for AoE.
If you go with a Druid tank, they have some AoE too... Swipe + Thrash + AoE Taunt + Thorns.

Your Druid has Hurricane, even if its not their main spell.
With a bit of dust/powder, you could change a glyph to add Slow to Hurricane.
Although staying straight healing and no threat might be better for AoE anyway.

[katsurahama]

I have a crazy question:

If my resto druid casts thorns on the DK tank, who gets the threat from Thorns damage?

The tank or the healer??

[Ualaa]

I'm going to guess neither of them.

If you have a low level alt and a higher druid.
The lower alt pulls the mob, doing some damage and tagging it.
The druid casts thorns on themself, goes into bear and taunts it with a no damage taunt.
The mob hits the druid when she sits with her back to the mob.
The mob dies and the lowbie gets full experience.

The same druid, kills the next mob.
Same type, same level, etc.
But uses a move like Wrath, Mangle or whatever.
The lowbie gets almost no experience.

[katsurahama]

This team is now 64/65 and it continues to be a lot of fun. Mobs drop fast but i run into problems on bosses that have auras, cleaves, or aoe. The druid has to spam heals in those cases.

This group is lots of fun for world pvp. I stealth everyone except the dk and entice people to attack me. A few days ago i got three people within fifteen minutes out in the world. Some spriest 3 levels higher than me attacked what looked like a lonely 64 dk. I deathgripped the priest and OMGWTF three rogues start stabbing the shit out of him. Before he released he saw the druid pop out of stealth and remove his SWP off the dk. Later i got another spriest who relogged an 85. I saw him coming and used the lfd tool to get away before he could land.

Im looking forward to 80 when i plan to reshuffle all my groups and this one will become an all stealth capable group. Bear tank, three rogues, druid healer.

This group just got to nagrand. I dont like nagrand very much so i will have to force myself through it. I do really enjoy the ring of blood though since it gives some great xp and rewards.

I will probably start another group rolling since i should have one level 62ish now but ive been enjoying the 73 group too much to set anything up. My original goal was to have a group every two levels so i never run out of rest bonus. I have no BOA items or high level toons so i need every advantage i can get to speed up the leveling process.

[Ualaa]

Not all teams are necessarily PvE viable, particularly for heroics.

I believe rogues have some avoidance skills, but the cooldowns are not short.
You have Evasion for physical type attacks.
You have Cloak of Shadows for most spell type attacks.
You can fight from the rear arc, which negates a lot of cleave type attacks.

Still, everyone (except the druid) will be in melee range.
Spam your Wildgrowth, and possibly spread some HOTs around.



For pvp, have the DK sit down.
And type /AFK.

On my PvE carebear server, I've done that from time to time.
Naturally, with a flagged solo toon.
Doesn't always work, but can be fun at times.



Rested is definitely quite nice.
If you can though, focus on one group that is very PvE viable.
Get a bunch of heirlooms, which can then be traded down to other groups.

My plate classes were more than happy to use Cloth shoulders and chest heirlooms.
The experience bonus is worth it.
And the lack of armor/stats is pretty meaningless, when you have 5x classes killing things.

[katsurahama]

The dk /afk tip is funny. Im on a pvp server though. I just like enticing people to entertain myself. :D

[katsurahama]

This team is now 66. I wasted a lot of time trying to complete Setthek Halls. There are level 69 mobs that fear and i never resist it. The team runs around for the full duration every time. Since theyre all gnomes except the druid, they run under obstacles in the environment, getting impossibly stuck between pillars or under carts/tables/boxes, etc. There is way too much trash in sethekk halls.

I would have been better off questing.

Anyway, i also did ring of blood. I wiped once on the last boss because the druid couldnt keep up with the healing. The druid is probably a bad choice for healer when using a dk tank. Now that healing touch is gone the druid has no big heals for spike damage. What in the hell was the reasoning behind that!?!? Lets take away their biggest heal until 78!! Wait, we should probably take away their ability to get out of roots/snares too. What about removing immunity to polymorph? No, lets wait until 4.10 to drop that one. Thats when we'll make them choose one form to stay in at all times, depending on their tree. At that point we will fix the models so cats and bears can ride mounts. We'll also bring back tree form but cats, owls, and bears can be tamed by hunters in arena.

In conclusion priest > (all other healers).

[Ualaa]

Sethekk... back when that was a current dungeon... I suppose Burning Crusade era of warcraft.

Clear a bit and then pull mobs a long ways back.
As they had a tendency to fear.
A shaman in general, healer or dps, could Tremor to break the fear for the party now.

You need to quickly kill the charm totem, figure what it is called and put that in your DPS macro so it is auto targeted just through auto attack spam.
I think in BC, my macro for attack might have been:
#show
<Insert Assist>
/target Snake Wrap
/target Totem Name
/castsequence reset=9 Spell One, Spell Two, Spell Three....

Blizzard balances around end-game.
They don't totally disregard lower levels, but level 85 10-man, 25-man PvE and Arena balance has priority over anything else.

Druids have not lost the ability to get out of snares.
And Resto druids can get out of any root with any shapeshift; Balance can only do so with Moonkin Form, while Feral has lost that core ability in any form.
Not all that happy with the Druid changes, but Blizz wants to homogenize the game, so every healer is the same as every other healer, so all ranged DPS are essentially the same, all tanks have the same tools even if the flavor is runes, rage or whatever...

[smalltanker]

Little suggestion on the rogues is to have an alternate macro/sequence that spams their low power ability for maximum combo point generation for using their recuperation ability. That way the druid could focus more on the tank while your rogue mostly white attack and dual poisons the mob... once things get stabilized shift back to the max DPS rotation.

[katsurahama]

This team is 67 now. I switched the rogues to assassination spec. They do more dps now and i still dont use stealth. The druid is a good healer as long as there isnt too much aoe. I helped someone do ring of blood and the druid was able to keep up the healing this time (at 67) through the entire chain.

I will set up a recuperation macro for the rogues next time i do an instance with them.




Something i'm wondering about is when to take this team to northrend. Should i go as soon as they hit 68?

[Jeremiah]

For pvp, have the DK sit down.
And type /AFK.



Lol!

[katsurahama]

This team is 68/69 now. I decided to go to northrend at 68 instead of seeing netherstorm or blades edge mountains again. The nice thing about having several teams is variety of playstyles. I also get to learn how classes can play off one another. The problem is seeing the same content over and over back to back. I planned to space them out more but it didnt work out that way.

The dk tank still does fine. I have not done either starting wotlk dungeon yet on this team. When i do i will probably use sap a lot at first. Three saps ftw! I will probably do the viking instance after completing all non-gathering boring tundra quests. Id be afraid to do it at 68 with hardly any aoe capability and mostly bc qyest gear at level 68!

As the rogues get more wotlk starter quest gear, their damage obviously improves. Quite a bit, actually. I used to think they were difficult to multibox. Actually if you wait until they get to the target before spamming the dps key they do just fine. Their dps is surely not optimal since i rarely stealth and never worry about positioning. Therefore i never get to use ambush, garrote, or backstab.

The druid is a decent healer if there isnt a lot of aoe to deal with. A priest was my first and favorite class in wow. Im used to using grreater heal on the priest and the removal of healing touch until level 78 or whatever has turned me into a click spammer when using the druid to heal. Periods of heavy damage are a race between dps and struggling to keep the dk up since i dont have a monster heal on the druid. If i forget to keep rejuv up and tons of damage starts rolling in im screwed. If that happens on the priest i use pom, coh, binding heal, renew, gheal. On the druid i cast regrowth, that cooldown spell which requires a hot to be up, renew again, then rejuv. It sometimes cant keep up with heavy damage. And if aoe starts or two toons takes lots of damage at once its over. But at least the druid is better than a shaman! My point is that i should have chosen a priest for this melee heavy team. I have yet to use a paladin for a healer.

Anyway, this group is ok. I know its not an optimal combination but if i had five different classes in every group i create, theyd pretty much all be the same and all this leveling would have gotten tedious long ago. Doing the same content repeatedly is bad enough. Doing it repeatedly and basically the same way every time would not be possible - for me, at least.

The only issue i have with this group is wondering how i could get more dps/dmg out of the rogues wihout having to individually set up the toons before each encounter like some chess game.