General Advice for heroics
I was having a tough time doing heroics and finally a few key elements clicked. I thought I'd list them out so you can try what worked for me, if you're having trouble. My setup is Pally, Shaman x3, Druid. All these tips I found on the forums, but, at the time, I didn't understand how important they were. These tips are listed in order of importance.
1) Have a INSTANTLY accessible key to strafe your followers left and right. Follow is FAR FAR FAR too slow to get out of AOE trouble. For me, it's my middle mouse button (you can tilt it left or right).
Do NOT make this a key combo where you have to move your hands, it should take you no time to move your alts.
You need to strafe your followers left and right in TONS of boss fights to avoid poisons, void zones, blizzards etc...
I used to have these mapped to my numberpad, but fractions of a second make the difference between getting out in time, and wiping. You can't reach it quick enough on the number pad.
This is by FAR the biggest game changer for me as far as killing bosses.
2) Make sure you have a macro to heal each of the followers and know them cold. You'll need to use this in many boss fights or when you mess up a pull. I actually wrote an addon that runs on my tank that detects when a alt has less than 75% health and flashes PRESS 1-1-1-1-1 now!!! So I know exactly what key to press when an alt is low on health so they get healed up ASAP. Make sure the macro does a /stopcasting and has ALL your healers heal that person with their fastest heal. Link to the addon I wrote: [Addon] LowhealthAlert
3) Gear up your tank, healer, and dps, in that order. Make sure your tank is defense capped (535) for heroics.
4) Keep it simple. Have one or two attack buttons that also map to the healer healing you.
All I have to do is target an enemy and hit "F" and it does the following
Tank: uses a /castrandom aggro, AOE, DPS sequence for my pally tank,
Healer: it casts a /castrandom heal on my tank from my shaman (lesser healing wave, healing wave, riptide, or chain heal).
DPS: it casts lighting bolt or /castrandom wrath, starfire.
5) With shamans, use healing stream totems unless you happen to be running out of mana. They tick for 200 each 2 seconds. With 3 of them, that's 600 heals every two seconds on the followers. It's enough to keep the alts healed up most of the time. Over a 2 minute boss fight those 3 totems will heal for 36,000 on EACH person, 180,000 total! Or make a dot that ticks for 1200, tick for 1/2 as much, giving you double the time to react. It's almost enough of an advantage to make me want to drop my druid and put in another shaman.
6) Most of the fights in the xpac can use poison cleaning totem AND nature resist totem. Make sure to know when to use them.
7) When gearing DPS, make sure to look for items with the MAX dps. Don't worry about stam, int, mp5 etc... look for Spell power, crit, haste. Don't hesitate to use cloth or leather if it's more DPS. Once you start farming all the heroics you can replace it with proper gear.
