cliche: shaman team

I started a shaman team this weekend. It's my 3rd team now. They're fairly interesting in that they can be tank, heals or dps, though I guess the same is true of paladins, more or less. That said, since all my toons thus far have been alliance, and I wanted to stick with that for now, I only had a choice between dwarves, which I already have a lot of, pandas which I find slightly embarrassing at least, or dranei. I picked dranei.

I had never run a dranei character all the way through the opening area (had a couple that I'd gotten to 6 or 7 before I quit playing years ago). I have to say that of all the starting areas I've run through so far using multiboxing, the dranei starting area is hands-down the worst. It's just one collection quest after another, and unlike every other mob-drops-quest-item collection quest everywhere else I've been multiboxing, the quest items only drop for one character in the party, rather than every character. This made running the quest chains exceedingly tedious, to the point that I ended up making a macro:
/jamba-team master next-toon all

Different for each toon, but it meant I could change the leader and run through the pick-ups again on a different toon, they get the pick-ups and it all tends to go faster that way (ordinarily I might simply click in one of the slave windows to get the pick-up if it was one that needed clicking on individual toons). The end result was that it took me FAR too long to make it off of Azuremist island.

Also, it amused the heck out of me to think of the name "dontsqueeze" for my shaman leader. But apparently that joke is quite old at this point. Someone had already taken the name and I checked the armory to satisfy my curiosity. It turned up 112 shamans named "dontsqueeze", along with two death knights and a rogue.

The new team also resulted in what I had been expecting all along - using RAF level grants that result in a team of very different levels. This may not have been the ideal plan, really, but with my two RAF account chains (I had two accounts to start with), I ended up with 3 level 36 shamans and 2 level 17 shamans. I could run the 17s through deadmines a few times but even so their exp rate is pretty low (about 10% level exp for ~2/3 of the dungeon). I might end up trying to run the two 17s as a pair for a bit doing quests outside dungeons for a bit to catch up.

Perhaps for the future the thing to do is never let the toons get more than 4 levels apart from each other so they don't stop gaining RAF exp.

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Originally Posted by tldr

I started a shaman team this weekend. It's my 3rd team now. They're fairly interesting in that they can be tank, heals or dps

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The LFD tool will not let Shaman select the role of tank, and if your goal is to do end game heroic instances, a Shaman does not make a good tank.

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Originally Posted by tldr

I have to say that of all the starting areas I've run through so far using multiboxing, the dranei starting area is hands-down the worst.

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Before Cataclysm hit, it used to be one of the best (IMO) (You needed to know the route around the stupid collection quests). The server that holds the BC content did not get touched when Cataclysm was released, which, to me, would only indicate that we can expect an upcoming expansion to redo (or add to) Outland, and in addition, revamp Azuremyst, Bloodmyst, Eversong, and Ghostlands so that they're on par with the rest of Azeroth.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by tldr

The new team also resulted in what I had been expecting all along - using RAF level grants that result in a team of very different levels. This may not have been the ideal plan, really, but with my two RAF account chains (I had two accounts to start with), I ended up with 3 level 36 shamans and 2 level 17 shamans. I could run the 17s through deadmines a few times but even so their exp rate is pretty low (about 10% level exp for ~2/3 of the dungeon). I might end up trying to run the two 17s as a pair for a bit doing quests outside dungeons for a bit to catch up.

Perhaps for the future the thing to do is never let the toons get more than 4 levels apart from each other so they don't stop gaining RAF exp.

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I don't know how you recruited your accounts for RaF, and at the moment I'm too lazy to look at the rest of your posts to figure it out (if you had even mentioned it in a post), but if you're leveling your teams together at the same time, they don't just fall out of sync like that.

If you had two existing accounts (A & B), then the recruitment should have been something like this:

Code:

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A > C
B > D > E

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Using the above method removes the ability to instance boost, where as:

Code:

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A
B > C > D > E

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Would have given you the ability to instance boost, but not quest all 5 together at once.

I like:
A > B > C
A > D > E

You can boost with A.
As both B > C and D > E are valid RAF chains.

You can also level a 5-man team, of all new toons, across ABCDE.

It you do boost, the dual chains get you as many (or more, if you boost 4+ sets) granted toons on A, as the number of sets boosted by A on BCDE.

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Originally Posted by MiRai

The LFD tool will not let Shaman select the role of tank, and if your goal is to do end game heroic instances, a Shaman does not make a good tank.

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Bah, that dungeon finder is so restrictive. I've never tried to tank with a shaman (frankly haven't played the class much at all beyond what I described in the OP), but I don't recall any hate management stuff that a good tanking class probably needs.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MiRai

I don't know how you recruited your accounts for RaF, and at the moment I'm too lazy to look at the rest of your posts to figure it out (if you had even mentioned it in a post), but if you're leveling your teams together at the same time, they don't just fall out of sync like that. If you had two existing accounts (A & B), then the recruitment should have been something like this:

Code:

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A > C
B > D > E

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Yeah, that's exactly what I did, where A and B represent my original two accounts.

The issue was that I used level granting... well, let's say I have toons A-1 B-2 C-3 D-4 E-5. They make up one team. Then I had another team, say A-6 B-7 C-8 D-9 E-0. I used level grants from 345 to level up 679 a bit, but that meant that 8 and 0 were left at the lower levels, because they were "leaf accounts" that didn't have any other toons to grant them levels. Anyway, that's how I ended up with a lop-sided team.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by tldr

Bah, that dungeon finder is so restrictive. I've never tried to tank with a shaman (frankly haven't played the class much at all beyond what I described in the OP), but I don't recall any hate management stuff that a good tanking class probably needs.

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Threat works different than before. Now tanks get vengeance from taking damage, which influences their dmg. It's an innate mechanic of how threat works nowadays. Shamans are unable to acquire vengeance. Thus nearly impossible to maintain threat.

True we can't best we can do is use the earth elemental on round robin, rock biter and the totem that absorbs damage... unfortunately alot of bosses are immune to some of our abilities for kiting (earth bind + frost shock), earth quake, etc.. the days of shaman OT are over with.