My first week as three 70 Shamans
Well, it's been a whole week since I dinged 70. And it's been tremendously fun. I just wanted to write a quick (Edit: it turned out to be long) post about my experiences, mostly for other 2-4 boxers who still have to group to do instances. Now I'm generally a care bear, but I'm on a PVP server (as Alliance even) because some of my friends rerolled to there a while back and I wanted to play with them again. They're in a Hyjal guild right now, and I managed to actually get an invite shortly after hitting 70, mainly because I knew them, shamans in general are rare on Alliance side this server, and I happened to be leveling up at around the same time as an officer's alt, so he already knew me and was blown away by the whole awesomeness of multiboxing.
I've done a few pugs so far. I was worried about doing pugs at first, for a few reasons. Three DPS looking for a tank/healer is usually a bad sign. Some groups may be wary about grouping with a MBer. And I have zero CC. But I figured, what the hell, and tried it. And it turned out awesomely. Now, no matter what, there's at least the guarantee that there are three good players in my group. (not to speak too highly of myself, but to be honest pretty much everyone on this forum is going to be quite a bit higher than average in terms of skill). So that makes things go smoothly even with my gear consisting of only quest green and blues.
Three (good) elemental shaman in an instance together The (almost) perfect focus fire is an awesome mechanic. If one of my guys is doing enough DPS to pull aggro, that means all of them are and that means the mob will be dead by the time it reaches me. And my god! The totems! I have basically two cast sequence macros set up for instances (depending on if there's a need for tremor). My default one drops, in order, Wrath of AIr, Grace of Air, Windfury, Totem of WrathX3, Strength of Earth, Mana Spring, and Earthbind. (I originally just stuck the earthbind in cause I wasn't sure what to use for my ninth totem, but it works really well. The healer usually likes to stand behind me, so the totem ends up being between the healer and the tank, in case of loose mobs taking off after heal aggro before the tank taps them.)
And, being in an awesome guild that I truly have no business being in (gear wise at least), I was able to get a quick Kara key run through so they could take me along on their Kara run before the reset. Running with a Tier 5 pally tank is ridiculous. For the BM run the healer got bored and just ran around the portal on his mount since he never actually needed to heal the tank. It turned out they only had two free slots in Kara though, so poor Shockthree had to go stand in the corner and log out. And once again Shaman Synergy (I feel like there could be a tongue twister based on that somehow) managed to shine in Kara. I was in a group with a destro lock, shadow priest, and a resto shaman. The destro lock ran into the trouble of being way over the hit cap because of my double Wrath totems and racial bonus. For totems I just dropped two Totem of Wraths, a Wrath of are, and a Tranq Air. Which worked great because the Destro lock in my group was almost always in danger of pulling aggro. And of course being able to chain Bloodlust on bosses was amazing.
The only real trouble I had in the run (after I figured out what totems to keep up) was on Nightbane. The Charred earth effect is slightly larger than the graphic, and since Shocktwo is always on follow I found that I left him in the charred earth. I got him out before he died, but it could have been bad. I didn't have time during the fight, but afterwards I figured out probably the best solution. I have two sets of movement keys, my main ones on my Nostromo, which are Do Not Pass listed, and another set on my NumPad (8 4 5 6) which go to all characters. I did not have strafe bound to anything that would go to all characters though, and that's what I needed. I managed to make it work by just moving Shockone and that caused Shocktwo to at least be facing the right way so I could move him with the NumPad keys, but that was a little awkward.
In conclusion, if you're only two, three, or four boxing and you can't solo instances, don't fret. Because it's still incredibly awesome. Now I need to go spend the rest of my Tuesday downtime looking at loot and figuring out what I need the most from various instances and raids, so I can stop whispering the Enhance (former ele) shaman "Should I take that? Is that good? Will I need that?"
