Experienced second team composition

I have experience with a team of:
Protection Warrior
Restoration Druid
Affliction Warlock
Frost Mage
Elemental Shaman

I like the team just fine and have successfully completed a number of WOD dungeons. Very few overall complaints and I've spent a lot of time customizing and improving the setup to the point where I can complete a surprising amount of the content.



I'm looking at running a second team and am considering:
Protection Paladin
Subtlety Rogue
Beast Mastery Hunter (/Marksmanship if I find it's more optimized, Beast Mastery seems like it'd be really easy to multi box)
Frost Death knight
Discipline Priest

Discipline Priests are a perfect fit for multi-boxing. One of the obstacles that I've run into with a druid healer is that while the rotation of HOTs is nice and easy to apply while moving, the druid healer design in general seems to thrive in a larger raid style group than a 5 man. The throughput seems like it'd get pretty crazy in a raid (I haven't raided on Druid, but from watching other Druids) but is less than optimal for a 5 man dungeon. I'm sure changes will be made every patch but from my first box team (which got to level 60 before I moved to my new team) I found the discipline priest to be great in a 5 man group and the abilities to be extremely multi box friendly. I'm not saying there is anything necessarily wrong with the druid, it just doesn't seem to be the number one choice for a healer in the current patch in a 5 man multi box. Am I doing something wrong with the druid or are my observations accurate?

Paladin tank also seems to work really well simply because of the constant consecrate. While the warrior has good AOE threat, it requires slightly more micromanagement, and on fights that have consistent rather than staggered add spawns it sometimes takes an extra few seconds to pickup the mobs while I wait for thunderclap to come off cool down. I also really enjoy the flavor of the paladin.

My biggest concern moving to this team is moving from only having 1 melee range character to having 3 melee range characters. I'm experienced juggling all of the necessary hotkeys and frequently have been leading from characters other than my tank already, is this composition going to be severely gimped by having more melee DPS? Is this something that can be overcome with IWT use and macros or am I always going to be falling extremely short and having more difficulty clearing content?

Part of the reason this setup feels attractive is for bosses such as the one in Skyreach which require constant movement. It seems to be a trend that the amount of environmental effects that require consistent movement are increasing, a trend I expect to continue in Legion. Melee characters and the hunter can move while DPSing without utilizing abilities with cool downs to do so. Is it reasonable to expect fights requiring constant movement are going to be easier for melee when utilizing IWT, or am I looking at it wrong and it's actually going to be significantly harder? In some cases I end up doing some fairly intense button mashing to try to manage all of these mechanics while continuing to cast spells on all characters and if it's possible to simply keep the group moving consistently I feel as if I'll have a distinct advantage.

Another advantage that I'm imagining for this setup is that the random "ground fire" type effects seem like they will have less of an impact with melee characters which are naturally mathematically tougher. Most WOD dungeons require constant movement and even with multiple movement binds that target specific windows and swapping between characters, if I'm not 100% on top of everything I can lose characters or wipe. It seems like the melee characters will have more "cushion" which may lead to fewer reaction time based deaths.

I've read a lot of people complain about multiboxing rogues. The primary complaint is that with the combo point system being randomized and the second resource of energy to concurrently track rogues end up doing poor DPS. Is this true or can it be remedied? I'm obviously not looking for 100% of the same effectiveness I can manage single boxing but I usually set a goal to shoot for at least 70% of the DPS I can accomplish through single boxing as being a good baseline for an optimized rotation. Will I be able to hit that figure or is it to optimistic?

Tons of questions, I appreciate any insights or tips offered.

Thanks!

I have a Guardian Druid, x3 MM hunters and a Disc priest and I'm so spoilt now I'd never change them.

The priest can at least spam Holy Nova if heavy moving is needed... I just love the mobility of the team.

My biggest problem with melee followers is when things happen that require you to move constantly. You start getting runaways, "target is not in view" crap and generally just poor DPS uptime. For stand-in-the-fire-and-tank-everything-because-we-don't-care fights, melee is fine. Just my 2 copper...

So melee groups are actually more difficult during movement intensive encounters rather than less difficult?

That's been my experience. The overall answer is still "It Depends" but in my experience, I have an easier time moving one guy out of the fire occasionally than having to train the entire group around the room to stay out of the puddles. [edit] Even when my paladin group was super OP, those movement fights were always a tremendous pain in the ass.

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Originally Posted by Ughmahedhurtz

That's been my experience. The overall answer is still "It Depends" but in my experience, I have an easier time moving one guy out of the fire occasionally than having to train the entire group around the room to stay out of the puddles. [edit] Even when my paladin group was super OP, those movement fights were always a tremendous pain in the ass.

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I really appreciate the feedback.

I'm going to try the group out and see how it goes and if I like it while leveling. Since acquiring my first maximum level team gold is no longer a real thing so I can purchase all of the heirlooms. If it's to much of a pain even in "easy" areas then I might try optimizing more towards a purely movement focused team.

While difficult mixed teams are quite enjoyable and challenging I think I may need to have at least one easy team that's less demanding for "relax" time. Some of these dungeons are very mentally demanding and APM intensive with a difficult mixed team setup and I know that with a setup designed to streamline and simplify it would just be a steamroll.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Gix

I really appreciate the feedback.

I'm going to try the group out and see how it goes and if I like it while leveling. Since acquiring my first maximum level team gold is no longer a real thing so I can purchase all of the heirlooms. If it's to much of a pain even in "easy" areas then I might try optimizing more towards a purely movement focused team.

While difficult mixed teams are quite enjoyable and challenging I think I may need to have at least one easy team that's less demanding for "relax" time. Some of these dungeons are very mentally demanding and APM intensive with a difficult mixed team setup and I know that with a setup designed to streamline and simplify it would just be a steamroll.

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Heirlooms trivialize leveling content. I mean, shit just doesn't matter anymore; complete faceroll. It's the old axiom that end-game is completely different from leveling.

That said, history is replete with examples of our fellow multiboxers taking a group nobody said was viable and doing wondrous things with it. Personally, I work during the day and play at night; when a group composition starts feeling like work (e.g. various melee people that have to be kicked in the head repeatedly for standing in the fire) I tend to move on. ;)

I have always used a pally tank- they are just so damned tough! Also consecration pretty much means I get all the adds and keep agro easily. You can't go wrong with a pally tank.

As for DPS I have had a crash course lately trying to reorganize my old team. My old team was pally tank and resto druid for healing and 3 Boomkins. With all the level boosts, xp pots, etc... I decided to experiment before committing to a team.

From playing pretty much every class up solo- it became painfully apparent nothing comes close to hunters for DPS. You will jump through hoops just to get your DPS to hunter levels. Needless to say I have replaced 2 boomkins with 2 hunters and seriously considering replacing my last boomkin with another hunter. Hunters can move constantly without restrictions. Even with melee DPS you lose hits re-adjusting to get out of crap on the ground.

For healing I changed over to a priest and am a bit disappointed. They can't heal on the move like a druid... These days movement seems to be a priority over almost everything else and having to keep your priest stationary almost always can really wreck your day. Needless to say I'm considering going back to a druid healer.

I'm not exactly sure what all your questions were- you seemed to be mainly asking what people are using these days and here's my 2 cents.

Back during the heroic end time dungeons I ran:

Prot warrior + rshm + 3x MM hunters.

I found that to be ideal for running dungeons. I guess disc makes more sense than the rshm because of the number of instants.

There are a number of reasons why melee are harder. The main reason is the way AE works. AE fired like a volley across the room at ranged is easy to see and deal with. The same is not true in melee range. It tends to land just before you react to it, every time.

Melee are also tough because of IWT. If you press it just at the right time you'll get a runaway. Like that window between touching the mob and the next keypress wasn't significant it will just keep on going as though IWT never happened.

There is also the problem with view clutter. A tank standing in a hot zone alone with the boss is an easy eye thing to spot. Throw three melee in there with him spamming effects and it becomes much harder to always spot the hot zone coming.

I don't view melee as easy whatsoever and I would not recommend that someone play a full melee squad in dungeons. That said, if you want a team that can do both PvP and PvE, a full ( or at least mostly ) melee team makes sense.

I may be doing this soon on my rshm + 2x enh + 2x war soon. Things that I already do that may be helpful:

Create a combat assist macro that works through WoW's /stopmacro functionality to set an order for targeting mobs. It goes in priority like: FTL assist found target? > Tank found target? > Target Enemy. That keeps them from running all over the place selecting their own targets.

And of course as stated in another thread, better to move the tank than the DPS if an all melee squad.

For stuff where you need to move everything at once set a toggle to switch between the primary and group. Like in Timeless Isle on the ghost ship fight I had a toggle for my entire team to move at once together. I found it super useful for that fight and the elites that ground slam too fast to respond to ( those fights I just spammed the move key while fighting them ).

Thanks for the feedback!

I leveled the team up to near max. Hunters are undoubtedly the best current multibox DPS... it's not even close, in terms of ease of play compared to performance. You can spend much less time on configuration and get much better performance when using hunter DPS, can stay always on the move, and have a few other benefits. If all you are looking to accomplish is the "optimum" setup, it's hard to argue that hunters are the way to go under the current system.

Certain fights are easier with the melee team than the previous team, other fights are harder, overall I'd say it's more annoying to get the same performance. At the end of the day it simply requires more hotkeys be used overall to take care of them. Enemies that cleave are plain miserable as it is extremely difficult to get the melee characters to position in a way that they don't get cleaved. General ground effects, ie. fire on the ground, aren't bad as the tank typically needs to re-position anyways and they can keep attacking while chasing the mob from behind. It can get gnarly though if they decide to run off which seems to happen frequently on some enemies.

The number 1 benefit to the group over the previous group is the AOE cleave. Areas and mob packs that group up for easy cleaving can be melted fast.

I noticed that a lot of the issues with IWT spawn from the delay between assist targeting and performing the interact. Basically, it attempts to interact with target before the assist has functionally finished, so the character attempts to fire an interact with a dead target or some distant target (such as a zone boss) that it locked onto on it's own. A trick that I found to work is to bind the key press on my melee interact button to perform the assist action. The interact is then bound to key release. What makes the whole thing work is physically holding the key down for a fraction of a second so the interact isn't fired immediately. It's cut down on melee mishaps significantly though it was tricky to get used to having a key that needs to be held down instead of just jabbed furiously.

Another thing to note is that it is fairly difficult to setup DPS rotations that actually give decent DPS on these characters, specifically for the rogue. I definitely wouldn't recommend for someone new to ISBoxer or someone that is looking for a "laid back" gaming experience. I did get it down eventually after many hours of wailing on training dummies and adjusting and now the rogue puts out good DPS but it took a lot longer than with other characters.

In WOD, and I imagine it will be the case in legion, movement is king and unfortunately I think that the melee team is going to struggle significantly in end game dungeons until they out gear them significantly.