Invincible PVE Group (A New Twist on a Classic)

Thanks for the feedback, Mercurio. I've been thinking similar things and trying to stress test with pulls of 12-15 mobs in heroics.

I went into ICC10 and trash there is just like heroics. The passive heals are all you need and the restos still pull 8-12% dps each. Some fights the two of them out dps my Boomkin. Fights are long but danger free. No mana issues, no heal issues.

I've wiped on Marrowgar so many times that I swear he's laughing at me.

My best attempt I had him near 70%, which was a fluke because I'm lucky to get him to 85% most attempts. There's just no margin for error. A great 4 min attempt is ruined with a bad dance. Most wipes were from stupid things, like botching group placement on the pull. It's an unforgiving fight and most of the team is low 5k gs.

You can chain heal through bone storm, with almost no frost resist, so the survival build works. The shaman still pull 7-8% on a raid boss, which is nice. But killing bone spikes while healing the tank is a mess.

I think it's doable with 3-4 situational macros, depending on who is spiked (if I brought back the elem shaman I'd have four options for backup heals, nukes, etc depending on the spike).

But I'm tired of repair bills and respawns and typos in my macros.

Does anyone have a link for Healing Stream Totem scaling? I've been searching and don't understand some of the stuff I'm reading. Is there a good site explaining the mechanics?

I just noticed that with the mage in the group their is a proc adding about 70hp per tick per totem. Not sure what is doing that, but with the mage they're comparable to 2 resto + 1 elem.

I've never spent much time trying to max healing totems :)

a war5lock would be better than a boomkin. more survivable, and more DPS.

I have both, I prefer the lock by a huge margin.

Battle Rez? Inervate? Off-tank if you need? MoW so your Pally can cast might? Extra hots in case of emergency. I still see a lot more utility from a Druid.

Yea the dps is lower but I want to look at the big picture for my entire team here. Granted, My lock is still a lowbie while i have 2 druids at 80, so I might have a biased outlook on this. But i guess that is just my opinion.

You can always have 1 of the 2 resto shamans go elemental and offheal if needed. My pve group has a holy priest and elemental shaman. When I first started doing heroics it helped a ton having the shaman join the healing if I was taking a beating.

I didn't know riptide stacks lol ...... I hadn't been using it on my main cause then chain heal kills it and I been using chain heal a lot.

I think Ill just stack up riptides on the main and cast chain heals inbetween targeting the mages. If I ever get my whole crew up I think 7 riptides should be sufficient ....

Yeah, riptide stacks and it is amazing, especially with Earth Shield. Even on Marrowgar I very seldom needed another heal on the tank.

The Druid dps is a little lower than the elem shaman. I haven't found a good way to bump it up, but the rest of the utility aspects that shadewalker mentions are incredibly handy. I've also swapped out the elem shaman for a mage, so my overall dps is higher than it was.

Also, I've accepted that Boomkin are a hybrid mage/lock, with a couple nukes and a couple dots. So, on trash, they do a lot less overall dps but on boss fights they fair better. I've started using recount as per fight only to get a better feel for team performance.

My two resto-shaman, combined, will occasionally out dps the boomkin. They have two shocks in their rotation though and the boomkin is forever casting.

It's funny seeing resto-dps his 22-24% while the boomkin is around 20%. I could do that in ICC10, on trash, without needed direct heals other than my riptide/earthshied/lightning bolt/shocks macro.

I was just talking to a friend, and I think it's important to point out that this is a survival strategy. So giving up 10% dps isn't that big of a deal. There is no dps race to nuke things down. Boss fights might be a min or two longer, but they are a lot easier to play.

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Originally Posted by gunsun

Thanks for the feedback, Mercurio. I've been thinking similar things and trying to stress test with pulls of 12-15 mobs in heroics.

I went into ICC10 and trash there is just like heroics. The passive heals are all you need and the restos still pull 8-12% dps each. Some fights the two of them out dps my Boomkin. Fights are long but danger free. No mana issues, no heal issues.

I've wiped on Marrowgar so many times that I swear he's laughing at me.

My best attempt I had him near 70%, which was a fluke because I'm lucky to get him to 85% most attempts. There's just no margin for error. A great 4 min attempt is ruined with a bad dance. Most wipes were from stupid things, like botching group placement on the pull. It's an unforgiving fight and most of the team is low 5k gs.

You can chain heal through bone storm, with almost no frost resist, so the survival build works. The shaman still pull 7-8% on a raid boss, which is nice. But killing bone spikes while healing the tank is a mess.

I think it's doable with 3-4 situational macros, depending on who is spiked (if I brought back the elem shaman I'd have four options for backup heals, nukes, etc depending on the spike).

But I'm tired of repair bills and respawns and typos in my macros.

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Are you trying to 5-box him? I've soloed him about 40 times, but always with 10 toons.

I certainly remember all the difficulties of getting each boss down the first time. Lots of repair bills and macro tweakage. It is painful, but I'm kinda looking forward to more challenges in Cata.

A druid could heal (no matter what their spec), and has both normal rez and battle rez.
That's more survivability then the mage.

Warlock has a healthstone and a soulstone, and more versatile crowd control.
Compared to the druid at least.

Mage is only DPS, but is strong in that.
And has a nice CC too.