Dinged 80 yesterday, accounts closed today

For CoS, I've gotten into the habit of pulling with AS, then when I get close enough I cast Holy Wrath. It gives me 3 seconds to position myself so that I have enough time to run to the caster in the group and position myself without eating the crits from the melee mobs. I use a castsequence macro with just Holy Shield, Hammer of the Righteous, Judgement of Wisdom, and Shield of Righteous. That macro is bound to the same key my dps are spamming. I manually weave in Exocism and Consecration. That way I don't burn through all my mana and still hold aggro.

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Originally Posted by 'David',index.php?page=Thread&postID=211580#post21 1580

A little update:

I spend a hour 3 getting some gear changes, macro and keybinds set.

Went into DTK, had 2 very bad whipes due blackholes on my shamans while beeing amazed how much earthshield helps.

After a while I got the hang of the healing. DPS even improved because they dont have to heal anymore.

Whiped the first try on trollgore (due healing trouble, needed to learn how and what) second try he went down smooth. Bloodlust used but no fire elementals.

Thanks for the tips and motivation to try once more. I know its not the hardest boss but it went sooooo smooth really. No real bad situations with HP I could not handle.

Btw my shamans went from 1k dps(due healing) to 1.8k with their shitty blue gear. I think thank my dps macro lacks since they idle quit a bit. Maybe haste rating makes them to fast. Here is the macro:

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/castsequence [nomod] reset=combat Lightning Bolt(Rank 14),Flame Shock(Rank 9),Lava Burst(Rank 2),Chain Lightning(Rank 8),Lightning Bolt(Rank 14),Lightning Bolt(Rank 14),Chain Lightning(Rank 8),Lightning Bolt(Rank 14),Lava Burst(Rank 2)

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I start with LB because FS gave them to much agro at the start

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I run DK, 4 Elemental Shaman and faced the same hurdle you are facing.

I will say that aside from Trollgore, I think that Gundrak is far easier to start heroics with. Particularly with the black peanutbuttercup of death dropping Soul Mages in the start of DTK.

Before I had geared out the tank, I had to pop the defensive abilities with every trash pull to survive (for DK's, this is primarily Icebound Fortitude). I am still leveling the Paladin, but going Prot and using the Redoubt and Holy Shield talents is key. Also, I am assuming that you are using BoSanctuary on the Paladin.

Another thing that I found when playing my other paladin in instances (only got him to 67 before I rerolled with RAF), Divine Shield as an Oh Shit button was not good as it would dump aggro to the rest of the team. However, I would use Divine Protection (yes the low level one) that allows 50% damage reduction and I wouldn't dump aggro. The mechanics of this may have changed, since it has been a year or so since I played the Paladin tanking instances, but I found that the 50% damage reduction DI spell much more useful. It's on a 3 minute cooldown though.

I am not a believer in speccing a shaman resto, but I will admit that when starting heroics, I tried it that way to begin with. Once I got enough money to gear out the team in all the craftable Titansteel pieces available (the mace, necklace and ring), things became much easier.

PM me if you want more info, as much of what I am saying is rehaching what others have already posted.

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Originally Posted by 'Catamer',index.php?page=Thread&postID=211590#post 211590

the gear on your tank seems fine.
the problem is probably style.

you need to keep holy shield up at much as possible.
for example my tank uses
/castrandom holy shield,
/castrandom x,y,z

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Why castrandom? If you do that then you get all kinds of "that spell is not ready yet" messages, and no guarantee it'll cast the spell you want.

I'm jumping in a little late to the discussion, but wanted to give some details of how I geared up. I have a mixed team, and started solo heroics using paladin tank, mage/warlock/shaman DPS, and dedicated holy priest healer. Gearing focus was tank and healer; DPS got little attention unless opportunities and gear presented itself.

I used as much crafted gear as I could: engineer tanking goggles and titansteel shield/boots as well as crafted blues for the other remaining slots if I could make it on the tank, and titansteel guardians for the healer and shaman (spellpower daggers did not exist yet, but used Kirin Tor tabards until I could buy their rep dagger) as well as any blue tailoring/leatherworking gear that I could to boost the healer first and DPS second. I had my own Blacksmith, Tailor(x3), and Leatherworker. I didn't have to buy or trade for any gear before starting heroics.

I was actually doing heroics with only about 527 defense and 22k hps to start, since that was the best I had or could make at the time and didn't want to wait any longer to try or spend any money on the AH. I started just doing 2/3 of H UK (skip Prince Keleseth), 2/4 or 3/4 of H DTK (skip Novos, and usually King Dred), and found all of H HoL easy enough for me (having a great holy priest was key for me for Ionar). I would just keep this easy rotation up each day until I had more epic drops and emblems to buy better gear with before starting to try harder stuff. Luckily, Prince Keleseth in H UK dropped his defense sword on my first solo kill to help boost my defense a little more to the cap, but never bothered with him for a while afterwards to avoid any likely wipes. I probably could have added at least 3/5 or 4/5 of H Gundrak to the list (not do Gal'darah), but just didn't think about trying it right away.

My priest would definitely get a workout at times. Sure, I would get hit by an occassional crit by not being capped, but it rarely resulted in a wipe so long as I tried to keep him close to full hps. Wipes did happen though, but at least I proved that you don't need any min defense or min hps to start heroics. Just do what is within your ability, and then move to more difficult fights as you gear up. I'll have new warrior and DK tanks in a few weeks, so I'll be going through the tank gear grind all over again, just easier since my priest outgears heroics now.

Rep is also very important, did you do all the quest for Wyrmrest accord? Did you do the dailies/quest-chains for Argent Crusade? Dailies/quest-chains for Sons of Hodir? Rep rewards are great! Wyrmrest has lots of tank gear, Argent Crusade head enchant and Sons of Hodir your shoulder enchant. Where you wearing the proper tabard to gain rep for your guys once you could start wearing it? There is a ton of Rep gear that is great and you should of been working on that while leveling as much as possible.

I have 2 pally tanks one has 10/25 man gear and sits at cap def (540), 30k HP, 27k Armor. Second tank is cap def, 24HP about 23k armor. Both have done the rep grind on Wyrmrest as well as Argent Crusade and Sons of Hodir.

And as a lot of the others said enchants and the right gems make a hell of a difference, I love the 24 stam gems myself I have as many of those as possible and I just meet the requirements for the meta gem, I personally like the 32 stam one myself.

Dont worry you will get there is not as hard as it looks, it just takes time and practice at pulling the trash mobs and killing the bosses.

I also run dedicated healer and heal like crazy, but my healer is a priest and 3 shaman dps. The priest has about 18k mana and the shaman stand around 16K mana and can maintain 1700-2300 dps depending on the situation, one of my guys has a crappy hit rate since that one is the one with the second pally. Two of the DPS at 79 and the other at like 26 so really bad.

Dont give up, never surrender!

"As long as there is injustice, whenever a multiboxing baby cries out, wherever a distress signal sounds among the stars, we'll be there. This fine website, this fine crew. Never give up... and never surrender."

Got to second all those "get crafted gear" posts.
I've replaced my shadow priest with another shaman a couple of days ago. All that shaman wears is either quested, crafted or raid BoE dropped (only exception are her rings, which are from UK and CoS). Said shaman just did 3.6k dps on a 4 player Eck kill.

And just in case of "why do you kill heroic bosses with only 4?!?):
Am trying to kill some heroic bosses with just 4 toons right now, cause am 4-boxing with my wife playing her toon for heroics usually. She is rather busy right now, so am getting some emblems for the new shaman.

Oh, and my other toons don't wear any BoP raid items either. We don't raid at all, so am not outgearing heroics thaaat much.

Long story short: Grind some dailies and buy some nice BoEs for an easier journey through heroics. :)

There is an Elemental Shaman DPS macro around here (check Fursphere's post history) that is quite good.

Not good to be 1K or even <2K DPS -- we did this much back in TBC at L70. :)

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Another thing that I found when playing my other paladin in instances (only got him to 67 before I rerolled with RAF), Divine Shield as an Oh Shit button was not good as it would dump aggro to the rest of the team. However, I would use Divine Protection (yes the low level one) that allows 50% damage reduction and I wouldn't dump aggro. The mechanics of this may have changed, since it has been a year or so since I played the Paladin tanking instances, but I found that the 50% damage reduction DI spell much more useful. It's on a 3 minute cooldown though.

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The skill is still the same.

I had a few whipes on Novos before I had to quit the HC for today. Trying to find the right way to kill him. On normal I just moved all chars far away from eachother and move them out of the blizzard by hand which worked like a charm. On heroic it seems easyer to hug the boss, when the aoe hits move the team to the other side and use the resto shaman to LHW all shamans back up. Had him on 20-40k hp twice so things are improving. The resto shaman does the job. And maaaaaaaan, earthshield works like sweet. I raided with a resto shaman but ES allways seemed like a extra handy thing, now that I have total control I actually see it`s real power. At trash where I used to drop in HP fast I keep high with just ES and a riptide once in a while.

A while ago I started HC gundrak. Went in at the snake boss and one shotted him with the resto shaman doing all the healing (micro management healing, around 15-20 buttons atm)

After that I went outside and gone back in by the other entrance. Oneshotted the mammouth guy. Again micro healing with the resto shaman and 1 or 2 chain heals during aoe. Could have done without that but just to be sure.

Eck was next. He went down on like try 4 or 5. Had some problems taunting him off. The kill try went smooth. He did a growth of some sort. I know he can enrage so I started spam healing but dint pop cooldowns on the paladin. Incomming damage wasnt much higher anyway.

Next was drakari colossus. One shotted :-) No aoe healing used at all! I allways did 3x healingstream and 1xnature totem but it seems that the resto healing stream makes a BIG difference. All the aoe damage that I had to deal with was easily outhealed by LHW on my resto shaman.

Yesterday I wanted to quit. Now I oneshot them :-), sweet!

Omw to the last boss now.

I recommend using the max-range trick on eck, tank him right in the arch into his cave and have your shaman stand about 30 yards out on the top of the mound with the ribcage sticking out of it. Removes the need to taunt, since eck never attacks anyone but the tank.

Edit: the first time i did this i made sure i started tanking him at about 40 yards and slowly brought him back until the dps started landing spells (the heals all have higher range, so it's a safe way to judge it without dying before you find the right spot)