Converting to trinity set. Would love some advice.

Righto.

I'm loathe to actually post this, but my problem here is driving me crazy and I could really do with some advice.
I've searched the forum several times and can only come across snippits here and there that apply.

I have a five box crew. Pally tank and four Elemental Shaman. They only made 80 about six weeks ago if that
and have been working through heroics piece by piece. At the moment I have the Shaman all nuke spec and
have been using a combined set of all four shaman doing "Oh noes" spam heals when required. Usually only
needed on bosses. However, this is terribly inefficient for both dps and healing. Full stop.

Plus, this can make group damage fights, for example, the second boss in Gundrak rather problematic,
due to not quite having the group heals to do it.

I have one of the Shaman dual specced to Heal but holy hell, I seem to just plain suck at this harder than
I thought would be humanly possible. +2k healing, it just does not cut it when it comes to group healing.

My question is, what is the best way to handle a Shaman group healing in a five man situation?
And more to the point, from a macro point of view, what would be a good way to set up?

Should I have four separate chain heal macro's, targeting each group member one by one?
One single chain into the group does not do enough good in a tight situation.

Have I just become complacent after spamming the same dps setup for so long while levelling the toons
and just need to suck it up and get my shyt together?

Should I just accept that mana is now going to be an issue for the group where it never has in the past?

Would I be correct in saying that the healer will have to spam heal as much as the dps does?
Is there anywhere I can be directed to where this sort of issue has been addressed before?

Now I also have a decently geared Priest @ level eighty as well, but in a perfect world I would
rather keep the shaman together, to keep their gear and rep at the same level. If that is possible.
I am well aware of the decent aoe healing that a priest can do, and I have run the priest with this group
several times with moderate success. As I said, I would like to keep the shaman together.

Any assistance would be appreciated.

Take this with a grain of salt... I've not taken my team into heroics yet.

I was running 5x Elemental Shamans, but have switched to 1x Prot Paladin + 4x Elemental Shamans.
One of my shammies has dual spec. I believe they are/will be 54/17/0 and 0/15/56, they're mid 70's so half a dozen points short each.

For questing and such, I just go with 4x Elemental and 1x Prot and blow stuff up.
Play the prot as the main, and the elementals as the slaves who assist party leader.
Have considered moving to the "target=targettarget" system, but haven't yet.

For more challenging content the one shammy goes Resto, which gives me Prot Tank, Resto Healer and 3x Elemental DPS.
Since mana totems don't stack, and the resto's mana totems are superior this toon always drops the Mana Spring.
Even as Elemental, for simplicity this shammy is the one that drops the mana totem.
The Elementals drop either 3x Healing or 1x Healing and 2x Cleansing depending on the situation.

I drop a lot of Grounding Totems. All of the shammies have the talent to knock 2 seconds off of the re-use time.
In theory, I'm negating a ranged spell every 2 seconds, but non-targeted AoE's like Flamestrike or Blizzard are not absorbed.

The Paladin is exceptional at holding threat against melee range opponents.

All of my Elemental Shammies have their dps set up, to attack the paladin's target and either cast offensive if the target is [harm] or healing if the target is [help].
Chain Heal assists party 1, so whatever my current leader (almost always Paladin) is targeting is the target of chain heal.
The syntax I use is:

#show Chain Heal
/assist [target=party1target]
/cast [help] Chain Heal; [help, target=targettarget] Chain Heal; [target=party1] Chain Heal

So if my Paladin is targeting a friendly, then the first condition is true and every shammy Chain Heals the target of my paladin.
If that target is hostile then the second condition comes into effect - is the target of the paladin's target friendly? If yes, they're the recipient.
Honestly, this second condition applies the most, because when my Paladin is killing something its almost always attacking the pally or a shammy.
The last condition defaults to heal the current leader.
I use a Party Leader system, where the current active toon is Party1 (group leader).

Resto shammy has the same Lesser Healing / Lightning Bolt macro as the Elemental Shammies.
However, her LB, Flame Shock, LvB and Chain Lightnings only fire off with modifier keys, so they don't conflict with her heals.
I have Healing Word and Riptide on G15 keys, specifically able to heal Party 1 through Party 5, now that party order is fixed according to invite order.
I also have a Healing Word macro which targets the same as the above Chain Heal macro.

I've not done heroics with this team configuration.
However running 4 druids and using this syntax with Rejuvenation, Regrowth and Lifebloom.. they're pretty impervious to damage.
As far as AoE healing, a resto has Healing Stream Totem and Chain Heal - which as far as raid heals go, is very effective.

When I went to heroics initially with DK, 4 Shaman, I respecced one to Resto and tried the 3 Elemental and 1 Resto route.

This worked well enough, but when I found that multiple Chain Heals were necessary in some boss fights, and DPS would stop anyways, making things very inefficient.

So I respecced them all to elemental and set up 2 healing keys, one for each shaman to Lesser Healing Wave the tank and one to Chain Heal themselves with a /stopcasting in front of it (although I am thinking of removing the /stopcasting portion).

LHW casts much faster and uses less mana and is typically more than enough to heal the tank (when multiplied x 4) for trash or boss fights. I didn't try to finesse the LHW, I just cast it by all 4 shaman on the tank without regard to overhealing. Same with the CH; I would cast CH on all 4 shaman at the same time. The Chain Heals x 4 are overkill for most AE boss effects, but it keeps the team alive.

Initially, I found that I was 15% mana or less on boss fights, primarily due to poor +spell gear but now that my group is almost completely maxxed in slots for single group content, I rarely drop below 50% in boss fights and I plow through the fights in probably half the time.

The AE healing of shaman is not great, particularly compared to Priests, which is why you typically have to stack multiple Chain Heals. But if you are going to do that, I found that making them all Elemental Spec offset the DPS loss with CHx4 with better DPS when not healing.

Of course, YMMV.

I'll second with Gomotron said, works for me too. One heal key for 4x LHW on the tank, if anyone else needs heals all the shammies chain heal, I don't bother trying to micromanage. It helps that my pally has several pieces of Ulduar 10 gear and one or two Naxx25 items, but all the shammies are in crafted/heroism badge/heroic 5-man gear (and all 5 started out with quest blues and crafted items). Don't be shy about wearing the leather resto druid or even cloth pieces that drop, they're better itemized in many cases for ele sham dps (haste/spell power is generally better than SP/crit/mp5).

Don't forget to drop resist totems -- 2nd boss in DTK for example, frost resist totem helps a lot with the healing, and nature resist helps with 2nd boss Gundrak. Also magma totems can get you around mechanics like the ice block the first boss in UK does. One shammy gets frozen, just have the rest drop magma and you're back to full strength very fast. Positioning matters too; most of them I leave the shams bunched up, but sometimes they need to be spread out.

In the PvE forum there's a thread with movies of a DK/4shammy team running all the heroics, these are excellent for tips on how to do each fight.

I have the same group and I run heroics as 1 tank 4x Elemental also. But I have more keys:

All Heal Target of Target
All Chain Heal Self
All LHW Player 1 (Tank) (In these, the paladin also casts Cleanse on that toon)
All LHW Player 2
All LHW Player 3
All LHW Player 4
All LHW Player 5

I find the key to healing succesfully is to make sure your dps and tank don't need attention. 1 button macro for tanking and dps leaves you free to focus on healing or movement. I play with 1 resto shammy and I have a bunch of different heals bound to heal each party member. Having a g11 keyboard with the extra macro keys is good for this. Don't forget on that second gundrak boss that the quicker u move from those purple spots the less damage you need to heal. I usually don't heal at all in that phase. Just nuke it down and move as neccesary. Heal up in collosus phase with heal self key on all chars. Hope this helps

edit: using bloodlust and fire elementals on elemental boss phase will also help. On my first kill my pala solo'd the last 25% and my pala was quite undergeared then.

I don't run a resto shaman (4x elemental, as others here), and I don't believe it's a big hinderance.

The problem I found with a resto shaman is that most of the time it was just sitting there. That cut my DPS down quite a bit, which meant stuff dying slower, which meant more healing, ... On balance, I just didn't feel that I was as efficient this way, and 4x elemental shaman with lhw is good healing and not really all that mana-intensive for the shaman (note: I take the mana regen/reduction talents and judge wisdom tho).

I have the following:

• 1 key that is 4xlhw on tank. If the tank's target is friendly, 4xlhw on target instead. I sometimes use this if one shaman needs a lot of heals, or somebody outside my group in bgs, etc.
• 1 key that is 4xchain heal. I use this most often to heal the shaman.
• 4 more keys, one for each shaman, that focus 4x lhw on them. For those really bad moments when one is going down and chain heal is too slow. I rarely use this.

My paladin has around 32k hps so it makes it pretty easy to weather a bit if I need to heal the shaman. However, I feel that a big priority with this type of setup is to put yourself in positions, or work out strategies such that the shaman don't take a lot of damage. Keeping the damage on the tank as much as possible helps all boxing.

To use the fight you mention as an example, NR totem helps a TON as do a lot of healing streams. I gave up trying to move out the slime once I realized that that combo combined with a chain heal here and there keeps them topped off pretty good.

Anyway, that's how I do it and it works really well.

Yeh after reading through what people here say I think it just comes down to personal preference. I wouldnt want to be without earth shield as it just heals for insane amounts without any interaction at all. I also believe that having 3 dps that are dps'ing all the time is better than 4 dps that have to stop and heal occasionally. Obviously 4 dps will become better as the tank gets more gear and requires less healing though.

My team basically has their dps on buttons 1-4.
1 is Lightning Bolt.
2 is Lava Burst.
3 is Flame Shock.
4 is Chain Lighting.

The paladin has a Holy Shield, Hammer of the Righteous, Judgement macro on keys 1-4.

When my fourth shammy is resto, her 1-4 keys only fire off with mod:alt.
Basically if I press 1-4 with ALT she will also cast that spell.
Clicking it without ALT and the resto will not cast any dps.
So if I need to heal, I can freely mash buttons 1-4, while free to heal without DPS casting as she wants to get a heal off.
If heals are ok, but I want her resto instead of a 4th Elemental, Alt 1-4 and she joins in the nukage.

There are a lot of options to consider.
Find something that works for you.

Thanks for the response everyone. I appreciate it.

To just clarify somewhat, my shams are absolutely nuking heroics. My Pally is geared pretty well, has well over 30k HP unbuffed. I click tank.
The 4 x ele dps works a treat, they are all in full heroic/badge gear and tote about 2.3k spell.
But I really don't like stopping dps to heal. I just think that having a dedicated healer would "appear" to be the best way to go about it.
It's interesting that others are doing as I have been and think its fine. Dont get me wrong, the 4 x stop and chain heal works well, but
it reduces dps....considerably. Drags out fights longer and can create issues.

With the four dps setup, they all pull well over 3k dps on bosses. For example, can nuke the last VH boss before the first belly port. I like being able to do that.

Strangely enough, with the 3x ele, 1 x resto setup, I just equalled my fastest Trollgore kill......go figure. Sooooo crit based, its really hard to get a figure on
your average dps.

I was thinking that having a dedicated healer in the group would make the more problematic instances easier in some ways.

I guess not. From the responses here I guess it all comes down to your play style and what you are comfortable with.

for me pesonally I found heroics too hard not to have a resto shaman when I just started doing heroics.
I had to use a large amount of crowd control such as hexing as much as possible.
after you get geared out you will find you aren't hexing anymore and the need for the resto shaman gets deminished to the point you don't need him anymore ( just 4x healing streams seems to do most of the work ).

while I had a resto I usually found that he could top off the team by just doing a chain heal on himself ( usually didn't need the big panic where everyone casts chain heal ).
the resto pretty much just stood there throwing light heals on the tank until something big happened.
I had used to use a two button type of system where one button was dps an all except the healer and the second button was the same dps except the resto was doing heals on the tank.

good luck