What groups would you box first?

I'm waiting for my new box to come in so I can start up my RAF and get the ball rolling on my 5 boxing career, and I thought I'd ask what group composition should I do first. I'll be mainly boosting with my soon to 85 Dk on the alliance side, while I only have a 58 dk on the Horde side, just gonna have to learn with the horde one at a lower level. I'm thinking I want to do 4 of the same class for my first few groups, and also not wanting to do a melee group, at least not right away. Throw in my desire to have some healing and it looks like I'm gonna be doing shamans, druids or priests. That being said I know that priests can heal just fine as discipline or holy, and shamans can also heal ok with 4 chain heals or with a dedicated healer. Can balance druids heal? never really played a druid other than as a cat, always found most casters more gear dependent than a melee character, at least while leveling.

Can an 85 DK tank wotlk content without a healer? if so then that opens the door for mages and warlocks, as well as hunters. I've heard dk's can do some ranged as well, but not really sure how to play them that way. I figure after my first group or 2 I might start swapping toons around, but not really sure about that, or even how many groups i can get to 80 in 90 days.

My favorites as a first group have almost always been druids, simply due to having a healer, stealth/melee dps, caster dps and tank all in one class. Versatility means I've been able to use one of them to assist my other teams when needed to get past something difficult. Paladins are a close second but lack the stealth or ranged DPS that druids have.

NOTE: I pretty much skipped PVP except for the odd world PVP, so 99% of my experience is doing PVE stuff. If you're mostly interested in PVP, shaman and DK groups become very desirable whereas druids become less so due to a lack of CC/anti-CC utility.

Not really interested in pvp, other than a brief foray into arenas during TBC I'll do some av's, kill opposing capital bosses for the mount etc, but its not why i play. I did like wintergrasp as well, the more schmucks running around the better I guess, I've never played the best pvp classes in pvp, or had the gear where it was truly fun and I was on the same level as everyone else.

1 pally 1 restro shaman 3 elemental shaman
1 blood dk 1 restro shaman 3 elemental shaman

Four or Five Shaman, is a good group to start with.
The synergy is strong.
It's easier to box everything is the same.

If you want to do PvE stuff, consider going with either a Tank Druid (currently Feral; Guardian once MoP launches) or a Prot Paladin.

Tank: Druid or Paladin
Others: 4x Elemental Shaman



You can also mix it up a little.
More classes is a little more complicated.
But adds flexibility.

If your goal was/is PvE, dungeons too not just questing:
- Prot Paladin or Tank Druid
- 2x Elemental Shaman
- 1x Boomkin (if Paladin tank) or 1x Warlock (if Druid tank)... for the +Spell Power... and not overlapping buffs.
- 1x Healer of choice, Disc Priest or Holy Priest.

I did pally/4sham as my 3rd 5-box group; had an irl /jawdrop moment.
3x Chain lightning makes short work of all but the toughest trash (and we all know trash is harder than the bosses while lvling).
4x HSTs make aoe damage almost a non-issue, and earth shield makes tank incoming damage a non-issue.

Also, I'd suggest not boosting your first team. The whole fun of multiboxing is actually playing the team and its easier to learn on low levels (where dungeons are simpler). Boosting is fine for bringing up lots of alts quickly using RAF, but is itself a really not fun part of multiboxing.

Prot paladin + 4 shammies is probably the easiest place to start. Everyone wants to be a special snowflake, but there is a reason this is the default boxing group (some people say take a druid tank, but I prefer my happy shield-of-thrown-silence-bring-them-all-to-me spell, in general I like paladin tanks the most though). The synergy is strong and multiple chain heals can get you out of a lot of situations where another group just dies.

I don't personally prefer boomkins to try and heal with, I'd do four boom and one resto if you want to do druids (or 3boom, 1 resto, one tank) in dungeons. my attempts to heal with boomkins generally resulted in, first 3 oom boomkins and then one dead tank. Disclaimer, that group was 4 years ago during BC, I've only done mixed groups with druids since.

Are there any trades that each team should absolutely have? I was thinking make sure I have say mining and skinning on my tank (for the stamina and melee dps boost), and the rest all with alchemy, and enchanting and herbalism on at least one member of each team. Also is the tailoring cloth drop boost worth having a tailor, and do they have to have raised the tailoring level to get the drop bonus?

nvm

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Originally Posted by roddo

Are there any trades that each team should absolutely have? I was thinking make sure I have say mining and skinning on my tank (for the stamina and melee dps boost), and the rest all with alchemy, and enchanting and herbalism on at least one member of each team. Also is the tailoring cloth drop boost worth having a tailor, and do they have to have raised the tailoring level to get the drop bonus?

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I'd go enchant/tailoring on the tank (for convenience) and screw the rest until you're high level. If you level through dungeons, (and maybe even if you don't?) the amount of cloth you get in a 5 man group is enough to keep one tailor on the level, and the tailoring gathering bonus is best had on the toon that does your looting (for me this is the tank, always). Keeping tailoring up also lets you feed caster gear to all your casters (important at least until the armor specific stat boosts (level 50?), and if you're using incorrect armor class heirlooms (like say the cloth robes on your shammies) you might as well keep using a mix of cloth all the way up, as you only get the bonus if you are 100% in mail). Random dungeon greens and blues should be able to help you keep enchanting at-level (with perhaps some extra tailoring if you need a bit more dust in that level range. Being able to masterloot and DE things on the toon you drive with is really extremely convenient.

You won't have time to keep gathering professions up (except maybe skinning... maybe), so I wouldn't bother trying. I would however go back and take 3-4 hours to add herbalism to some/all of your toons whenever you purchase flying/epic flying (if you intend to purchase epic... which you shouldn't necessarily plan to do for EVERY toon). The mini heal/speed boost is a nice thing to have and you can level with the plan of getting an alchy levelling kit at the same time. I wouldn't recommend worrying about any other professions until end game, if ever.

Also, while you're asking for more "what can I plan before I start" ideas I'd suggest deciding how you want to set up your teams. I chose to mix and match multiclass teams so that every class I wanted to play would be in the mix. If I had it to do over again I would have prioritized having one of each kind of tank on slot 2, all my healers on slot 1, and dps accordingly. You probably want the same slot to be the same account for each team as well, saves a lot of unnecessary confusion.

I also wish that rather than trying to be creative with my names (I have a WhoxWhatxWherexWhenxWhyx team), I'd simply gone with complimentary names so that I wouldn't have the situation that I have right now where I did one team based on seasons... and then changed around half the characters. I have Autumni (from a "seasons" team name) and "Tuesdayi" (from a weekday themed name) on the same team now.

The last 15 toons or so I named all simply start with Vii, and are generally names/ideas that start with Vi. That simple spelling change means that most any word I want to use is actually available, and it lets me swap toons between groups without feeling like I am messing things up.

Silly problem but one of those things you can think and plan for. (the planning is half the fun).

i use Rod in alot of my names, roddo for my first character, a hunter. My warlocks a gnome named bigrod. My dk is roddk, not very original, but easy to remember. I was already planning on having my tanks all on one acct, and my healers on another, with the dps in the other 3. was gonna go acct1 on the chain tanks, with 5 the healers, but that doesn't seem like such a good idea now, i can get more levels on the second acct in the chain and be more likely to ensure having 1 of each healing class at max level if i get after it like I should.

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Originally Posted by roddo

Are there any trades that each team should absolutely have? I was thinking make sure I have say mining and skinning on my tank (for the stamina and melee dps boost), and the rest all with alchemy, and enchanting and herbalism on at least one member of each team. Also is the tailoring cloth drop boost worth having a tailor, and do they have to have raised the tailoring level to get the drop bonus?

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Keep in mind, herbalism and mining provide XP every time you use a node, and that XP is NOT negligible. I have several sets of heirlooms for my teams and I've found that herbalism and mining on my main gave enough XP to keep her caught up with the slaves, each wearing 2 pieces of +XP heirloom gear. If you don't have heirloom gear to make up for the gathering XP, the toons that have mining or herbalism will very quickly and permanently outlevel the rest of your toons.

Enchanting is always a good option, as is tailoring. This way you can DE all the junk you get leveling up, plus you can feed all the stuff the tailor is skilling up on to the enchanter to DE. Even if you don't have a cloth wearing slave, it's good to have a tailor for the extra cloth at higher levels.

IMO, anything else you can pick up later and blast through it at max level instead of trying to keep up with it as you level.

I like to level skinning on all toons (except when boosting). Its very easy to level it while questing.

Constantly spam IWT and all toons (can) get the skill level up for each mob you skin. They broke it somewhat in one of the patches when I started getting a "target is tapped" error, but if you keep spamming IWT eventually all toons skin the mob.

Ok starting to lean towards doing a mixed group then, pally tank, 2 shammies, a mage and a priest. will roll instances with 1 shaman healing, 1 elemental, and the priest as discipline to help with the heal load. should work pretty good.

One more thing related to naming your toons.

One time I named my toons something like Sin, Sina, Sinb, or something similar. None of the targeting works anymore, doing an "/assist Sin" would target Sin or Sina, whichever is closer, its not an exact match.

Take my opinion with a grain of salt I have barely been boxing two weeks. But five years of theorycraft.

I have been against a 1 pally 4 shammy or 5 shammy group since well as long as I have known about boxing I HATE using FOTM things, With all the new advances in boxing and changes in WoW in the past year I did not want to make a mixed team so I went with 1 paladin 4 shamans.

I am only 24 atm but I am having a blast doing just instances. The things you can do with them are just so fun. Like 4 healing stream totem+earth shield+word of glory and let the healer dps the whole fight with stopcasting just in-case he needs a heal. 4 interrupts, 4 purges, Searing totems firing off. It does not matter who dies if one survives they all have res and I have not even made it to the fun of things like. Chain lightning, Chain heal, Anhk, My minds a blank but many more I am looking forward to.

I played a mixed group 4 years ago to level 40 and I did not find that as fun although not to much harder. I believe that's because I was not used to noticing everything from 5 class's at once yet so I was not getting the same enjoyment. Which also says to me a mixed group would be harder to play these days (Since best dps has changed form rotation to priority)

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Originally Posted by roddo

Ok starting to lean towards doing a mixed group then, pally tank, 2 shammies, a mage and a priest. will roll instances with 1 shaman healing, 1 elemental, and the priest as discipline to help with the heal load. should work pretty good.

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I'm a little surprised that you chose this as everyone here is saying to not do a mixed group your first time out.

Oh well everyone wants to be a unique snowflake. my first to 85 team was pal/dpriest/mage/mage/boom and it put out some very pretty dps but everything was a lot harder than it is with chain heals and healing totems all around.

Got my box today. Still thinking about group combos, probably going to do 4 druids until they can group with my 47 feral druid and then go to 80. my horde team will probably be my 70 dk and 4 shaman. After those two teams are leveled I'll decide what I want from there.

One of the common things to do is to aim for a plate, mail, leather and cloth to use any drop... a good example would be pally, 2 shaman, 1 druid, and a priest, mage or lock. Locks are kind of light on damage but gives some nice benefits. I know when I was doing a mixed team on a PVE realm I ran fury warrior, paladin, priest, shaman, boomkin. Later I changed it up to drop to do tol barad as all ranged by ditching my warrior for a arcane mage... so the team was Arcane Mage, Shockadin, Elemental Shaman, Shadow Priest and Boomkin. Lots of great buffs, lots of potential healing (only one pure DPS class) and it is hard to be picked out as boxing with the diverse classes and races. My current team of 5 DKs makes me fly to instances by not having a heal class (paladin or druid). When I started leveling my shamans I used a boomkin to queue as a tank spot... once I hit late LK content I just four boxed and pugged a tank.

On a different note for new boxers. To avoid some grief look at picking different names. My shaman (5 elemental/resto (IOC and AV)) never get called out when we do big forty mans with multiple boxers from the Zerg. The DKs and 10 box shaman/hunters get called out but no one ever notices the five resto shaman (Ziegvolk, Mellifer, Hexenbiest (main), Jagerbar, and Blutbad) that look like identical female trolls... much easier to fly under the radar.

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Originally Posted by smalltanker

On a different note for new boxers. To avoid some grief look at picking different names. My shaman (5 elemental/resto (IOC and AV)) never get called out when we do big forty mans with multiple boxers from the Zerg. The DKs and 10 box shaman/hunters get called out but no one ever notices the five resto shaman (Ziegvolk, Mellifer, Hexenbiest (main), Jagerbar, and Blutbad) that look like identical female trolls... much easier to fly under the radar.

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Yeah I haven't had anyone say anything about my shaman (autumni, starshiny, tuesdayi, luxori) but my old mixed group got a certain amount of flak (whox, whatx, wherex, whenx, whyx). People are mostly too lazy to notice if the names aren't all the same.