Culling of Strathholme (Heroic) Meathook

[Multibocks]

I flask sometimes so my shaman can now hit 2200 SP using regular Elemental spec. Stuff gets real easy when you can kill it fast =)

edit: also since your tank is above defense minimum then trade some out for more health or more dodge/parry/block rating.

[puppychow]

Definatly change one of your shamans to resto, i did and ive never looked back. The resto shaman can heal non stop while the others dps and i never run oom before the fight is done, Heroic strat was the first heroic ive completed and is now trivial to me. I couldnt see me doing all the other heroics ive done besides HoT, Hos and oculus is the only ones i havent completed, without one of my shamans being resto. its the best move youll ever make, Why stop dps to heal on 4 when you can keep dps on 3 and healing on one!!

Just curious but are you able to do timed heroic strat (for the bronze drake)? Thats one thing I'd like to do, my gear isn't good enough yet (I haven't even tried heroic strat, since I wiped so much on regular strat a week ago lol).

[Hachoo]

Yeah the whole resto thing is personal preference. I personally would never do it. When people say things like "It will be almost impossible to finish heroics without a dedicated healer" it makes me want to laugh. People are doing heroics with 5 shamans, hell some have been done with 4 shamans and no tank! And you're telling me 4 elemental shamans WITH a tank can't do it? Bah! I'd rather have the faster DPS personally and I don't have to stop DPSing to heal "on all 4". This would be a crappy setup.

The way my healing works is I have a DPS button which uses castrandom between LB, CL, LvB, and so due to this, after a couple of casts the "sequence" of each of my shamans is staggered. (That is, their cast bars are all at difference points, not even). So, when my tank starts to drop, I keep spamming my tank button but I switch from also spamming my DPS button to my "all clones cast lesser healing wave on tank". With this, due to the staggered casts, I can now keep spamming the heal button until the desired number of shamans start casting lesser healing wave. As each one finishes the current spell it will start a LHW on the tank - if I want say 2 lesser healing waves I wait until 2 shamans have finished their current spell and have started casting LHW, then I rotate my finger back to the DPS button. I can 95% of the time do exactly how many heals I want (1, 2, 3 or 4, or multiples of those), when I want, without really messing up my DPS since I don't use a /stopcasting in my healing (bad idea for "general healing" IMO).

Anyway, not sure how other people handle healing but for me that works amazing and I don't believe I'll ever need to respec resto (and I won't, ever, so I'll MAKE it work without a resto shaman )

[Multibocks]

That's a pretty neat idea Hachoo. I hated how I had to stop dps with my 4 shaman. Typically I would pewpew until my tank hits 50% or so and then I make all shaman cast LHW on tank. Since I manually do the spell rotations it meant that all shaman are casting the same spell at the same time. So when I heal it is always 4 shaman healing and no dps going on =(

I like your idea better.

[GizmoxLoW]

I have this macro on my dps shamans
/cast [mod:shift] lighting bolt; lightning bolt

on my resto shaman i use this macro
/cast [nomod] lighhtning bolt
/stopcasting [mod:shift,harm]
/target [mod:shift] mytank
/castsequence [mod:shift] riptide, lesser helaing wave, lesser healing wave, lesser healing wave

this way 3 of my shamans keep dpsing while my resto shaman heals my tank, with earth shield and the glyph that makes LHW heal for more on targets with earthshield, i only have to spam it a couple times. there minimul dps loss and its only for a couple seconds its a lot easier than having all my shamans completley stop dps to throw a small heal

[Multibocks]

so is the timed event hard for MBers? I havent even tried this instance yet.

[Gares]

As much as I would love to work with Hachoo's idea I think going resto has pretty much been the breaker for me. I am able to complete content that I was unable to before with 4 Elemental. As much as I hate having one of them resto, its allowed me to do what I want to do. My only problem is alot of the time he just stands there because I have taken him out of the DPS rotation, but I still want to use Flame Shock/Lava Burst with him on some of the DPS race bosses. I have him still tied into my spam LB macro, but that is about it.

[Niley]

fyi, for some credibility(not epeen or anything close to it), Im the highest dps elemental shaman on wws(been highest ele on patchwerk for past 4 weeks, each week getting better , this week I did 5200).
Now when You gear Your shamans, You should aim for hit, sp, then haste, and at the end of the chain You have crit. You might ask why? Its simple, we already have 100% crit chance on our hardest hitting spell, that's basically almost 40% of our damage, also come next patch EM will add tons of crit, that should last You through whole heroism.
Spell hit for heroics isn't much, its just 3%(2% with blueberry).
At 543 def You can still eat crits quite often, while def is Your priority stat in the beginning, once You get there You should look for gear with dodge, its the cheapest avoidance stat.

Now my take on resto vs 4 ele.
I used 4 ele shamans for whole tbc duration, from slave pens to soloing kara. I did most heroics with 4 of them specced ele in wrath....then I rerolled a new tank to replace my paladin, and i decided to make a switch to one resto, 3 ele/dk unholy tank. And all I want to say is what a difference, everything got so much easier, content that used to be quite hard is nothing now, yesterday I ran 10 or 11 heroics, with one wipe due to stupidity. I can run up and pull 2, sometimes 3 groups of mobs and heal just fine. From this point one of my girls will always be resto, tbh I think its much better solution then burn 4 ele team.

Strat event isn't hard once you get a little bit of gear, did with about 3 minutes on the timer.

[Gares]

Well I just completed Heroic Strat with a my resto shammy and I think I wiped about 4 times total. So far I'm not a big fan of the RUSHING you have to do in this instance. The zombies that constantly spawn are a PITA for one. I wiped once on Meathook because I was trying to LOS my healer on him and ended up LOS my own tank. Next try I just left them all in the open and if I saw my resto get chained I just healed with my other 3 if my tank was low.

The 2nd guy I wiped on at first cause he spawned right on me and I wasn't ready, got him the next time but the damn ghouls are a PITA.

As for the Chrono Lord he was a pushover. He even two shotted one of my DPS shammies and I still beat his ass down.

Mal'Ganis I beat first try with no wipes but due the lack of prep time to get spread out and totems down I almost wiped cause I wasn't prepared.

All in all not very hard but I don't like the scripted feeling of this instance at all.

[puppychow]

Yeah I absolutely hate rushing instances like Black Morass, Violet Hold, and CoT. At least I can confirm in CoT that the waves don't have a timer, you can take 45 minutes to kill one wave before the next one -- whereas in VH or BM you only have a certain amount of time before the next wave starts.