General Advice for heroics

[Kicksome]

I was having a tough time doing heroics and finally a few key elements clicked. I thought I'd list them out so you can try what worked for me, if you're having trouble. My setup is Pally, Shaman x3, Druid. All these tips I found on the forums, but, at the time, I didn't understand how important they were. These tips are listed in order of importance.

1) Have a INSTANTLY accessible key to strafe your followers left and right. Follow is FAR FAR FAR too slow to get out of AOE trouble. For me, it's my middle mouse button (you can tilt it left or right).
Do NOT make this a key combo where you have to move your hands, it should take you no time to move your alts.
You need to strafe your followers left and right in TONS of boss fights to avoid poisons, void zones, blizzards etc...
I used to have these mapped to my numberpad, but fractions of a second make the difference between getting out in time, and wiping. You can't reach it quick enough on the number pad.
This is by FAR the biggest game changer for me as far as killing bosses.

2) Make sure you have a macro to heal each of the followers and know them cold. You'll need to use this in many boss fights or when you mess up a pull. I actually wrote an addon that runs on my tank that detects when a alt has less than 75% health and flashes PRESS 1-1-1-1-1 now!!! So I know exactly what key to press when an alt is low on health so they get healed up ASAP. Make sure the macro does a /stopcasting and has ALL your healers heal that person with their fastest heal. Link to the addon I wrote: [Addon] LowhealthAlert

3) Gear up your tank, healer, and dps, in that order. Make sure your tank is defense capped (535) for heroics.

4) Keep it simple. Have one or two attack buttons that also map to the healer healing you.
All I have to do is target an enemy and hit "F" and it does the following
Tank: uses a /castrandom aggro, AOE, DPS sequence for my pally tank,
Healer: it casts a /castrandom heal on my tank from my shaman (lesser healing wave, healing wave, riptide, or chain heal).
DPS: it casts lighting bolt or /castrandom wrath, starfire.

5) With shamans, use healing stream totems unless you happen to be running out of mana. They tick for 200 each 2 seconds. With 3 of them, that's 600 heals every two seconds on the followers. It's enough to keep the alts healed up most of the time. Over a 2 minute boss fight those 3 totems will heal for 36,000 on EACH person, 180,000 total! Or make a dot that ticks for 1200, tick for 1/2 as much, giving you double the time to react. It's almost enough of an advantage to make me want to drop my druid and put in another shaman.

6) Most of the fights in the xpac can use poison cleaning totem AND nature resist totem. Make sure to know when to use them.

7) When gearing DPS, make sure to look for items with the MAX dps. Don't worry about stam, int, mp5 etc... look for Spell power, crit, haste. Don't hesitate to use cloth or leather if it's more DPS. Once you start farming all the heroics you can replace it with proper gear.

[Fuzzyboy]

Good advice - nice post

[Hurricane]

Really nice!

One question, that addon which says "heal ur noobass minions", how do i get it?

[emesis]

Epic idea on the Addon. "Press 1-1-1-1 NOOB".

Awesome post.

What mouse do you you that has the "strafable" middle button?

[Kicksome]

This is the mouse I use. The middle button tilts left and right, which I use to strafe my followers.
http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/mi...s/130&cl=us,en


The addon I wrote myself. It's hard coded with my players names so I'll have to change a bit and post it. I couldn't find any addons that alerted me to low health so I wrote one. It's VERY simple, but effective. I'll try and post it in the macro's and addons section.

[Lyonheart]

This is the mouse I use. The middle button tilts left and right, which I use to strafe my followers.
http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/mi...s/130&cl=us,en


The addon I wrote myself. It's hard coded with my players names so I'll have to change a bit and post it. I couldn't find any addons that alerted me to low health so I wrote one. It's VERY simple, but effective. I'll try and post it in the macro's and addons section.

i have the G5 mouse and it does that as well ( i did not know until I read your post ) sweet! this will come in real handy! ( not sure how to bind the tilt part of the wheel yet )

Your logic about not needing to move your hands for movement is true even in pvp. Also I have my grounding totems and my round robin macros for tremors on my mouse, as well as thunderstorm and Novas. In some of the boss fights, keeping grounding totems down whenever they are up is vital.

Thanks for the tips, good stuff!

[Niley]

Probably best boxing mouse, 15 fully programmable buttons, and very responsive:





I would rate G5 as the 2nd best, its amazing mouse that I used for years until the one listed above came. ON the other hand i also purchased mx revolution, and compared to g5 it felt sluggish, heavy and just bad for gaming :/ waste of 100 bucks:P

Now back to the topic(I'm bored waiting for servers to come back up D: )

[puppychow]

Excellent advice! What I did was bind shift-QWEASD to move keys on my alts (as their 2nd movement) and pass shift-QWEASD in keyclone/octopus/etc. That way if I need to strafe my non-tank left, i just hold down shift-Q and everyone strafes left; shift-E for right, shift-W for forward, etc. QWEASD move my main as normal, and those keys aren't passed. Of course I used a /focus based system, I don't think it would work with FTL.

I use F1-F5 to change the group leader and /focus and PiP (changes in under 15ms and automatically follows and all that jazz with Jamba), and I have shift-F1 to shift-F5 bound to a macro that heals that respective person with LHW (every shaman casts it so its 3x LHW in 1.5 secs on one person). So if person2 is suddenly taking a spike damage from impale/etc I press shift-F2 and all the shamans cast lhw on them, something like

/cast [target=party2,help][] Lesser Healing Wave

The only thing is that the target has to be tweaked slightly different if you use target=party2,party3,party4, etc -- I prefer this way since I can swap in new people as needed, you can use names instead to be completely accurate. I just played around with the target=partyX until all 3 shamans were healing the same person.

I have slowly found having one shaman spec resto definitely helpful. There are maybe 2-3 fights where having all shamans be elemental would have been nicer, but for the majority one resto is great. My attack spam button is 2 (castrandom LvB/lightning bolt), shift-2 is flame shock (I open with that), my paladin tank button is 2, so I usually just mash 2 throughout the fight.

My 1 button has the following for my resto shaman:

#showtooltip
/use 13
/use 14
/cast Tidal Waves
/cast [mod:shift target=focustarget,help][mod:shift target=focus,help][mod:shift] Lesser Healing Wave
/cast [nomod target=player] Chain Heal

on my 1 button for my resto shaman. I do not use stopcasting, and on bosses I take out the attack button on my resto shaman. that lets me slip in a 1 or a shift-1 (chain heal) quickly in between attack button spams to get a heal or chain heal off. I also have a seperate key (g) set up as an emergency heal, it does a natures swiftness and healing wave on the tank -- 10-15k instant heal.

Also I highly, highly recommend using Pitbull as a frames addon. It does three things i love:

(1) it clearly shows on your main char the hp/mana of the entire party in a nice tight frame
(2) it shows CASTING BARS for your party, it lets me see exactly and quickly who is casting what on my tank, sometimes after fears and stuff I can quickly reorient everyone if someone isnt casting (facing the wrong way)
(3) it shows heals incoming as a layer on top of party/tank bars, so I can tell exactly how much the incoming heals will heal up for

I've tried a bunch of unit frames and keep going back to Pitbull for the reasons above.

[Lyonheart]

I wanted to stop in and say 'WOW" 4xhealing stream=ezmode! I have been using 4x mana or a mix of mana and cleaning totems depending on the content. FOR SOME reason I have not been using healing stream, I guess based on what i "used" to know about them ( they sucked) They heal very nice now and make a lot of the troubles I have had go away 8) Thx for that tip. Also I bound strafe to my mouse wheel as you talked about.. again..big help!