Thanks for your advice all, I really appreciate it. I hadn't thought of my resistance totems. As far as adding a pally, my rationale was this, please correct me if I'm wrong. the leveling to 80 should be easy enough with 5 shamans, right? it's only in instances that I'm going to have problems. and I really, really dislike leveling melee classes. I figured it would be easier to level my 5 shamans to 80 and then use them to boost my pally up that much quicker. At 80, I'd rather have a 5 shaman team for things like dailies(my main motivation for getting to 80 in the first place, making money to fund other teams) and general world pvp anyway, and then just have the paladin for instance runs.

Do you think this is a viable plan, or am I deluding myself and need to put in a pally immediately before my shamans get too much further ahead?


I also have one last question for you all. Should I be wearing a shield on all my toons? All the time, or just in instance runs? having always been a caster class, I've never had opportunity to see how much damage reduction a shield actually gives you, so I went with staffs on all my toons that had better stats than one hander+shield combos that were available to me.


Again, I'm very grateful, I know you all get questions like this a lot and I really appreciate you taking the time to help a relative newb out.