5 Boxing Naxx - Trinity Setup - Thoughts

[Pact]

""Well my guild and i decided we would give naxx a quick go on the weekend. At the moment im running a paladin tank 3 ele dps and 1 resto shaman.
the rest of the group was a warrior tank/druid tank/cat druid/holy preist/dest warlock.

We had no trouble with trash, but trash is easy. Also bear in mind none of us had been to naxx before but weve all had experience with raiding higher end content.
First thoughts after attempts were, I should get rid of my pally tank and respec him holy. For one there absolutely no need for three tanks here and another healer would of benefited us more.
We tried anub'rhekan and eventually i saw my main problem. Its pretty much impossible at starting raid gear to control the characters i needed and get out of harms way quickly.

In the end we tried patchwerk as well and he pretty much confirmed we were lacking in gear to continue. After all it was only a look around.


In the end I decided that taking a trinity group into naxx was not the way to go in order to benfit and actually play a decent role. It would be much better to take either 4 dps and a tank which is still to hard or to only take 4 dps which i can control more accurately. (which has already been done by others and obviously works)
We have another holy priest thats at 79 now so hes ready to fill the other healer spot.
Im sure some fights are entirely possible, but reading ahead and watching a few videos it seems that most fights though will require more movement than is controllable by tanking and leaving your shaman behind and using strafe or staying on follow behind another person.

Anyone else have a better experience with this?

[puppychow]

Couple thoughts, I don't take my team into naxx together but split em up and run pugs (have cleared both naxx10/25 on 3 of my 5):

- Naxx25 is easier than naxx10 for the most part. Sad but true. Gear coming out is also better. No big deal, just fyi.
- I would agree that wrt multiboxing, the best comp would be taking in 3 ranged DPS. Actually the best classes would be hunters or mages, perhaps boomkins. Shamans are mediocore imo, maybe next patch will up the DPS but for DPS fights like patchwerk/thaddius putting 3-4 shamans in is kind of gimping your raid. Still do-able of course.
- for starting naxx groups, the setup tends to be 2 tanks, 3 healers, 5 DPS. You can drop to 2 healers once geared up and replace with a DPS.
- replenishment IS HUGE! Ret pallies, hunters, or shadow priests are imo a must for beginning naxx groups, otherwise healers gonna be running OOM a lot (esp on patchwerks). I think frost mages also can replenish, but frost is a very gimp spec to FFB.

I don't really think you can tank and multibox DPS at the same time, as you found on on Anub its very hard (maybe for the adds you can OT them and DPS), it gets insanely harder later with stuff like Noth (tank on adds, DPS on boss), Gluth (omg), Thaddius (tank thrown diff sides), etc. I would say take 2-3 ele shamans and run with that in raids.

Naxx gets a lot easier once your entire raid is above certain spell dmg/attack power/HP/etc constraints, so getting as many people to get their t7 from badges/voa/obsid sanctum is a great start too.

[reman]

tanking, dpsing, and healing. normally, you would just want to fill the dpsing roles in here, at most 2. Individual movements do get hard for later bosses in naxx. Personally, I have experience with running resto as main, and 4 elemental dps in naxx. It worked ok as early bosses in naxx were not really THAT diffcult. I run all 5 clients on 1 PC as that makes individual movements easier (watch debuff, and mouse click that window then move). The elemental slaves' dps were pathetic though. I am getting 1500 - 1800 dps with cast sequence. Can't take down pathwerk with this.

With that said, the trinity setup is certainly doable. You can fill the tank, dps, heal roles. As with all, it takes practice. If your group are willing to spend time and money for you to learn the encounter. I am sure you can master it, given that you have to be geared for the instance. In instance, BOXING provides no advantages over indvidual players, only disadvantages. It makes sense to require over geared boxers to do the instance. Otherwise it would be too easy for non-boxers. Keep in mind that for some later encounters, I have not found a way to box it effectively. It doesn't mean your team can't beat it. It is just that I often had most of my slaves dead that they are not really contributing to the fight. In naxx, that would mean , Heigan the Unclean and Thaddius

1 thing I do suggest is to do whatever it takes to gear up your shamans. That means PUG it if you can get into a 25 man raid. There are many many 25 PUG for naxx on my server. I've taken all my shammies to 25 man naxx. Sometimes boxing two resto at the same time. The resto crit & mp5 epic that you get is way better than any blue or heroic elemental gears that you can get, even for elemental dps. and healing in 25 man is really ezmode as I just spam chain heal, riptide, and sometimes healing wave.

[genocyde]

I will preface this entire post with one fact. I have an amazingly understanding guild that is made up of mostly r/l friends... This helps alot.

I took my first team into naxx10 with my guild not too long ago. I run druid tank, disc priest, 3x mage. By the end of the instance i had 6 total respecs and a new respect for multiboxing with others.

Started out as trinity group, respec'd once to 5xdps, once back to trinity(holy priest instead of disc), then 5xdps again. 300g worth for respec, never changed glyphs or anything but my druid tank is fully geared boomkin as well for pvp, and my priest is actually much more properly geared for shadow than healing. I run 3x frost mage at all times and that = pretty much unlimited mana for my 5 and I gear accordingly.

Now you may ask why I would respec like that, when your running with a bunch of r/l friends you all do what is necessary to make the run smooth. That for us was a 10 min break for everyone while I respec on 2 toons. This is mainly to combat what puppychow said "Noth (tank on adds, DPS on boss), Gluth (omg), Thaddius (tank thrown diff sides), etc."

Thaddius was not so bad as trinity. The tank punt is solved by simply having a /focus macro for your 2nd tank and refraining from pressing /follow focus.
I did wipe the group once missing the jump between phase 1 & 2. I just happened to jump with my tank forgetting my clones and walking them all off to their demise.
The ± charges sucked for me but we worked out a triangle rotation instead of the typical '2 poles' we'd do with a 10 man group. I formed two of the 3 points on our triangle; One + one -. The other point was a staging area for the rest of the ranged to hold for a second at the start of the pull and during any polarity change so that the lag in me moving polarities hit me only if I was too slow. This makes the fight last a bit longer but mana is never a problem with my team and we still beat the berserk timer by a good 45 seconds (we might outgear naxx10 i'm not sure).
Thaddius is easier as 5xdps in my opinion.

Heigan: what can I say. I hate this fight with PuG's cause they don't listen. I hate this fight as trinity cause I have trouble keeping up after 2 or the phases go by.
The first time I did this fight resulted in a /follow mistake killing all 4 clones but this fight can be done with 2 or 3 people so it just made it alot longer.
5xDPS is much easier on this fight but you still have to pray for low latency or the Safety dance gets risky with /follow lag times. We have yet to make this achievement (all 10 survive) but I have kept all 5 alive one time so far while we lost someone else.
Heigan is easier as 5xdps in my opinion.

Gluth (OMG): This boss can die in a fire for all I care. He's cake as 5x ranged DPS (maybe less cake for 5x shaman I can't say) He is retarded as trinity group.
1) NEVER volunteer for the kiting job. I will buy a coke to the first guy that downs this boss as a 5 box while doing the kiting job.
2) bring AOE. Boomkin, sPriest, 3x mage = more aoe than most groups and it made this fight cake. Plus sPriest 3x frost mage = insane mana recovery after the aoe stages.
3) profit?

We did not full clear yet with all 5 of my toons. We move slow and we ended up at Buffalo Wild Wings drinking beer rather than try the final 3. I'll report If I get them down as a trinity or 5xDPS

[Catamer]

we had 6 dps shaman, 2 resto shaman, pally and DK.

I was kind of stunned that we couldn't bring him down. I don't think we used any fire elementals but still, we shouldn't have needed them imo.
both teams run heroics all the time. I think the dps shaman were just too weak, they are only putting out apx 1800 dps.

to burn down 2.2M points you need a higher dps rate.

[Maklar]

You could use the corner trick for dps if you are multiboxing. You just stand in the corner for the whole fight and don't have to move. Should work but I've never done it that way as I always just run along (doing it solo).

Heigan: what can I say. I hate this fight with PuG's cause they don't listen. I hate this fight as trinity cause I have trouble keeping up after 2 or the phases go by.
The first time I did this fight resulted in a /follow mistake killing all 4 clones but this fight can be done with 2 or 3 people so it just made it alot longer.
5xDPS is much easier on this fight but you still have to pray for low latency or the Safety dance gets risky with /follow lag times. We have yet to make this achievement (all 10 survive) but I have kept all 5 alive one time so far while we lost someone else.
Heigan is easier as 5xdps in my opinion.

[genocyde]

we had 6 dps shaman, 2 resto shaman, pally and DK.

I was kind of stunned that we couldn't bring him down. I don't think we used any fire elementals but still, we shouldn't have needed them imo.
both teams run heroics all the time. I think the dps shaman were just too weak, they are only putting out apx 1800 dps.

to burn down 2.2M points you need a higher dps rate.

If you are running 6xshaman for dps I feel sorry for you until next patch. Under 2K dps on a raid boss is just sad. It's been said before I'm sure a million times that ele shaman are just under par right now. It's funny the shaman bring all of the most important buffs in a raid, this means that they themselves don't scale in a raid environment and most ele shaman I've seen run about the same DPS in heroics as they do 10/25 content. Running 5xDPS as moonkin,sPriest,3xmage my 5 run a total of about 14k DPS.

Usually the 3 mages fall the farthest behind with me not able to catch procs such as instant fireball or missle barrage or instant pyroblast. Whatever spec they are the mages have something annoying to watch for. Despite that if they fall under 2500dps on a tank and spank I'm disappointed in myself. Moonkin are easy win at 3k DPS and sPriest seems to be really dependent on me keeping the DoT rotations perfect.

The mages will always get to me a little since the only other mage in our guild has no problem closing 3.7-4k DPS with sPriest and Moonkin buffs yet mine are over 1k DPS behind him at similar gear.

I hope they bring ele shaman up to snuff in this next patch for you guys.

Edit: I thought I should note all those DPS numbers are with a resto shaman for totems/heroism. Take the shaman away from me and I drop from ~3K avg dps to 2.6-2.7k Shaman are almost worth half a toon worth of dmg buffs to my crew.

[Owltoid]

Sorry, I'm a noob. What is a trinity setup? Healer/Tank/DPS? Or three DPS? Or something else?

[Hachoo]

Its the holy trinity of 5 mans:

tank
3 dps
healer