Requesting feedback re: team member reassignment for northrend instance runs

[echo]

Background: I tried running running UK with my 5 shammy team and it was very rough; I wiped way more than I normally do, so I would like to reassign my team members to optimize the teams for instance runs in northrend as I think that will be my primary means of leveling as I hate collection quests with a passion. (follow up question: with rested experience, is this method a good return on time investments? or am I better off ae grinding or just doing kill only quests? which is faster?)

To: Those who have had experiences with boxing northrend instances, if you can help me with reassigning members of my current teams so that they will be viable for the majority of instances it would be much appreciated. (if you can provide rationales for the group composition and which group would be perfect for certain instances that would be a bonus, but by no means required)

Current teams: (all 70+, within a level or 2 of each other)

5x Paladin
5x Deathknights
1x Warrior, 3x Warlock, 1x Priest
5 shaman
4x hunter
5x druid
4x mage, 1x priest

(and a priest / rogue that are basically played solo, but can be subbed in if they would be useful)

p.s. Ideally, I'd prefer something simple like maybe 4 dps/tank of the same class with a different class as the tank or healer, just to make it easier for me to tune the macros, but if the synergies provided by a mixed group is too good to ignore, that'd be good to know too. I've been slacking with wow lately so my knowledge of endgame wotlk spells/talents/instances/tactics are very limited. I'm hoping to be able to feed off the experiences of those who have already been there, done it, and bought the t-shirt so I dont have to learn things the hard way and make changes again later on.

p.p.s. When is dual spec coming out? I'd love to be able to keep them spec'ed both for instance runs and then a homogenous spec for pvp burst damages.

p.p.p.s. on an unrelated sidenote, any idea where is the best place to farm up the schematic for tbc mana/hp potion injectors? I have literally hundred of the tbc potions from leveling up these teams that are taking up way too much bank space.

[JasonB87]

For group comp. you could easily do pally tank + 4 shaman or pally + 3 mage +priest/shaman. There are a lot of combos. I'd probably say pally + 4 shaman would be best. With this you can have them all heal the tank and still have 4 dps.

[Aradar]

I believe all heroics except Oculus have been cleared by the following teams:

Pally Tank, 4 Elemental Shaman
DK Tank, 4 Elemental Shaman
Pally Tank, Resto Shaman, 3 Elemental Shaman
Pally Tank, Resto Shaman, Boomkin, 2 Elemental Shaman

Allthough other various combinatinos are making serious progress.

So go with what works and pick one of those comps. I myself run Pally Tank, Resto Shaman, 3 Elemental Shaman and have cleared all but 2 bosses outside Oculus. In hindsight, I'd probably add a boomkin for the additional spell damage from their earth and moon talent but I don't feel like leveling one. DK's can also provide this benefit from their Ebon Plaguebringer talent but I'm kind of partial to my pally. One of the warlock curses also adds this benifit.

As for dual-specs, don't hold your breath.

And lastly, both plans are BoE world drops as well as BoP drops from the last boss in Magisters' Terrace. Whether they drop in heroic or normal, I'm not sure. Can't seem to find anything that is definative.

[echo]

Thank you both Jason and Aradar for your help and feedback, it's very nice of you to take the time. But I was too vague (what I get for posting after midnight)

Clarification is that I want to make use of the majority of those teams. Maybe assemble at least 4 -5 teams with those people, so that I can get as many of those to 80 as possible so that I can begin cranking out a massive number of easy to do dailies.

With that in mind, how would you assemble the teams so that the most number of toons get used and that all teams are viable? That's where I'm getting a bit stumped. :/ (my goal is to speed up the grind for these characters to 80, not to complete the instances as I'm sure that will come in time. But trying to level up all of these toons to 80 without the exp boosts that come from the collection quests is like watching paint dry, only slightly less fun.)

[Aradar]

Got ya. Well obviously if you selectively quest to avoid collections your group compositions don't really matter. Just go all DPS.

On the other hand, if you want to level through instances, I'm going to make some assumptions, i.e, you want a holy trinity with no melee dps. With that said, you ignore the rogue leaving you with 35 toons/7 teams. Also that means your DKs and Warrior have to be tanks since they can't heal or do ranged DPS which gives you 6 tanks. For your 7th tank, I'd pick one of the pallys. Now your pallys can't do ranged DPS either so the remaining 4 would be healers leaving you with the option of priest/druid/shaman for your other 3 healers and then everythnig else would be ranged DPS. Mix and match at your leisure.

However, as seen on these forums, people are running tank/4 dps, healer/4 dps and melee dps setups so your options are pretty much endless.

[JasonB87]

Well if you plan on instancing them up here are some combos I see for teams:

tank healer dps
1 pally 1 priest 3 warlock
1 pally 1 priest 3 hunter
1 pally 1 shaman 3 shaman
1 pally 1 druid 3 mage
1 warrior 1 hunter 1 druid 1 deathknight 1 paly

This would get you 25 80's out of the 39 total assuming the trinity setup is prefered. The rest you could grp and quest.

If you looking to quest to 80 truthfully any combo will work.

[echo]

Thank you both once again Nice to have advice from experienced folks. Gonna go try out some of the suggestions. But the consensus seems to be a mix of at least 3 classes per team? I assume this is for talent/spell synergies so I'll get off my butt and do some research on that. Thanks and have a great weekend!

[puppychow]

You may want to step back and think about what you really want to DO. If you only enjoy leveling then yeah leveling all those teams in various combos (tank, healer, DPS is basically the best) in quests & instances will be a blast. It'll take probably a year to get em all to 80, but things will be different enough.

End-game in WOTLK is very rich, there is a lot to do although most of it you can burn through in 4-8 weeks of daily play -- namely getting a few (5-8 new ones) factions to exalted for items/recipes, running all the heroics daily for badges/shards, buying badge gear (about 200 badges worth of good gear to buy atm, more in future patches), Wintergrasp PVP fun, dailies, profession dailies, leveling profs to 450, etc, etc. Its pretty extensive and I spend 2-3 hours a day on just a single team and cannot come close to getting everything I want done. Not sure how you could possibly do it with multiple teams.

Not to mention the raid zones in WOTLK are fairly easy and you can pug them all, unlike TBC. I haven't yet multiboxed all of them, but every single one of my characters has cleared every 10 and 25 man raid zone except Malygos. Its a lot of fun seeing all the raids, Naxx25 can run anywhere from 3-8 hours so its not super short - the other two raid zones are each 15 minutes or so however.

Point is you may want to seriously consider just picking one team, leveling them to 80, running heroics, getting reps up, doing raids, etc. That will consume virtually all your play time for at least 2 months. By then the next major content patch might be coming down the road, which will definitely have a new 10/25 man raid and may include new dailies, faction, 5 man, etc. I'd guess we'll see the next expansion in 12-16 months as well.

I leveled ~15 toons to 60 when RAF was active (one team per weekend basically) and virtually all of them have sat at 60 for the past 3 months Even now I doubt I'll ever touch any of them, I am leveling a single Deathknight to try out the new class, but theres always some heroic I want to run on my main team, and then Wintergrasp goes hot, and then...

[JasonB87]

Yea that's the underlying idea behind the teams I put together. They offer simple macros along with being able to use the same macros between teams, like the paladin tanking one. Also with using 3 of the same dps there's less micro management.

I'm actually doing what puppychow has stated and only leveling one group up to 80 because I know once I hit 80 I'll have my hands full. Plus with the toons that I have gifted levels I have almost a second team ready to go if I ever get bored with this one.

But it all depends on what your goals are.

[echo]

See, THIS is why I posted. I didnt know what end game is like, and I just wanted to cover myself in case my class got nerfed hard I will at least have alternates to play. But this is GREAT info to know, and I think I will just tighten it down to 2 teams then. a PVE focused one and a PVP focused one. PVE is pretty simple based on the feedback I got so far, the holy trinity setup seems the way to go apparently. I'll just go and research some more for a pvp group before I post here again for feedback.

Thanks for taking the time to pass on your experience Puppychow, you probably just saved me a bunch of time.