Question on shaman totems

[lamf123]

I've been lurking on the forums for a couple of months, been a multiboxer since my first MMO Shadowbane doing two systems side by side and recently came back to Wow and have been using keclone to 2-3 box but after reading up I decided to do a 5x shaman team. RAF'ed a team to 60 via instance boost and now I'm starting in BC so far so good. Question I have is how to treat the totems. Do you have all 5 toons drop them at once or do a round robin rotation. If you have them all drop totems do you do all the same ones or mix it up. If you only have 1 or 2 drop at a time what are the best ones to drop. Sorry if this is posted somewhere but I didn't see any shaman post talking specifically about totems.

[Ualaa]

With the new totem bar thing, I have two sets of totems.

Fire: Totem of Wrath, Frost Resistance, Searing, Searing.
Water: Mana Spring, Healing Stream, Cleansing, Fire Resistance.
Air: Grounding, Wrath of Air, Windfury, Grounding.
Earth: Stoneskin, Tremor, Strength of Earth, Earthbind.

Fire: Magma, Magma, Magma, Magma
Water: Mana Spring, Healing Stream, Healing Stream, Healing Stream
Air: Grounding, WoA, Windfury, Grounding.
Earth: Stoneclaw, Stoneclaw, Stoneclaw, Stoneclaw.

My keybinds are Backspace for the default set and Shift A for the AoE set. Pally consecrates on Shift A as well.

In addition to that, I have Fire Elementals, Tremors, Earthbind and Fire Nova and Thunderstorm on round robin. One click has a shammy do one, next click for the next shammy.

In addition to that, I have specific drop totems too. I can have them all drop Grounding, or do my 1x Mana 3x Healing Stream, or my 4x Cleansing, 4x Searing etc.

I'd recommend coming up with a default, each shammy drops a totem per element. Then maybe an alternate. Also look at what you'd like one of at a time, and what you'd like them all to drop at once.

[Ridere]

Being able to toss down all four totems at once now is both good and bad. It's good in the sense that you can have all your totems ready to go with a single button click. It's bad that you're paying mana for all your totems in a single button click :P

You'll probably find that you don't need the majority of your totems for regular questing. Not sure if you're going to be doing instances in BC as a five shaman team, but if you are, then probably you want all your totems. But if you're questing outside, I wouldn't bother. That's a lot of wasted mana.

What I'd probably suggest is a Mana totem and 4 Healing totems. (Swap one healing for a cleansing totem as the situation warrants). I'd then do the Totem of Wrath totem, or Flametongue totem if you're not specced elemental. And if you're on a PvP realm, i'd probably keep a tremor totem and a few grounding totems out).

You'll be killing too fast to worry much about DPS fire totems, most earth totems and most air totems. At least I never used them. To be honest, I generally would just toss out the water totems and call it good. Though that was when we had to press four separate key strokes for the separate totems, so it wasted more time. If I went back and leveled now, I'd probably still stick with just the water totems and maybe a Totem of Wrath.

Ultimately it's up to you, but I know I hate seeing my mana drop for a bunch of searing/magma totems that i know won't hit more than maybe once (if at all) before the baddies die, anyway. And especially as an Elemental Shaman, you'll want to conserve mana as best as you can to avoid running out.

And make sure you spam Thunderstorm whenever it's cooldown is up, and you're not at full mana! It helps a ton