Question for pala + 4 shaman teams

[Fuzzyboy]

Do you have a resto-spec when running heroics or do you take the extra dps and pop heals when necessary?

[BobGnarly]

I run 4xelemental. There are pros and cons to both, but I like the burst DPS abilities, and 4xlhw is about 50% of my life anyway. I do miss earth shield, but I've had no problems so far. In fact, I can almost kill Noth with this team of 5, so the healing isn't tooo bad.

The only downside is that you have to stop all dps to heal, and this can be a problem on fights where time is an issue (like phase 3 black knight) - you need to keep dps up. One thing that helps though is that, after a few casts my 4 shaman tend to get a out of sync with each other for whatever reason (lag, cast pushback). After 3-4 casts, they are all over the place casting, which is pain for me having to mash buttons (gonna get carpal), but the nice thing is there is always somebody coming around for a heal soon. Plus, I can kind of feather the heals a little bit depending on how low I am. It's kind of hard to explain, but basically I'm just trying to say that it's not as bad as it seems having to wait for one cast to complete (or interrupt) before you get any heals.

So yeah, there are disadvantages to it, but I've always been able to figure out an approach that would work, and having the 4xdps is great.

[Powerwar]

I used a dedicated healer at the beginning when my paladin was undergeared... entered my first heroic being NOT def capped and with 17k HP on my tank (buffed). The only way to survive was to spamheal my tank.

After getting decent gear the healer became also DPS and now I have 4 elemental shamans that top me in the very rare ocassions I need to get the tank topped.

btw, do you happen to post on a well known adult webmaster board? I have seen that same avatar there too... don't think it's a coincidence

[Fuzzyboy]

Powerwar: LOL... It's George Costanza from Seinfeld - not me :-P

[Ualaa]

One of my shammies is resto dual-spec.
The other three are single spec elemental.

Pally is dual spec, Prot/Holy and deep Prot.
Honestly don't use the 2nd spec on her all that much.
Was going to have her heal BG's for gear, since I cannot force the horde to attack my tank.
Have not taken this team into BG's much.

I like Earth Shield and Riptide.
They trivialize a lot of things which would be harder without.
Going 3x dps full time and 1x healer is about the same as 4x healing a quarter of the time and all of them DPS the rest.
Either works, its preference.

[Powerwar]

Powerwar: LOL... It's George Costanza from Seinfeld - not me :-P

I know who is he. The nickname is also almost the same. that's why I asked

nwm, not a big deal... must be one of these funny coincidences you find from time to time

[Ughmahedhurtz]

I've yet to run into a heroic where weaving in heals from the elemental shams wasn't good enough, and I have 33% more DPS for all those fights where a resto's abundant healing just isn't needed.

[Niley]

only used resto when heroics were still kinda hard in the beginning of wotlk.
I dont even heal now(paladin has stupid amount of hp), let JoL, SoL and totems do all that(I dont use SoV for 5 box heroics, only raids)

[Dorffo]

I tried switching one ele to resto for all of a couple days and since I'd never used the dedicated healer approach with my crew I found that it caused many more issues than it solved (but that was all playstyle and the fact that my last dedicated healer was a holypriest healbot in my 2boxing days).

The healing setup that I used from TBC through ToC10 was:

g: heal tank (lhw x4)
shift-g: heal self (lhw on self for each sham)
ctrl-g: lhw spam on tanks target or targetoftarget

h: chain heal tanks target or targetoftarget
shift-h: chainheal self

[Fef]

Like many already said : I found a dedicated healing shaman absolutely necessary at first. Now that my team is geared (mostly the paladin, but also the shamans for these fights where killing the boss fast is key), I prefer the extra DPS and run without the comfort of a dedicated healer.