Heroic vs Normal with leveling toons :)

[crowdx]

Hi all,
so as you may have read in another thread I just posted, I am on the leveling path again. I have 3 shammies, a druid and a priest in a 5 man team that I am going to level to 80. So my question is about dungeons, I tried one yesterday and due to being totally undergeared only tried to clear the trash up to the first boss in UK, 3 of the team had just dinged 68. If I hit level 72 and have my gear sorted by that point to pretty much all green Northrend gear, what would the level of difficulty be vs doing heroics at 80? I know it is hard to judge but I am wondering how much higher should my team be to alow for a nice easy run through the dungeons as I level. It will also be cool to get the dungeon quests completed as I level too and gain the extra Xp and some blues.
Anyone got some insight?

[jimbobobb]

Hi all,
so as you may have read in another thread I just posted, I am on the leveling path again. I have 3 shammies, a druid and a priest in a 5 man team that I am going to level to 80. So my question is about dungeons, I tried one yesterday and due to being totally undergeared only tried to clear the trash up to the first boss in UK, 3 of the team had just dinged 68. If I hit level 72 and have my gear sorted by that point to pretty much all green Northrend gear, what would the level of difficulty be vs doing heroics at 80? I know it is hard to judge but I am wondering how much higher should my team be to alow for a nice easy run through the dungeons as I level. It will also be cool to get the dungeon quests completed as I level too and gain the extra Xp and some blues.
Anyone got some insight?

Incoming wall of text - skip to last part to get it all in 3 sentences.

When wrath first came out, I did all of the dungeons at level. This on my freshly 70 two weeks before wrath came out team. So they were not in spectacular gear - all quest greens and blues. This was also my first boxed team, so I was new to lots of stuff and still wasn't very good at it. As I went through northrend getting more quests and upgrades, I had no problems at all doing any of the dungeons at level except Anub Arak in azjol nerub, which took me quite a bit to learn and really sharpened my skills as a boxer I believe.

When I dinged 80 in my fresh greens and blues, dtk, cos, and gundrak (skipping frost guy) were what I farmed to start. They were extremely easy. Eventually as I got more confident in my skills as a boxer, I did all the rest.

Flash forward to my new 5 druid group that I just brought up. I did the daily random every day because it rewards 2 emblems even if you're sub 80, and never got a dungeon I couldn't do. Once they dinged 80, I also had pretty much no problem doing any random heroic I got in just my blues and a few crafted purples because I know the dungeons so well now, I know exaclty what has to happen even if my gear is garbage.

If you know the dungeons, it'll make up quite a bit for gear. I would not suspect that you would have any trouble doing dungeons at level in northrend. And since you already have a team at 80 and now how heroics are, I would bet you won't have any problems once this new team is 80 jumping into heroics.

[crowdx]

Thanks for the input , my thought really for doing some dungeons while leveling is that I do not want to spend a lot of time doing a dungeon and really only want to take care of the quests in the dungeons.
I am hoping that if I wait till about 71 - 72 for UK then I will be over level enough to make it feel like I am running an heroic in blues and epics.
With this team having a priest healing (currently speced Disc but may change that, not sure) and a Druid tanking and also using totems with my 3 shammies, I have much to learn in the config which I want to have down by the time I hit 80, unlike my first team which I wiped multiple times on the first dungeons I did with them, even wiped UK reg on my first tries at 80

[Zappy]

The biggest difference will be your hit rating. At 68, you lose a lot of DPS on the bosses and some trash in UK from lots of misses which makes all the fights a lot longer than they should be. Once you get to the 72, you should be hitting a lot more which and have small stat increases that you'll notice.

Without a question, it'll become a lot easier, I remember trying UK on my shammys @ 70, and got smoked hard. At 72, it was a little easier, but still not doable. At 73, I could clear most of it, but still had to get another level before I finally cleared it. Part of that had to do with group makeup as well.

As far as your group make up goes, heroics will start off hard, but as you get a little bit of gear, you'll quickly outgear them. I was running 5 druids (bear,3xboomkin,tree) through heroics in pretty low gear (iLvl 187 and lower gear), and was managing just fine. Since you have 3 shammys in your group, @ 80 you'll be able to set 3 focus targets as well, and Hex them through each trash pull making it a lot easier.

[crowdx]

I am not understanding your comment about 3 focus targets? Are you saying that I should set 3 macros, one for each shammy and use them to hex the current selected target of the tank? Just clarifying

[Zappy]

When I need to CC on my team for pve, i use focus.

For example, on my DK/Ret team, I use F7-F10 to set focus targets. (My shammys use F6-F10)

So when I press F7, my DK does:
/script SetRaidTarget(target, 1)

And one of the paladins is bound to F7 to do an assist and /focus

This makes it quick to simply target a mob, hit F7, target next mob, F8, etc.

Then after I mark each of the targets, I have another macro that does /cast [@focus] Repentance, so when I start the pull all the targets are CC'd. You can do the same thing with Hex, polymorph, etc.

[crowdx]

So basically what the first part of your setup is doing is setting skull, X , moon etc, then the second part is where you actually select the target and then use focus to have the toon CC the target depending on which toon the keybind references? Still not 100% clear

[Zappy]

leader marks all targets by selecting a target and pressing F6-F10

F6 bound on leader to set a raid target
F6 bound on first clone to assist leader and set focus

F7 bound on leader to set next raid target
F7 bound on second clone to assist leader and set focus

Then you create a CC macro that casts Hex on the focus target, so when the key bound to your CC macro, all the toons with focus targets will cast Hex at the same time.

Mine is set up very similiar for all three of my 80 teams and my CC macro is a global macro shared between all my toons per account:

/cast [@arena1,exists][@focus,exists] Hex
/cast [@arena1,exists][@focus,exists] Repentance
/cast [@arena1,exists][@focus,exists] Entangling Roots