Help me suck less

[kate]

So, I have an awful admission to make:

I think I have managed to clear exactly 1 heroic dungeon with my 5x paladin team (prot + 4 rets): Utgarde Keep. And even then, only once.

Another awful admission to make:

There are some normal dungeons that I can't seem to clear (or, there's one boss in there that usually causes at least 1 wipe - I'm looking at you, Ionar! And that guy in Occulus!)

And yet another admission:

Jousting kicks my ass in Normal ToC 5 man. I haven't even cleared it once. Killing the trash guys is easy. And I've managed to kill 2 of the enemy champions, but of course, they don't *STAY* dead (unlike my guys, who get knocked off their wolves, then trampled to death) so what winds up happening is I kill 2 and then while trying to kill the third the other 2 get back on horses. Silly cheating AI jousters!

So, some questions:

ToC 5 man: Is there *any* way to kill those guys at the beginning and make them STAY dead? Also, is there any way to skip the goddamn 15 minute roleplay thing when I'm coming back from a wipe on the jousting? Since I don't have credit for the instance it won't let me just skip it. And this instance has tons of stuff that would be good upgrades for me. And badges.

All other heroics: Is it my gear? I'm using many of the tactics I see here, but I just get whomped by most bosses - I can't do random heroics because they keep throwing me into ones I can barely beat on normal (or can't even beat on normal)?

I took a month or 2 off of playing these guys to level up some shaman back-up, but they're even less geared.

My armory for my tank is Katalepsy on Undermine. An example of my rets is Traydrel on Undermine.

If anyone can give me some ideas, I'd love to hear 'em. Thanks

[ghonosyph]

search for the countless pally threads to find tips on gearing, but basically farm your ass off for gold/mats and get yourself 245 chest/bracers and the 226 belt/boots and titansteel gear(should be relatively cheap if you have a smelter... just get a ton of saronite ore for cheap, smelt it, get the bars turned into titanium bars via transmute alchemist then buy /farm the eternals. From there smelt several hundred titansteel bars and get the gears made! ), and then gear your tank solo in randoms to make it easier


I found it incredibly hard to do heroics for a while,if you know all the instances strats then it should be pretty easy to figure out how to make it work for you. Your toons are still a bit undergeared, making things VERY hard. Quest up a couple thousand gold and get your 245 stuff (usually cheaper to buy lots of mats and have it made than to buy the gear from the ah Pre made) If you can get some of your friends /guildies to buy crusader orbs and runed orbs with their badges for you and offer to repay them after you get a few heroics under your belt.

Remember that your seals can change a TON on how you play. Seal of Wisdom i used for the longest time because i felt i needed the mana regen, but i figured out that seal of righteousness was incredible for burst damage(tho by the end of the fights i was out of mana and had to drink, big deal tho, when you're gearing up drinking can be fine). I made sure to always have runscrolls of fortitude and one of my pallys is a cook so i make the cheap feasts or buy them so i can do better Here's a little play tip, using a button lets say keybind the pally taunt on your RET PALLYS to shift + T and your taunt button on your TANK pally to T . This is a BIG HUGE shot of dmg and all you have to do is Shift T then T. This helps a ton when you're trying to race thru some dmg to get a target down quick(tho only pve, as it doesnt work on players)

i also did a few things for healing: i have a wow mouse so i have several keys bound on it for different things, since you're not using a dedicated heals you should bind your heal spells to some key VERY CLOSE to where you're keeping your hand( easy access is the key here) .

Bind your left button on your mouse to "heal tank" and your right button to "heal self" the macros should look something like this "/cast [target=yourtanksnamegoeshere] flash of light this macro should be on all four of your rets the rets should then have another macro /cast [target=self] flash of light. Once i made the change and put the macros to my mouse it helped immensely to my surviveability.

The second thing you should do buttonwise is to A) figure out WTF your bubbles do B)spec into divine sac into prot tree so you can use it to keep your team alive through aoe C) set up a round robin macro that will cast your bubble on one toon and use divine sacrifice too. This way you can hit yer bubble and divine sac 5 times giving your whole party a HUGE amount of dmg reduction that can be up pretty much for a long period of time(Long enough for MOST boss fights imo). Another thing you NEED to do is to KEEP SACRED SHIELD UP FULL TIME OMG OMFG. If you're not doing this you're GIMPING yourself by taking more dmg than you should and you're not benefiting from the awesome crit bonus it gives when you cast flash of light.

Use divine storm glyph and get the divine storm idol. It does a lot of dmg and a lot of healing! As soon as possible work your way up to getting 2 pc tier 10 as well it helps soooo much to be able to cast divine storm more lol!

lots of people say going into pit of saron regular mode and doing garfrost to get the two ton hammers for your pallys is like the easiest most efficient way to get a weapon upgrade and a badge/some gold and if you keep resetting it you're gonna be able to get a ton of badges that way. I remember reading a thread not to long ago that one of the boxers here farms him 50 kills a night easily and farms that for badges and gold. This could be the easiest/best option for a group of pallys starting out(provided you get down forge of souls first but you COULD do that solo or kick your 4'th ret and get a healer pug to help) and if you have trouble you can get all the pallys the EASILY FARMABLE frost resist set to make it a SIMPLE fight. This prolly could be the best way for you to go if you're low on cash Just remember KEEP TRYING! there's SOOOO much you can do with your pallys once you figure out how their abilities work, write a TON of macros for healing(or get some kind of grid/vohudo addon that allows you to click and heal **this requires you to use innerspace tho so you can use repeater regions)and gear up some. Once you get a few pieces of gear you're gonna get more and more! It starts to come easily after a while so keep at it!~ I myself have managed to solo glory of the hero with my 5 pallys, which was an amazing feat!

good luck and keep tryin!

[SaraiE]

Hi Kate!
If you are thinking that teh pally + four shegoats route, I am telling you it is not going to be easy.
I don't know strategy for LK that well, but I am having trouble with normal too.
My plan is to just farm golds and get epic crafted. I also dual spec one of my she goat to be restro.
Once I have the golds to deck the tank, i will go back and give normal a try and then maybe heroics.

I have seen that my tank get spiked damages, so I am working on the crit immune 535 defense on my pally girl. She is at 532 now...when I get my enchanter high enough I can add more. But basically, I am grinding for golds from dailies to gear the tank.

Can you all tell me if I have spec the pally and she goats correctly? I know i still need to work on glyphs and gems and enchants, but i am piss poor.

On Ner'zhul PVP
Lamanh - she pally
Saraiee - she goat
or just do a guild search for iBox as the guild name...

I cannot stand and won't use my shepally to do instance by one-boxing, this defeats the whole purpose of MB-ing!

SaraiE

[jinkobi]

Hi Kate!
If you are thinking that teh pally + four shegoats route, I am telling you it is not going to be easy.
I don't know strategy for LK that well, but I am having trouble with normal too.
My plan is to just farm golds and get epic crafted. I also dual spec one of my she goat to be restro.
Once I have the golds to deck the tank, i will go back and give normal a try and then maybe heroics.

I have seen that my tank get spiked damages, so I am working on the crit immune 535 defense on my pally girl. She is at 532 now...when I get my enchanter high enough I can add more. But basically, I am grinding for golds from dailies to gear the tank.

Can you all tell me if I have spec the pally and she goats correctly? I know i still need to work on glyphs and gems and enchants, but i am piss poor.

On Ner'zhul PVP
Lamanh - she pally
Saraiee - she goat
or just do a guild search for iBox as the guild name...

I cannot stand and won't use my shepally to do instance by one-boxing, this defeats the whole purpose of MB-ing!

SaraiE

Yep you have the same problem. Gear! I know you don't want to spend much money but some of your gear isn't even gemmed or enchanted. Defense cap is 545 btw. All your guys are bare no glyphs nodda. At least grab some glyphs they're on the cheap.

[Solon]

I had this same problem a year ago Kate, and, after 1 year, stayed the same. I just never could get over the heroic gear hump, could never accumulate badges, and could not stand even 1 full pug. I spent all my toons cash on AH upgrades and it was a waste. You need to be dedicated more than anything IMO. Also, choose to skip HDTK too, those soul mages and their AOE are too much PITA for trash. I never had any trouble with the jousting in ToC, but after they were dismounted they spanked me, they are immune to CC. Good luck and I hope you accomplish more than I.

[jinkobi]

I had this same problem a year ago Kate, and, after 1 year, stayed the same. I just never could get over the heroic gear hump, could never accumulate badges, and could not stand even 1 full pug. I spent all my toons cash on AH upgrades and it was a waste. You need to be dedicated more than anything IMO. Also, choose to skip HDTK too, those soul mages and their AOE are too much PITA for trash. I never had any trouble with the jousting in ToC, but after they were dismounted they spanked me, they are immune to CC. Good luck and I hope you accomplish more than I.

Sorry to post so much you guys probably get tired of seeing my name, lol. Bored as hell ya know...


HDTK is easy easy bro. There's only a couple of soul mages in the whole joint at the beginning. When they cast the circle on the ground a simple strafe- or if all melee just move :P Shadow resist aura as well.

Next to HGundrak, H Utgarde Keep pretty much one of the simplest dungeons to box.

[jinkobi]

kate your problem is your gear pretty much.... You're still in greens and blues for the most part. Go to the auction hacienda and buy as much gear as you can- especially for your tank. You're also over the defense cap by quite a bit - cap is 545.

Toc you have to keep trampling the champions after you have them on the ground. Or they'll slowly try and get on another mount. Just run over them- fight on top of them.

Occulus isn't bad but better gear matters and you have to use the strategies like the ones in the Occulus thread in this forum section.

Ionar- when he disperses - hit follow and run when he does disperse. Go back to the room with the statue guys that come to life- reposition. Also be spread out because he does overload. the thread in this section for Halls of Lightning will help you.

You're hitting some crappy dungeons for multiboxers without gear. Try Gundrak, Drak Tharon Keep.

With each piece of gear it'll only get easier. If you're still having troubles then maybe consider setting up a holy trinity- have one of your rets spec holy and be a dedicated healer.

[Nejcha]

Ok I have a little advice. Keep in mind I did all my heroic grinding starting the second week of wotlk...

Still when I was poorly geared(all season 4) what I did is have a full time healer. Now I run four shamans and an assortment of tanks that my partner plays, so one of my shamans specing resto wasn't hard on me. You might want to try it, I didn't start four dpsing till my tanks could handle it, still even the most recent tank I geared up (warrior) with top of the line gear I still had to swap one back to resto to stop the tank from dieing every pull.

That aside, this is what I saw from a glance at your armory:
Prot-a-din

• Go for Stam - agi pants enchant, agi = armor... and armor = more ehp

• Wrist enchants... really I'm just one of those people that enchants and gems the hell out of my self no matter the cost.

• Work on your avodance stats some. I find it's better to have an avoidance tank while 4 dpsing thing a hp bag

• Crafted epics! You can get allot more of them.

One the Ret-a-dins Hooray for crafted weapons! You can still get allot more crafted epics.

I really would submit that with being so under geared to make one of you a healer.

[OzPhoenix]

Wow, sorry to hear Kate you're having issues.

I remember your all-Pally team dinged 80 about a week or two before mine did. Thanks to some gearing (and some assistance from other 5-boxers on my realm) I think I've pretty much disposed of the new-80 hump now. I don't say that to bignote myself (I'm hardly an elite multiboxer.. lol), but to give you hope that it can be done.

I've kept a detailed journal of my teams progress and I'd be happy to share this with you, either in this thread or via PM's. Given that we've gone through with the same team at almost the same time, I think I might be able to be of some assistance.

I'll cover some points up front here:

1. Gearing

My team covers all professions bar Inscriptions. With that, and about 20-25k gold gearing budget I was able to craft a number of epics as soon as they hit 80. These were crafted in tank variants for the prot and 4 x ret variants for the rets:

i245 Chest and Braces
i200 shoulders, head, hands, feet, cloak, shield (prot only), 1h-weapon (prot only), 2h-weapons (rets only), rings (prot only).

All armour pieces were made by the smither, except for the cloaks (the leatherworker) and the rings (the jewelcrafter). Additionally the smither made i200 epic weapons for all (which I'm beginning to replace with i219's from the ICC 5mans).

This meant that I was able to start on Heroics with at least some non-trashy gear, though trinkets, librams, leg and neck pieces remained pretty bad as well as the ret rings (and mostly still are).

As to gemming and enchanting I go for broke there - any little advantage I can get to help me over the hump I take, so gem/chant to the hilt as soon as possible.

2. Key Setups

The important setup principles here I think are firstly a focusless (FTL) setup - handled automagically by ISBoxer (praise Jeebus for ISBoxer eh).

The next important principle to have set up is independent movement for followers and mains. I have my main move around with the arrow keys, and all followers by the W,A,S,D key combination. This is particularly necessary for some of the early bosses you can take down (Ingvar in UK for example).

I also use Divine Shield in a 1-->2, 2-->3, 3-->4, 4-->5, 5-->1 setting so that both Divine Shield and Lay On Hands can be used both in the same fight should ever I need it.

3. Early Dungeons

From the get-go I was able to do UK. However, it has to be said that for a new all-Paladin team, Ingvar needs to be handled carefully or his aoe stomp will be an issue - but once you get the hang of it, you can put him on farm pretty quickly.

Old Kingom likewise is quite easy for an All-Paladin team, including the optional fungus boss (Amanitar), but excluding the cultist boss (Jedoga Shadowseeker) right before the final boss (Herald Volazj).

Drak'Tharon Keep is likewise immediately do-able for the Random. I initially had to skip Novos the Summoner (but have now downed that), simply for running out of puff during the longish fight, and King Dred due to his mechanics (aoe stomp and fear), but the first boss (Trollgore) and the last boss (The Prophet) are tank 'n spanks that can be done by even brand new teams.

Culling of Stratholme is also another run that a brand-new All-Pally team can do, however you'll need to adjust strategies somewhat for Meathook, the first boss in there. Once he's down though, it's quickly put on farm.

Gundrak was the most recent one I put into farm status and only because the first boss' AoE poison nova (Slad'ran) is a real ballbreaker for an all-melee team. But there's a few tricks and tips that can be used against him too, and all the other bosses in that run are very easily disposed off.

So, right now, I can clear 5 of the 12 dungeons that could pop for me in the Random. I've been able to purchase the i232 hands and shoulders and I'm just a few badges short of the 75 needed for the i245 head piece. Next will be the trinkets, in particular to address a severe low-hit issue (just 108) with the prot paladin.

In total, across all 12 dungeons, there's now 26 bosses I can kill, though with 5 dungeons on clear, I tend to just stick to popping those for the bonus random-dungeon run badges. Once I have the i245 head piece I can think of 3 more dungeons that I can currently almost clear, that I should be able to add to my list, being Nexus, Oculus and Violet Hold.

The five dungeons currently on clear are on full-farm status, that is, pretty much without any deaths (and certainly no wipes) during every run.

4. Dungeons to avoid

HoL has 2 mechanics, just before the 3rd boss and the 3rd boss itself, that's going to make it next to impossible I think for a new All-Paladin team to run it. However, the first 2 bosses are eminently farmable.

FoS - not actually impossible to do, but the mechanics involved I found anyway to be really nasty for the final boss for all-melee. I'd skip this one until your gearing is better.

HoS - again, the mechanics of the bosses aren't going to make this fun for an all-melee team.

UP (kinda) - it's boss 3 here that'll cause the issue. But it's doable if you're particularly persistent.

Nexus - the "optional" boss, Stoutheart for us Horde, is extremely anti-melee. Telestra is a pain in the ass for under-geared pallies to. I'd skip this one till you had more gear to.

5. Summary

As I've said, I've kept a detailed journal and could post for you, either here or in PM, my complete list of boss kills, dungeon by dungeon including the strategies I use for each one.

An All-Paladin team (and like you, I'm using 1xProt, 4xRet) definitely has some challenges to it - I've found it far more gear dependent than my 1xProt, 4xShaman team and highly susceptible to anti-melee bosses (Lord Ahune being a fantastic, if temporary example of anti-melee bosses), but there's always some bosses available, even to the newest of new pally-teams.

For the first week, I would take whatever RFD popped for me, and get from each dungeon whatever badges I could. Once I had 2 or 3 on cleared status, I was then able to get the random daily + random bonuses more often and now I can pretty much (time permitting of course), spend all my time in Heroics.

If it helps, I'd be happy to post my armoury details, though my signature includes my main already.

Keep up the efforts Kate - they're not the easiest new team to run with I think, but with a little gearing and some persistence on the more pally-friendly dungeons, you'll soon get yourself over that awful new-80-team hump I'm sure.

I'd be happy to elaborate further on any of these points.

[JackBurton]

Sometimes we will come across someone that has great gear but does a fraction of the dps he should be doing because he doesnt manage his procs and cool downs well. study these video guides for examples.


How To Do Top DPS in WoW


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgDjG...os=fhdQBRvZKe4

How To / Guide - Internal Cooldowns


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6IDQ...os=xL9MrNIbi-E