Invincible PVE Group (A New Twist on a Classic)

[Mooni]

Happy to hear it's going well! Good luck with your Swiss-army-knife group.

[gunsun]

Are you trying to 5-box him? I've soloed him about 40 times, but always with 10 toons.

I certainly remember all the difficulties of getting each boss down the first time. Lots of repair bills and macro tweakage. It is painful, but I'm kinda looking forward to more challenges in Cata.

Yeah. I have a 10 box setup but I never tried ICC with them. A few have gear issues. But this was a 5 box attempt. I could last 4-5 min and get him down a bit, but it's a mess.

Dividing things into heals for the tank and dps for the bonespike, at the same time, is the issue for 5 boxing it. If there weren't bone spikes it would be a very long but simple fight since the shaman can heal through the bonestorm.

Happy to hear it's going well! Good luck with your Swiss-army-knife group.

Thanks :-)

[gunsun]

A druid could heal (no matter what their spec), and has both normal rez and battle rez.
That's more survivability then the mage.

Warlock has a healthstone and a soulstone, and more versatile crowd control.
Compared to the druid at least.

Mage is only DPS, but is strong in that.
And has a nice CC too.

I agree that a lock would be better util than a mage. But I don't have one ready for Cata. I have a team of them and they're close, but not 80 yet. The raw output of the mage is nice in a group with lower dps.

Plus, I really like my portals, it just makes the whole group more mobile. And I have an offspec of Frost for replenishment if I really need it, currently running arcane.

[zipzip]

This sounds fun & appealing, and I may experiment with the two healer setup once my team is 85. Currently my team is:

Pally tank
2x warlock
ele shaman
resto druid

I have other shamans, and thought momentarily about swapping out the druid for 2x shammy in this team, but then I realized I can just as easily have a resto druid & resto shaman for the 2x healer setup. dps is dps, so I like the idea of two different classes worth of healing spells.

I am curious if a resto shaman does more dps than a resto druid...I suspect it would.

[Bollwerk]

Does Earth Shield stack?

[Ualaa]

No, but you could E.Shield one target per Resto Shaman.
Presumably going with Water Shield for PvE.

And E.Shield on healers in PvP.

[valle2000]

#show earth shield
/target Tank
/castsequence [@targettarget, exists] flame shock, lightning bolt, lightning bolt
/castsequence [@Tank] reset=combat earth shield, null
/cast [@Tank] riptide

This macro looks interesting.
However I'm no expert so I'm wondering can the same be used with a priest to assist with holy fire,smite and at the same time making sure tank is shielded and renewed?

But what happens exactly when the macro is activated? If tank has a target, won't the result be only the dps-spell is cast and the others lines will be rejected due to "can't do that yet"?

[Redbeard]

Seems like it would be similar to the other fall through we're doing now.

For example:

/castsequence flame shock, lightning bolt, lightning bolt, lightningbolt
/cast lava burst

youd think lava burst would never cast but it will cast on cooldown.... somebody correct me if im wrong for the macro quoted above,

Thanks.

[gunsun]

This sounds fun & appealing, and I may experiment with the two healer setup once my team is 85. Currently my team is:

Pally tank
2x warlock
ele shaman
resto druid

I have other shamans, and thought momentarily about swapping out the druid for 2x shammy in this team, but then I realized I can just as easily have a resto druid & resto shaman for the 2x healer setup. dps is dps, so I like the idea of two different classes worth of healing spells.

I am curious if a resto shaman does more dps than a resto druid...I suspect it would.

The benefit of the 2x resto shaman group is the huge passive heals from earthshield, riptide, and the enhanced healing stream totems. With all three of these stacking the tank almost never needs a direct heal and the group very very seldom needs an aoe heal. (EDIT: earth shield doesn't stack)

The reason I avoided other healing classes is to avoid casting healing spells whenever possible. Also, the CD on earthshield and riptide allows the shaman to dps. So the synergy of the two resto shaman is amazing.

This macro looks interesting.
However I'm no expert so I'm wondering can the same be used with a priest to assist with holy fire,smite and at the same time making sure tank is shielded and renewed?

But what happens exactly when the macro is activated? If tank has a target, won't the result be only the dps-spell is cast and the others lines will be rejected due to "can't do that yet"?

When I was 10 boxing I tried setting up similar macros for my two priests. I ran 3 healers, a pally healer dedicated to the tank and 2 holy priests dedicated to group heals with aoe. The priests seldom did much and I tried to macro some dps for them.

Other than a few dots, the problem with priests is that they have long cast times. So you can't really spam one dps button because your priests end up casting holy fire or smite more often than the heals.

The reason the resto shaman macro works as well as it does is that riptide has a 6 sec CD and it also stacks. Two of them, plus earth shield are all the heals you need on the tank. (I also earth shield the mage.) Shocks also have 5-6 sec cooldowns, so the two castsequences chain together well. You cast riptide when it is up and you spam lightning bolts most of the time.

Take that spell synergy and multiple by two characters. You now have a team that mostly heals itself and has a low-but-acceptable 3rd dps.

[gunsun]

I'd like to note that I haven't started playing this team in cata yet. I'm letting rest exp build up to instance grind a couple levels and I'm scouting out the new content by single boxing my fury warrior who should be 85 later today.

I've found that deepholm has a bunch of dailies, but you have to do every quest in the zone to unlock them. Things like this are helping me identify leveling strategies for the team. I think I'll instance grind about half of 80-85 and then run a group of 2 and then a group of 3 through certain areas for quest gear and to minimize the horrid collection quests.

There are tons of collection quests and phasing, which I absolutely hate, but the money and gear from quests, plus unlocking dailies, is too huge to ignore. I've also found that questing is more interesting than instance grinding.

The real test of the team is cata-heroics. Having pugged the some new instances, I'm not that concerned about boxing them. It will be a lot slower than a pug, but I haven't seen anything that looks impossible yet.