Currently leveling up a 20 man ZG/AQ farming team - What do you all think?

[nodoze]

Thanks for the reply.

I am making note of the comments about a potential lack of healers and the mana-inefficiency of resto shaman. I hadn't thought about this.

I had a couple of reasons for wanting 3 Shamans. First reason being obviously the totem utility, which is a must for Fury Warriors and which is also just powerful in Classic in general. The second reason is that most of the time my characters will be clumped together in 2 parties, the caster/ranged/healer one, and the melee one. This makes Chain Heal a very attractive option. The third reason is the option to use one of the Shamans either as a Resto/Enhancement hybrid or as a full Enhancement shaman with Annihilator for the armor reduction debuff.

I'm hoping that with my high burst setup and with a stock of mana potions and with Mana Tide totem, I will be fine for raid bosses.

If mana sustain ends up becoming a clear problem, I will either replace one of my Fury Warriors with a second healer priest, or respec my druid tank to resto and convert one of my Fury Warriors to a full tank or a fury/prot off-tank. Do you think there's a clear winner between these two options here?

I am a big fan of Hybrids with Shaman being my 2nd favorite class for PVE so I really hope it works out and their flexibility plays well for you (I know they should in BC+ and hope so now). I have heard good things from some 5boxers of Shaman that they can indeed sustain if built right so maybe one or more of them may chime in (I don't know the details of how they built to push sustain and then again you can always leverage consumables).

I would definitely watch the ZooBoxing ZG videos that Congau found (AWESOME FIND THANKS AGAIN !!!).

It sounds like he leveled four 4 man teams (each with a tank and healer and 3 DPS) and for the 20 man raid, like you are saying above, he also kinda breaks his team into 2 main 10 man groups (one ranged group and one melee group (with some ranged in it)). In the end between totems and Chain Heals I think you may actually be able to come out ahead in many ways.

There are several things he could maybe do better (as is the case for all of us I suspect) but is very competent and works his raid pretty well (and we are seeing him in his early attempts at the various areas).

Some observations:

His rogue appears pretty useless and dies a ton. If he brought him for chests and/or lockboxes I would personally just use engineering charges (or just leave them) and replace the Rogue with something else.

He has 4 tanks (2 Warriors+2 Druids) with his Warrior as his main Tank and uses them like I was referencing above (instead of CC). His ZG Venoxis fight video shows them best with his main Warrior taking 2 adds and then the other Warrior taking one add and the 1st Druid tank taking one add and the 2nd druid taking the boss. According to his addon log that is his 2nd kill for that boss and he really starts well with all 4 tanks doing great jobs. Things go a little south when he loses a Druid tank on the boss but he recovers that well and picks up the boss quick on his main warrior and re-positions him. Then the Boss AoE kills the rogue fast and then the last 2 off-tanks (though if he had some action target groups to pause their assists they likely would have been fine (except maybe the rogue)). From that point forward he keeps deep healing the main tank (and only tank left) and focuses on burning the boss and gets the win (though the 4 focused healing barely kept the main tank alive)!

I would note that he does indeed have 4 main healers (2 Paladins & 2 Priests) and it looks like sometimes even with them going all out with heals and his main tank barely survives... I believe his 3rd Priest is a Shadow Priest buffing the Warlocks so he could increase his healing output without changing his composition if he needed to... I think he using Grid2 for healing and not sure how he breaks up the healing or if all 4 are just healing the same targets with downranks if/as needed or what... It may be that the healing just needs to be better optimized to make things easier (not sure) but bottom line he gets it done. It may well be that Chain Heals would be a huge help but if I saw correctly 3 of his 4 healers were pretty much OOM (which is saying alot considering Paladins are the most efficient healers) so that is something to watch for.

If I recall correctly he has at least 3 ZG boss videos and he does a lot of commentary on at least the ZG trash one (things started getting better and better as his gear improved and he mentioned that the bloodvine was really helping his team's DPS). Since I like Warlocks I was glad to hear him saying he liked his Warlocks' DPS. I am kinda in a hurry and plan to go back and watch the fights closer later but Warlock-wise I noticed in the Venoxis fight that the Warlocks were close to top tier until the final phases but ended up in the bottom tier and that looks to be because they went OOM (and not sure if they ever life tapped nor whether they started wanding when OOM etc)...

Bottom line is that all is pretty impressive and fun to watch. Perfect timing for you to review to make any adjustments now.

[WOWBOX40]

OP, we are missing the details on how you will run this 20man, pc specs wise

[dustofoblivion]

I am a big fan of Hybrids with Shaman being my 2nd favorite class for PVE so I really hope it works out and their flexibility plays well for you (I know they should in BC+ and hope so now). I have heard good things from some 5boxers of Shaman that they can indeed sustain if built right so maybe one or more of them may chime in (I don't know the details of how they built to push sustain and then again you can always leverage consumables).

I would definitely watch the ZooBoxing ZG videos that Congau found (AWESOME FIND THANKS AGAIN !!!).

It sounds like he leveled four 4 man teams (each with a tank and healer and 3 DPS) and for the 20 man raid, like you are saying above, he also kinda breaks his team into 2 main 10 man groups (one ranged group and one melee group (with some ranged in it)). In the end between totems and Chain Heals I think you may actually be able to come out ahead in many ways.

There are several things he could maybe do better (as is the case for all of us I suspect) but is very competent and works his raid pretty well (and we are seeing him in his early attempts at the various areas).

Some observations:

His rogue appears pretty useless and dies a ton. If he brought him for chests and/or lockboxes I would personally just use engineering charges (or just leave them) and replace the Rogue with something else.

He has 4 tanks (2 Warriors+2 Druids) with his Warrior as his main Tank and uses them like I was referencing above (instead of CC). His ZG Venoxis fight video shows them best with his main Warrior taking 2 adds and then the other Warrior taking one add and the 1st Druid tank taking one add and the 2nd druid taking the boss. According to his addon log that is his 2nd kill for that boss and he really starts well with all 4 tanks doing great jobs. Things go a little south when he loses a Druid tank on the boss but he recovers that well and picks up the boss quick on his main warrior and re-positions him. Then the Boss AoE kills the rogue fast and then the last 2 off-tanks (though if he had some action target groups to pause their assists they likely would have been fine (except maybe the rogue)). From that point forward he keeps deep healing the main tank (and only tank left) and focuses on burning the boss and gets the win (though the 4 focused healing barely kept the main tank alive)!

I would note that he does indeed have 4 main healers (2 Paladins & 2 Priests) and it looks like sometimes even with them going all out with heals and his main tank barely survives... I believe his 3rd Priest is a Shadow Priest buffing the Warlocks so he could increase his healing output without changing his composition if he needed to... I think he using Grid2 for healing and not sure how he breaks up the healing or if all 4 are just healing the same targets with downranks if/as needed or what... It may be that the healing just needs to be better optimized to make things easier (not sure) but bottom line he gets it done. It may well be that Chain Heals would be a huge help but if I saw correctly 3 of his 4 healers were pretty much OOM (which is saying alot considering Paladins are the most efficient healers) so that is something to watch for.

If I recall correctly he has at least 3 ZG boss videos and he does a lot of commentary on at least the ZG trash one (things started getting better and better as his gear improved and he mentioned that the bloodvine was really helping his team's DPS). Since I like Warlocks I was glad to hear him saying he liked his Warlocks' DPS. I am kinda in a hurry and plan to go back and watch the fights closer later but Warlock-wise I noticed in the Venoxis fight that the Warlocks were close to top tier until the final phases but ended up in the bottom tier and that looks to be because they went OOM (and not sure if they ever life tapped nor whether they started wanding when OOM etc)...

Bottom line is that all is pretty impressive and fun to watch. Perfect timing for you to review to make any adjustments now.

So I did watch his High Priestess Jeklik video. Great find indeed.

I noticed three challenges:

1. The fear towards the end. I feel this one could have been easily avoided by having a shaman use tremor totem in each of his melee parties, and by putting a fear ward on the main tank.

2. The adds that show up mid fight. I think he handled that pretty well. I would have the 4 mages there to AOE them down with a feral druid (+ maybe 2 warriors) to take the aggro on them.

3. The fire. I'm not sure but it looks like some of his toons started taking heavy damage towards the end because they were standing in the fire. That one is not that easy to deal with, but you could use Follow Me to move some of the toons towards you, and then make stop following you once the relevant characters are out of the fire. I think that's what I'd do. I could also have a Broadcasting On keybind with "All w/o current" as its Target to move characters out of harm's way. Or if the boss is almost dead like in the case of the video, just pop a fire resistance totem and ignore it.

After watching his video, I'm pretty confident in my team composition. I could use some of my warriors as Fury/Prot tanks to take the adds, I have plenty of AOE with 4 mages and 2 warlocks, and I have ways of dealing with the fear. I do think that I need an extra healer, I'll probably spec my 3 shamans as resto instead of having one as Enhancement. I would also make 2 Fury/Prot off tanks. This would bring me to 3 tank warriors, 1 druid tank, 3 resto shaman, and 1 Disc priest. I think 1 healer and 1 tank per party seems like a solid choice.

[dustofoblivion]

OP, we are missing the details on how you will run this 20man, pc specs wise

Correct me if I'm wrong but this isn't really the right place on the forum to discuss hardware. Besides, it doesn't exactly take a supercomputer to run 20 clients of WoW Classic these days. Anyway here's my specs, since you ask:

-CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12 core
-Mainboard: MSI X570-A-Pro
-Memory: 64 GB of DDR4 RAM
-GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080

I've run 30 clients of BfA at once without too many issues in the past.

I plan on running 40 instances of Classic at once in the future, 35 on my main PC and 5 on a laptop, or even 40 on my main PC if it can take it. Not sure yet.

[nodoze]

So I did watch his High Priestess Jeklik video. Great find indeed.

I noticed three challenges:

1. The fear towards the end. I feel this one could have been easily avoided by having a shaman use tremor totem in each of his melee parties, and by putting a fear ward on the main tank.

2. The adds that show up mid fight. I think he handled that pretty well. I would have the 4 mages there to AOE them down with a feral druid (+ maybe 2 warriors) to take the aggro on them.

3. The fire. I'm not sure but it looks like some of his toons started taking heavy damage towards the end because they were standing in the fire. That one is not that easy to deal with, but you could use Follow Me to move some of the toons towards you, and then make stop following you once the relevant characters are out of the fire. I think that's what I'd do. I could also have a Broadcasting On keybind with "All w/o current" as its Target to move characters out of harm's way. Or if the boss is almost dead like in the case of the video, just pop a fire resistance totem and ignore it.

After watching his video, I'm pretty confident in my team composition. I could use some of my warriors as Fury/Prot tanks to take the adds, I have plenty of AOE with 4 mages and 2 warlocks, and I have ways of dealing with the fear. I do think that I need an extra healer, I'll probably spec my 3 shamans as resto instead of having one as Enhancement. I would also make 2 Fury/Prot off tanks. This would bring me to 3 tank warriors, 1 druid tank, 3 resto shaman, and 1 Disc priest. I think 1 healer and 1 tank per party seems like a solid choice.

Yeah I think you have a good chance to be OK with that 3rd Shaman going resto as long as they can sustain (or you use consumables if/as needed). If you were still really hurting for some additional healing you could pick up another healer via respecing your Druid resto without having to level another toon because any of your fury/prot warriors could swap on a shield and go off tank... Those fights seemed pretty short so likely sustain isn't a big deal.

Since most folk move the foreground window with the mouse and/or WASD I generally I recommend you put make the arrow keys as movement keys for "All w/o current" and that should do quite a bit for you if you don't have much channeling at that time. If you want to get fancy you could add some modifiers to have the arrow keys to also not include off-tanks or what not...

[WOWBOX40]

Correct me if I'm wrong but this isn't really the right place on the forum to discuss hardware. Besides, it doesn't exactly take a supercomputer to run 20 clients of WoW Classic these days. Anyway here's my specs, since you ask:

-CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12 core
-Mainboard: MSI X570-A-Pro
-Memory: 64 GB of DDR4 RAM
-GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080

I've run 30 clients of BfA at once without too many issues in the past.

I plan on running 40 instances of Classic at once in the future, 35 on my main PC and 5 on a laptop, or even 40 on my main PC if it can take it. Not sure yet.

Fair enough. Keep us up to date please later on when you have everything up and running. Eeger to hear how the performance feels like. The pcs i use, that each run a 5man (has same specs as your pc, but only has 32gb ram currently: playing retail wow).

[valkry]

3rd shaman to resto mate if you need the extra healer & leave the feral as the OT. Won't need annihilator for ZG. Once you get some gear your warriors & AP mages will blow through the bosses before mechanics matter.

[dustofoblivion]

Fair enough. Keep us up to date please later on when you have everything up and running. Eeger to hear how the performance feels like. The pcs i use, that each run a 5man (has same specs as your pc, but only has 32gb ram currently: playing retail wow).

Hey, I'm sorry, I realized that I may have sounded rude with my last message. It wasn't intentional. I'll keep you guys updated for sure!

[Weepy]

I did Venoxis and Jeklik yesterday with the help from 3 friends.
Maybe not that useful information since 3 characters were played by live players. But hey, might count for something.

Boxed Characters:
4xWarrior (2 of them tank and the 2 dps were lvl 59)
Shaman Healer (lvl 59)

7 Mages
1 warlock
1 Priest Healer

Live played characters by friends:
Hunter
Warlock
Resto druid

[Weepy]

I've now managed to kill venoxis, jeklik and Mar'li "solo" with 16 characters.

4x warrior
Shaman

8x Mage
Warlock
2x Priest