Input Wanted -- Creating a Heroic Team

[accretion]

I'm currently leaning toward either: Pally/Resto Shaman/3xHunter or 5x Shaman. Despite leveling 10 or so characters to 60+, I have to confess that I'm a bit of a Shaman n00b. I understand they're quite a force and 20 badges in 3 hours is impressive. I also don't want to fight over the same gear on normal 70 runs, but I don't see much alternative outside of PVP. Would BS player-crafted armor be a decent stop-gap?

I may end up trying both. I also currently have a 5x hunter team that will probably be able to farm normal 70 instances at a decent speed.

[Sanctume]

I run Pally + 3 Shaman + Mage and love it.
Mage works just great for the food/taxi service.

Imagine doing Nagrand reading googles, porting to shatt, fly to netherstorm, fly to throne, and porting back again--so convenient.

Or after you clear an instance, you just port back to shatt.

Or even better, you Hellfire, and port to Ogrimmar to train your newly levelled shamans.

[Zolo]

Currently running 1 pali 4 shammy, doing a LOT of heroics, there great but I do miss CC a lot so Ive been thinking about a new team. havnt quite decided what yet but imo the ultimate heroic group will need:

1) Pali tank - AOE agro is not only great for no CC groups its great for multiboxers giving us extra time to cordinate which target to CC
2) atleast 2 healer - theres loads of times when one char will get CCed so 2 healers, 1 primary 1 off healer is a must
3) ranged dmg - boxing melle yuck no thx
4) as much CC as poss
5) wipe prevention - i love anhk's i hate releasing

That's an interesting point about the 2nd healer. I'm going to need to give that some thought. My current low level team is 1xPally, 1xPriest, 3xLock. You've exposed a major flaw in that group for me. Thanks, you might have just saved me the effort of boosting a 2nd healer up. :thumbup:

[yarr]

I run Pally + 3 Shaman + Mage and love it.
Mage works just great for the food/taxi service.

Imagine doing Nagrand reading googles, porting to shatt, fly to netherstorm, fly to throne, and porting back again--so convenient.

Or after you clear an instance, you just port back to shatt.

Or even better, you Hellfire, and port to Ogrimmar to train your newly levelled shamans.

How do you mix your Mage in with the Shaman? Since Shaman are mostly lightning bolt / chain lightning, do you just spam fireball / frost bolt? I've often thought about adding a mage for food, taxi, and buffs, but didn't know what to do with him/her. Never really played a mage before.

I ran pally + priest + 2x shaman + mage for quite some time. I always just had the mage fireball or frostbolt (depending which spec, i tried both). As fire, the mage could keep up with my shamans on dps but always OOMed first, this is in level 30-50 instances. As frost, the mage had quite the staying power due to all the mana efficiency talents in frost, however it would always come out about 30% less damage than LB/CL spamming shamans (unless I did a lot of aoe pulls).

It was very nice having portals and water. In fact i'd say it was worth taking teh mage in place of another shaman just for the water. However when the going got tough, shamans always outperformed mage, when it came to pulling aggro, shamans could survive it , mage would get 2shotted.

Sheep was IMO more trouble than it was worth, with a pally tank (i suppose you could make an argument for bringing a mage for sheeps in heroics due to the huge incoming damage)

[Kaynin]

Most easy to manage and effective set up?

- Prot paladin
- 3x Mages
- Priest or shaman healer

Pro's: One of the more easy set ups to level. A lot of CC. Potential to have some fun in PvP for a change. (With the 3x mages and healer, could have quite some fun in battlegrounds. Especially if you make the mages undead and the healer a shaman. Tremor and WotF as a backup when you dont have tremor up or it's crowded and can't wait for tremor.)

Cons: Can't think of any yet. This set up would rock in just about any heroic with the right tactics.

[accretion]

So after doing some research prompted by these posts, I plan to do Pally + 3x Shammy and leave one slot open for a "swing" character, probably a Hunter, Mage or Lock, depending on the instance. This gives me solid tanking, reasonable AoE (with a Mage), good heals, wipe recovery and still 3x totems.

Thanks for all the feedback and feel free to keep adding.

[BobGnarly]

Even though you said you've made a tentative decision, I'll break down how I view it:

Tank:

Pally, hands down. They are the best multi-mob tank, and can generate a ton of threat with absolutely no input on your part after the pull (pull, drop consec, do nothing). Not saying you'll want to tank like this, but it's really nice to have a tank that doesn't require input every GCD to be effective since you've got a lot of other stuff to be doing all the time.

Healer:

All can be good choices for various reasons. I would choose priest because personally, as I feel they are the most adroit healers overall (just my personal preference). Honestly though, any of the 3 healers could work great here.

DPS:

The idea of splitting up here is compelling, but I'll stick to your 3 class wish.

No on rogue, warrior, paladin (melee).

Priest would be interesting, and would have obvious bonus of a fun PvP (bgs) teams with 4priests+paly.
Shaman would be very nice with the totems. Could help paladin (WF) and healers, in addition to themselves with the different totem selections.
Druid. 3 boomkins yay!
Hunter's could be fun, but not top-tier here imo. Lack of synergy with each other and, while it's much better, still have a ranged position requirement.
Warlock is a very close second. Lot's of group utility, and multiple of them is very nice. However...
My pick is mage. Great DPS, probably best-in-class for AOE. Water ain't for nothing, and having ports really is a nice feature. The biggest factor, however, is CC. There's a reason you see people wanting mages for heroics and zones like Magister's Terrace, and this is it. I think it's even more clear when you consider that 5 boxing places a certain amount of burden on your ability to micro. 3 fire-and-forget CCs here is priceless.

Anyway, that's my take.

[Havelcek]

My only comment here is that with a Paladin tank, you don't need CC. And consecration, a Paladin's greatest AoE tanking ability breaks CC...... somewhat counter-productive and may required extra time to setup and effectively use.

That would argue for Pally/3xShaman and 1 mage for port, water, int buff

[Moredots]

If you picked group 4 I have some suggestions that would be great for that group. Hunters pets would be great if you had two owls / bats one with rank 5 Screech and one with Screech 4 (they stack that way for over 300 ap reduction) then maybe a wolf for the extra dmg for the paladin and both owls / bats. To be honest with the two bats and the dmg mitigation on your paladin you could go with any dps pet.

The other advantage to going the hunter group is you will level fast as hell... Hunters are just OP when it comes to leveling. I got my 5 man hunter group to 20 in one night... it was nuts.

[Zoroaster]

I use a War/Sham/Mage/Mage/Mage setup. I've cleared a few of the heroics so far, SP/UB/Bot are my usual 3, haven't even tried a lot of them. I'm just trying to maximize by badges per hour right now, since I don't often have more then a couple hours per day for heroics.

Tanks - I already had a 70 warrior which I've played since WoW release, since I was very familiar with the class I didn't feel like rerolling and gearing a pally. However if you are starting out I'd definitely have to agree that prot pally is the best.

Healer - Same thing as with warrior, I raid on my shaman and have very good T6+ gear, so no way was I going to reroll/regear another healer. I'd say go with a shaman since the heroism is nice, and they really aren't bad for healing the majority of heroics. Earth shield is also really nice for helping you get a ton of initial aggro. Either priest or shaman will work fine though.

DPS - Mages overall are probably the best due to the crazy amount of CC you get. Have decent burst DPS for bosses via heroism, icy veins, and elementals/combustion. If you go the prot pally route for your tank warlocks and/or elemental shaman should work pretty well, since it is a bit harder to CC, also the pally can hold AoE aggro better, chain lightning away!