OMG, there should be a suergeon general warning or something (need some advice)

[vincenight]

LOL, I wish I knew ahead of time how hard it would be to 5 box multiple classes. I 5 box a 2xmage/shammy/priest/Prot Pally combo. I finally have their button setup minimized and setup but I spent a better part of the week trying to set up a decent spell rotation without having my shammy go OOM because she dropped to many totems.

Okay, enough of my plight and on to my questions: Is it better to 5 man SM armory, or Sm in general, until I no longer get any xp from the mobs or should I quest.
Also, I would love to hear if anyone else is Multi-boxing several classes together instead of going with the typical 5 x same class type.

[zanthor]

I started with pally + 2 mages, progressed by adding a holy and shadow priest by 70th. Button real estate is a highly valuable item, figuring out which spells stack well is even harder, and yes, trying to manage mana across the 3 dpsers is a bitch. But, it's definitely doable, and the reward is that I'm pretty solid in PVE in the end with lots of CC and dps along with great heals and a real tank.

[dRiN]

I boxed a druid for tanking, warlock, mage and shammy x2. Also tried a spriest in the mix.

Since the druid was for tanking, I had the normal bindings on that one. The mage would just frostbolt / fireball. Shammy some simple lightning bolt and the warlock specced for destro, since keeping up dots on a slave is really hard to manage. Update == DPS. So destro was just spam the shadowbolt and dps would be fine. The spriest was not really giving what it should give. I had it on a flay flay mindblast castsequence. So the micromanagement was not too hard. But then you miss out on the optimal dps rotation of keeping CD's up for SWP, SWD, VT and VE.

So it is not optimal, but doable. Just keep it simple and build on that. Don't try to use all abilities untill you have a set that feels really natural and gives the room to see all that is happening on your screen again and then start to expand. It's just like driving a car for the first time. You don't see further than 3 yards infront of the car, untill you get that natural car driving feeling. The more you drive the more further you start to see.

Im for one am a big fan of the Keep It Simple Stupid principle : )

[Frosty]

I'm a glutton for punishment..

Running the following:

Protection Pally
Fire Mage
Afliction Warlock w/ Imp pet
Resto Shammy
Shadow Priest.

[Otlecs]

I'm not sure THAT many people are running full 5 man homogenous groups to be honest.

The first team I took to 70 was pally, priest, mage, mage, hunter.

Your question about questing vs. instance grinding has been answered many times before, so you should have no trouble finding that with a quick search. There's even a full section about it in the Wiki, which I found just by typing "leveling" into the Wiki search....

All the information you need is already here

[vincenight]

Thanks for pointing me in the direction of the Wiki. I should have checked their first. As far as the button real estate goes. I use a full array of 1-9 and F1-F12 for my set up. Running my set up in PVP has pissed off several people. There is nothing more annoying than having 2x frost nova, fear, and grounding totems going off at one time. I have them all bound to the same key for pvp

[ElectronDF]

I started off with 1 and worked my way up singly to 5 chars. I picked a healer as my first alt, since I wanted to not have to stop and eat and wanted to kill elites (back when they were out in the wild). Then I added a warlock to stop runners and add DPS so I could kill elites faster (again, out in the wild). Then I added a hunter so I could do instances with just DPS. It worked, but I hungered for a true tank for my squishy mains since they always pulled aggro. So last was warrior. Yeah, all different, but picked on purpose. And they rocked hard. Really good DPS, no micro managing, etc.

I used pretty much 3 main macros. Attack, heal and misc.
Just an example:
Attack:
Hunter - /castsequence [target=focus-target] reset=combat/target Serpent Sting, Arcane Shot, , , , , ,
Warlock - /castsequence [target=focus-target] reset=combat/target Corruption, Curse of Something, !Shoot, , ,
(I had 3 curses, weakness for bosses or meaninies, recklessness for runners and tongues for casters)
Priest - /castsequence [target=focus-target] reset=combat/target Shadow Word: Pain, , !Shoot, , ,
Warrior - /castsequence [target=focus-target] reset=combat/target Demoralizing Shout, Sunder, Thunderclap, Sunder, , , , , ,
Main - /castsequence reset=combat/target Spell 1, , Spell 3 (just example, spell 1 has a long cast time)

Pretty much 1 macro button for all people to do pretty good damage. Sure you make it totally DPS amazing, but then you have to work out how much you really need to do and how much more mana you are wasting if you only need a small DPS. Yeah, no timing on things much, since almost all are instant spells. Sorry, I chose things that way for a reason. If you have casting times, just put in a dummy command to give time for spells to cast.

Heal:
Hunter - /castsequence reset=combat/20 Mend Pet, , , , , , ,
Warlock - /castsequence [target=focus-target] reset=combat/12 Drain Life, , , , , , , , ,
Priest - /cast [target=WarriorName, nocombat] Power Word: Shield
/castsequence [target=focus-target-target] reset=combat/14 Renew, Flash Heal, Flash Heal, Power Word: Shield, , , , , ,
Warrior - /cast [target=focus-target, nocombat] Charge
/cast [combat] Thunderclap
Main - Just put in a spell that helps, or none if you want

Again, simple, one button, everyone tries to heal and take care of what is going on. No targeting. No heals for 1 person or another, just 1 heal spell for everyone. The priest heals whoever the mob is beating on. I put charge on my warior and PW:S on my priest, so they both do those at the same time. Tank ends up at the mobs with a sheild on and that gives me time to get all the DPS going before I need to heal.

So you can work with different classes, just try to pick which abilities you want. I wanted to have pets that I didn't have to watch. I wanted to have mostly instant casts so I didn't have to worry about timings. I wanted to have seperate abilites that I didn't have to worry about (no runners, trap to protect healer, complete aggro on tank, etc).

[Toned]

My first wow group was druid/rogue, before I rolled my 2 shaman teams the end result of my group was: Druid/Rogue/Hunter/Priest/Mage. Lots of micro management thus why I never used this group for pvp, but once i went 5x sham it became a pvp frenzy.

[Drakkun]

Druid Tank
Shadow Priest
Hunter
Elemental Shaman
Holy Pally

Takes some time to get down spell sequencing, but I've got it down to about 10 keys for most fights. 5 of those being for heals and 5 for dps. I usually click the tank's spells because its easier imo.

[vincenight]

Pretty much, I do the same as Drakkun >.< I am Kindergarten mode with macro writing. I still don't know how to create the "BIG" button.