Archive for March, 2009
I decided to level my priest on Friday night - he’s the last vital component in my 5 boxing mixed class melee team and I’m impatient to begin running them together.
I’ve boosted with my druid up to and including blood furnace but had no idea how difficult subsequent instances would prove to be.
So I decided to give the coilfang reservoir instances a try.
First stop was the underbog and it went pretty well. No real issues and only a priest death due to AOE poison from one of the bosses. I hadn’t set up a macro for the priest to heal himself, otherwise I’m sure that death could have been avoided.
The priest did heal the druid, but it was more a case of using it because it was there and to get used to doing it rather than providing anything vital. Xp wasn’t that great either, but my priest was 65 and with rested was under 900 xp per elite killed.
After the very successful underbog run I moved on to Slave pens.
I made a macro so the healer would heal himself and went through the slave pens with no incidents at all. Still not great XP but a nice change of pace from running around all over the place questing.
Two instances down, and I figured a nice Steam vaults run was in order.
This was a step up in difficulty and I was very happy that I was boosting a healing class that could top my health up.
It was still, relatively straight forward, but I am embarrased to say that I actually died on the end boss. I decided that when the boss went to heal himself from a water tank I would switch to cat for the dps boost and then switch back to bear. Unfortunately I was slow to switch back to bear - had no rage for frenzied regen, and had ignored my placement and was out of range of the priests heals. A basic,basic error, and I probably could have recovered from it but failed to react. Still I had lots of time to reflect on this after the painfully long run back in to the instance.
The second time was easy. I stayed in bear, only had one of the water tanks heal the boss as I did enough dps on the others and took him down steadily. I didnt require healing from the priest much and all in I enjoyed the run.
I did have my priest die on the robot boss in there - and I’d like to get my priest through that alive next time.
XP with rested was about 1300 per elite kill and it’s not a huge instance either so I suspect I’ll be in there for some time. I got some nice gear for 68-70 for the priest, but not too bothered about that as Northrend will replace all that).
All in the 3 instance runs netted about 3/4 of a level (including the quest hand in for finding the various druids in two instances).
I think If I’ll run steam vaults a few more times, get the priest to 67 and then head through to nagrand for the ring of blood arena event. (It’s such a huge chunk of XP and easily done with the druid).
At 68 I’ll head on over to northrend and questing there will get me to 70 very quickly - and then the work of getting my mixed melee fivesome macroed up to work together effectively.
I’m in two minds at the moment whether I should spec the priest to holy at 70 (He’s shadow at the moment). Probably a good move, but would impact me badly on levelling outside of instances.
Really looking forward to it now.
March 30th, 2009
I’ve been planning out macros for my team trying to imagine situations I might encounter and how to react to those specific scenarios. I soon realised that this would actually result in a team with limited reactions to situations.
For example, I originally planned on having the bears growl/challenging roar macroed up with the various other class abilities to drop aggro.
This was to ensure the bear got aggro. However i then imagined a scenario where the bear might want to growl off the healer - but in the situation it was resisted or on cooldown I would want all of my dps to do their best to taunt aggro off the healer. (of course the healer would definitely fade too).
I came to the conclusion that I want to be able to quickly and easily access a core set of abilities for each of the three roles.
In the long run I’m hoping this will result in a more fluid team able to cope with difficult and unpredictable situations. (pretty much how my solo runs with guildies are).
So here is my list:
1. Tanking
Controlled pulling.
Aggro maintenance.
healer protection - taunts, growls, charges, high aggro attacks.
dps protection. - Taunts, growls, high aggro attacks
Movement - Kiting, staying in Line of sight of the healer.
2. DPS
Targetting - the DPS need to be targetted on the correct mob.
Healer protection (post pull crowd control, stuns , taunts etc).
Aggro control - Staying below tanks threat, using threat reducing abilities to lose aggro.
Damage
Movement - Moving out of AOE, poison/acid puddles
Correct use of AOE.
Pre pull Crowd control. Reapplication of Crowd control if available.
3. Healing
Keeping tank alive
Aggro control - using threat reducing abilities e.g Fade if possible.
Single Target healing (other than tank)
AOE healing
Movement - Moving out of AOE, staying within range of tank, keeping LoS.
CC potentially.
For the purposes of simplicity I’m going to consider all 3 of my dps as one character. They will all fire off the same type of ability at the same time.
I’m also considering them expendable. They will try to save the healer, but will perform no action to save themselves. That is the job of either the
healer or the tank (or both).
Hopefully I’ll talk more of specifics when I get to macroing this up.
March 25th, 2009
You’ll be glad to hear I’ve not decided to change my final team composition yet again.
I thought I would just post a quick update to how things are progressing.
I’m taking a rather odd route building this team. Rather than working them up through the levels together I’ve been soloing. This isn’t due to some master plan - although I was tempted to suggest that I was soloing each of the members of the team to get a better idea of what their core abilities are making it easier to gel them all together at the end.
The simple truth is, that I’m enjoying soloing at the moment. I’m very active in the guild i’m in and my guildies are altaholics too so we tend to swap 80’s in and out depending on who we want to gear up.
Anyway down to the progress report.
I swapped my elemental shaman to enhancement at 76. After an initial period where I really wasn’t liking it (his dps dropped to about 700-800 dps soloing) I figured out how to play him (okay I just went to elitistjerks and read up on playing as enhancement). I can honestly say that I now love being an enhancement shaman.
A few days ago the shammy hit 80 and I decided to at least try a bit of melee multiboxing with my druid.
This was make or break time. If i couldn’t cope meleeing with 2 there is no way I could handle 4 melee and a healer.
A couple of quick macros later (namely a follow macro) and a dps macro I started out trying some icecrown dailies with the two of them.
Initially there were some positional issues. The druid fairie firing to pull tended to work well, the shaman was generally in range for melee.
It was more when I was running in on a mob. The shaman would get in to range start attacking and melee would break follow. The mob would move a little and the shaman was no longer in range for melee - so all he was doing was earthshocking.
The solution wasn’t too difficult. Just wait a little bit for the druid to swipe a couple of times and the mobs stopped moving and then tap follow to bring the shaman in to range, then start dpsing again.
This will be exactly what I’ll be doing in instances. I need to wait for the druid to gain initial aggro anyway, so this will work out perfectly.
I need to work on handling certain procs on my slaves. e.g I need a way for 5 charges of maelstrom weapon on the shaman to be reported to the druid so that I can throw an instant lightning bolt (or chain lighting). I tried an addon called tell me when, but couldn’t even get it to tell the shaman that maelstrom was up.
I have heard that Mik’s combat text may do this, but haven’t looked into this as yet.
Now there’s a few things i love about enhancement - Feral Spirits. That is just insane. Summon two wolves that come and do some rather nice damage - but also heal you loads too. Shamanistic rage to gain mana back when meleeing and my drinking times remain quite low. Being in close on melee means that I tend to use the aoe of Magma totem more. I’m really looking forward to when the team is fully formed. Magma totem, death and decay and consecration all doing lovely damage while we work on taking the current mob down.
My deathknight is now 74. My retribution paladin is now a 77, so will be the next to join the team.
Unfortunately I’ve had no time to level my 64 priest so that will hold the team back for a while - but I suppose I could always try getting a guildie to heal for a few runs.
All in all this taster of melee multiboxing hasn’t put me off at all, quite the contrary.
March 19th, 2009
So my last post was “this is my final team selection”, and barely a couple of days later here I am posting with my new final team selection.
Talk about sticking to your guns 
I was looking at the team I was trying to put together and realised there was quite a bit of work required to get them to Northrend.
I wanted a team that I could have fun running northrend instances in the shortest possible time.
Looking at my higher level characters I noticed that two of them were melee. Normally I would follow the advice of a tank, 3 casters as dps and a healer, but recent guild runs with a ret pally showed how much damage they can do even in average gear and it got me thinking that I wanted one in my team.
Once I had decided to add one melee I figured why not go for an all melee team.
So my team composition is
Druid Tank (80),
Ret Pally (73),
Death Knight (73),
Enhancement Shaman (76),
Holy Priest (64)
This could prove to be a massive failure, I’ve no doubt it will prove more difficult than a tank and 4 shaman but I will take a certain amount of satisfaction knowing that I am following a slightly more unusual path.
My first priority is to level the priest to 68 and get him through to Northrend. After that I will start doing the lower level Northrend instances.
At that point I’ll start discussing the strengths and weaknesses of my team and melee multiboxing, the problems encountered and the possible solutions.
A long term project for sure - as I spend a lot of time running heroics with guildies - but I’m looking forward to seeing how successful it proves to be.
March 9th, 2009
If there is one downside to multiboxing it is that it gives you so many options.
So many classes, so many specs, and loads of incredible combinations.
Multiboxing (other than for boosting alts) has been very much on the backburner for me, and that’s the way it will stay. I’m in a very small, very friendly guild who all play more than I do, so when I log on they want me to run heroics with them so I don’t get left behind gear wise. (They really are a special bunch of folks).
However I do want to have a multibox team to work on for those rare occassions when no one else is on.
I’ve posted in the past about the team I’m going to roll - oooh 5 deathknights, No 5 druids, No wait 1 pally 4 shaman, but this time is a definite, not going to change team selection.
I will get all these characters to 80 before I try to level any more characters.
So listed below is the team I’m going for (and their current levels).
Tank: Feral Druid (80). Currently my main and tanking heroics.
DPS1: Elemental Shaman (76). A totem for every situation.
DPS2: Frost Mage (61). Portals, Food/drink, intellect buff, crowd control.
DPS3: Moonkin (57). I love druids, what can I say. Mark of the wild. Crowd control. Hit debuff on target. Moonkin aura.
Healer: Priest (64). great healing. lightwells. stamina buff.
The shaman will be soloed to 80 as she’s only got 4 levels to go. The moonkin, mage and priest will be triple boxed up through the levels giving me time to work out nice dps macros (and potentially working on setting up their CC abilities) and getting the priests healing abilities sorted.
March 4th, 2009
I logged on Friday night and decided it was time for me to improve my gear.
After doing a bit of research I had found that the gear I was wearing (even the blues) really wasn’t that bad and so decided to invest in regemming, getting armour patches and enchants on everything, even adding some decent leg armour. I was concentrating mainly on Stamina as that was probably the stat I was lacking in most.
My health improved quite nicely going from just over 19k to over 22k in caster form, which put me at over 30k health in bear form unbuffed. My armour is about 30k, and my dodge chance is about 33%.
Our main tank was levelling an alt so the guild was quite happy for me to run as the tank to gain more experience.
We started with the
heroic of the day, the culling of stratholme.Quite a quick heroic and can be frenetic. We wiped twice, both times , through mistakes I made.
One was piling in to a bunch of mobs with feral charge, just putting me out of healing range.
The second wipe was just running out of rage when mobs spawned at either ends of a corridor in one of the buildings. No rage to try and gather the mobs together and they were running everywhere. Sadly I failed to get aggro back in time, end result was a dead healer and a wipe.
I did feel bad as we couldn’t remember the last time we wiped on this heroic. Still, I’ll ensure it doesn’t happen again.
It went smoothly after that and we beat the final boss (I won’t say downed him as he doesn’t die )
After much discussion we decided to do utgarde keep, and then follow that with the harder utgarde pinnacle.
Utgarde keep was a piece of cake. I’d tanked it easily the night before and noticed a huge difference from my gear upgrades (not to mention my gains in experience).
Utgarde pinnacle was another first time tanking experience. It has one very difficult fight in it. I’d only been in there once after being a fresh level 80, and we wiped tonnes on one particular boss.
However this time round it went pretty well. It’s a gauntlet type affair. When you run towards the boss, he mounts a dragon and flys off. One person picks up harpoons and when the boss is in range shoots him with the harpoon. In the mean time, loads of big vrykul fellas run down the hall towards you, and you have to pick them up and move on towards the end of the hall. The dragon occasionally flies down and does a frost breath down one side of the hall or other, so you have to move to avoid that. Wave after wave of these vrykuls come and you have to pick up the aggro on all of them – which can be quite difficult as a bear tank due to the longish cooldown on your roar.
Eventually the boss comes down and dismounts. He does a whirlwind type thing – going after one person at times , and you have to avoid it. ( I really must pay more attention to the bosses names).
I struggled grabbing the aggro fully on the waves the first time and we died after the boss got to the ground, however the second time went a lot better, thanks to the ret pally taunting off a mob that I had missed that decided it wanted to say hello to the healer, and the boss was dead.It was pretty easy after that. I did have one scary moment on a bad pull but recovered nicely.
It was still quite early and so it was off to do a heroic nexus run. Nobody really wanted to do it but our healer was after a mace from the end boss (called something like the mace of unrequited love) so we went there.
This one was an absolute cake walk. I’d learnt a lot from the tanking of the other instances and we burned through the place.
One boss we used to find hard when we first started doing heroics we breezed through (anomulus), one guildie Jude even commented that she thought this was the quickest we had ever downed him.
All other bosses are fairly simple. The end boss can be problematic if you don’t know what you are doing but now he is no problem at all.
At the end of it all I felt like a proper tank. I’ve got used to watching the other members of the team, and have recovered mobs that were going for the healer before the healer had to worry. My guildies warnings were coming after I spotted what was happening, so I’m happy with that.
I’ve got quicker on the growls and aoe taunts now, which makes a huge difference, when mobs can one or two shot your healer.
I’ve learnt some things to watch for when pulling as well.
And most importantly, I’m having fun too.
March 2nd, 2009