I remember when I first heard about Blizzard’s plans for Dual spec.
I thought “So What?”. 1000 gold just to be able to swap between 2 talent trees. Why would I want to change specs that often. I mean, even if I was up to the 50 gold a respec rate it’s still over 20 swaps, and I was unlikely to do that.
Initially I’d heard you had to go back to the inscription tone to do the swap, so figured this was entirely useless.
Then it went live, and I went in to an instance with a guildie who had setup dual talent specs. He changed gear/role right in front of my eyes. Realising that you could change specs as many times as you want in an instance or raid was a revelation.
Now, one thing that stopped me swapping to resto on my shaman or druid, was the fact it takes so long to kill things. Doing my dailies would be a complete chore. Not anymore. I swap to my dps spec and wrap up my dailies then go back to resto.
It’s made finding a place in a pug heroic run (on the rare occassion my guildies aren’t around). DPS is a dime a dozen, but pugs are always looking for a tank or a healer. I see someone looking for a healer I swap specs and get an invite.
However, it’s in raids that it really shines. Take last night’s run of Naxxramas for example. We had massive issues with various players relogging and finding the login server wasn’t working for them. So, we were inviting other people in and changing our roles quite frequently.
I went along as a moonkin but spent a lot of time in resto. I love that. I healed the add kiter on Gluth. Was healing on Thaddius, and tanking the two caster bosses with another off spec healer on the four horsemen.
It adds so much flexibility to a team, being able to swap the raid configuration on the fly.
More importantly it allows me to sustain interest in my druid.
May 19th, 2009
I made a post quite some time ago about how to pick the classes you multibox with. A short summary would have been - pick casters when possible, the only melee you should have in your team should be the tank. Shamans got a massive vote just for their utility, self heal, ressing capabilities, but it was almost a case of any caster would do.
Melee was still possible, but required a lot of dancing round on the tank and putting your team back on follow to get the positioning right for all your melee to be hitting the target.
However Patch 3.1 changed all that. Amongst the changes was the “Interact with Target” keybind. This allows you to assign a key on your following characters that would allow you to interact with the taret they have selected. It made looting easier.
The real beauty of this change was that if you enabled click to move on your slaves they would run into range of the target and interact with it. In the case of mobs this resulted in them running over to the mob and hitting it. Even better - if your slave character was turned away from that mob it would turn around and run towards it. A nifty solution for when a mob was mixed in with your group and some of them were facing away from it.
This opened up all sorts of possibilities for class combinations.
General advice still stands - The less different classes you have the easier it is to multibox. So I’ve seen 5 ret pally teams, 5 deathknight teams, but if you want to have a mixed team, go for it.
If you are doing PVE go for a tank, healer and 3 dps. Tank wise you’d be fine with a Pally, DK or Druid - my personal preference is the Paladin - very simple to tank with 1 macro. Healing a priest, druid or resto shaman are ideal. They all bring different benefits. A paladin healer isn’t ideal for when your team take AOE damage (and there is a lot of AOE damage in Northrend instances) and may be a bit too intensive to heal with - but if you really want one go for it.
For DPS pick three characters you like. Go for 3 melee or 3 ranged/casters, but other than the difficulty of macroing everything up there’s nothing to stop you picking a combination - and just having interact with target and click to move enabled on the melee characters.
Also try to remember that you can mix your team up even further with Dual talent specs. I run my shaman as enhancement but can swap him to a healer. I run my druid as cat but again, can swap him to healer (I did toy with the idea of changing him to moonkin instead).
So the good news is - You can have any team you want. The bad news is you now have more choice than ever before.
May 15th, 2009
I had a bit of extra time on my hands yesterday and decided I would go back for a bit of multiboxing fun on my 4 shaman 1 pally team.
The paladin and 3 of the shaman are 65 with the resto shaman being a 71.
I chose Mana tombs as the instance to go to. I’ve never run it much on any character, and it was the right level.
A couple of pulls in and I found that my lesser healing wave spam on the Paladin tank wasn’t going to be enough. So I changed the macro to do riptide, lesser healing wave, healing wave, riptide, lesser healing wave, healing wave. Combined with the earth shield this worked a treat.
One flaw in my setup - I hadn’t specced cleanse spirit on my resto paladin. This cleanses a disease, poison and a curse. This would have been useful, as I found a shaman or two would die after I’d finished off a group of mobs. I noticed that they had a curse on them (I think). I did get by just by hitting chain heal on the shammys, but I need to macro this so that they chain heal each other instead of themselves.
I managed to get through the whole instance with no wipes. Completed a few quests, then did the final escort quest. It got a bit messy on the escort quest as I hit a mob that feared, hadn’t got my tremor totems down and so had a couple facing the wrong way. Then a couple of the shamans died, and I thought I might actually die. I tapped my follow, got the remainder of my team on target and killed him. I then had to drink up, and res the two dead shamans. (I was worried the escort would go on without me, but that didn’t happen). So I successfully completed the escort quest as well.
The 3 shaman all dinged 66 right at the end or at hand in. The paladin moved to over half way to 66.
I did learn something else on this run. I was pulling the group, and was going through my tanking sequence on the pally. I started dpsing after the first couple of hits, but before the first consecrate kicked in. This resulted in ranged spell casters hitting my shaman instead of the paladin. I found it much better to wait till the consecrate hit then start dps. That worked a treat and I had less problems after that.
It did take a while to clear the whole thing, and I may consider killing to the first boss only and reset in the future, but I’ll definitely run this again.
May 13th, 2009
I was doing my ebon blade dailies yesterday on my shaman and I was merrily killing those duelling giant Vrykuls and planting the banners.
I looted the corpse and saw purple. Oh goodness!!!! An epic. I wonder how much that will go on the Auction house for. Visions of me actually having an epic flying mount on one of my characters sprung forth. I took a closer look.
Bind on Pickup. Grrrrr!!!!! Okay, never mind, what wonderful things will it let me do.
It’s a trinket, and when activated it turns me into a gorilla in a purple sphere for 5 minutes. It’s also on a 1 hour cool down.
And do you know what - I Love It. It’s pointless, it’s silly, but it’s all mine.
Last thing before logging off I decided to take a run round Dalaran in monkey form - just because I can.
May 7th, 2009
Last night we headed back into Naxxramas to down the mighty Kel’thuzad.
We headed in there at 7pm, and didn’t leave until just before 11pm.
Wipe after wipe after wipe.
It has to be said it’s a tough, tough fight.
We tried various different strategies and multiple different group setups.
The fight happens in 3 phases. Phase 1. We all run in and stand within a big circle marked on the floor. You aren’t meant to leave that circle, and kill anything that comes at you. (I accidentally stepped my big toe out of that circle and wondered why all the mobs in the room decided to come at us. Luckily both guilds found that wipe funny, And of course everyone who didn’t know already was told of the time my druid used in the middle of an opera fight in Karazhan. It was going great, until the starfall pulled all the spectators in to the fight and wiped us - but i digress.
After about 3 minutes of killing these various types of mobs Kel’thuzad awakens and phase 2 starts.
You have to kill any remaining mobs quickly then get on the boss. It’s tank and spank basically but with a couple of tricks.
Every so often he casts ice block. It chains to anyone within 10 yards of the person affected. We tried spreading out round the boss but it ended in all of us getting iceblocked and an eventual wipe. Oh, and the ice block hurts. It does big damage, so if you don’t get healed you will be dead before it wears off.
The second trick is a ground spawn type effect. A red circle goes off – generally where someone is standing. You have a little time to get out of that area. If you don’t you take about 13k damager per second till you get out of it. For most people that’s a death sentence.
His last ability of note is a mana bomb. He plants it on one player. That player then runs away from everyone else. If he’s not within range of others it takes 2000 of his mana away. If he is it blows up and I think does damage to everyone in range. There’s some ice bolts he throws as well but they’re not too bad.
After fighting him through this - and you wouldn’t believe how many die to the ground spawn, or to the ice blocks- Phase 3 begins. This is the same as phase 2 except two massive beetle like guardians spawn and need to be picked up and tanked by an off tank. This off tank needs to be quite beefy as they will enrage.
As mentioned before it was a bit of a wipe fest. Ice block seemed to get progressively worse through the fight and the healers needed to be on the ball to keep you alive. With 2 healers we really struggled.
One healer was a resto shaman and if nature’s swiftness was on cool down it was difficult for him to get a heal off on a couple of people ice blocked.
We had about 4 melee on the boss plus the tank, so we had to stand in pairs. This way we were out of range of the tank, so he wasn’t iceblocked. It also meant that 2 of us got ice blocked at once, but this was preferable to all 4 or 5. Our successful group composition had 3 healers and two very well geared tanks. Everyone eventually got used to the spawns and stopped dying to them. Thinking about it, our melee heavy group probably made ice block more of an issue than with a caster heavy group. If we were at range and spread out a lot of the time 1 person would be iceblocked and would have got healing attention straight away.
We had one last wipe where one of the tanks died. The other tank was tanking Kel’thuzad and both guardians ( and was doing great), but because of all the big mobs on him, didn’t see the ground spawn and died. We had had the boss down to 300k at this time and but for that one quirk of fate would have got the boss that time.
The final run went well. Everyone working well together, and finally two achievements popped up on my screen. One for killing every boss in Naxxramas, and one for killing Kel’thuzad. A great moment.
The tier head piece dropped and I won the roll. It looks amazing. A big spiky helmet with fiery eyes and the face hidden.
I think it’s pretty good going that our guild (and those from the guild we formed an alliance with) have cleared all of the bosses on the third week of trying. At the start only one of us in the guild had raided in Wotlk and when we joined together with this other guild both had only cleared spider wing and a couple of bosses in another wing. Working together we’ve cleared the whole place and have further raids to look forward to.
We’ll still run Naxx of course – there’s gearing up to do, and it’s so much fun. It will be great to get to the point where we rip through that place.
Now I just have to go farm some gold - I had a huge repair bill for last nights efforts.
May 6th, 2009
My enhancement shaman went along to another raid session this week.
Our guild and friends from the other guild have progressed wonderfully in Naxxramas this week. I went along to two other raid sessions this week, and we have now downed all the wings and taken down the the mighty Sapphiron.
Only Kel’thuzad awaits. We had time for two attempts but sadly he beat us. It definitely felt achievable, and we will have all night tonight to try and beat him down before the reset.
All my heroics and these few raids have resulted in me building up a nice resto shaman off spec set, and I dual specced to resto a while ago (sadly I’ve done zero healing as a resto shaman, and am going to try to remedy that). This really turned out to be fortunate as I was called upon to tank one of the Four horsemen. It was me and a resto druid at the back of the room, and two pally tanks on the other horsemen.
Initial placement was wrong, and we wiped about 4 times. The last wipe the druid and myself had been tanking our bosses flawlessly (in fairness it seems quite simple once you get the hang of it).
I’ve been pleasantly surprised with our progress. Each wing we’ve been told that it’s going to be tough and yet we manage to prevail.
I sure hope we take the Kel’thuzad down tonight, but either way I’m sure we’ll have plenty more fun in Naxxramas before heading on to other raids.
May 5th, 2009
Last night was somewhat unexpected.
No scheduled raid and not enough people to do a run with so I wasn’t expecting much. However one of our guildies has been making overtures to another small guild that don’t quite have the member base to raid, or don’t want to be a raiding guild. We were going to do a few trial runs of heroics with mixed guild runs to see what the other people in the guild were like, when one of our guildies noticed we could put together a 10 man. 7 from our guild and 3 from the other.
So we found our way to outside of Naxx. Gave out vent details and did some brief introductions. The folks seemed nice enough and off we all went.
We had a whale of a time. We did spider wing super quick. Had an unlucky wipe on Faerlina when she was very low on hitpoints, but sailed through it. We then headed on to the plague wing.
Our last run there took out Noth the plaguebringer and we finally downed Heigan after wipes.
This time round we killed Heigan on our second attempt and found ourselves in front of loatheb. Apparently loatheb is a bit of a gear check (similar to the curator fight in Kara).
If you can’t down this guy you need to gear up, it’s as simple as that. It’s a fairly simple tank and spank. Healers have a hard time as they appear to get 3 second windows to heal through, the rest of the time they can’t heal.
We downed Loatheb with no problems at all.
So our joint run was very successfull. The other guild seem to match ours in their attitude. Lots of friendly camraderie, no guilt trips, and no egos in play. So things look bright for fun raiding.
We’ll be hitting up Naxx again on Friday. I’m hoping we will definitely clear at least one of the other wings (if not both)
We’ve done a bit of the construct ring before. Downing Patchwerk but wiping on grobbulus so it will be great if we can take him out this time.
April 30th, 2009
I mentioned recently that I was going to switch my paladin from retribution to protection for my mixed melee team.
I want to run heroics on him (although all of the team isn’t at that stage) and so I wanted to get to the 540 defense rating. For heroics 535 makes you uncrittable to the level 82 bosses, 540 is required for the level 83 bosses found in raids.
A quick search on the internet and I found this really good guide to initially gearing up a paladin.
This site is fantastic and contains everything you need to know about tanking as a paladin.
I was lucky enough to have the titansteel shield and at least 1 epic from Naxxramas 10 mans that had defense on it, but still only had just over 400 defense. Following this guide I was able to go from 400 defense to my target of 540 well within 2 days.
The rep items and crafted stuff that phase 1 suggested was relatively cheap.
I did have to gem for defense, using I thick autmn’s glow gems - or something like that.
Each of them adds 16 defense rating (or about 4 defense).
I also had to put a defense enchant on my chest and a titanweave enchant on my cloa to get to the magic 540.
I’ve only got about 19k health unbuffed so some of the harder heroics will be out, but it’s a great starting point.
April 28th, 2009
After playing my horde paladin (65 currently) I’ve been forced to reconsider my decision to have my druid tank for my team.
I chose the bear tank, primarily because trying to DPS as a feral cat seemed to require watching too much at the same time. This meant I would have to spec my pally as retribution.
One i decided the paladin would make the better tank it was now a case of figuring out a way to get decent feral cat dps whilst multiboxing.
1. The problem.
Feral cat dps relies on a priority of abilties. Add combo point watching to that and it would take much needed concentration from my situational awareness.
2. The solution.
I found out about an addon called Mik’s combat scrolling text. I can modify certain of the triggers in this add on to watch for ability procs on members of my party, not just my main character. So with this in mind I’ve decided on the following.
i) Set up a trigger in MSBT that lets me know when the cat has 5 combo points. I will have one macro that will trigger either ferocious bite, or rip based on which key modifier is pressed.
2. I will set up a trigger for Berserking and the tiger’s fury ability coming off of cooldown. Depending on how much time remains in the fight i can decide if i want to trigger these abilities or not.
3. Set up a trigger for Savage roar dropping off. Savage roar is a huge dps increase, so it’s vital to keep this up at all times. Normally a 2 combo point savage roar will outlast trash mobs, but on a boss fight will need refreshing.
4. I’ll get the mangle glyph for my cat. Solo play I might want to be behind the target but with the positional problems of multiboxing I’ll have a dps macro consisting of mangle, with the odd rake put in there to keep bleed effects going.
I think the pally is easier to play as a tank than the druid (certainly whilst multiboxing) and this will free up quite a chunk of concentration to watch for MSBT proc reports.
I’ll probably turn of 90% of the notifications from MSBT so that I only get druid procs, and the shamans 5 stack of maelstrom weapon.
I think this should result in acceptable dps levels on the cat without compromising the team.
I’ve heard of other addons (such as parrot) that may allow you to assign audible cues as well. I’ll try with MSBT for now though.
April 27th, 2009
I took my paladin and 4 shaman into Slave pens on friday night.
I’ve heard this can be quite difficult to multibox for non Paladin and shaman team but it was quite easy for my group composition.
The trickiest boss was actually the first. Mennu the betrayer. It was an endurance fight, it just seemed to go on forever. One of my shaman died early on, and i just kept hitting and hitting the boss and he wouldn’t die.
This boss drops totems at various stages of the fight. A stoneskin, a healing stream and a fire nova. I think my key issue was that i didn’t have a macro to target the two totems that needed to be taken out (healing and stoneskin). I was targetting them manually on my paladin. Eventually the boss died (although I nearly fell asleep with boredom before he did 
)
Other than that this instance was pretty easy, I think the shamans self heal and poison cleansing totems made the last boss trivial.
April 27th, 2009
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