Discussion: 3 mage+tank+healer teams

[Hksix]

I'm sure there are several of us planning on running this comp. I am interested to hear everyone's thoughts / plans / ideas. Feel free to chime in whatever thoughts you are having on your team. Some questions to consider:

Which tank and healer will you be choosing and why?
What do you want to achieve?
How will you spec your mages?
Do you have a leveling route planned out?

Some random tips:

Mob Tagging
At level 6 you get fire blast, which allows for instant mob tagging from ranged. Create this macro and set up round robin with auto assist in ISBoxer:
/cleartarget [dead][help]
/targetenemy [noexists]
/cast Fire Blast (Rank 1)

Coordinating Polymorph
I have 2 different methods for setting up polymorph. One is for on the fly sheeping, with round robin+auto assist. Another is for pre-pulls. I set up targeting using /assist on round robin, then having each mage cast on their own target at the same time

I'll post some pros/cons to get discussion started

This is not intended to be a comprehensive list. It is just things I thought of off the top of my head.
Which tank to choose?

Warriors
== Pros ==

• Strong in PvP with a healer
• The best single target tanks for mitigation and threat

== Cons ==

• Adds complexity to something that is already complex (multiboxing)
• Requires a lot of attention to fully utilize (stance dance, weapon swaps, cooldowns, etc.)
• Not that much utility compared to the other tanks
• Not that much dps until very geared

Paladins:
== Pros ==

• The best AoE tanks (I don't care what Skarm says - I've done the math on AoE TPS and paladin comes way, wayyy ahead)
• The ability to do massive pulls with bubble for AoE pulls
• Ridiculous utility with BoP, BoF, BoW, BoSalv, etc.
• Able to heal and rez if needed

== Cons ==

• Mana problems
• Single target threat (not really an issue though with blessing of salvation on dps)
• No defensive tanking cooldowns outside of holy shield
• In general, takes more damage than the other 2 tanks
• Can't pull from ranged aside from engineering or a 3 min cooldown trinket. Although I've heard of some prot pallys having success tanking even while being specced into holy shock

Druids:
== Pros ==

• Strong single target threat
• Very good at handling groups of 3-5 mobs using swipe
• Good utility with thorns, innervate (you can make a powershift macro for this), battle rez, stealth, the list goes on
• Able to use leather, which would otherwise mostly be wasted with 3 mages in the group
• Not super gear dependant
• Can respec at 60 to either tank, heal, or DPS if you want
• The highest single target dps of the 3 tanks (at least until later)

== Cons ==

• Takes more damage than warriors
• Probably difficult to execute in PvP while multiboxing
• A lot of abilities adds more complexity. This may be a pro for some people
• The worst tank of the 3 for large aoe pulls

Which healer to choose?

Paladins
== Pros ==

• Strong single target heals
• Mana efficient
• Very strong utility as outlined above
• Very good pvp healer (plate armor+bubble)
• Cleanse
• Can wear cloth, leather, mail, and plate. Meaning less competition for the mages

== Cons ==

• No aoe heals
• Little to no offensive capabilities
• No CC

Priests
== Pros ==

• Many would say they are the best healer in vanilla
• HoTs, shield, and aoe heals are all great to have
• Fear ward if alliance
• AoE Fear
• Has a dot + wand when not healing
• Can fade if they get aggro
• Offensive dispel is nice in PvP
• Holy nova (honestly this one is not really that great)

== Cons ==

• Cloth armor - dies easily and has gear competition with the mages
• Easily focused in PvP
• Fortitude and spirit are nice, but not as good as the buffs the other healers offer

Druids
== Pros ==

• HoTs are always good
• Lots of utility as mentioned above. MotW, thorns, innervate, nature's swiftness
• Leather means less competition with the mages. Also very easy to gear up and minimal raid gear competition

== Cons ==

• Only able to res one person once every 30 minutes
• Pretty bad at healing in PvP without micromanagement (bear form, travel form, roots, etc.)

Shamans should probably not be considered for this group because the other healers all synergize better, but it could work if you really wanted to



Personally I will be rolling a team of Paladin+Paladin+Mage x3. I think a tank paladin massively benefits from having a 2nd paladin in the group. The mages no longer have to choose between wisdom or salvation. The tank can get sanctity aura, wisdom, and blessing of sanctuary. Dungeon leveling will be super fast - switching off paladins pulling massive groups with swiftness potion+bubble to group them up for the improved blizzard-fest.

[fenerous]

An outside of the box group can also be a Shaman and 4 mages, Shamans can tank any dungeon easily and they can also heal themselves through most fights since you'll be doing a ton of DPS. Each mage will have ice block for bad pulls and pair that with engineering + totems and I think it would be pretty viable.

I might be totally wrong though.

[dalo199]

I’m going Warrior 3xMage Preist mostly due to experiences from multiboxing on vanilla wow private servers

A lot of it is still theory crafting at this point and I can’t wait to see what other people can do with their 5 man teams

[Apatheist]

Paladin, priest and 3 mages covers everything you need for a solid PvE farming group.

You can dispel every debuff type, priest gets an offensive dispel to remove HoT's/shields some mobs cast. Paladins have excellent AE threat and mages have excellent AE damage.

Having mages in the group not only eliminates your paladins mana problems but it allows you to spam heals with your priest every fight, which lets you pull more mobs. You have to drink after every pull but the clear time ends up being faster because you can pull as many packs as your paladin can survive since threat isn't an issue. If necessary, you can use improved blizzard or cone of cold to keep mobs slowed and then kite them in circles on your consecration to reduce incoming damage.

It's a minor thing but 2 dwarfs and 3 gnomes makes things easier since they all have the same starting location.

Warriors can reach equivalent AE threat levels to a paladin but only with specific gear pieces, consumables and the right buffs. If you choose a warrior as a tank, I'd swap the priest for a paladin. Sanctuary and retribution aura increase warrior AE threat considerably.

[FuriousFromage]

I'll probably be going warrior-priest-3xmage. I may sub the priest for a pally though.

Which tank and healer will you be choosing and why?
Warrior - I intend on maining a warrior in raids so it will need to be part of my 5 box group as I level! I've been playing around with priest because spirit tap lets me be very aggressive with the warrior pulls => mage AOE is more efficient.

What do you want to achieve?
Hit lv60 on all 5 characters. Have my warrior ready for reading and have my 5 box crew for gold farming.

How will you spec your mages?
Before blizzard comes online I'll be using arcane explosion and will spec into the arcane tree for arcane subtlety, clearcasting, and AE crit. I have yet to experiment with mouse broadcasting to multicast blizzard. AE has crazy high DPS and I can cast it while the mages are on /follow so I might just stick with that all the way to 60.

Do you have a leveling route planned out?
I plan on dungeon leveling most of the way. There have been a lot of videos put out recently stating that wow classic's elite mobs are much easier than pservers so this may be a viable leveling strategy. I'm putting together some notes on a leveling route where I'll grab dungeon quests, dungeon grind, and will dip out into the open world for large hubs of transit/kill X quests. Its a WIP though. Would love to share results if anyone else is working on something similar.


How are you guys managing hotkeys/broadcasts with your 5 man groups? I have a couple broadcasted abilities for my mages (assist-frostbolt/fireball/fire blast, arcane explosion, assist-poly) and a mouseover macro for my priests heals bound to buttons on my mouse. My left hand has buttons for my warrior's rotations. Currently, I am manually activating every warrior ability but intend on setting up a 3 cast sequences for the warrior for different situations: 1 target, 2 targets, >2 targets.

[Hksix]

How are you guys managing hotkeys/broadcasts with your 5 man groups? I have a couple broadcasted abilities for my mages (assist-frostbolt/fireball/fire blast, arcane explosion, assist-poly) and a mouseover macro for my priests heals bound to buttons on my mouse. My left hand has buttons for my warrior's rotations. Currently, I am manually activating every warrior ability but intend on setting up a 3 cast sequences for the warrior for different situations: 1 target, 2 targets, >2 targets.

Right now none of my abilities are auto assisted with the exception of a few spells, as I prefer manual assist for more control. My tank abilities are on q and 1-5 with modifiers. My mage abilities are on e, r, f, and c with modifiers. Healer abilities are on z, x, and ~ with modifiers. I have a clickbar set up which is how I do most of my healing but I do have a few mouse buttons for heals on the tank. I have all my broadcasting toggles, follow, stop follow, etc. on mouse buttons.

I have a clickbar that toggles 1 of 2 things: When I press my blizzard hotkey, all mages cast blizzard using VFX with next click (per Mirai's aoe video). When I click the clickbar, it disables this so that when I press Blizzard it only casts on the current window. This is pretty important because it allows me to stagger my blizzard casts for better kiting.

[Hksix]

I’m going Warrior 3xMage Preist mostly due to experiences from multiboxing on vanilla wow private servers

Care to elaborate on this? What are your experiences that influenced your decision?

[dalo199]

Care to elaborate on this? What are your experiences that influenced your decision?

I talked a bit about it here..

https://www.dual-boxing.com/threads/...l=1#post420588

Warrior is the best tank in vanilla by quite a large margin overall in my opinion... yes you can do some funky stuff with the AOE from a pally but when content gets harder (level 60 instances) the ability to AOE dungeon packs starts to reduce and its more of a CC pull situation I've found

The Priest vs Pally healer might be personal preference but I'm rocking a pally healer on the private server at the moment and the lack of AOE heals and a HOT/PWS annoy me.. Shackle is also much better than fear undead when running strat/scholo... the buffs from Pallys are better but Fort/ShadowResistance is still very good and you don't have to reapply it to 5 ppl every 15 mins

If you run a Pally just to have a non cloth healer you have to release all that Holy Pally will end up in a ton of cloth +heal gear anyway and still want all the same spell dmg trinkets, rings and neck as the mages

I'm getting pretty bored on the private server now I just want Classic WoW (don't we all).. I might respec the Pally to Prot and the Druid to Resto and do a couple more runs just to get a bit more info.. I have tried a prot pally in Vanilla before and found it so lacking and also watched a tonne of youtube videos on Prot Pally's... ill use some of that info and try it out again

Oh and I also plan on rolling Horde which eliminates Pally for me anyway

Hope that answers your questions

[Hksix]

Warrior is the best tank in vanilla by quite a large margin overall in my opinion... yes you can do some funky stuff with the AOE from a pally but when content gets harder (level 60 instances) the ability to AOE dungeon packs starts to reduce and its more of a CC pull situation I've found

The Priest vs Pally healer might be personal preference but I'm rocking a pally healer on the private server at the moment and the lack of AOE heals and a HOT/PWS annoy me.. Shackle is also much better than fear undead when running strat/scholo... the buffs from Pallys are better but Fort/ShadowResistance is still very good and you don't have to reapply it to 5 ppl every 15 mins

I hear you. Thanks for the input. For me I'd like to raid as a paladin, so that means having a paladin either tanking or healing for my 5 man team. In my opinion paladins can tank just fine in any dungeon. For single target, cc pulls they may be inferior to warriors but I think they are more than capable of holding threat - especially with salv on the DPS. Also I recently got the idea of leveling a 2nd team of 3pally+2 mage. Then I would have 5 mages and 5 paladins. Single class teams are a blast in pvp.

[Mercbeast]

One thing to remember about Paladins is, they will be essentially useless as AOE tanks until the server matures a little bit and you have shield spikes up on the AH to purchase. A huge portion of their aoe damage comes from a shield spike, and not having them makes them go from being able to aoe grind 20 mobs, to not being able to really aoe grind at all.

So, paladin viability as a maintank for aoe grinding instances will probably depend on how hard you are pushing content. If you're hitting level 25 a month in, you might be able to find those shield spikes as your paladin starts to really come online as an aoe tank. If you're hitting level 25 on day 2, you better hope you get those plans yourself