Bobby i'm about to take advantage of the blizzard black friday sale and purchase 4 new accounts. I wanted to 4box shamans through instances using IB. Now i was wondering what spec would be most effective for the said 4 shamans considering i won't have any BOA gear? At least 1 would be resto obviously but since your the shaman expert and you made the CC i want your opinion on the other 3.
When I multi-box to level chars, I try to keep the character configs and gear selection as similar as possible primarily so I don't have to deal with variation in gear choices, etc. In that case, I would probably run 1 resto / 3 eles while leveling since while leveling all four basically wear the same gear. If you can get AutoEquip setup how you want for each unique char, that becomes a non-issue so running a 1 resto / 2 ele / 1 enh may work better for you. In either, the reason for going with the ele's over enh's is for larger mana pools for off-healing described below.
A: Resto with RAF Combat Style set to Healing Only.
B: Elemental with RAF Combat Style set to Automatic
C: Elemental with RAF Combat Style set to Automatic
D: Enhance or Elemental with RAF Combat Style set to Combat Only
The Healer A is setup as Healing Only, but will still DPS as described in the release notes if you have specced either Telluric Currents or Focused Insight and no healing or dispelling needed at the moment. If you don't want the Healer to DPS at all, be sure to omit those talents from your Resto build.
In the new version, if you are an Elemental or Enhancement Shaman using the Auto setting for RAF Combat Style, then ShamWOW will detect if the healer dies and switch to Healing Over Combat and begin off healing as needed and DPS'ing when possible. It automatically switches back to Combat Only when the healer resurrects. The comp above would have B and C setup like this and gives you some decent backup healers with good mana pools due to gear. The new version also works well in a multi-healer group so having two off-healers detect the situation at the same time will work well.
The D slot should be Combat Only since you already have 2 chars that will switch to off-heals as needed. This will keep one with no dps loss in the event of a healer death. In the event of a tank death, it would already be in melee range of the mobs so its auto-cast of Earth Elemental Totem would be in the best spot to pickup tanking.
You'll want to equip the Glyph of Thunderstorm on your Elementals. The spell is used to regen mana as needed and knock back attackers if they are in melee range. Disabling the knockback would prevent problems that can occur in aggroing a lot of adds by knocking one off a ledge or cliff into an area that hasn't been cleared. This can happen in several, but RFC, RFD, and the Deadmines come to mind.
Unless you are choosing races for other reasons, if you are creating Alliance characters I would roll all Dwarfs. Shaman can only cleanse Curses until your Resto specs Improved Cleanse Spirit and can do Magic also. As Dwarves, ShamWOW will cast Stoneform to self-cleanse Poison and Diseases which mitigates not having the dispels from other classes available in group. Otherwise, I would keep them the same race unless you have your RAF Summon available to get them in the same start area then choose based upon what racials you would prefer for end game play or farming.
With that setup, you should likely be able to IB level without doing a corpse run since you are guaranteed to have 4 rezzers and 2 off-healers in any instance.
