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fishingme
10-10-2013, 09:41 AM
Did a forum search and found nothing on this topic. So what's your soloing tactics?

I'll start. I usually root/rot with poison and disease dot but after doing this for what feels like 30 levels I have been playing with melee + slow + poison dot cast.

DrKvothe
10-10-2013, 10:47 AM
Depends on the level.
Pre-24: pull with drowsy, stab stab stab, root if it starts running a way that might get me killed, after fight heal to 80% or so with inner fire if necessary.
24-29: Root/rot in places I can single pull.
29-34: You've got haste to go with regen and you've got greater healing, so grouping wins hard.
34-45 and counting: Root/rot with pet to add dps and hold aggro on adds til you can land a root. Still pulling with drowsy *shrug*.

Estu
10-10-2013, 11:18 AM
Pre-14: Melee.
14-59: Root-dot. Unless you have great gear, in which case you can melee for a while at low levels, but root-dotting will still win out by 30 or 40 in terms of efficiency. I've tried various methods of EXPing (though I never had uber gear) and root-dotting always gets the job done fastest in terms of raw EXP per hour.
60: Melee with Torpor.

There are obviously some tweaks here and there. Canni+regen comes along and gives you a nice boost in efficiency. Your pet comes along and gives you a little extra DPS and CC. With your epic, you get way more efficient. JBB and fungi help a lot too if you happen to be sitting on a mountain of platinum.

Stinkum
10-10-2013, 11:33 AM
Shamans change a lot with every new set of spells, which is one of the things that makes them fun. You can be a poor man's Druid, a very powerful Necromancer, or a tank. You just have to play around with what race you picked, what works best in a given situation, and what tools you have.

loramin
10-10-2013, 04:06 PM
I've found there's a few basic styles (which, as others have said, you have to re-choose from almost every five levels when you get new spells):



Slow, dot, melee

Advantage: you get to add melee damage (great if you have a Barbarian Spiritist Hammer or something similar)
Disadvantage: you have to waste mana healing yourself after
Once you get a pet, he essentially becomes an extra dot when you fight this way

Dot, root ("root rot")

Advantage: No mana spent on slows or heals
Disadvantage: Slower than other approaches, a bit of extra mana needed for roots

Just send your pet in to fight

Advantage: No mana spent at all (pet can heal on his own after, and you don't need root since you're not out-agroing pet)
Disadvantage: Very slow, and only works against light blues or weak blues

Root, slow, dot, send pet in to fight (pulling him out of the fight when he gets low health)

Advantage: Faster than pure-pet fighting, but you don't need to heal yourself
Disadvantage: Against some monsters your pet will die so fast it's almost not worth sending him in
Alternatively you can save the root for last; this will eliminate any chance of your dots breaking root, but it means you will take some hits while dotting/rooting



And then of course there are variations of those approaches. For instance, if you're doing the root + pet tank approach, you can throw in a bit of your own melee when your pet gets low.

Hope that helps.

Estu
10-10-2013, 04:23 PM
Just to add - another method no one's mentioned yet is straight-up kiting. You can SoW yourself and/or your pet, DoT the monster, and then run like hell. Not necessarily a great method in many ways, but it can have its uses (back when I was first bringing up my shaman, I found this to be pretty effective from 9 through 13, although this was before the DoT damage fix to moving monsters).

Stinkum
10-10-2013, 05:14 PM
Just to add - another method no one's mentioned yet is straight-up kiting. You can SoW yourself and/or your pet, DoT the monster, and then run like hell.

I found this tactic to be very good in DL at level 49 when I got Envenomed Breath, as long as I had a Clarity or Clarity II on me.

Retti_
10-10-2013, 06:15 PM
Its not very mana efficient withmoving damage reduction

Estu
10-10-2013, 06:35 PM
Its not very mana efficient withmoving damage reduction

Well, even without the -1/3 damage penalty, it's not great because you don't get to meditate (unless you pull some crazy shit with perfectly-timed sitting).

Stinkum
10-10-2013, 06:44 PM
It only really works if you have Clarity. I was able to kill red con ravishing drolvargs that would've used a lot more mana otherwise.

Triangle
10-10-2013, 07:11 PM
my tactic @60 with summoning mobs.
1)Malo --> Slow --> Malosini OR Malosini --> Slow (depending on the level of the mob).
2)epic dot / canni / jbb / canni / jbb etc (then rinse and repeat)
- this way you avoid spell cooldowns, because you always click a clicky after a spell.
I usually have a pet up with celerity, and torpor when I am down to about 1-1.2k out of 2.5k hp. Having a lot of hp helps with this because you can cast torpor earlier. Make sure you are aware of how long you have left on slow, you will want to reslow before it runs out.

gotrocks
10-10-2013, 08:31 PM
scourge is your friend until 49, and even after, its a good spell.

tons of damage, low mana cost, just takes a while to take affect. Get really good at root rotting 4+ mobs at a time with scourge pre-49 and watch the xp roll in.