Shaman solo tactics
 

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.

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*.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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).

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.