Totem Talk: Scraping off the rust

One of the interesting aspects to playing a class as varied as the shaman (or any hybrid, really, but Hybrid Theory's on weekends, you should read that too) is the disparate roles you can end up playing. For example, on my slowly leveling paladin, I'm constantly forced to look at quest drops and say "Well, it's a healing drop, but it would be an upgrade to my healing set, so I'll hold onto it." On my shamans, even though I rarely see a quest drop nowadays, I've worked to assemble elemental, enhancement and restoration sets for each: my restoration shaman has been getting some love lately, with certain new drops and enchants helping increase his plus heal to around 1800 or so, but at the same time I've been forced to realize something.

I went three months playing nothing but enhancement and man, I was rusty. The first Magisters' Terrace run I did on the orc was a parade of dead tank, dead me, dead DPS. Now, admittedly, this is entirely due to my own foolishness in trying to heal MgT my first run back on the job, so to speak, and subsequent runs in Shattered Halls and Black Morass went much better, helping me to get my legs back under me. It's not like you actually forget the role so much as you have to take the time for it to become familiar again.

Well, okay, I totally forgot about downranking my heals. Hey, don't look at me like that, it's not like as enhancement I downrank a lot except maybe if I'm on spell interrupt duty. (And we all know that I'm noob enough to be using Stormstrike but not thinking to let the boomkins and elemental shamans take advantage of the buff, but that's different because it's not like I'm downranking there, either, I'm just being selfish and was suitably chastened for it by you folks.) I remembered around the second pull in Shattered Halls that I have an entire bar set up with downranked heals.I also remembered that I had to go re-download Grid and Healbot.

Like I said, rusty.

Back and forth again

Going from melee DPS to caster DPS isn't really as hard, I find, although it does have unique challenges of its own. My elemental set isn't quite there yet, but it's not awful, so I've tried a few variations on the spec and gone on a few runs with it. Luckily I played resto first, because if not, I probably would have run directly to my death because I'm not at all used to standing back and casting for my DPS. As a noob elemental I make many, many mistakes... I mess up my rotation, I drop the wrong totems reflexively, I spec poorly (I forgot Totem of Wrath my first time out.) This isn't quite the same thing as being rusty, I admit, but it's part of the same syndrome: the three playstyles are different enough that a long time spent in one does almost nothing at all to prepare you for the other two. Thankfully all three drop totems at least. So you don't have to relearn how to do that.

To some degree this is the penalty you pay for being so flexible. If a warrior wants to become caster DPS, welcome back to Elwynn Forest, dude. Sweet skirt. Have fun hitting wolves and kobolds with a stick. If I want to go caster DPS, I can just go on a run as the healer and say "offspec". It's not as easy as that... often there are people who peskily want gear for the specs they already are... but it's still a sight easier than trying to get yet another Uldaman PuG off of the ground.

So embrace the complicated and non-intuitive process of re-learning or even learning a spec for the first time, I say. And how may you go about doing that? I'm glad you ask... what, you didn't ask? Well, the segue demands that I pretend that you did. No, no, it's no good trying to demur. I like you, sure, but the segue will not be denied. Have you ever tried to deny a segue? Not the scooter... look, we're getting way off track here. Yes, I'm aware that they weren't actually scooters. They were hybrids, too. But that's not getting us any closer to...

Boot Camp for Your New Spec

One thing I recommend doing for a refresher is a battleground. No, BG healing isn't much like raid healing at all, and neither enhancement or elemental perform in PvP as they do in PvE. The reason to go to BG's is to get used to multiple targets, to familiarize yourself with your spells and abilities in a situation where poor performance won't wipe your group (trust me, it's better to die sixteen times at the blacksmith, trying to remember where you put Nature's Swiftness, then it is to discover you've forgotten to hotkey it on a Lady Vashj pull. Not that I know anyone who's done that. I can feel you shaking your head right through the screen) or at least where wiping your group is generally going to happen anyway.

Think of the battlegrounds as a fast refresher course. If you have raid interface addons you'll have access to a makeshift raid to test them out in, opportunity to use your new spec in actual combat (heck, somewhat more frantic combat than you're likely to encounter in most PvE... most, I said) and what's more, you don't have to tell anyone that you died because you forgot you had instant cast Ghost Wolf now.

Once you're at that level of familiarity with the new spec, stop running BG's (well, okay, you can run them for fun if you want, I'm not here to tell you not to have fun) and start running five mans, preferably heroics. You need to start getting back into the group dynamic for PvE, remember what totems to drop in what situations (even as a restoration shaman, if I have a melee heavy group I often drop Windfury Totem for them, but as enhancement I got so used to buffing a melee group with it that I'd forgotten that elemental often drop other totems for caster groups... I had to be not so gently reminded by a moonkin that I was in fact there for Wrath of Air and Totem of Wrath) - use these runs to develop a familiarity with group composition and your role in it. It's going to change as you get to the 10 and 25 man raiding level, but each change is gradual (10 man raids can't really afford to stack groups the way a 25 man can) so you can still learn for the next level.

If you raid on one spec and are planning to raid on another, then pay attention to what your guild's content level is. If you're currently in Sunwell as an elemental shaman but are planning to go resto, you probably don't want to just show up at Brutallus in some AH blues. I mean, who knows, your guild may be crazy, but most players I know frown on someone dying constantly or running OOM or being unable to heal at the content level. For my own situation, since we're raiding at the entry level to Hyjal and BT, it made sense for me to start my enhancement shaman in Karazhan when I decided to go elemental on him and get badges, gear that would otherwise be sharded, and experience in pew pewing. A few runs to SSC and TK on off nights are the next step, to get experience in throwing lightning bolts and carved sticks in the same basic kind of raid but at a lower gear check level.

That's basically all there is to it. You can probably accelerate some or all of this... if you respec between resto for arenas and elemental for raiding all the time, you're probably at least passingly familiar with both specs and don't need to refresh yourself as much. If you raid enhancement but are always volunteering to respec to heal hard fights, your guild is probably already keeping you properly geared and you don't need to spend a lot of time dropping back down to 10 man content to gear or familiarize yourself.

Obviously, I would have liked to talk about new talents in the WotLK alpha this week. That didn't happen because... well, because there doesn't seem to be any information, not even probably inaccurate leaked information. So we'll just have to wait on that.

Please give us some form of CC or anti-CC, Blizz. I'm on my knees here.