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Skill Mastery: Ascendance takes shaman to new heights
Ascendance is a new ability coming to level 87 shaman of all specs in Mists of Pandaria. For 15 seconds every 3 minutes, you'll transform yourself into an Ascended elemental form that looks very much like the trash mobs in Grim Batol or Bastion of Twilight. The actual Ascendant's appearance and the function of the form vary based on your current specialization. For enhancement, you take on the form of an air Ascendant, making your melee auto-attacks and Stormstrike become ranged attacks that are able to be used at up to 30 yards away. They also deal pure nature damage, which means they're benefited by Enhanced Elements and ignore armor. From a PvP standpoint, melee attacks from a 30-yard range that ignore armor will be frustrating for escaping clothies and plate-wearers that you're trying to keep your distance from. Elemental morphs into a fire Ascendant. In this form, your Chain Lightning morphs into Lava Beam. Lava Beam is similar to Chain Lightning but hits a total of five targets and doesn't reduce its damage when it jumps, which is potent AoE. For single targets, your fire Ascendancy makes your Lava Burst have no cooldown during its duration, which means back to back critical hits for 15 seconds. The last Ascendant form is restoration's water form, which functions very similarly to the Essence of Dreams in Ultraxion. For 15 seconds, every heal you cast duplicates its healing done and splits that secondary healing amount among all nearby targets. If you cast a 100k Greater Healing Wave on your tank, she'll be healed for 100,000 and another 100,000 healing will be split among allies near her. It's very potent. If you want more in depth views of Ascendance and the benefits and cons, Joe Perez and I recently wrote Totem Talks covering Ascendance for DPS and resto shaman. It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!
Totem Talk: A restoration shaman hands-on with Ascendance
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement and restoration shaman. Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration, brought to you by Joe Perez (otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticus and cohost of the For the Lore and Raid Warning podcasts), shows you how This week, we're going to talk about our level 87 ability, Ascendance. That video above is not mine, but it is pretty darn cool, so I figured I would link brandonk99ing's video here since it did such a nice job. It shows our brand new ability for Mists, which we get to play with at level 87. Each flavor of shaman gets a different version of the ability. Elemental and enchancement get some nice damage increases, while resto gets to walk around like a giant water elemental, throwing out crazy healing numbers. Basically, while in the Water Ascendant form, all of our healing done is duplicated and distributed evenly among nearby allies. I've commented that it looks just like the ability Essence of Dreams from the Ultraxion encounter -- and to be honest, that's exactly how it feels. I figured I would share with you my impressions of the ability, now that I've gotten my hands on it.
Raid Rx: Shamanism heading into Mists of Pandaria
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poohbah of World of Matticus and a founder of Plus Heal, a discussion community for healers of all experience levels and interests Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading, the Matticast. After covering monks, priests, paladins, and druids, there is one class left to review: shaman. How are they going to fare entering Mists of Pandaria? Totems ... gone! Just kidding! They're not really gone. They've switched to more of a utility focus now. Looking at the entire list of totems available, not a single one provides any type of stat increase. Totems that provided passive buffs like Flametongue Totem, Mana Spring Totem, and Stoneskin Totem have been removed. Healing Stream took a nerf cannon to the face, now only affecting a player now instead of whole groups.
Totem Talk: The highs and lows of Ascendance for DPS shaman
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. Once a lonely tauren shaman in a bad Scarlet Crusade-themed transmog set, Josh Myers is now a female dwarf shaman with pigtails who raids using all three specs on a regular basis. He kept the same transmog set, though. Elamism didn't hit level 87 on the beta this week. It wasn't for lack of trying, but something more akin to lack of time. Despite grabbing two heroic No'kaleds from our first heroic Madness kill two weeks ago, I still had guild raiding to do this week (I ended up picking up a heroic Rathrak for my elemental spec, so I can't complain too much), and I had to make preparations for my trip to Michigan next week. Coupled with the fact that I had to dedicate a night to testing my arcane mage as well, I wasn't able to dedicate enough alone time with my shaman to hit level 87. Thankfully, other people have had the opportunity to play more than I did (special thanks to Ashunera, who graciously allowed me to use this Ascendance video here). It's thanks to Ashunera that we've gotten our first taste of Ascendance, the new class ability coming to shaman in Mists of Pandaria. Spoiler alert: It's totally and completely awesome.
Totem Talk: 3 reasons enhancement shaman should be excited for Mists of Pandaria
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. Once just the expert on enhancement shaman, Josh Myers has spent most of Dragon Soul as elemental, and he's not quite sure how he got there. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I'm going to be honest: I still love Cataclysm. I know that it has a lot of problems, but I think a lot of the issues people have with Cataclym are that it isn't Burning Crusade (or vanilla, for that matter), and I'm very much an enemy of nostalgia. Especially in comparison to its immediate predecessor, Cataclysm has a lot of things going for it. Class balance is in a better place across the board than it was in Wrath. Even though Firelands was a giant explosion of red and orange visual vomit, it still doesn't compare to Trial of the Crusader's single room. And, even though we've not been amazing at all during any of Cataclysm, enhancement shaman haven't actually sucked during any patch, much less the entire last year of the expansion. That said, I'm terribly excited for Mists of Pandaria. Part of the excitement is that for once in my life I'll have a horde race to play that isn't tauren as I hate all the other choices, and The Amazing Panda Adventure was possibly my favorite movie from 1995. Another part of the excitement is that Mists of Pandaria is new and shiny and it's only human to love things that are new and shiny. I love some of the new ideas Blizzard has cooked up for level 90 players, from PVE scenarios to companion pet battles. Yes, I was young enough to play Pokemon when it was relevant, but I'm also old enough to not be ashamed of wanting to play it again. Most importantly, though, I'm most excited for the potentials changes coming to enhancement in MoP. Enhancement has had some pretty glaring issues for a good part of this expansion, even if we regularly remained competitive. Thankfully, some of the changes that came in last week's updated talent calculator look like they'll be on the road to solving these issues when Mists drops.
Totem Talk: What MoP talent updates mean for DPS shaman
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. Once just the expert on enhancement shaman, Josh Myers has spent most of Dragon Soul as elemental, and he's not quite sure how he got there. It seemed like a good idea at the time. When the Mists of Pandaria talent trees first debuted, I wasn't the most pleased DPS shaman on the block. I wasn't exactly displeased, either; my emotional involvement was most summed up by the word "meh." Stone Bulwark Totem looked interesting; Healing Tide Totem had me super psyched; and Echo of the Elements looked insanely powerful, stacked with elemental's mastery. On the flipside, the entire third tier of talents looked super boring, and the top tier of level 90 talents was so underwhelming that I almost wrote off the new talent system as a lost cause. Thankfully, we're not in even the closed friends-and-family beta yet, and so I knew changes would definitely be implemented in time. I've been looking forward to Wednesday's talent calculator update for nearly three months now, and I'm glad to see that I wasn't terribly let down. While there still are some definite issues with the tree as it stands, Blizzard's already said that we were one of the two classes that it's currently focusing on, which is why our level 90 tier of talents is still empty. As long as the original talents don't come back, I can only get happier. To top it all off, the new talent tree reveal also showed us our level 87 spell, which is looking to be one of the coolest in our arsenal.
