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Totem Talk: It's all about the Mana Tide
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 co-host of the Raid Warning podcast), shows you how. So last week, we had ourselves a little bit of a Q&A for restoration shaman. The post went live on the same day that the patch 4.0.6 shaman changes were announced. A lot of what we talked about changed as a result of those notes, causing a lot more in the way of questions and concerns from just about everyone in the restoration shaman community. While some of the changes are being hailed as pretty bad or downright nerfs, there are quite a few tweaks and buffs. This includes the new restoration shaman casting animations that are being put into the game. While we have done some analysis of the changes, I felt it would be good to really take a look at these changes a little more in depth. I've spent the last few days really poking around on the PTR trying to see exactly what effect these changes have on us, and I'd like to share that with you.
Patch 4.0.6 PTR: New restoration shaman spell animations
With all the changes up on the latest build of the PTR, something that wasn't documented is happening, and it is pretty awesome. Restoration shaman spells are now getting a different animation. Until now, our casting animation was very similar to that of druids. Green energy would glow around our hands and small leaves would form within that power. While it was nature-related, it wasn't very shaman-esque. A healing shaman's element has always been water, and now our spells are accompanied by that very element. Gone are the leaves and green; instead, our hands our now encapsulated in glowing blue orbs of water as we bargain with the element to heal our allies wounds. When Greater Healing Wave lands on a target, it has a water splash animation very similar to Riptide, and for now, Healing Surge and Healing Wave have had their leaves replaced with sprite-like things that fly up in a circle around the target. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if Healing Surge and Healing Wave get similar animations on target to Greater Healing Wave. I don't think anyone quite expected an update like this, but it certainly a welcome one. It gives us just a little bit more of a unique flair and really fits our style of healing. It also shows that even now, Blizzard is looking at all of those little things that make the game so awesome, like cool casting animations. What do you think? World of Warcraft: Cataclysm has destroyed Azeroth as we know it; nothing is the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion, from leveling up a new goblin or worgen to breaking news and strategies on endgame play.
Totem Talk: Cataclysm update and resto mail bag
Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration will show you how, brought to you by Joe Perez, otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticus and the For The Lore podcast Last week we talked a little bit about the mastery stat and how it is being implemented and what it will affect, as well as talking a little bit about how the developers are are looking at totems -- the highlight, of course, being comments from Ghostcrawler (Blizzard's lead systems designer) himself. This last week though there was a new beta build released. Cataclysm build 12694 has hit, and with it, there have been quite a few changes that will affect restoration shaman. Various talents and spells have been moved, trimmed or otherwise adjusted. I'm certain you are wondering what new and exciting things were waiting for us. This week I would like to take a look a these changes and give you my own impressions of them, after having tested them quite a bit. I also thought that this week we would take a look at some of the common questions I've been receiving in regards to playing a restoration shaman in the Cataclysm beta.
About the Bloggers: Mike Schramm
Twice a week, our writers will tell you more about themselves, and let you get to know them and the characters they play a little better. Click here to read more About the Bloggers.What do you do for WoW Insider?I first started writing for WoW Insider way back in August of aught-six, and my first post on the site wasn't even actually about World of Warcraft. A few months (and many posts) after that, I was invited to co-lead the blog with Elizabeth Harper, and nowadays (many, many posts later) I work alongside Dan O'Halloran in running the whole site and coordinating all of our talented writers, as well as posting news I find whenever possible. I've also done quite a few of the podcasts.What's your main right now?My main main is Shamanic, a level 70 resto Orc shaman on Thunderhorn (Horde-side). I also have a level 68 Undead rogue there named Punishment (best rogue name evar), and lately I've been playing a level 61 Night Elf hunter on Cenarius (who needs a guild, by the way). I've also got quite a few alts floating around, including a level 60 gnome warrior, a shadow priest who's about 50, a blood elf hunter around 30, another undead warrior around 30, and maybe twenty or so alts below that. A couple of them are, yes, paladins, but I've never been able to play them past about 25, and I've never gotten a warlock past about 15 for some reason. No idea why.Lots more (maybe too much more) after the break.
Build Shop: Shaman 15/5/41
Eliah is away from the Build Shop this week, so I'm taking his place, and I figured what better time to look at a great Resto Shaman build-- mine. Sure, some of you talent pros will probably tear it apart (it's a little less than conventional), but for my preferences and my playstyle, this build works pretty darn well.So let's start by telling you how I play my Shaman. Clearly, I'm not an Enhancement Shammy-- while I leveled as one, I decided right when I hit 60 (and yeah, I leveled to 70 with this build, too) that I wanted this character to be a raider. I was just getting in good with a great guild, I loved being a great healer (keeping a group up even in dire straits is fun for me), and I knew that healers would always be in demand, letting me run lots of groups.On the other hand, however, I didn't just want to be a healbot. I wanted to have the opportunity, when I was able, to crank out some DPS.
Building a better DamageMeter
WyldKard sent us this great piece he wrote over at mendax.org about building a better damage meter. DamageMeters is a pretty standard addon by this point, and considering that even Blizzard has started to include damage and healing figures in some battlegrounds now, players have generally agreed that tracking your healing or damage output is a fairly good way to determine your skill as a player.Except that it really isn't. Wyld lays out a few reasons why, the most obvious being that one player outputting tons of damage doesn't mean your group actually succeeds. As a resto Shaman, I often get the short end of the stick on damage meters-- I do both healing and damage, so I never end up at the top of either list. Also, Earth Shield still isn't listed correctly even in the latest version of DamageMeters-- all of that healing, which I'm clearly responsible for, gets listed as the warrior's.That's more of a bug fix, though (DM just has to get its numbers straight), and Wyld has bigger ideas in mind for damage meters.
Let my Orc shoulders grow
Change comes a lot in this game. Some changes are small, and some are big. Some changes players hate at first, and then they learn to live with and even like them. But some changes are simply and totally unacceptable. And of course when I say that, I mean the change to the male Orc shoulder size.We male Orcs are especially proud of our powerful, broad shoulders. I love my shoulder pieces-- I once ran UBRS countless times (and I do mean countless times-- just ask my guild, who I dragged through with me) just to get the Pauldrons of Elements. We have broad, towering, expansive shoulder armor, and we are respected, loved, and feared because of it. Your male Orc Warlocks, your Warriors, your Shamans, Rogues and Hunters all stand proud knowing that each of our shoulder pieces is as big as our head.Or at least they were. Now, after the patch, they're small, a fraction of their former size. They're diminuitive, tiny, and a paltry shadow of what they should be. They're-- dare I say it-- puny and pathetic. We are male Orcs! Like Thrall, we are the real heroes of Warcraft. We're the ones who rage into battle at a moment's notice. If anyone deserves gigantic shoulders, it's us. We are true heroes, sung and unsung-- we are Orc males, and our shoulders must be large, majestic, and befitting of our muscular stature. Blizzard has acknowledged the bug, sure, and they say it'll be fixed in the next major patch.But this-- this, my friends, is a true injustice. The next time you see your favorite male Orc, don't make jokes about whether size matters or not. Resist the urge to mention "shrinkage." We are our shoulders, their size, their width, their girth-- when they suffer, we suffer as well.[ Thanks to all who sent this in-- I feel your pain, my brethren! ]
Tabard or not tabard, that is the question
brkn_doll over at WoW Ladies rolled a Draenei shammy to join up in her friends' guild, and when she picked up the tabard for it, she saw... well, unless you're color blind, you can't miss it*. As she says, she looks like a pumpkin.What do you do when you finally put on a guild tabard, only to find that you wish you could take it back off again? For April Fool's Day, my guild leader turned our tabard hot pink, which I actually thought looked kind of good on my female Blood Elf mage. My shaman wouldn't have looked good in it, but he's wearing the Tabard of the Protector anyway, so there's one option: get a new tabard.Not all of them are bad-- my gnome warrior was in a guild for a while with a blue and gold tabard, and that little minitank looked good. Have you ever confronted a guild leader about their bad tabard choices? Or if you're a guildleader, what made you choose your tabard colors? If they're orange and green, you should probably just go ahead and pay the 10g to fix it, because if doll's experience is any indication, it's hard to look like a badass when you're wearing a pumpkin.*Because I know someone will ask, her strikingly clean UI is apparently built with Tet's UI. You're welcome.
Fun with the Armory
Now that the Armory is finally up and working (it was crushed by requests when it was first posted), I've had a chance to look at it, and I have to say, I think it's the coolest thing I've ever seen on an MMO's website ever. The Camelot Herald was cool (for those of you who know about that), but, privacy issues aside, the Armory is going to become a terrific tool for players, guilds, Alliance and Horde all over the world.Already, it's showing us things about the game that we'd never known otherwise. There are apparently 22 pages of Legolas toons, although Leroyjenkins doesn't have the showing I'd have thought (50 entries, none of which are above 60 as of this writing). Maybe he wipes too much. While there are tons and tons of "alliance" guilds, there's only a few for "horde." Death and Taxes either has 20 chapters, or 19 wannabes-- Nihilum doesn't have any. And while arena teams are fairly new, lots of people didn't get too creative with them-- there's 165 teams with "arena" in the name. I tried to see if our friend Juffowup, the naked troll hunter, was still naked, but he hasn't been on a while. Antitweak, the naked druid, is only 20, but she is-- yup, still naked.And there's lots of cool personal stuff in here, too. My shaman, Shamanic, shares a name with lots of people, but from what I can see, he's number one (the one from Thunderhorn) on the list-- confirming what I already knew, ahem. And I think it's particularly cool that on every character screen, they even show, in the right corner, the buffs you have on the character at the time. Now that's real-time! Unfortunately, they also show your professions, so everyone in the world can see that I've been slacking off. But overall, I love the Armory. You guys seen anything funny or cool in there yet?
Up and down, all week long
Well I'd love to give you first impressions of the Burning Crusade, but the only land I've visited is Outlagg. So far, my realm, Thunderhorn, has been all over the place tonight.I started out by taking my Shaman to Outland-- Hellfire Peninsula was up, but lagging so much I couldn't even get off my mount. So I pushed inland, to Shattrath City, where I got my first quest done (the tour of the city is fun and easy, and gives you a little lore, a little XP, and that nice Aldor vs. Scryer decision). Eventually, however, that too was lagged. My friend and I then decided to start up our Blood Elf alts (I'm doing a mage), but while there were plenty of player Blood Elves in the starting area, the NPCs had decided to stay home. It's about then that the world server crashed, kicking us all off.Later I tried to run Hellfire Ramparts, and we started rolling, even as the Outland server crashed (all of our guildies exited the game). Unfortunately, we had a bad pull, and wiped, and then as soon as I released, the server did a "what the??" (because it wasn't there), and kicked me out of the game again. Our instance group is going to try again later.It's too bad, because everything else I've seen of the expansion is terrific-- the lands look great, the story is deep, the music is terrific, and the items are droolworthy (even the few greens that dropped in the instance made us all go "whoah", and we're in Tier 2 sets). If it weren't for the lag, things would be great (and on the less popular servers, things probably are). But considering how many more people are going to be picking up BC and playing this weekend, outlook not good for Outland on the high traffic servers.
Getting Tabard of the Protector at the BC World Event
Have you checked out the ongoing BC World Event yet? I've heard things are happening all over Azeroth. but so far the big draw is right down where Blizzard said it wouldn't be, in the Blasted Lands. Down there at the Dark Portal, there's a questgiver who gives you a really, really simple quest-- all you have to do is take out 6 of the felguards coming out of the portal, and the reward is a neat "limited edition" Tabard of the Protector-- it's black, which is cool, but it's also got a fun little proc that makes you flex and give off the priest AOE animation. Not bad for just a few minutes' work.Unfortunately, there's a lot of QQing already-- apparently the Dark Portal area is packed with people on most realms, and especially on PVP realms, there's plenty of PVP happening. I'm on a PVE realm, and yet a few hordie buds of mine and I couldn't keep from killing flagged Alliance-- we cleared that place out, and it felt awesome to be fighting them in among all the Argent Dawn and Burning Crusade NPCs running around. There's a few different mobs that are flowing out of the portal-- felguards and voidwalkers, and also a few mini core hounds, and every once in a while, a 63 elite Dreadknight shows up with an AOE Shadowbolt, but he gets cut down to size pretty quick even with just the AD troops fighting.But it's definitely a sight to see. There's no telling how long this will all be going on (I'd guess the mini-war itself is a permanent fixture, but the tabard might be gone within a week or two), so even if you have to go later at night when it's not so darned crowded, make sure you check it out.A few more pics I took after the jump.
