Totem Talk: Personally

Totem Talk is the column for Shamans. Matthew Rossi plays two shamans, a level 70 horde resto shaman and a level 70 alliance enhancement shaman. Actually, he specced his orc enhancement last night, but he'll be resto again by tonight's raid, it's just a lark.

Yes, that's my healing shaman in the back there, wearing enhancement gear. I went and respecced him to enhancement after the raid was over, knowing full well that I'd be resto again by tonight, because by the end of the raid I was literally vibrating with suppressed tension. Not because it had gone poorly, not at all, we one shot everything we saw. (Go Vees!) But on several occasions we lost one or two players on a boss, or even on a trash pull, and I realized something about myself as a healer last night.

I take it personally when anyone dies.

I really hate when I let the DPS die. Especially when it's melee DPS, because those guys are usually right next to the tank, which means it feels like it's my fault for not getting my chain heals off in time, or not targeting the right people fast enough. I get worked up when I see people drop, especially when I was casting a heal and then it fails because they died before I finished casting. This is one of the worst feelings in the world to me.

So I specced enhancement, picked up a couple of decent green fist weapons with 2.6 speed, and went out to beat on some things. I got lucky and picked up a set of Beastmaw Pauldrons last night (no other mail in the raid) so while my punchers weren't very good, the rest of my gear is fairly nice, with a couple of purples and solid blues otherwise. And I went out and I beat on things until I felt better about it. Yes, I realize this was a ridiculous thing to do. Yes, I went out in the game and did something to relieve the stress I'd accumulated playing the game. But hey, it worked, and tonight I'll be back on the healing log.

One of the things that has to be said and understood not to be a gripe or a claim to superiority is that healing can be very difficult. As you gain experience with various instances and raids, those fights become trivial. You gear up, get more mana regen, more +heal, the rest of the raid gears up and fights that were once very very hard become less so. You move on to new fights and those become the ones that challenge you, the ones that are difficulty... but even fights you've mastered in the past can become very difficult again if a few breaks go unlucky instead of lucky, or someone goes down before you have a chance to react. As a shaman healing, I always feel a little disadvantaged when I'm asked to focus heal on a tank compared to other healers, although Earth Shield helps. My personal experience tells me that I have a lot of the talents and abilities needed to keep groups of melee DPS up in a fight, either by chaining heals into the tank which splash over onto them, or by casting chain heal directly onto one of them and letting the chains top off the tank. This is especially true when I'm working in concerts with our guild's excellent healing priest, Vito.

So when they die, it always feels like a failure to me. Even when the boss dies. We had a Moroes fight yesterday which was a nailbiter: we lacked CC, so we had to shackle one add and burn down three before doing Moroes himself, and those garrotes really called for a lot of healing. Both Vito and I went down at least twice (I know I got a battle res after popping my ankh) and in the end, when Moroes went down, I was standing there in melee range casting chain heals on myself to stay alive hoping that the splashover would be enough to keep the two rogues up as well. It was actually a better kill for me than any previous ones just because we managed to heal through those garrotes and keep most everyone alive.

I don't know how it is for other healers, but for myself on my shaman, I actually have to watch the fights fairly carefully. When can I afford to just throw Healing Waves onto folks and when do I have to use Chain Heal? Should I refresh Earth Shield? Maybe I should ES the druid tanking the adds instead and trust the priest's Prayer of Mending to keep the MT topped off. Should I juggle a few downranked heals onto the rogues to get Healing Way on them while getting ready to throw a max ranked Nature's Swiftness heal onto them? I've entirely gotten out of the whack-a-mole mindset when I heal. I do watch bars, but as an adjunct to watching folks positioning: where are they and where are the other people taking heavy damage in relation to them? Will a chain do any good here? We have a warlock who, for whatever reason, is close to ten times as hard to keep alive on the AoE pulls than anyone else. Harder than the mages, harder than other warlocks, harder than the Moonkin, he's just a brutal nightmare to keep upright. I've had to abandon the idea of even using chain heal when we do those pulls, it's max rank healing wave followed by an instant healing wave and then feverishly casting, trying to stay ahead of what I can only assume is his Hellfire damage, since I can't bubble him. I actually use more mana on those pulls keeping him upright than I do on bosses, and when he dies anyway I often curse the screen and grind my teeth in frustration.

I know this is ridiculous. I know it's just a game. But I hate it when people die when I'm healing.

Every class has their own strengths and weaknesses when healing, of course. As a shaman, for example, I love healing on the Maiden, the Curator and Shade. These are fights where I feel my particular spells are most useful: healing groups of folks taking damage at the same time, putting a heal that goes off when someone is being hit meaning that it doesn't matter as much that I'm stunned, and healing clumped up groups that can't move feel easy to me. I like chain heal for the tank and offtank on Curator. For some reason, I always feel like I'm behind the eight ball on any of the Opera fights. Perhaps it's all the running around and situational tricks to the fights, perhaps I'm just not good at keeping Water Shield up in a constant healing situation leading to a lack of mana near the end, perhaps it's the urgency of having to keep dropping totems every two minutes, perhaps it's wondering if I should use Bloodlust early or late. But I always feel like the other healers, especially when we have a healing priest or two, do a lot better on those fights and leave me in the dust.

I've managed not to let it worry me too much. To be honest, I don't care who does more healing, I care that no one dies. If no one dies, I've done my job. Intellectually I know that there are going to be times I can't get the heal off in time, people will be out of range, the chain heal I expected to chain won't because of positioning or a lack of understanding on my part of where people are, I'll be healing one person and someone else will take a big hit in the middle of my heal, a million things could go wrong. Shaman healing really does seem superior at keeping groups taking consistent damage up and a trifle inferior once you lose the advantage of chaining heals, but if I was going to be honest I'd have to admit that I haven't come to a fight yet that I felt that a shaman couldn't heal, just ones that shamans seem better at versus ones that shamans seem slightly worse at.

My advice for shamans coming up as healers is, get good at pegging how close people are to each other. Don't waste mana just using chain heal if it's not going to chain. Make sure to take a look at the Elitist Jerks thread on healing as a shaman: you might not end up agreeing with all of it, but their math is almost always impeccable. You'll notice that they emphasize not using Lesser Healing Wave unless time is of the essence, and I have to say that I emphatically agree with them: LHW is not a spell you want to use in the manner that Paladins use FoL. It's backup. Don't be afraid to use it when time is of the essence, however. One of my worst habits as a healer is not knowing when to cast LHW, I'm so used to using the other heals. You have a fast casting time heal for a reason, so keep it in mind.

You may or may not grow to love downranking as I do. It's not as good as it was in the distant past, when dinosaurs ruled the earth and played vanilla, pre-expansion WoW, but it can still save you a huge chunk of mana and keep folks topped off nicely when the damage isn't so bursty. I love a downranked chain heal to keep the rogues less dead before switching to higher ranked heals when the tank or someone else is under more serious fire. My advice here is to try it out and see how you like it.

Finally, even if you're not restoration, you should give healing a try. With decent gear, an enhancement or elemental shaman can heal well enough to get through a non-Heroic with minimal difficulty, a heroic is within the realm of possibility if you're careful. And try to not do what I do and take it so personally when folks die.

Next week, elemental shaman discussion comes back as we discuss gear, raiding and where to look for advice on spec. And stay tuned for a Year in Review post on Shamans sometime soon, as 2007 changed a LOT for the class.