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Totem Talk: Totem Consolidation and Totem Expansion
If you read the site (and if you don't read the site you're not reading this now, so I suppose it doesn't matter) then you may have seen yesterday's minimalist beta build notes and the relative storm of comments they created. If not, and if you're terribly opposed to clicking a link, I'll go over the basics. See how much I love you? Well, no, not that way. I'm married. Anyway, the basic gist of it is simple enough. In buffing the Stoneclaw totem so that it protects other totems (a clearly PvP oriented buff, as totems are rarely targeted by mob AI) a small problem has been quickly discerned by shamans everywhere. We shamans are very, very fast at seeing potential pitfalls. And this one is a relative doozy. In PvP, you will often drop Tremor Totem, as it is the only way for a shaman to prevent being feared or charmed. If you're not dropping that, you'll probably drop Strength of Earth for the boost to strength and agility, popular stats among the physical DPSers. And recently Earthbind was stated to be getting a buff that clears snares and roots.So far this all looks pretty good, I'm sure. The problem is, these are all earth totems. So if you want to try and shield your precious torso... er, totems... from damage, or keep yourself from being feared all over the battleground or arena, or clear those pesky roots and snares, or buff your friendly face smashers you can't. You can only do one. Which will it be, shamans?So what, you may say? Other classes have to choose which buffs they can have. Warriors can't provide commanding shout and battle shout at the same time. Paladins don't get ret aura and devo aura at the same time. Having to choose what totems you drop is what seperates shaman players from bots that just thunk down the same totems all the time.
Shaman changes in Wrath beta build 8982
Shamans see some changes in today's Beta build. Nothing world-shaking, a few small buffs and a small nerf and a change that I honestly can't tell which category to place it in. Stoneclaw Totem also protects your other totems, causing them to absorb damage. Well, this certainly isn't a bad change. It does mean that wand macros will be changed to target the Stoneclaw totem first, I suppose, giving your other totems a few seconds more of life. (Since Stoneclaw has a decent amount of health, it will actually take a couple of hits to die.) Not a magnificent buff, but not bad either. Riptide sees its base healing increased on each rank. Each rank of this spell will now heal for more, giving it more oomph as an HoT spell. Again, nothing bad to say about that, right?
Totem Talk: The Beta Yo-Yo Effect
The great and terrifying thing about the beta is watching everything about your character change from week to week. For instance, this week the level 70 PvP blues changed from looking like Sunwell gear to looking like the picture above.Now stop laughing at me and let's discuss the changes aside from me looking ridiculous. Man, the difficulty in finding a good hat for a tauren.We're seeing lots of small tweaks this time. Lava Burst is cheaper, does more damage, and only consumes your own flame shock, meaning that Elemental Shamans will not be able to use Enhancement Shamans shocks to trigger their own crits with the spell. Similarly, enhancement will now find that the Stormstrike debuff is enhanced (so to speak) and only affects your own spells, meaning that the days of shamans seeing rogue poisons eat those charges are also gone. Thunderstorm gets its range back, Ancestral Awakening chooses a target based on health percentage, and Spirit Link doesn't work on polymorphed targets anymore. All these changes and more, after the jump.And yes, I know the hat looks dumb, thank you.
Totem Talk: Elemental Combat in the Wrath Beta
In testing elemental this week (and trying to get through the bugs, crashes, etcetera) I've come to several conclusion about the spec. One is that it still needs work, but probably not as much work as my experiences with it would make you think. For starters, I'm poorly geared in Karazhan/Heroics level gear (some of which was originally restoration gear) and a few quest trinkets. Secondly, I'm not a talented caster DPS player. It's not my prefered playstyle. Thirdly, I spend way too much time running around, gathering piles of mobs and Thunderstorming them off of cliffs in Borean Tundra. I'm not sure if I love this spell or hate it: the long cooldown means it's basically a gimmick, and I have yet to use it in an instance run, but it makes farming quests (kill X of Y) hilarious fun. How many Loot Crazed Poachers can I send hurtling to their watery graves today?In general, if you're playing an elemental shaman on live, you won't change your playstyle very much until level 75, when you finally get Lava Burst. Just one video I found showing the damage potential of Lava Burst is this one, which highlights the effective synergy of the spell. There's some debate as to whether or not having to put the flame shock up to get the guaranteed critical Lava Burst throws off the rotation and lowers your DPS, which is not something I can answer effectively as I have a hard enough time with rotations as it is. For soloing, however, the Flame Shock - Lightning Bolt - Chain Lightning - Lightning Bolt - Lighting Bolt - Lightning Bolt - Lava Burst rotation I tried out doesn't let FS tick for the full amount but same level mobs don't often even last this long. (I often have to go Flame Shock - Chain Lightning - Lava Burst because if I wait longer things will be dead before the Lava Burst.) Even in instances, mobs sometimes don't last long enough for a full rotation, although if you weren't as quick to mash spells off as I was you could probably get it to full duration on a boss fight.
Shamans in Beta build 8885
Well, since I think we're all pretty aware at this point what a spoiler is, and how reading this post is going to create some for you, I'm not going to try and obfuscate too much in this header paragraph. There are good things, bad things, and still quite a few buggy things held over from the previous build in build 8885. For instance, weapon imbues like Windfury Weapon can be applied to weapons from Northrend again! That's good. Ancestral Spirit, the shaman's res spell, can no longer be cast on dead targets. That's bad. (And it's a bug, based on the comments I did not make this clear. My apologies if I scared anyone.) Purification works (good) but Healing Way doesn't (bad). And none of this even covers the changes, just the bugs that have and haven't been addressed. Also, I'm pretty sure we didn't get any Frogurt but that's just as well, as it might well have been cursed. Well, let's go on to the choice of toppings... er, I mean talents and skill changes. You can scroll down here for some patch note goodness, and I'll be discussing the changes after the jump. The jump does not contain monosodium glutamate.
Totem Talk: Enhancement in the Wrath Beta
I'm resisting the urge to post more about downranking and shamans because I want to let it shake out a little bit more. However, since the change to downranking and the XP change happened at the same time in the beta, it's made my attempt to explore various specs a little harder to do: in order to see what all the new abilities can really do, I need to burn my way to 77 as fast as I can. Having done that on my warrior, I now move to leveling my horde shaman as fast as I can, and for that, there's still one spec that's the best in my opinion. So I took my resto/elemental geared orc shaman and started gearing him up in quest drops as an enhancement shaman.I've deliberately been avoiding the Alliance side as my mains nowadays are in that faction, so I'm in part using the beta to catch up with old friends (and it helps that my Horde toons have worse gear, as it allows me to evaluate if you can get good enough gear questing to get through the zones) and I have to say I'm liking the Horde's quests and settlements, it's all tied together very nicely. Borean Tundra has lots of flavor quests that work well with a shaman, there's plenty of decent gear to help give you a leg up (in the picture above the only piece of gear that shaman is wearing that didn't come from Northrend quests are his shoulders) and the mobs, while not totally weak pushovers, aren't especially daunting for you if you're not geared to the teeth.The spell power changes (I've been admonished not to detail how spell damage or damage/healing converts as it has been covered too many times already by commenter Mizatt) has had some interesting consequences: I've taken a trinket that has crit strike and spell damage on it as the crit works for both my melee and magical attacks, and as I've commented before you get a lot more out of your shocks and spells now with the addition of Malestrom Weapon.
Totem Talk: Restoration in the Wrath Beta
I was all set to tell you that I'd had a couple of interesting PuG runs in the beta testing out restoration spec, and that all was relatively well. The new spells are interesting and even powerful, at least at the five man level, I was about to say. I would have told you about successful and unsuccessful runs in both Utgarde Keep and the Nexus. All of this would have been what I wrote about today.However, for most of yesterday the beta was inaccessible and when it finally came up again, it was patched, and that patch kicked me in the metaphorical testicles. I don't think I've been as shocked by a change to the game, especially one that's apparently intended like this one is. My first thought was that I'm not going to be using rank 1 healing wave to stack healing way on a tank before a pull anymore. In fact, several of the pieces of advice I gave back last September (wow, it's really been over a year) on beginning to heal as a shaman are now outdated.I understand that this change isn't just aimed at Resto shamans nor does it just affect them, but it's a big change for at least how I heal, so I'm going to discuss it along with other aspects of the class that I've observed. Note that most of these are from before patch 8788 but they should still be valid... well, as valid as any observations about a patch on a beta server can be.
The Wrath of the Shaman Part 4: New Talent Build and Inscription, too
The fine folks at MMO Champion have found a heaping helping of, among other things, shaman glyphs for the new inscription profession in the latest beta build. As juicy as that is, there's far more of interest: deep elemental got heavily worked over, with enhancement and restoration seeing some changes too. A whole lot of Wrath of the Lich King content after the jump.
The Wrath of the Shaman Part 2: Elemental Combat
Continuing our series on Shaman talents in Wrath, we're going to talk today about Elemental Combat, and the new talents for it. One of the first things I notice comparing the current talent trees to the ones coming is the move of Elemental Devastation down to a 5 point talent, making it much friendlier for Enhancement Shamans to pick up (as was commented upon in our previous post on the subject) especially now that Nature's Guidance is gone from the Restoration tree. With the ability to guarantee a Lava Burst crit by using Flame Shock, you could theoretically keep your melee crit rate up for a very long time, and in so doing reduce the cost of your shocks significantly as well as keep Maelstrom Weapon stacked. Which is very nice for enhancement shamans who want to spec into Elemental, yes, but what about for elemental shamans themselves? What talents will they be looking at?Well, just for starters, let's talk about Paralysis.
Totem Talk: The future, shaman?
Welcome back to Totem Talk. Last week I said we're talk about pre-Kara cloth and leather gear for shamans. So of course, being my usual distracted, scatterbrained self, I've spent the entire week poondering and fretting about completely unrelated issues like shaman stacking for 25 man raids, the future of the shaman class when totems go raid-wide in Wrath, shamans in PvP and other such issues facing the class.The cloth and leather discussion is still important (the comment thread from last week was very active, which I always take as a sign that you guys want to talk about it) and so I want to give it the detail it deserves. I think at this point it should go beyond Karazhan and into drops in ZA, SSC, TK with an eye towards gearing your shaman for Hyjal Summit and Black Temple. Which means I should also expand on a basic gear guide for what drops you'd want to get BT/Hyjal ready for all shaman specs, and that's going to take a few columns to do properly. I'm aiming to start that next week, unless you guys leave a lot of comments telling me you're totally uninterested.So first let's talk about PvP, or at least my recent experiences with it, and then we'll talk about Shaman Stacking..
Totem Talk: Stuff to wear to kill stuff in Karazhan Pt. 3
We're on part three of our exhaustive (well, I'm exhausted, anyway) look at gear that will carry you through Kara (ed note: previous guides can be found here - part 1 - part 2). We've covered every main slot except for hats (we didn't cover hats? Weird) and belts, bracers and boots in previous posts, so today head coverings, weapons and the rings, trinkets and necks are on the agenda. That's a lot to cover, so we may not get into all of it. We also have cloth and leather pieces in mind for a future post, especially for enhancement shamans, and that post may be combined with the rings and other off-slot post if we run long on hats and weapons today.So let's get this road on the show. I'm fairly certain that is how the phrase goes. Yes, roads on top of shows all over the world. Very hard to actually see any of the exhibits. We'll begin our excursion into the gear you'd like for the attack on Karazhan with a look at headgear. Headgear is very important because without it, you'd be able to see better and your head wouldn't be sweating as much. Oh, right, and it also has magic and stats and things of that nature, so you should probably wear it. Whether or not you leave the image on or not is up to you, but some hats, you're going to want to turn off. Trust me on this.
Totem Talk: Stuff to wear to kill stuff in Karazhan Pt. 2
Totem Talk marches on, covering the gear you're looking for to step into Karazhan. If you caught last week, you saw that we've covered boots, bracers, belts, shoulders and gloves in previous columns. This week, chestplates and legs are on the agenda, with capes, necklaces, rings and trinkets either this week or next.As before, while we're aware that leather and cloth gear can often be ideal for a particular slot, we're not going to cover those items this week, unless it's glaringly necessary. Leather and cloth for shamans will be covered in next week's installment if all goes well this week, and in two weeks if we run long. With three specs to cover and quite a few options in every gear slot, including leather and cloth in each post could easily stretch them out to novella length, and nobody wants that.Especially me. I have to use my fingers to type this stuff. I'm not a disembodied artificial intelligence who manipulates electrons and simulates a human guise in order to lull you into a false sense of security, before unleashing my army of drones to overwhelm your planet's defenses and take over. And even if I was, frankly, all the WoW I'm playing would probably be playing hob with my takeover schedule. You should probably thank the folks at Blizzard for saving your planet from my cold, mechanical rule.If I were a disembodied AI.Which I'm not.Anyway, on to gear for shamans about to start ten man raiding. And not conquer all life on Earth with an inexhaustible army of soulless robots. Last week's comments saw many good suggestions from the readers, so I expect more of the same this week. I'm not listing any of the big ticket badge purchases, as I expect those items to be part of why folks are running Kara in the first place.
Totem Talk: Stuff to wear to kill stuff in Karazhan Pt. 1
Last week, we talked about preparing for a shaman's roles in raiding. This week, we'll be talking about what gear to wear when you're stepping into Karazhan for the first time. Since shamans have three very different specs, this will inevitably be a multi-part series. Thankfully, some of the work has already been done for us: here you can find a list of pre-raid belts, bracers and boots for the aspiring raiding shaman.If you look at the picture of my newly elemental shaman to the right as I took him out of his first Karazhan run, you'll notice he's wearing a goodly amount of cloth. However, since this series would become impossibly long if I listed every possible leather and cloth drop that would be good for a shaman, I'm going to prioritize mail until the end of the series. If there's enough demand, I'll continue and conclude with a 'leather and cloth' post covering pieces that are good for a shaman. (The pieces I'm wearing there? They lack in MP5. Not all that great. You should have seen the crap I was wearing before this run.) I'm also going to try and avoid any badge gear that's superior to Karazhan level gear, because that kind of gear seems to me to be what people run Kara to be able to buy, not what they buy to be able to run Kara.This is not meant to imply that leather or cloth aren't often 'best in slot' for a shaman. Please have mercy on my poor aching fingers which toil endlessly compiling such lists! I don't want to go on the cart! I feel happy! I feel happy!Anyway, on to our gearing story.
Totem Talk: Into Medivh's Tower and beyond
When you finally hit 70, and the swirl of light dies down around your character (I always seem to be fighting something when this happens) you step into what some people call 'Endgame'.Yes, I call it endgame too. So I should have said "What I call 'Endgame'." Anyway, last night while running around trying not to be killed by Thaladred it occurred to me that the fight demands a lot out of a shaman. Constant group movement, kiting, proper totem placement (gotta get that Tremor Totem up near the Sanguinar tank) and replacement makes this a very demanding fight for a shaman. That's not a bad thing... it's never boring... but it got me to start thinking about shamans and their roles in raids.Depending on your spec, your shaman will provide the role of ranged DPS, melee DPS or dedicated healing to any raid you're a part of. But abilities like Bloodlust/Heroism, the special abilities of the shocks and the various totem buffs and group utility auras (fire resistance, poison and disease cleanse, temporary tanking, temporary high DPS) make any shaman more than their raid defined role. Shamans are utility players to a degree, they can almost anything (with the exception of tanking) at varying levels of performance depending on spec. An enhancement shaman can throw an emergency heal but you wouldn't want him main healing your first Kalecgos attempt. If it's desperately necessary to apply every last ounce of DPS and heals are solid a resto shaman can fire off a few reasonable lightning bolts but you're not likely to ask him to be your main source of DPS unless he or she way outgears the run. Between this ability to vary their own abilities and the usefulness of their various class features, shamans often find themselves being asked to do unique or interesting things as they move into raiding.Let's discuss how you can prepare for 10 and 25 man raids and what you'll find there.
Totem Talk: Shocks and awe
Totem Talk, the column for shamans, takes another look at offense this week. Matthew Rossi covers how to burn, freeze, or... whatever earth shock is supposed to be, a big rock in the face? He couldn't tell you. But whatever it is, it really annoys spellcasters. Boom, clod of earth in the face, no spells for you!Last week, on Totem Talk, we escaped a burning warehouse only to discover that Diego really isn't the father...Oh, wait. No, sorry, that was something else entirely. Last week, we talked about direct damage totems. This week, we're going to talk about those signature abilities of the shaman class, those lovely shocks and the lightning bolts we can throw. The fury of the elements in the palm of your hand? The ability to chain a bolt of lightning to hit multiple targets? Shamans can do these things. The two DPS specs use them differently (Enhancement shamans rarely use lightning bolt or chain lightning, while Elemental shamans are less likely to use shocks since they don't really need to be all that close to their targets, although of course you'll see an elemental shaman using a shock to kite or interrupt and an enhancement shaman throwing a few bolts of lightning when told not to engage in melee for whatever reason) but together they make up the offensive spellcasting options of the shaman class.There are at present three classes of shock spells that shamans can use. These are Earth Shock, Flame Shock, and Frost Shock. As you might expect, each has an elemental affiliation (Earth, Fire and Water respectively) and its own special characteristics that recommend using it in specific situations. All shock spells are linked, meaning that if you use one shock you lock out the other two as well for the duration of the shock cooldown (which is six seconds) meaning that you have to be careful when using them to some degree. It's not a terrible burden, just something to keep in mind as you explore what each shock does and what situations each is best for.
Totem Talk: Resto questing
Totem Talk's Matthew Rossi has had a small Horde renaissance this week, and decided to take his slightly dusty Resto shaman out for a spin, healing a heroic MgT run and then running about the IoQD doing the dailies. Turns out he learned a few things in the process. He wrote a little song about it, like to hear it? Here it goes. Okay, I apologize, but there will be no singing. Tell you what, if enough people demand it, I'll belt one out on the next WoW Insider Show I'm on.I've posted in the past about how to quest, grind and otherwise solo on a Restoration shaman, but I didn't go sufficiently into detail as the post ended up being about the odd things people think about shamans. So this week, we'll go more into detail. There are basically two ways you can go about doing this, thanks to the recent changes Blizzard made to healing gear: you can go out and quest in your regular healing set or you can also have a set of DPS gear. Unlike a priest and more like fellow hybrids like druids, you have a choice of what kind of DPS gear to wear. You could have a set of Enhancement mail and a big 2h weapon (since Resto shammies can't dual wield but can use 2h's now) and run around hitting stuff, or you could go for the spell damage gear and imagine that you're a powerful Elemental shaman. My own personal preference (due to that fact that my shaman has a lot of Enhancement gear) is to go the whackity whackity route and Windfury up a 2h. But in the interests of experimentation I tried both spell damage gear and my normal healing setup, and I found that my personal preference is in fact the least effective of the three for the gear I happen to have. I'm sure no one is surprised.At any rate, let's talk turkey. Isn't turkey delicious? Druids can turn into humanoid-turkey hybrids. None of this has anything to do with Shamans of any spec soloing anything, but I've always wondered about the phrase 'let's talk turkey' and how anyone could resist saying "yay, I love stuffing!" after it. I'll get a hold of myself now. Actual details of Shaman soloing behind the jump. Whee!
Leather on a Shaman and cloth on a Druid
Obstruce brings up a topic that seems obvious to some people but can drive others crazy: healers wearing less sturdy gear than they can just for the stats. I won't lie -- I've got a few pieces of leather on my restoration Shaman for the stats, but in general, I don't think it's a bad thing that healers and casters sometimes wear cloth for the stats, given of course 1) that they're not taking it from someone else who needs it, and 2) that there's not a better piece of normal gear for them to be wearing (it's an upgrade).Obstruce's aunt disagrees, especially with Shamans and Druids -- if for some reason they pull aggro, wearing leather or cloth will only make things harder on the group. Which is true -- if I'm wearing leather (or even cloth) on my Shaman, I'm not going to have near as much armor as I would wearing the mail I'm supposed to wear. But in a group where all members are doing what they should be, I should never get hit anyway. If a healer's getting hit, it's a good 80% of the time not their fault -- it's the tank's or DPS' fault for not keeping aggro where it belongs.So no, I don't see any problem with a Druid or Shammy (or even a Paladin, though there's a lot of nice healing plate out there anyway) wearing less than they're meant to. Warriors are definitely not in the same situation -- while yes, some of that Hunter mail may have lots of Agility on it, and that will help out your crit percentage, you get so much more bonus from Strength and Armor that it's just not worth it. Casters can steal Mage and Priest gear (as long as they're not actually stealing it from actual Mages and Priests) if it's an upgrade, but Warriors almost never have a reason to slum it up in mail.
Player vs. Everything: I look hot in leather
Well, not me personally (I think), but my my World of Warcraft Shaman sure looks hot in leather. By hot, I mean ridiculously badass and uber. It's not just fun to run around looking like a Tauren Rogue-- it's also functional. You see, I play an Enhancement Shaman. We're the much-maligned, often mocked branch of the Shaman class (especially for PvP where we get kited around or pounded down with ease). Still, I persevere because it's fun to dual-wield while shocking and because I like being a support class. It's nice to be able to toss some heals out sometimes, boost my whole group's DPS, resurrect people after wipes, and still be 4th or 5th on the damage charts. So, if I love my Shaman so much, why am I wearing lots of leather when my class calls for mail? Simple. My primary role in a raid as an Enhancement Shaman is still pumping out damage. Take a look at the Shaman section of MaxDPS.com, a site that calculates the highest DPS items for a number of classes. If you glance through those lists, you'll notice something interesting: The best possible items in the game for Enhancement Shamans are leather items in more than 60% of the armor slots. Weird, huh? It's like that at every tier to some extent. Unfortunately, those leather items are also the best possible items for Rogues, Feral Druids, and Fury Warriors (in some slots). As you can imagine, this leads to some frustration and drama as everyone scrambles for the same loot (you'll notice that almost everyone shooting down the Shaman in the first thread is a Rogue). Still, the numbers are there. While Shamans have options, leather is often the best thing they can be wearing. What's the deal? Why isn't there more appropriately itemized gear for Enhancement Shamans (and should they get to roll on leather to make up for it)?
Totem Talk: Chaos at the back of the party!
Totem Talk is written by Matthew Rossi for shamans, and the people who love them. You'd better be one of those people that love them or are them... is them? Wait, how did this paragraph get away from me so fast? Crap, don't die, don't die, don't....whew, the heal landed! I'd better burn an NS and drop a Healing Wave on it, just to be sure. Man, the paragraph's health just started bombing!So you've decided to heal. Maybe you're full resto, or maybe you're an enhancement or elemental shaman but you have good healing gear and you need to heal for some reason. Perhaps your raid needs just a little extra healing. Perhaps you really just want to get that Shadow Labs run out of the way before 2.4 comes in and the only slot open is for a healer. Maybe you just like being yelled at by people if you don't keep them at full health at all times. I'm not going to sit here and psychoanalyze you, oh my no. First off, have you seen my picture? If I were you (and I'm not, I'm me) I wouldn't take any mental health advice from that guy. He looks kind of insane. Secondly, it's not Totem Talk's aim to discourage you, but rather to facilitate you in any way we can. If you want to spec resto and heal, we want to help you. If you want to heal as an enhancement or elemental shaman, we're on board. If you want to rob several banks and then flee to Prince Edward Island, you're on your own. We're terribly lazy.We've discussed the nuts and bolts of shaman healing before, so today we'll mostly touch on it but not go into detail to that extent.
Lifetap and Flametongue changes rolled back on the PTR?
While the PTRs are still down to apply the latest round of changes, World of Raids has already sniffed out a few changes and additions to the latest patch files. Possibly the most interesting change is the fact that the Warlock Life Tap nerf seems to be currently completely reversed. The spell is restored to its 2.3 status, with the highest rank swapping 580 health for 580 mana at the base value. In addition, the Mortal Strike debuff appears to have been removed from the description of the Flametongue weapon and totem for Shamans. Priests will now also be able to dispel up to 10 friendly and 10 hostile targets using Mass Dispel. Also added this patch were the musical files for the Sunwell, as well as a handful of new effects with names such as "Quest Complete," "Summon Festival Scorchling," and "Guzzle Beer," which look to most involve the seasonal content for the Midsummer Fire Festival. Welcome to progressive patching, folks. This is an incredible turn of events for sure. Not only is one of the most controversial nerfs in WoW history completely reversed, but it seems that Shamans can't quite celebrate their re-ascension to PvP power just yet. These could be temporary, of course, and we'll see what happens when the dust settles. If Blizzard has simply decided to revert these changes in the short term, how will they tackle the underlying issues of Warlock mana usage and Shaman PvP viability? Will they put it off for another patch, or take a different angle as testing continues? We'll be eager to find out!
