Silv got his wings, yesterday, much to my delight – it’s one of those spells which I always felt slightly envious of – especially at screenshot time.  He’s also rocking a very bloody familiar shield… Still, at least it’s prettier than most of the Northrend levelling shields – for which I’ll likely have to give up this one soon.

Also, apparently I still have a really bad case of altitis and shaman-lovin’:

I’ve promised myself to get on a bit with Loremaster before I level this baby-shammy up, though!  I always find the low-levels a nice distraction when I’m feeling a bit over-done on my main, though, so we’ll see how long it takes me to cave and play him s’more.

He’s rocking the cloth shoulders, at the moment, because I got them for my mage and tauren-priest-in-waiting – I’ve enough shards to buy the mail ones now, though, so he’ll hopefully be rocking those as soon as I can be bothered to drag myself over to Wintergrasp, hehe.  I just wish you could buy the chest pieces with Wintergrasp shards, too… re-doing all of the Argent Tourny dailies is not appealing and I’ve too much else to buy with badges.  Oh well, maybe later.

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Something Drug mentioned here (an excellent post) got me rolling on actually writing this post – I’d been mulling over it for a while and, whilst it’s mostly spurious personal speculation about class differences I do want to also address an important point. Simple does not always mean easy.  Hell, it needs bolding and bright colours:

Simple does not always mean Easy

I’ma go ahead and quote the direct bit from Drug’s post which is the base on which I want to build.

There is a very common mis-perception: shamans are easy to play. Most of the time, those people point at the few healing tools shamans have and then at the great variety of spells of a holy priest or a tree. This is wrong.

He’s talking about healing, specifically shaman healing, but I think it applies in a broader context and is something which is particularly keenly felt by the non-strongly-thematic part of some hybrid classes – mainly Druids and Paladins but also to some extent Shamans.

Whoa, back up there, what the hell are you on about Aurik!?

The easiest example would be druids.  Druids are, thematically, healers, casters then tertially feral.  Their healing repertoire is decently large and they are strong healers.  Sum durid is make strong hot, if you will.  Some durids, however, can B 4 tank. Tanking druids… don’t have so many buttons.  In fact, tanking druids have a ridiculously small number of actual go-to buttons for tanking to the point where ‘lol swipe spam’ has become a comment I’ve heard from other tanks.  It’s, in my experience, a lot harder to get up-front threat on a druid compared to the other classes, unless you rely on a 3 minute cooldown every pull…

How about Paladins?

Paladins have a decent number of tanking buttons – not out of the box, to be sure (as I’m sure Honor’s has attested though I cannot find the post I was looking for, annoyingly) and even though their rotations can be simplified down, there’s a complexity there that outstrips faery fire, lacerate, mangle, swipe, swipe…  not only that, but they have the, I won’t say benefit, but quirk of having mana-based threat which can be front-loaded.  Whilst ret and prot have clear thematic ‘protectzor and smiter of teh bad guyz’, holy… doesn’t so much.

Holy  is often looked at as the red-headed-step-child of the healing classes – the stereotype of a moronic paladin who sits, slack-jawed, pressing one or two buttons over and over is unhealthily prevalent and is a very unfair one, in my opinion (though, I admit, I have encountered the stereotype often enough to wonder… A few good players keep me disabused of this notion!).  Whilst holy certainly has a lot more tricks up its sleeve than it used to, it cannot match the arsenal of priests or druids.  I’d say they were on par, tricks wise, with shamans, but with less of a range to let them shine.

and Shamans?

Healing as a shammy is fun, they have a decent but more limited set of spells than a druid or priest and no defensive cooldowns anywhere near that of a holydin.  They are niche and often misused (as Drug mentions) and fall prey to being in a dip at the moment between Blizzard deciding to buff one side or other of their healing.

Ok, now you’ve stated the obvious can we have a point, please?

Right, point, yes.

I’m getting there.

As I stated at the beginning – simple doesn’t mean easy.

Caveat Lector - this is mainly from my current five-man perspective and raids can be different, but you can take out ‘makes it harder’ and mostly turn it into ‘makes it harder to do as well as’ and it oft hits the raiding perspective.  To summarise the above:

• Tanking as my druid is harder than my prot warrior – I have less skills to use, thus less ways to pull aggro back when I lose it.  Against a boss I lose any advantage of my healing abilities (bar frenzied regen, but warriors have enraged regen) so it’s not like being a hybrid is making up for me having a lack of buttons for one particular spec by allowing me to utilise ones from other specs.  On that point, despite the fact warriors can now charge in-combat and gain rage, bears still have to expend rage to charge.  Hmm.
• Tanking as my druid is harder than my death knight – rage is harder to manage than runes and bear spec doesn’t afford the dps a death knight can put out to contribute to aggro – especially at lower gear levels.
• Healing as my shaman is harder than my druid – despite my druid being undergeared, she can ramp up healing when it’s needed and has more variety in the spells she can cast to cover small or large incoming damage as well as far better mana regen.
• Healing as my paladin is harder than any other class I’ve healed with – I only have a few buttons and I have to use all my class can give me to play well and not lose some DPS on AoE.

Contextual Bias

To be honest, half of this post came out of my annoyance that my low-level warrior can easily hold aggro versus people 4-5 levels above her – my druid just couldn’t.  I’d almost forsworn tanking again because it had become an exercise in frustration wherein I couldn’t generate enough rage to hold mobs, they’d turn to dps, further reducing my rage, I’d maybe get them back on me and then had exhausted my methods of returning mobs to myself  when the next would invariably tear off.  Waiting on a taunt cooldown feels like forever…

On my warrior?  If someone does manage to tear a mob off me I have two stuns, three ‘taunts’, a couple high threat moves and all the while I can spam heroic strike or cleave like it’s going out of fashion because I have so much rage.  More complex, more buttons, hellishly easier to play.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had this feeling – it was very much the same healing through some heroics (say Halls of Lightning) which I’d had trouble with at first on my shaman and yet my not-amazingly-geared druid did in a beat-the-quest-reset speed run with ease.  I had more buttons, more niche spells, better ability to ramp up or down healing.  Again – more complex, but easier.

I don’t know, in retrospect, whether this post is a rant at certain aspects of classes which I just happen to feel particularly frustrated with, but it’s a topic which I figured the rest of you might have some feeling on (and not necessarily the same feelings I have) and I wanted to get down on e-paper exactly what was irking me.  I feel better now.  I love my blog.

<3

On a completely different note, I had an interesting comment in a pug, when someone referred to me as ’she’ (was playing my trollette warrior) after a BoE had dropped and someone had offered it to me.  I refused, saying I’d replace it in a level with a crafted one which was better so they might as well sell it:  “Nah, if he was a girl, she’d have totally taken the shield to sell for herself,  lol’.  Nice to see stereotypes are alive and well in WoW!  Oddly, Sporeggar seems more gender-biased behaviour-wise than Bloodhoof ever did – but I may just have been insulated by the wonderful peoples there.

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So, you’ve just got your shaman alt to 80 and you want to try out resto – or maybe you decided to grab that dual spec and don’t know where to start or you finally realised that being a priest / druid was far too easymode and you wanted to try a class which actually took skill to heal with?  If so, this here is the guide for you!  In the last few days I’ve had a  two guildies get their alts near / to 80 and start asking these questions and have had a few others ask for offspecs etc.  Whilst I love to wax lyrical about my favourite class, I felt it would be better to actually write something down which I could refer people to rather than trying to explain (badly) in relatively short sentences how to ‘do it rite’.  (It’s also a good excuse for me to do a cathartic outpouring of shamanyness).

This guide is meant as an entry-level guide – going into spells, stats, mana regen, talents and tips at a relatively basic level.  The aim is to give people who’re just starting at resto shamaning a primer with a few quick-start points but enough detail for those who like to know ‘why?’.  In depth and number crunching is not here – that’s for someone else to teach – and I’ll provide a few links for further reading at the end of the guide.  It’s also based around lower-end healing such as heroics and t7 content where most fights are over in 5 minutes or less.

The only assumption I am going to make here, though, is that you are already level 80.  I will not assume that you’ve levelled as ele or enhance, I will not assume you have any clue at all about healing as a shaman (or any other class).  I’ll also point out where things will differ depending on if your focus is towards eventually raiding 10 mans, 25’s or doing heroics with your friends.

Caveats done, let’s start:

• Spells
• Stats
• Mana Regen
• Talents
• Addons
• Gear / Gems / Enchants
  
• Random Extras
• Links

Spells

Chain Heal (CH)- Multi-target, moderately heavy on your mana.

Chain heal used to be the bread and butter of shaman healing.  In fact, it used to be the filling, too – and for good reason – with downranking and high spellpower, it became more efficient than any of our other heals – even on a single target.  Thankfully this is not the case anymore. Using chain heal and only chain heal will run you dry pretty fast – so it has to be used with a bit more care, especially in 5 and 10-mans.  Chain heal, moving from target to target, is usually referred to as it ‘bouncing’ – i.e. ‘Bounce the chain heal off the tank onto the melee’.

One thing to be clear about – if only one person has taken damage, or if people are more than 8 yards away from the player targeted, chain heal will not bounce.  Practice shows that the chain chooses where it will jump when the heal lands – so preemptive casting when there’s incoming AoE damage is a good trick to learn.

Chain heal, whilst very pretty and the supposed ’signature heal’ of Shamans will not work in a good number of situations.  Get used to using it only when people are close together and multiple people are taking damage as your other heals are faster (with tidal waves), can heal for more and don’t run you out of mana so quickly.

You should also get used to using this with Riptide to maximise its effects in heavy-damage situations.

Things which can effect this heal:

Riptide: Boosts the amount of healing done by your chain heal by 25%

Glyph of Chain Heal: Chain Heal may now hit 4 targets.

~o~

Lesser Healing Wave (LHW)- Fast, small heal

This heal used to be the red-headed step-child of Burning Crusade healing.  Woe was he who touched the lesser healing wave button!  In Wrath, this spell has come back into its own – especially when glyphed it is relatively efficient and good for tank healing.  In situations where the group is very spread out to the point where chain heal will not bounce, this heal is a good one for topping people off.  Having a decent amount of crit on your gear really helps to make this heal more effective – LHW used to trigger an improved water shield proc 100% of the time when it crit but, alas, no longer – only 60% of the time and thus it’s not as super-efficient as it was.  Nonetheless, it’s a very potent tool for 5-mans and sometimes larger groups too.

Things which can effect this heal:

Tidal Waves: Chain Heal and Riptide can proc this effect which reduces cast time by 30% and gives a 10% bonus healing.

Glyph of Lesser Healing Wave: A really nice glyph which is good for 5-mans.  In raids, its value really depends on how often you’re likely to be assigned to heal the tank.

~o~

Healing Wave (HW)- Slow, big heal

Healing wave is the big daddy of heals – it’s tricky to master using this heal as it is rather slow, but once you have it down it’s a very nice healing tool.  In raids this heal tends to go to waste on overheal unless you’re the only person healing your assigned target, or your target is not a tank.

Things which can effect this heal:

Tidal Waves: Chain Heal and Riptide can proc this effect which reduces cast time by 30% and gives a 20% bonus healing.

Healing Way: This resto talent was buffed to only require one heal to put up the full buff rather than three. Whilst of limited use in 5-mans, it can be a valuable tool in 10/25-mans – especially if you are often assigned to tank healing.

Glyph of Healing Wave:  This glyph doesn’t really effect the spell much except to heal yourself when you use Healing Wave on someone else.  In my opinion, this is a weak glyph compared to the others – though I imagine it has its pvp uses.

~o~

Riptide (WOOSH!)- instant, mana heavy, HoT

This is the new kid on the block – fast, makes a cool sound and has a fun spell effect.  It’s a very tempting heal to use but, if abused, can eat through your mana.  It’s a spell which can also end up being a bit of a crutch and you should make sure not to use it where the hot will be completely wasted or an instant heal is not needed – often a LHW may be better.  The secondary function of riptide is to boost chain heals and it can be very useful to riptide your tank (the hot is rarely completely wasted in a 5-man) and bounce CH’s onto the melee – keeping your tank topped off and your melee un-dead (despite them standing in fires).

Riptide has a high synergy with other heals – boosting chain heal and proccing tidal waves.

Things which can effect this heal:

Glyph of Riptide: Increases the Duration of your riptide by six seconds.

~o~

Earth Shield (ES)- ‘reactive’ heal

Earth shield is flying rocks you can put on another person.  It is very cool! Most people use this on the tank, but in 5-mans it can be a lifesaver for any squishies and can even be used on yourself if you’re having trouble with mobs / attacks hitting you and increasing your cast time – especially so when a boss has a channelled AoE or direct damage attack.

Earth Shield should be up at all times.

Things which can effect this heal:

Improved Shields: Going into enhancement for this is a good idea and part of most standard resto builds – esecially as it also boosts your water shield.

Glyph of Earth Shield: boosts your Earth Shield by 20% – a decent raiding glyph, though I feel it lacks utility for 5-mans in comparison to the other glyphs available.

Spellpower:  Earth shield can be super-charged by trinketing or using other buff effects before putting it on someone – including your totems.  It is good to get into the habit of laying your Flametongue totem (if you’re using it) before you put your earth shield up.

~o~

Healing Stream Totem – Passive ‘hot’

Not a true ‘heal’ per-se, but if you happen to run with a group which does not need your mana-stream totem (you have two paladins, say) then this little totem comes into its own.  It still only works in your own group, but can be used to some effect for low-level, constant damage – allowing you to keep your attention elsewhere for longer and can buy an extra second or two if someone is reduced to very low health suddenly.

Things which can effect this heal:

Glyph of Healing Stream Totem:  This boosts the output of your healing stream totem and, whilst nice padding, isn’t really all that great outside of high AoE-damage encounters.

~o~

Earthliving Weapon – weapon imbue, small ‘hot’

This is your restoration weapon imbue – use it, love it and cherish it.  Besides giving you a hefty healing boost, it also sometimes triggers a small hot on the targets it hits.  The healing by Earthliving is never omgimbapwn but there is no reason you should not have this on your weapon at all times whilst healing.

Things which can effect this heal:

Glyph of Earthliving Weapon: Earthliving has a 5% increased chance to trigger.

Elemental Weapons:  This is another enhancement talent – one which you may or may not have depending on your build.  Various sources seem to calculate its worth at around 45 sp – so whilst it is a nice boost when you’re just starting, you might eventually want to put your points elsewhere.

Stats

Yes, horrible numbers, but they let you know which shiny gear you want.  You do want shiny gear don’t you?  Yes, yes I thought so! Greedy buggers.

• Int

Intellect is the base stat which determines how big your mana pool is.  It also gives you a small amount of crit per point of intellect (it takes around 166 points of Int to gain 1% spell crit for a Shaman). With the talent Nature’s Blessing – which is pretty bread-and-butter in a resto spec – you’ll also gain a little bit of spellpower from your intellect.  Intellect is also very good regen stat for shamans – which I will go into in the regen section, below.

Intellect is, thus, a pretty well-rounded stat for a shaman – more mana, more crit, more spellpower.

• Bonus Healing (spellpower)

Spellpower is the thing which gives meat to your spell – boosting the shiny green numbers which you see above peoples heads when you heal them.  Using your Flametongue Totem will net you an extra 144 sp.

• Crit Chance

Crit is a stat which gives a lot of bang for your buck: it sometimes increases the size of your heals – those heals can add armor and may proc ancestral awakening if you have the talents.  Crit also gives you come mana back from improved water shield, if you take it.  It is now a very desirable stat for a shaman.

• Mana Regen

Mana regen, or mana per 5.  The number you care about here, when  you mouse over it, is the while casting one.  Generally you want to have about 110-150 before you start doing heroics and closer to 200+ for starting Naxx (including water shield).  This is your ‘base’ regen which you can count on to sit, ticking merrily away, slowly adding to your mana pool.  

• Haste

Haste makes heals faster.  Whilst this has the benefit of getting more heals where they need to be in a short amount of time, if you’re a bit trigger-happy you can end up running yourself out of mana faster.  Two of our heals – Healing Wave and Chain Heal have relatively long cast times and both benefit from having a good bit of haste to reduce time spent casting.  It also benefits us by allowing us to cast and move more frequently if needed.  If you are using your Wrath of Air totem you will get 5% spell haste from that alone.

~o~

You want some of all of these – though you don’t want too much haste to start with.  At first, go for a decent mana pool and mp5, crit as a side dish, and then eventually start putting some haste on top once you’re having few mana problems.  You don’t want no haste at all, you’ll probably end up with around 200 haste rating on your gear very early on even if you’re not trying to stack it.

Shoot for:

• 18k Mana
• 1.9k SP
• 150-200mp5
• ~200 haste rating
• ~20-25% crit

This is pre-Naxx, and  although you can go there with a bit less, these numbers will probably see you most of the way through with little trouble.

Mana Regen

As a healer, a large part of your time may be spent managing your mana.  If you constantly spam spells you will end up running oom, but, of course, not doing enough healing is bad.  Therefore, we have to look at the various methods of mana regen.

First of all, you can forget spirit-based regen – that’s for druids and priests.  Spirit means bugger all to a shaman and is wasted stats on any item which has it.

Intellect Based Regen

Intellect regen is based on the idea of utilising the multiple talents you and others have which return a % of your base mana.  The higher your base mana, thus, the more they return per tick to you.

Replenishment is the ‘best known’ of these and can be given by:

• Survival Hunters
• Shadow Priests
• Retribution Paladins
• Frost Mages
• Destruction Warlocks

This is, of course, if they have each specced into the necessary talent!

The other source of intellect based regen is your Mana Tide Totem.  A lot of people seem to forget this totem and, worse, some seem to think it’s a wonderful thing to never have to use it! First off, it benefits not only you but your whole party (not raid!) so be aware that even if you’re at full mana, others may get something out of you using this totem.  Secondarily, if you have so much mana you are never going below 75% then re-gem or re-enchant or twist around some gear and boost your throughout.  You will always have your mana tide totem,  so you can gear around using it – especially for fights where your heals need to be beefy.

I know not all will agree with me on this point but I see absolutely no point in ending a fight above 50% mana unless you vastly out-gear it, have too many healers, have had a lull to stand around regenning or accidentally took a mana pot just before the end of the fight! 10 Intellect = ~6 mp5 if you can count on replenishment and always use your Mana Tide totem.

Mana Per Five

At the beginning of The Burning Crusade this stuff was shaman-crack – you could not get enough of it, you always wanted more and you’d do a lot to get your fix including hanging around with 24 other people looking for trouble…  However, when Water Shield got its buff – becoming both free to cast and giving a hell of a lot more mp5, the extreme lust for that same stat dropped.

In Wrath, Water Shield gives a whopping 100mp5.  Still, even though you don’t need to stack mp5 to the hilt like in TBC, this little stat, beloved of shamans, is still relatively important.

If you mouse-over your ‘mana regen’ (under spells in your character pane) you’ll see two numbers.  The first is your non-casting mana regen.  That is the rate at which you will regen mana when you’ve not cast something within the last 5 seconds.  The other number, which will be a bit smaller, is your mana-regen whilst casting.  As a shaman, standing around and waggling your tail (or other appendage of choice for orcs and trolls…), will net you very little – you don’t have a huge difference between your casting and non-casting regen like a priest or druid does and cannot regen a whole lot of mana that way in a short time.

Therefore – mp5 is a solid base of incoming mana which is always ticking away in the background.  Having a reasonable amount of this is essential, even in crit-heavy builds.

Crit

Crit heavy builds?  What?!  Crit is for Paladins, isn’t it? Well, yes, but with the homogenisation of gear it made sense for Blizzard to prod the two non-spirit using healing classes closer together so that they can use similar gear.  So where does crit come into the equation?

Improved Water Shield.

This little talent, fully maxed, will allow for a water shield orb to be consumed when you crit on a Healing Wave or 60% of the time on a Lesser Healing Wave.  Each of those little balls of water is ~400 mana (depending on talents and glyphs) – not a huge deal, but it somewhat helps lighten the heavy costs of both HW and LHW.  The one issue with this regen is that it is rng based – if you do not crit you do not get mana back and an unlucky streak may leave you dry.

There is also the other issue of keeping water shield up – if you crit, use your shield up and don’t refresh it then you can end up with a net loss of mana – the best choice is usually to refresh it any time you have a spare global cooldown so that you need not stop healing at an important part of the fight to refresh it.

Talents

5-Man Build

This build ignores healing way and picks up healing focus.  Even after the mechanic change, pushback can be a killer on your longer spells and you’re more likely to have loose mobs chomping on you in a 5 man than a raid.  If you know your tank is solid then you could consider putting points in focused mind, healing way or even some in totemic focus since you’re more likely to be uprooting and replacing your totems more frequently.

Note the recommended glyphs: LHW, Water Mastery and Chain Heal.

Water Mastery glyph works out as 30mp5 so if you feel your mana is in a good place you can drop it and take something with more utility – HW, Riptide, Healing Stream glyphs for example.

Mixed Raid Build

This is my current build and glyphs – I can be assigned to tank heal on one fight and raid the next so I pick up Healing Way and drop elemental weapons.  As much as I’ve never been a huge fan of focused mind it can be useful  in a raid build – though you could easily switch those points to elemental weapons or imp. reincarnation.  Totemic focus is generally not needed in a raid setting as you will often  able to ‘fire and forget’ your totems for the less-than 5-minute duration of most boss fights in Naxx.  Even in Ulduar there aren’t many fights which require repositioning of totems, either.

Tip from Drug:

In a raid situation, 1/3 healing way works pretty good for me. Sometimes you get an unlucky RNG and it takes some time to get the buff to proc, but if you really need to spam HW over a long time, it really does the trick.

Addons

For those who’ve never been healers before:

As a healer, a lot of the information you’re going to be digesting will come in the form of health bars.  You need to be aware that only concentrating on these is bad and can lead to healer-in-a-fire syndrome where you’re so busy healing that you don’t realise you’re bringing about your own doom.

Using a good, specialised unit interface for groups and raids can mean you can spend less time figuring out what’s going on and more time staying out of fires. A good raid unit frame will give you health and mana bars, notification of debuffs and, if you want it, buffs as well as being relatively compact so that they do not obscure your view.

Grid / Healbot / VuhDo

These three addons are those recommended by many healers – VuhDo is a new addon which I’ve not tried yet but it’s gotten some good reviews.  Grid and healbot are both tried and tested with Healbot being said to be the easiest to install and get going, but grid being the more customisable and flexible one with many additional specialist modules.  Personally I use grid and I may do a post about the particular way in which I set up grid in the near future.

This addon simply allows you to cast a spell by clicking on your unit frames of choice rather than selecting a person then hitting a heal or using mouse-over macros.  Personally I like to keep my left hand free for trinkets, nature’s swiftness, tidal force, and push-to-talk so clique is perfect for me.  Having a 5-button mouse really helps in this regard – though you can do every shaman heal in your book with a three-button mouse and modifiers!

It is important that you are able to see curses, diseases and poisons on your unit frames so that you can remove them when needed.

Gear

I started a section on some nice pre-raid pieces and then realised that it really needed a post of it’s own. I’ll link it here when I’m finished with it so <under construction>.

Gems / Enchants Quick Reference

• Meta: Insightful Earthsiege Diamond
• Red: Runed Scarlet Ruby or Luminous Monarch Topaz
• Yellow: Brilliant Autumn’s Glow or Luminous Monarch Topaz
• Blue: Dazzling Forest Emerald or Royal Twilight Opal

• Head: Arcanum of Blissful Mending (Wyrmrest Revered) or Arcanum of Burning Mysteries (KT Revered)
• Back: Speed / Greater Speed
• Shoulders: Lesser / Greater Inscription of the Crag or Lesser / Greater Inscription of the Storm
• Chest:  Super Stats / Powerful Stats or Greater Mana Restoration or, if you’re cash strapped Exceptional Mana
• Wrist:  Superior Spellpower
• Hands:  Exceptional Spellpower
• Legs: Azure / Sapphire Spellthread
• Feet:  Greater Vitality / Tuskarr’s Vitality

“Wait, what, Tuskarr’s Vitality?  But that’s a tank enchant!”  In a raiding situation I’d take extra run-speed over a tiny bit of mp5 and hp5.  We are not terribly mobile healers and any little bit helps – especially if many of those you’re going to be healing will have some form of movement boost.  Utility here, for me, wins out over raw stats.

In general I’d always use the cheaper enchants unless you don’t expect to upgrade a piece for a long time – the stat differences are often minimal for the extra expense.

Random Stuff

So you healed at 70…?

Maybe your guild needed an extra resto shammy for raiding, or you switched chars and, for whatever reason, you’ve come into Wrath and you’re not sure ‘what’s changed’.

No down-ranking – You have four direct heals, and none of them is Chain Heal (Rank 5).

Chain Heal is no longer your God – We are now polytheistic and worship all spells more-or-less equally.

Your mana spring totem doesn’t stack with a paladin’s Blessing of Wisdom (improved) so if you have a paladin using that, you should use Healing Stream (or any of the others if they happen to be useful for a particular fight).

You now have a weapon imbue especially for healing – no more stacks of mana oil, woohoo!

Priests still cry about your ‘op raid healing’ despite the gazillion buffs they’ve gotten.  Some things never change.

Practice Makes Perfect

Twee, perhaps, but very true – especially if you’ve never healed before.  Get yourself out there and heal some pvp matches to get used to your key bindings, then hit up some easier instances and, eventually, jump in and grab some heroics.  Never be afraid to tell people you need them to slow down a little bit or wait for you to regen your mana.  If you’re used to playing a priest or druid be aware that you may need to drink a bit more between pulls – shamans don’t regen mana that much faster out of combat than in!

When I first levelled my shaman I was a hyrid ele/resto spec 60-70 so that I could heal.  Without half-decent gear, though, some of the Wrath instances may be tough to heal for an offspec, newbie healer.  Dual specs are expensive but helpful in this regard.  If you cannot afford that then I’d suggest getting to level 78 (or before!) and then switching to a resto spec and then healing your way to 80 from there.  That way, you’ll get plenty of experience, a little gear and, more importantly, realise if healing is for you or not.

Nature’s Swiftness

This spell, contrary to popular belief, does not come married to Healing Wave.  Quite often it will be more useful for you to use in conjunction with Chain Heal so get used to activating it and utilising it in a number of situations.

Links

• Drug @ Shield’s Up and Faulsey @ Faulsey.com – both of whom read over my post and helped me polish it up.  /hug /kudos
• Llyra@ Healing Way – Drug linked me to this  blog – she has a number of awesome posts up which are well worth reading for those new and not-so-new to resto-shamaning.  Specific reccomendations are her post on wanted raid buffs and which totems work in raid or party only.
• Elitist Jerks – Not always the best resource for those brand-new to the class or who are not raiding, but EJ has the number crunching that I don’t.
• Shield’s Up – Drug is a wonderful resto shaman with good articles about best-in-slot gear,  glyphs and raiding as a shaman in general.
• Wowwiki – I am terrible with numbers and stats so most of the above statistics / numbers come from Wowwiki.
• Wowhead – See above.

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Tired, unable to sleep, I checked the front page of WoW’s European site where I found they’d put the winners up for their Valentine’s Day card competition.  The first picture which loaded as a winner? Yours truly’s entry. /flabbergasted!

Competition Winners Page

/glee

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I was waiting on the Trasmutation book spawn for Higher Learning and, with two resto druids and some pets, created my own little performance team!  Eventually we were joined by a hordie death knight, too.   I have so many silly screenshots of ‘waiting for the damn book to spawn’ but they’ll come in another post.

Some of the Lightwalkers admins being a bit silly – Gravlax (gnoam), Indigo (hooman) and myself in Danrassus in our event finery.   Mages, festival gear and mirror image make for some silly screenies.  When we got bored of chmoozing the Darnassus guards we moved onto Stormwind to find another admin – Bob – who turned himself into a blood elf and joined in.  No luck getting him to wear a dress though /sob.

Some more random but kinda cool screenies – myself and Indi’s paladin alt (whom she was letting me sprinkle with flowers for the achievement) and then a randomly cool, if slightly sinister screenshot of me in the dark whilst standing next to a Storwind guard.  The Light of his lamp gave off a really interesting shadow effect!

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Knowing raids would be shutting down for a week or so over Christmas / New Year I decided to do something I’d been putting off for the moment – spec enhancement.

Enhancement

It’s been a while.  A long while.  Indeed, with the exception of a few hours of madness Avarix has not ’stepped foot’ (or should that be hoof?) in the enhancement tree since he hit level 60 and got himself some nice spell damage mail.  I had always wanted to play elemental, something a bit different from my usual beloved melee, with an eye to trying resto when I hit 80 and this I did quite happily.

When 3.0 came out, though, enhancement gained a lot of new shinies to play with – mechanics which I figured might make playing a little more fun rather than what, to me, had felt like a very ’slow’ dual-weild class.

I must admit that I am rather impressed, having tried it, at how they’ve managed to make the spec feel very much more like how I imagined shamans were originally designed – the mechanic of maelstrom weapon, for example, really adds that ‘hybrid’ feel to the class and truly gives them a unique playstyle – an integration between spells and melee which had previously only been touched on by paladins and now death knights.

New enhancement feels interesting.

So, why did I spec back to elemental a few days ago?

Elemental

I used to ‘like’ elemental – it was a way to level but I enjoyed resto more and felt that resto dps for grinding really wasn’t all that far behind elemental.  Come Wrath, though, and the changes to elemental, I’ve found that elemental now feels very different to resto.  The spells are all the same but the rotation is a little different and oh gods the damage is so markedly different between specs even though I have reasonable gear for each.

Elemental, to me, has a flow not entirely dissimmilar to enhancement – a preferential order for attacks rather than a strict rotation and an awareness of cooldowns as they become available.

So, coming back to the question of why respec -

Enhancement has more abilities and attacks – it takes more ‘getting used to’ and the attacks, whilst more complex and interesting end up feeling a little disjointed.  I couldn’t find a proper ‘rythm’ or ‘flow’ and thus even when supposedly mindlessly grinding, I had to be a bit more switched on.  I’m aware this is partially a ‘practice’ issue but I’ve clicked far faster with every other respec – even on my hunter going from BM > MM and back was easier to gel with and I’m useless at huntering.

Elemental, conversely, has a flow – almost a rotation (dependant upon haste) and thus you can slip into a slightly mindless state whilst grinding and can more easily manage minutiae (movement, trinkets, etc.) whilst maintaining decent damage.

Enhancement also feels slow when you’re used to other melee dps.  My alts include a feral druid, combat rogue and dual-weilding death knight.  I like ‘fast’ melee and having lots of buttons to press and less of this ‘waiting on cooldowns’ time. Enhancement feels a little dull beside this.  Elemental used to feel a little slower but now with so much more mana regen and a few new ‘fast’ abilities you can be throwing off instants and fast-casts more often.  That wait also usually ends up with a nice big wham of damage at the end of it, too, so feels more satisfying.

But what about resto?

Resto I still love and it will be my raiding spec for a long while to come but I feel more than ever that resto restricts me when I want to do dailies or even instances.  Only one healer is needed for most instances and we only have a few guild tanks so more often it’s dps who are being looked for than an extra healer (at least when I’m online).  Doing dailies as resto is also far more arduous compared to the new, boosted, elemental damage (even if it does need a further pick-me-up).

Roll on dual specs…

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Dear Healing Druids and Priests,

I am a Resto Shaman.  Yes, one of the persons to whom you’ve been directing your antipathy these past few weeks and months – ever since you heard of  ‘The Nerf’ which was to come.  You’ve wailed and cried and, perhaps, you’ve come to terms with it or, hell, maybe you’re still fighting and trying to overthrow ‘the man’ to keep your beloved, non-nerfed circles of healing and wild growths.

Well, I support you.  No, really, I’m not being facetious, or mocking – I really wish priests and druids were not getting this nerf – especially priests.  Why?  Because I’m sick and tired, to be honest, of what I see being the case once the patch comes out:

That I’ll be:

• Sick of being ‘forced’ to AoE heal because I’ll be the ‘best’ class at it.
• Sick of being called a one-button healer and it being true (again).
• Sick of being told I only hit the top of the meters due to said easymode healing.
• Sick of people complaining about how they’ll never get a raidspot versus shamans when we currently (and likely will continue to) run with over four priests in every raid  (in TBC we ran with as many as 6 in one raid) and very few other guilds will change their setups either.
  
• Sick of the dps/tanks blaming CoH nerf and not their own ability to get out of fire on them dying.*
  
• Sick of priests whining about not being amazing uber imba healers who can do everything better than every other healing class when they drop a tiny bit on the healing meters.**

I don’t mind things being harder, I applaud it and I understand their reasoning for the nerf.  I also know how it is to have one of your tools which seemed so cool and all-purpose being changed into something completely different (look at how many of the new shaman talents don’t actually affect chain heal).

But I am also concerned that it’ll negatively impact raids – we run with one priest who actually has done (and frequently does)  the fabled 70%(+) CoH on some boss fights (without running oom) and whilst it does make the content fairly trivial I’m concerned people are not prepared to ‘tough it out’ until priests (and druids) learn to cope with their modified healing tools.

I know a lot of you will disagree with me on this but these truly are my feelings on the issue.  I don’t want to see the nerf going through because it’ll take away the enjoyment I have at being able to be a single-target healer – I don’t want to go back to the days of spamming chain-heal because, well, it’s dull.

However…

I also know that with two CoH priests in the raid I, currently,  might as well go afk on trash – the only thing I can do is throw an earthshield on the tank and the occassional riptide, anything else will be healed by the time my heals land.  Another shammy in my guild (not naming names) was on a pug Naxx with a group who had a CoH priest who was being chain innervated and just spammed CoH doing 70% of the entire raid healing whilst gleefully announcing how awesome a healer they were; said shammy also mentioned how utterly boring it is to be in a raid at the moment with any priest of that ilk.

If there’s one thing I’d like you both to understand it’s that I don’t care if I’m 1st on the meter so long as I’m keeping people alive and doing reasonably versus others of my class who’re in similar gear, and I know you probably don’t either.  What I do care about is the fact that if we bring 2 CoH priests to a raid it makes me so ineffectual that I can dps 99% on some bosses – but when it comes to bosses which require a lot of  single-target healing or widely spread AoE damage, the same priests and druids have trouble keeping people up.

I really wish I could propose a middle ground but I know that, at this point, it’s a ‘deal with it’ sort of issue.  I’m only hoping that it turns out to be like the ‘zomg mana regen nerf’ worries of pre-wrath in that it changes gameplay less than is imagined.

* I know there’s been a lot of ‘dps hate’ recently and I know that not all dps are awful but I also know that many of them tend to be blinkered when it comes to healing – “I never received a heal for ages” when they were being spam healed…

** I also know not all priests are like this but I’ve met too many for my tastes.  We’re all in the same boat, stop asking for a bigger oar.

Excuse the lack of imagery in this post, but I’ve not managed to get around to reistalling photoshop yet.  Oops!

Oh and sorry disc priests,  you’re being slightly shunned in an effort to make the post shorter and not have to include ‘except disc priests’ every third line.

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It seems like only a few weeks ago that I was gleefully squeeing over my awesome new tier 6 shoulders!  Oh, it kinda was.  Ah well, as is the way of things I’m slowly starting to phase out my old gear and replace it with new shinies and, inevitably, the shoulders had to go.  I’d be a little more sad if I wasn’t replacing them with t7.5  *ahem*

If it isn’t shoulders as wide as I am tall it’s shoulders as tall as I am wide!

That was going to be the end of this delighted-shiny-lookit-what-I-got post but then we went back to Naxx after I’d half written the post and, well… [Chains of Adoration], [Quivering Tunic], [Wraith Strike], [Atonement Greaves], [Legguards of the Undisturbed], and [Girdle of the Gambit] all in one night.  I think I took something from almost every boss – despite asking the Paladins if they wanted anything even if it was mail but, no.  I guess there’s some benefit to being the only resto shaman raiding at the moment…

Well, at least our guild now has a very nicely geared shaman.  These, along with my new trinket ([The Egg of Mortal Essence]), have increased my stats rather a lot – from:

• Healing: 1545
• Mana: 15.9k
• Mp5: 358 (whilst casting)
• Haste: 137
• Crit: 20.55

to

• Healing: 1931
• Mana: 18.5k
• Mp5: 381 (whilst casting)
• Haste:288
• Crit: 22.39

Almost 400 +healing in one evening, not to mention a nice chunk of mana, crit and haste.  I am a little wary of the haste, though, so I’m going to poke through my gear and see if I can sort out a haste heavy kit and a regen kit alongside a balanced one.  Too much haste is pretty useless if not downright dangerous in some fights so I want to be able to make sure I control the amount I have.  Oh and I need to go recheck the values for it again *makes a note*.  I’m also still, sadly, using green gems as couldn’t even buy the blue quality ones from the auction house! There were simply none of the kind I wanted so my stats will see a further boost from that once I have it sorted.

In other news…

Someone mentioned in guild that a  raid to kill the opposite faction leaders was going on and I leapt at the chance to do For the Alliance!, scoring myself another bear – [Reins of the Black Bear]!  Really, though, it should be called a slightly-dull-grey bear rather than a black bear…

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Ok, so, this post is terribly late as usual but the madness of levelling and new content and whatnot has distracted me even further.

I hit level 80 around 2am last Friday, deliberately making it a discovery-ding (the best kind!)  Looks kind of awesome getting that ding spell effect in the air, too!

I skipped Howling Fjord and Sholazar so I have something new for my alts to go through – I was rather glad I spent my last level and a half in Storm Peaks as it has some awesome quests and some pretty interesting utilisations of the new quest mechanics and vehicle technology which I might otherwise have left until ‘later’ to do (much like I find it hard to be motivated to do Icecrown after the mammoth levelling session I’ve just completed…).

Also, if I hadn’t levelled in Storm Peaks I might not have nabbed this pretty yet:

If you’re thinking that the [Reins of the White Polar Bear] (really, did they have to specify white?) looks a little small you’d be right – here’s a comparison versus the brown armored mount you can buy in Dalaran (thanks to Grav for modelling with his bear!):

Of course, only  a few days after that we’re all given a baby polar bear!  Khi was as delighted as I was and promptly took a rather nice screenie!

I’m a little overloaded at the moment and now that I’m 80 I’m trying not to overdo it too much – we’ve got long road ahead of us and I see no point in running to the end just to wait and get bored – some might see the road as ending at 80 but not me, nosir.  I’ve done my running, I’ve tired myself out and now is the time to go at a slow and steady pace.  Ok, I think I’ve probably worked that metaphor to death now…

Like many others I also started a Death Knight.  Despite plans to start a little dwarfette, I played around on the beta and came to the decision to roll a draenei.  I know, I know, I love my dwarves but sadly the dwarven animations look rather old compared to the shiny new draenei ones and I really, really, can’t stand the female dwarf casting animations.  I deleted my poor, forgotten, level 11 mage and brought her back as an undead killing machine.  They share looks and names so, in my mind, my mage ‘became’ a Death Knight and I’m levelling her with that in mind.  When I say levelling, though, I mean leaving her to build up rest-xp in Hellfire.  *ahem*

Azmoo also rolled a female draenei death knight and I ran over to meet him to see how closely they resembled one another.   Could almost be sisters, it seems, hehe…

My girl is the one in the middle – she shares a look with the progenitor of the name I also gave her – a female toll warrior I have on Sporeggar – Yjin (silent j!).  I’ll be updating the blog with her profile soon and updating my outdated character page.  I might also add something to th sidebar as I feel having Aurik at the top of the page and doing posts about healing has confused people as to what class I play (I’ve seen a few references to myself as a paladin, hehe).

I’m really in the mood to draw one of my chars doing something cool in Northrend but I’m not sure what yet! Any ideas on the back of a comment and posted below, please! *ahem*

Other than that I’ve been trying to motivate myself to finish off some quests for rep, poke about herbing on my hunter, and do every heroic I can.  I’ve respecced to resto (I was just getting to enjoy elemental, dual specs can’t come fast enough, goddamnit!) but I’m actually gathering off-spec enhance gear again – I’d really like to try it out as it now looks a lot more interesting than I felt it was before.

Enough of the rambling from me – back to playing!

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Sephrenia’s post is something everyone should understand by now.  Really.  Nothing irks me more than an “omg heal me!” being shouted over teamspeak or party-chat by dps and especially when they’re not only asking for their own healing, but for someone else.

Shouting “heal the tank!!!!” when the healers are, most probably, doing the damndest to keep said tank alive is not only annoying, it can be counter productive, too.  For example, if a number of healers is assigned to each tank and someone shouts to ‘heal x!’ some healers, we shall say the ones less ’sure’ of themselves, will switch their healing target – causing another tank to die.  This can also when a dps character calls out for healing and too many healers actually listen to them.

Now, I know a lot of people would say ‘but just ignore them, do what your assignment is’ and I’d agree to some extent but also point out the fact that quite often, in Burning Crusade, there are fights which require you to redirect your efforts mid-encounter.  People are used to being reactive to damage and, especially raid healers, are equipped to switch targets quickly or cover said targets with ’splash healing’.  When someone calls out for healing not only may the tanks lose healing but those reactive healers may change their primary focus and end up wasting healing time as four large heals land at the same time on one dps char who stood in the fire too long.

When is it ok?

Some would say that its never ok to call for additional healing but I think there are circumstances where it is valid.  Some of our tanks have macros which call out when they have used their defensive capabilities – saying them in teamspeak is a little quicker “coming off shield wall in 5…4…” etc.  Not directly calling for healing, perhaps, but close enough in directing it.

However, in general, asking directly for healing is not really going to get your healers to heal you more.  Like Sephrenia says – it’s very tempting for a healer to let said players die on trash or somesuch so they stop messing around.  Not the most mature way of handling things, perhaps, but effective in calming your temper.

I don’t need reminding that you need healing – it’s something that I am acutely aware of. It’s all I watch on my screen – those little grid boxes of dwindling health. I never see much else.

I reiterate her point here – your job is to dps or tank, keep an eye on your own rotations, your own dps and your own threat.  Stop telling the healers to heal, it’s what we do and it’s all we’re concentrating on besides not stepping in the fire.  If you’re telling us to do our job I doubt you’re doing your own effectively…

Totems

The same thing goes for telling shamans which totems to put down.  You can mention to us why an encounter might favour another totem in a way we might not have considered as the spec we are but unless you are the raid leader – and sometime even if you are! – you should think about the fact that totems are part of the shaman class and, as such, we also usually understand how and when certain ones should be used.

No Sunday Screenies today (I’m sure you’re all crying at the loss) – I’ve not gotten any particularly good new screenies except ones I’ve taken for tommorrow’s post!

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