by Rich Maloy

Being a hybrid class means there’s not a lot of wiggle room when it comes to making specs as one spec can serve us well through 10s, 25s, dungeons, and soloing. While PvE builds don’t leave much room for experimentation, I’ve seen far more variance in PvP specs, mostly depending on play-style.

Of course there are distinct PvP talents built into the trees and there are core talents for both PvE and PvP without which we’re just not enhancement shamans. But depending on your gear, team, and how your play you can customize your PvP specs for defensive, offensive, mana-rich, or anywhere in between.

Let’s start right out with the two of the more common builds right now:

PvE – 19/52/0 – this spec will serve most all enhancers well across all levels on content and is the spec I use on Stoney.

PvP – 16/55/0 – as I mentioned above there is far more flexibility in specs for PvP. I chose this one because it’s a good starter PvP spec that is highly mana-conservative and defensive focused. I’ve seen many different takes on enhancement PvP specs and experienced players will alter to suit their own play style. But if you need a place to start, go with this.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Mimetir

If you do know something about macros then have a read anyway – some of these might be basic to you, but you might pick up something that saves your skin, bark or cow-printed hide.

Paladins

1. Buffs up quicksmart

/castsequence [target=focus] Beacon of Light, Sacred Shield

• This macro will put both of your essential healing buffs up on your focus, which is likely to be the tank.
• TIP: you can use the addon Need To Know in conjunction with this setup. It’ll give you permanent timer bars for those buffs regardless of whom you’re targetting.

2. Easy judging

/cast [target=focustarget] Judgement of Light

• Casts your judgement of light which both does healing and gives you a powerful haste buff
• It won’t cause you to overaggro when casting your judgement as you’re using it on the tank’s target
• Means you don’t have to mess around with tab or mouse targetting a mob to cast it on. You may need to re-target your tank but that’s less trouble than having to target everything manually.
• TIP: you could use the addon Clique, which will allow you to set up mouse and key bindings for anything you could wish. Want to heal the tank? Sure, click the <insert mouse button here> and you needn’t retarget them after using your JoL macro.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Joe Perez

The shaman toolkit might not have as many tools as say a holy priest, but the ones we do have are quite effective at their specific task. Each one is useful and colorful and we do have several that are quite unique. Lets take a look at them shall we?

Spells:

• Lesser Healing Wave: This is our version of Flash Heal. The cast time is 1.5 seconds and before spellpower and critical strikes, at the maximum rank it clocks in at just under 2,000 healing. This spell is fantastic for fast top offs and when combined with Glyph of Lesser Healing Wave can become a very effective tank heal. You get the first rank of this spell at level 20 and you will be using it pretty regularly as you level. It is a fast heal that does the job well.
• Healing Wave: This is our version of a Greater Heal. This spell comes in with a 3 second cast time and it is our nuke heal. Useful for fights where one target is taking a large amount of damage, it starts with a cap of about 3,500 healing before modifiers, but I’ve seen this spell hit numbers close to 40,000 healing. You start the game with this spell right off the bat, and you will see your first four ranks of it before Lesser Healing Wave becomes available. For early leveling as a healer this will be your bread and butter. During the end game, if you stack haste up to the soft cap, Healing Wave becomes a replacement for Lesser Healing Wave but we will cover more on that in a later post.
• Chain Heal: This is one of, if not the, most iconic spells a resto shaman has not only in look and ability but also in sound. Each cast is accompanied by the sound of rolling thunder. You get the first rank of this ability at level 40 and as soon as you are able to use it, it will become a healing spell heavily used in your selections. This spell has two modifies to it that increase the healing potential quite a bit. First off there is a talent which we talked about last week, Improved Chain Heal, that gives the spell a 20% increase in healing output. Second there is Glyph of Chain Heal which allows chain heal to affect an additional target. It is one of a shaman’s most mana efficient spells and in addition to being cheap and effective it is also a smart spell. It will always jump to the nearest target within the 12.5 yard jump range of the original target with the largest hit point deficiency. The spell will check for a valid target at each stop, so the third and fourth target (with the glyph) don’t necessarily need to be within range of the first target. Each jump calculates crit individually on the targets and each jump has a chance to proc weapon effects like Earthliving Weapon and certain items like that Althor’s Abacus. On top of all that it has a chance to trigger talents like Improved Water Shield. Once you have this spell you will use it heavily well into the end game.
  
• Earth Shield: Another iconic staple to the resto arsenal, you get this spell as part of our talent tree. You will have enough talent points to pick it up at level 50, and by 52 you can talent it to give you additional charges and improved healing. Earth Shield is a spell that places 6 charges (8 talented) on a target of your choosing, visible by a ring of floating earth surrounding your target. The spell is instant cast and it is a purely reactionary heal. Each time your target gets hit, a charge is burned and they are instantly healed with a cooldown of roughly 3 seconds between charge uses. The amount healed is modified by your crit, and spellpower at the time of casting the spell. It benefits the most from a high spellpower on the caster, so items that add spellpower like trinkets or temporary buffs that increase your spellpower are highly desirable before casting it. By default it healing is only augmented by 15% of your total spellpower, but with talents such as Improved Earth Shield and Improved Shields, you can push that to 35% of your spellpower. The spell also now correctly benefits from Purification. This can lead to some impressive and very useful shield procs. Normal placement of the spell is on a tank, but there are other ways to use it. It does reduce push back by 30%, so placing it on a healer or another caster when there is a lot of damage pushing their casts back. It can also be used on DPS who has a tendency to steal aggro. It might not be able to keep them solely alive, but it may give enough of a cushion to snap a heal off and keep them alive.
• Cleanse Spirit: This is a cure-all, or as close to one as you will see as a resto shaman. Cleanse Spirit effectively saves you button pushes, removing the reason to ever use Cure Disease or Cure Poison. The spell also allows for the removal of curses, which is incredibly handy in a pinch. While a resto shaman can’t remove magical effects, being able to remove 3/4 of removable debuffs with just one spell is pretty good. Another spell you receive from talent points you can pick this up at roughly level 44. Grab it as soon as you can and put it on your action bar, use often for great success.
• Riptide: This little beauty has become yet another icon of the shaman healing toolkit.You obtain this spell through talents and can snag it as early as level 60. Riptide is an instant cast spell that has a heal over time component. Heals a friendly target for 1604 to 1736 and another 1670 over 15 seconds. This is of course modified by your spell power and can produce fantastic numbers both on the initial attack as well as the ticks of each HoT. This spell also has a component that augments Chain Heal, increasing the amount healed by an additional 25%. This helps to increase healing output and also gives us mobility. Riptide also triggers many of our key talents and has cemented itself as a spell that should be used by each and every resto shaman

Read the rest of this entry »

by Joe Perez

The restoration talent tree is very strong and versatile, filled with a lot of the talents focused on augmenting your existing ability to heal. It is also very lean in the fact that it does not have many talents that you need to absolutely avoid, and they all have a very distinct role in the shaman toolbox. These talents also provide you with key spells essential to your success as a healer as well as our most iconic spells. While we may not have as many healing spells as a holy priest, our toolbox is still very versatile and it does the job quite well.

Talent Overview

Restoration talents that are struck out are considered expendable. These points can be moved around as you see fit. Talents that are in italics are ones that are more PvP centric and have limited application in PvE. From the enhancement tree we will only talk about the talents that further augment the restoration specialization

Read the rest of this entry »

by Joe Perez

If you’re reading this, you’ve most likely decided that healing is going to be one of your two possible specs and you’re looking for information before you jump right into healing. I can think of no better place to start my inaugural post of Totem Talk: Restoration than to provide the basics to get you started on the path of one of the strongest healing types in the game.

This is not the definitive Restoration guide this is just the basic overview, the more complex stuff will come later on.

1. What is Restoration?

Restoration is the shaman talent tree dedicated to healing. Your spells and totems are there to keep your team alive.

2. Benefits of Restoration

• Strong group healing.
• Access to one of the strongest reactionary heals in the game.
• Ability to go from group healing to single target healing without having to change spec or glyphs.
• Lots of buffs for nearly every class and spec you could party with.
• Gear upgrade choices are pretty clear.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Matt Low

The professor has a masters degree in potions and a Ph.D in raid wiping. Even the most stalwart of healers will have face a barrage of obstacles that will affect healing ability. This guy is my personal Achilles heel in Icecrown so far. Not more than a few days ago, I went an embarrassing 8 for 8 on Malleable Goo deaths. Talk about my pride being wounded. I’m supposed to be good at dodging stuff that comes flying toward me not running into them or getting drilled in the face by this green exploding goo.

Anyway, keep reading for my awesome mistakes and what I learned from them.

I’m assuming that if you’re reading this, you have a basic understanding of the Professor Putricide encounter. This article is meant mainly for the healers.

Alright, on to phase 1!

Phase 1

Pick two tank healers to cover your tank on Professor Putricide. If one of them gets focused by a green slime or has to kite the orange cloud, at least you’ll have one more for support. In any case, this early phase is a light one and there isn’t a whole lot of healing that needs to be done. You can probably get away with five healers. If your DPS is jaw-droppingly amazing, take 6 with you instead.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Rich Maloy

If I told you the enhancement shaman basic spell rotation was: SR, FE, SW, MW5_LB, MT(0), LS(1), ES_SS, SS, FS, ES, LL, FN would you run away screaming?

What if I told you that was just for single target boss encounters and there’s a different priority for boss fights that require changing targets, another priority for boss fights with heavy adds, and yet another priority for trash mobs. Scared yet?

It’s OK. Please come back. This is what we Enhancers have bouncing around in our head. I’ll make everything alright by breaking it down into a few easy-to-remember chunks. Because we all like chunks.

Thankfully we enhancers have math geniuses calculating the theorycrafting and supercomputer geniuses writing the code to the simulator to help us tweak our output at any level for any given situation. However, this article is not for theorycrafting and not about running simulations.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-EnhSim. Just this week I went through a detailed iterative sim on Stoney’s gear to recalculate optimal gemming and then maximize my output with a new rotation. EnhSim is a seriously awesome tool — and we’ll get to it in a later post — but using it is a process. In fact at progression/end-game levels of play it’s practically required for optimization. But for the Totem Talk enhancement columnist to say “sim it” is just a huge cop-out, and doesn’t exactly make for good reading.

Today’s article isn’t about the utmost optimal and ideal rotation, nor is it about how to get that for yourself. It’s about simplifying a complex rotation. This is to help the new-to-80 (or thereabouts) enhancement shaman wrap their head around a basic core spell rotation.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Michael Sacco

Elemental is one of those specs. The kind of spec whose 51-point talent is more of a fun, situational ability than one you stick in your regular rotation. The kind that you’ll love and everyone in your party will hate.

That’s right. We’re talkin’ about Thunderstorm today.

In terms of the normal WoW ability “kit,” Thunderstorm is a pretty unique snowflake. What makes it so special?

• It’s free. Unlike nearly every damaging spell in the game, all Thunderstorm costs you is a global cooldown.
• It gives you mana for nothing. Not mp5, not lowering the mana costs of spells — this is a straight 8% mana return every 45 seconds if you so desire.
• It’s got knockback. Twenty yards of it, in fact. Wrath added the knockback ability into the gestalt WoW experience, but it’s still fairly unique, shared only with a few other spells like Typhoon and Blast Wave. And twenty yards is a long way to go.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Rich Maloy

Playing an enhancement shaman, and playing it well, means dealing with the most extensive spell rotation in the game, having two caps to hit in gearing, and a dozen cooldowns to track. Not to mention the need to run out of fires, avoid whirlwinds, and generally dodge all that hate on melee. It’s safe to say enhance is one of the most complex specs to play. It’s also one of the most fun.

My favorite part is that we’re right up front making a mess of things with both physical and magical damage–to deadly effect. You want to play enhancement? Let’s dive right in to get you started!

Spec & Glyphs

First things first, a spec. 19/52/0. Okay, that’s done.

The best two glyphs are Feral Spirit and Stormstrike. I swap between Windfury Weapon and Fire Nova depending on the fight, but if frequent glyph changes isn’t your thing then go with Glyph of Windfury Weapon.
Read the rest of this entry »