by Mathew McCurley

Bati has created something that I truly appreciate: easy-to-use, easy-to-set-up, pre-made Grid healer profiles that give you everything you could ask for. The profile set even includes a DPS setup for your off spec, if needed.

An interface for every healer

Oren.1 is the paladin interface, showing all of the pertinent buffs on the target at the bottom of the Grid frame, with built-in timers from the excellent addon OmniCC. Bati is the priest Grid setup, displaying shields, Weakened Soul, Prayer of Mending and other vital priest information right on the Grid frame. Paired with a PoM counter addon, this setup proves very powerful for priests.

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by Rich Maloy

Casual raider? Or not fortunate enough to play a shaman as your main, but instead stuck on another, lesser class? This article is for you. If you need to go out and gear up your shaman from guild alt runs, PUG raids and mucking about in daily dungeons for your two frost emblems, then read on for your gear choices.

From the applications we received over the past few months at Big Crits, it seems that guilds and PUGs alike had a hard time getting past Deathbringer Saurfang — that is, until the bigger ICC buff hit. Now the breaking point is 6/12 ICC, with kills on Festergut and Rotface being commonplace but little experience beyond that available. Taking into consideration how far casual guilds or alt runs can realistically get into ICC, I’ve listed the loot in order of progression, from easy to hard.

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by Joe Perez

This week, we are going to talk about Healing Rain, a new spell obtained when a restoration shaman reaches level 83. When we first received word of the new spells and abilities during the Cataclysm class preview, there were quite a number of people who didn’t know how they felt about this new spell. Would it be good? Would it be useless? Was it really necessary? When the beta was released and the level cap moved to 83, we started to get a small idea of what the spell could do. I’ve been spending the better part of the last couple weeks testing it out in various situations, seeing how it complements the other tools in our healing arsenal.

What is Healing Rain?

Healing Rain is a new restoration shaman healing spell learned at level 83. Here are the stats:

• 46% base mana
• 30-yard range
• 2-second cast time
• 10-second cooldown
• 10-second duration
• Calls forth healing rains to blanket the area targeted by the Shaman, restoring 345 to 409 health to allies in the area every 2 sec. for 10 sec.

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by Rich Maloy

Halion, the Twilight Destroyer. Three phases, good loot and a huge scale-up in difficulty on heroic mode. It’s a good fight that requires paying attention throughout the entire 8-minute enrage timer, in which one death can mean a wipe, especially on heroic. There’s no 30 percent buff incoming, so you either learn it and beat it, or you don’t and fail. For our part, as enhancement shaman, there are a few tricks we have up our sleeves.

Positioning

Of course, for any positioning you want to follow your guild’s guidelines; never be the lone jerk running around doing his own thing. (That’s what battlegrounds are for.) The #1 rule of positioning on Halion, for both regular and heroic modes, is back foot. He has a huge parry zone that I’d estimate is nearly two-thirds his body length. Parries cause parry haste, which instantly kill tanks, which causes wipes. Wipes make raid leaders angry. Angry raid leaders make people cry. Don’t make people cry. Stand far back on his back foot and don’t force a parry; this gets dicey in phase two, but we’ll talk about that in a bit.

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by Matt Sampson

This time around, I thought I’d cover a question of increasing frequency: how will elemental scaling work in Cataclysm? After the rollercoaster ride of changes through Wrath of the Lich King, most shaman are a little worried about how things are looking. Since we’re still in the early days of the beta, and since we can’t get to level 85 yet, it’s a bit difficult to do any in-game testing or experimentation.

However, that’s never stopped me before. Rather than building a complex model on things we don’t yet know the mechanics for, what we can do is look at how Lightning Bolt is going to work. Since LB comprises 70-80 percent of our damage, it’s a useful measure of how damage increases with spellpower and critical/haste rating. So for some baselines, we’re going to assume all the raid buffs are present, that the spells can’t miss or resist, and that we’ve got 2.2k intellect, 15 percent haste, and 25 percent critical strike chance. I’m also going to assume a 5 percent mastery value, for when the mastery bonuses come into effect.

We then need to split things up into how they affect the spell. First we look at spellpower bonuses, damage bonuses based on passive talents, buffs and debuffs, which all need to be handled separately. Then we top everything off with critical damage multipliers, factor in Elemental Overload, and top it all off with haste.
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by Matt Sampson

The increase of buff range will be a godsend. Hopefully they increase it to the standard 100-yard range of all other auras, preventing the classic “the raid just moved and now I have to redrop totems a few times to make sure everyone is covered” problem. The other side of that is with the additional instant-cast spell in Unleash Elements, and the casting-while-moving ability that is Spiritwalker’s Grace, there will be less running time during which to recast totems.

The Searing Totem change is also very, very nice, not to mention something that we have been asking the development team for for a while. The question remains whether the totem range increase will be applied to Searing Totem as well, to avoid the “I can be 36 yards away from the target for everything but my DPS totem” problem.

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by C. Christian Moore

I started enjoying 5v5 at the end of season two. For a large part of my time in WoW, 5v5 was by far and wide my favorite arena bracket. It’s also the bracket I’ve gotten most of my rank #1 titles from (clearly no coincidence to being my favorite bracket *wink*).

The 5v5 bracket is a far different beast than 2v2 or 3v3 and is far more misunderstood. I’ve met 2v2 and 3v3 gladiators who just cannot comprehend the differences in the 5v5 bracket. 5v5 is the Rodney Dangerfield of arena. The bracket just doesn’t get enough respect. The biggest misconception centers around 5v5 being a “zerg” bracket.

You like how I throw around StarCraft terms like cowpies? Mhmm.

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by Matt Sampson

It’s time for me to waffle on again about elemental shaman. A few weeks ago, we saw the talent tree revamp down to seven tiers, and there have been a number of changes in the builds since then. Some of the changes are small, but there’s one or two in there that I think you’ll like, if you haven’t heard about them already.

I’ve also spent a little time on the beta, and aside from being totally unfamiliar with the UI, I’m enjoying it. Earthquake is fun to use, although I do wish that the cooldown didn’t exist. As you can see from the image above, the current animation isn’t quite finished yet, but looks promising.

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by Joe Perez

The Cataclysm beta has been offering us many things. From talent trees being changed to revealing new voices for bosses and audio for events, there really has been something new discovered almost every day. This is not too surprising considering the world is going through a massive series of changes as well as the game mechanics themselves.

One of the things that is being watched very carefully are the changes to healing and the mechanics not only of healing output but also mana regeneration. Sadly, though, there is still a lot missing from the client, making it hard to get an idea of exactly how it will all wind up being balanced. That said, there are still a lot of changes in place for healers in the way we quest and level. New talents and spells make it a different experience than before. On top of that, there are also a plethora of quests that seem to be tailored at least somewhat with a healer specifically in mind.

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