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.

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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.
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by Michael Sacco

If you’re here and reading this, you’ve probably decided that elemental will be one of your shaman’s two possible specs and you want to get a good grasp of how it all works before you dive in. The maiden voyage of Totem Talk’s Elemental edition is intended to tell you everything you need to know to get started as one of the game’s simplest specs, from mechanics to gearing to rotation.

What it isn’t intended to be the is be-all-end-all of Elemental theorycrafting. We’ll delve into more complex stuff later on.

Let’s get started!
1. What is Elemental?

Elemental is the ranged DPS tree available to the shaman class. You deal damage from afar with Nature and Fire spells.

2. Elemental benefits

• A simple rotation and easy mechanics.
• Damage increases dramatically once you acquire Lava Burst, making you competent DPS immediately at 80.
• Lots of buffs to nearly every class/spec you could party with.
• Little mystery in gear upgrades.

3. Elemental drawbacks

• A boring rotation. Very little to watch for or keep track of.
• Your damage doesn’t scale as well with increasingly powerful gear compared to other classes/specs after the initial boost from Lava Burst. You’ll notice.
• Few “unique” buffs and many buffs that are trivialized by ones provided by other classes.
• Highly specialized gear means it’s harder to find from bosses — and Blizzard doesn’t provide much emblem gear suitable for Elemental, either.
• Elemental has few worthwhile instant-cast spells or DoTs, making them ineffective in any fight that involves moving around.

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by Neppy @ Ensidia

I decided to write a guide for Resto Shamans who can’t be arsed to read through walls of text written like they’re for a rocket science dissertation or something, so here we go!

WUT’S CAIHN HAEL!?
Chain Heal is your best friend. You have picnics with it and you prance with it merrily in the poppy fields while the sun shines down upon you. You love Chain Heal, and Chain Heal loves you. So you use it – a lot.

Basically, the facts you need to know about Chain Heal are:

1. It has a 12 yard jump range. Anything larger than that, and Chain Heal won’t bounce.

1. It activates Tidal Waves, a useful Resto Shaman talent that lowers the cast time of your next two Healing Waves. You should like Healing Wave too, because with enough haste it’s awesome for tank healing (and raid healing!).

1. It’s awesome if you glyph it, because it hits 4 targets instead of 3, and your Earthliving Weapon will proc more as well. Lots of pretty green numbers all over your screen!

1. It (Tidal Waves) increases the crit chance of your Lesser Healing Wave spell by 25%, which is never a bad thing.

WHAT’S RIPTIDE, PRECIOUS? WHAT’S RIPTIDE, EH!?
Riptide is our 51 point talent. It’s an instant HoT that heals for about 1.7k (baseline) and another 1.7k over 15 seconds. It’s a nice instant heal. With the current talents, using Riptide is not completely necessary, but it can help save a life and you should be very vigilant about this. You’re a healer after all!

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Today i went on my warlock to just run around (bored as hell) I had my felhunter out and he gives a buff to all in the party called Fel Intelligence and highest rank gives 48 intellect and 64 spirit, I was grouping with a level 8 priest and he had 1k mana i was like wutlol ?

after that i saw that he had the highest rank of fel intelligence on him as a buff yay!

This work with shamans totems to ! For instance you can have a level 1 with 100 + spell power

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Written by mek

Introduction:

-Glossary:

I may use these abbreviations during the guide.

LHW = Lesser Healing Wave
ES = Earth Shield
SP = Spell Power
MP5 = Mana Regen per 5 seconds.
INT = Intellect
STAM = Stamina
DPS = Damage Per Second
HPS = Healing Per Second
AoE = Area of Effect
ilvl = Item Level
HoT = Heal over Time

I’ve been playing Restoration Shaman since the release of World of Warcraft with only a couple of short breaks. I think in the current version of the game it should be classed as a support healer, when played perfectly you will not get out the same kind of effective healing out as a similarly geared and skilled Druid or Priest. On the flipside, however, you offer some great buffs that will help secure that raid spot. As soon as Chain Heal began auto-targeting players with the lowest health it became the most dominating skill for Resto Shamans. This continued all the way through TBC and in Sunwell, with full Haste gear and a Shadow Priest in your group, you could push out some ridiculously high HPS with AoE healing. In Wrath of the Lich King, however, it seems that Blizzard’s intentions for Shaman healing have changed dramatically. Talents, gear and the way the other healers have been designed push it much more into the Tank healing category with quick spot healing thrown in. I’ll go into more detail on this later. The purpose of this guide is to give you an idea of the direction to take your Shaman if you want to improve your raid performance or if you are a beginner with the class. This is not going to be full of math – I am not a theory crafting nut. I think the best way to approach character optimisation is to just play and adapt to what is going on around you, particularly when playing a healer.

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this exploit i found is for the first boss in the 5man trials of the champion for the first boss, works in both heroic and non heroic

exploit is for phase one if your group sucks at jousting

if a shaman pops their totems down before u start the jousting phase some of the mobs will aggro to the totem and just sit there evaded until you recall making it easier to burn one down

granted this exploit is small but i still figured i’d share it

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by Matthew Rossi

There are two major changes coming to shamans in 3.2, one of which is a universal change (the addition of the new totem interface) that will affect all shamans, and the other primarily for one spec, restoration. There are other changes as well, however. Base range of all shock spells is being increased to 25 yards from 20, all shamans will now have approximately 7% more health, and our bread and butter interrupt will no longer be Earth Shock, but the redesigned Wind Shock, now named Wind Shear.

General changes

First off, low level shamans (specifically ones between 16 and 20) will have access to Ghost Wolf sooner to compensate for the arrival of mounts at level 20. Not a major change if you’re not that level, but I half expect some level 19 twinks will be happy.

More dramatically, we have the new totem interface to get ready for. The three pre-configurable ’sets’ of totems that you’ll be able to drop in one GCD (rather than the current system of each totem using a cooldown) will be Call of the Elements (gained at level 30), Call of the Ancestors comes at level 40 and gives you another four totems to pre-program and drop at once, and the final such set is called Call of the Spirits. Totemic Recall takes the place of Totemic Call and does basically the same exact thing, allowing you to pull up all of your totems at once.

It’s hard to oversell how much easier this will make instances for any shaman. No longer will you have to spend up to eight seconds dropping totems for a group while all the other players get to immediately DPS or heal – one keystroke and your previously selected totems will be down. And if a fight requires a lot of motion, you can yank them up and drop them down again with a lot less effort and hassle.

Combined with other changes for all shamans (7% more base health, 5 more yards on shocks, Wind Shear’s cooldown not linked to other shocks so that you don’t have to worry about using a shock and then not being able to interrupt) and pretty much all shamans are going to have some nice surprises come 3.2. But let’s not forget the Restoration revamp.

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by Mike Schramm

Patch 3.2 is here, and there is a whole herd of mount changes stampeding into your stables. Here’s a quick rundown of just what’s changed about all the things you ride in patch 3.2, from updates to when you can buy mounts and for how much, new tweaks to old mounts like the Ulduar Proto-drakes and the TCG items, and brand new mounts like the hippogryphs from the Argent Tournament and the long-awaited Ravasaur.

Mount costs, level requirements, and speed changes

The biggest news is that Blizzard has made major changes to when you can buy your mounts, and how much they cost when you do. When the new patch goes live, all of the mounts will have their level requirements reduced: Regular land mounts will now train at level 20, epic land mounts will be trainable at level 40, regular flying mounts will be trained at level 60, and epic flying will be trained at level 70. This means that you’ll be riding at an epic speed from level 40, and you’ll be able to train flying mounts at level 60 (so you’ll be able to ride around Outland with a flying mount from the first time you step in there. Here are the full details on all of the riding skills and their new costs.

Apprentice Riding (Skill 75)

• 60% land mount speed
• Requires level 20
• Cost: 4 gold
• Mount cost: 1 gold
• Mail will be sent to players at level 20 guiding them to the riding trainer

Journeyman Riding (Skill 150)

• 100% land mount speed
• Requires level 40
• Cost: 50 gold
• Mount cost: 10 gold
• Mail will be sent to players at level 40 guiding them back to the riding trainer

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