by Dawn Moore

So here’s the situation: you’re putting together a raid and either your normal pally is absent, for some reason (read: debauchery), or you’re in a pug and there are no paladins to be found in ye ol’ trade chat. What do you do? Can your other healers handle the tanks or are you doomed to a wipe fest?

Holy paladins are probably the most influential healers a raid team has because what they do for the raid is so important. That role is, of course, healing the tanks.

But don’t think that a healadin’s influence is just the result of what he does and not what he is; holy paladins heal the tanks because they’re very good at it. They are designed for single target healing, and have been that way for a very long time. Currently, a paladin’s bread and butter spell, Holy Light, is the strongest single target heal (not on a long cooldown) around. Paired up with Beacon of a Light and you have to wonder why they think they can’t raid heal you’ve got more single-target fire power than a disc priest can produce in twice the time, and that’s counting the absorbs.

So here’s the big question: do you really need a holy paladin to raid?

The answer is no.

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by Bethany Myers

So you’re ready to venture into the thankless realm of healing? It’s not for the faint of heart. You will be begged to heal an instance you hate and blamed for deaths that aren’t your fault, only to lose gear upgrades to DPS — all in the same run! On the other hand, healing can be a nice diversion from faceroll macro-mashing, and it’s definitely nice to have instant dungeon queues.

Whether you’re changing specs at level 80 to help your guild progression, stepping into The Deadmines as a level 18 healer or twinking out a battleground medic — here are some helpful hints as you prepare to make those health bars greener.

5-man PvE
Regular dungeons, heroics and group quests in which you are the only healer
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by Mathew McCurley

Class-specific addons are a wonderful thing. These powerful addons serve very specific functions for their intended class. Featuring one of these addons in the Spotlight is a bit of a challenge — I do not want to alienate the players of nine other classes by showcasing one specific addon for one specific class, and nor do I want to dilute a Spotlight with too many addons. You are witnessing the compromise. Behold! AddOn Spotlight Class for Class. For the next couple Spotlights, we will focus on three to four classes with one addon for each. These addons aren’t necessary, but could be extremely helpful to these specific classes. Let’s get to it!

The paladin, shaman and death knight classes can be addon-intensive. Paladins keep track of a variety of buffs and their DPS specializations utilize a “first come, first served” priority rotation for maximum damage output. Shaman have totems to deal with in order to work at peak effectiveness and have intricate timers for both damage specializations in order to operate flawlessly. Death knights, diseases and fevers are no strange bedfellows, with cooldowns and DoT ticks under constant scrutiny. Today, we take a look at some addons for these three classes that can help the player with a bit of the confusing timer issues, rotations and cooldowns.

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by Zach Yonzon

1Historically, shamans have always been underrepresented in Arenas and Battlegrounds although not necessarily because the class has serious failings but also because fewer players play shamans than any other class in the game if census numbers are to be believed. Rogue and warlock numbers dropped over the years, too, but shamans have always been in last place for most of the game’s existence.

Shamans are great, but have never really been established as a threat in PvP and very few players really quake at the sight of a shaman entering the battlefield. Undeserved reputations aside (or lack thereof), shamans are a very versatile class and any player underestimating them could easily be on the receiving end of a fatal shock spell. After the jump, let’s quickly go through the shaman’s commonly used abilities in PvP before moving to the different specs and what to expect.

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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

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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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