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

1. The tank is your #1 priority. Your tank is either a bear or the person in plate armor with the highest health. You must keep the tank alive at all costs so that the monsters can hit him or her instead of you. A dead tank almost always means a wipe.
2. You are your #2 priority. When the stuff hits the fan, someone might pull aggro and die. Dead DPS shouldn’t automatically mean the fight is over; many groups can still win the with the loss of just one DPSer. But a dead healer can’t heal the tank, and you can guess where that will probably end.
3. Learn and use your bread and butter spells. Every healing class has multiple spells designed for different circumstances. Learn your class’ abilities. Different types of spells include HOTs, shields, short- and long-casting direct heals, multiple-target heals, AoE heals and combinations of all of these. Though it will take practice to perfect your timing and use of them, knowing what you’ve got is half the battle!
4. Watch your mana bar. You can’t heal without mana, so make sure you always have plenty of drinks in your bag. If you’re out of combat and your mana bar isn’t full, drink. It could mean the difference between a sloppy pull that wipes your group and one that doesn’t.
5. Buff. Give the ones you’ve got, and don’t be shy to ask for buffs from your party members. Also remember to ask for a soulstone and healthstone from warlocks and conjured food and water from mages.

Raid PvE
Groups of 10+ in which you must cooperate with other healers

1. Talk about healing assignments. If the healers are grouped together, ask in party chat. If you’re not in the same group, make a channel for healers to discuss strategy. Each healer should be very clear on his or her specific target(s) and roles during the fight. This helps avoid confusion, mana waste and overlapping cooldowns.
2. Use the Set Focus feature. Right click on the main tank or off tank’s portrait and select Set Focus. You can switch back to your primary target quickly after throwing a heal on someone else.
3. Eat your consumables. Obvious advice is obvious, but you’d be amazed at how many moochers don’t want to spend the time and money on consumables. Bring your own if your guild doesn’t have an assigned consumable-giver. In PUGs, it’s safest to assume that no one else will bring the Fish Feast. At minimum, you should have a food buff and mana potions. For progression content, you will want to add elixirs and/or flasks. Pull your own weight and remember to buff your weakest area — if you never struggle with mana, better to buff your throughput, and vice versa.
4. Run a healing meter. Don’t obsess about being at the top. Like your GearScore, the meter is just a tool, not the total measure of a player. It’s much more important to perform your assigned role (see above) and keep one person alive than to top the meter.
5. Analyze the healing meter. Learn to read it. Pay attention to your playstyle. If you tend to run out of mana before the fight is over, look closely at your overhealing. Figure out where you can improve.

PvP
Healing in arenas and battlegrounds

1. If you want to win, use Vent. Arena playstyle depends totally on your team combination, so communicate with your teammates. Likewise, premade battlegrounds benefit enormously from voice communication.
2. Don’t wander off. Battleground play is a free-for-all. Stick close to your teammates — not many healing specs in healing gear can last long one on one versus a DPS class. If you go off on your own to cap a flag or whatever, you’ll probably die. Remember your support role and bring a DPSer or two with you.
3. Get a specialized UI. Special UIs are a requirement in arenas; you need unit frames that will show you critical information about the opposite team. Battlegrounds are the last vestige of 40-man raids — reason enough to ditch Blizzard’s cluttered raid UI. Also, mouseover macros are incredibly helpful.
4. Go on the defensive. Use your pre-emptive healing spells (particularly shields and HOTs) to absorb damage at the beginning, rather than waiting until everyone around you is at half health. Be proactive, not reactive.
5. Heal yourself first. If the other team is paying attention, they will try to interrupt your casting and focus fire you. Don’t let them. The longer you can keep yourself alive through their attack, the longer your teammates can DPS the people targeting you.

Of course, these tips don’t even begin to cover the complicated world of WoW healing. There is a wealth of information out there. When you have a question about your healer’s spec, gear, abilities or a particular fight — do your research. The best tip I can give you is to take advantage of the WoW community’s extensive resources. Know your class. Guilds and PUGs alike will be impressed, and you will gain a reputation for being a pro healer. Keeping your friends alive is a very rewarding job. You might even start to love it!

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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.

Paladins: First come, first served

Retribution paladins have an interesting DPS rotation that isn’t really a rotation at all. Unlike other classes that use an ability rotation, paladins use a first come, first served priority rotation, where certain abilities take precedent over other abilities. To confuse things even more, your priority queue changes as you get different gear. Luckily, there are addons to help.

My personal favorite retribution priority tracker is a little addon called CLCRet. CLCRet is a small, simple ability tracker that, according to the priority chain you input, displays what skills in the queue you should use next. In addition, the addon has an indicator for when Avenging Wrath is available. You can set the size and appearance of your CLCRet indicator and the addon works with ButtonFacade to keep your UI looking clean and uniform.

One of the features I love about CLCRet is that, for retribution paladins, Exorcism will only be activated in the first come, first served queue if Art of War has activated. The addon is smart, and I like that. CLCRet not only helps with retribution, but can also be used for protection paladins who would like to use an ability rotation synced to the 6-9-6 rotation. CLCRet, as noted on the page, is intended for use by level 80 raiding paladins and might not have the same results in 5-man content, but it definitely is a help for the paladin unsure of what abilities will give him the most DPS output.

If you want to go real hardcore, do some research over on Elitist Jerks and find out the best priority of abilities based on gear.

Download CLCRet at [Curse].

Shaman: Shock and awe

Enhancement shaman is one of the most, in my opinion, fun DPS classes in WoW. Enhancement has many options that are only going to be expanded on, considering what we now know about the upcoming Cataclysm changes. Elemental is going to be gaining a huge amount of mobility with their new skills, but that spec is for another day.

ShockAndAwe is my addon of choice for my shaman’s DPS specialization — this addon has it all. ShockAndAwe monitors the cooldown on feral spirits, the internal windfury cooldown and provides timer bars for Lava Lash, Shocks, Stormstrike and more. Plus, ShockAndAwe has a high-damage priority ability tracker much like CLCRet for paladins that can help the player with a recommendation for what shock and ability to use next.

ShockAndAwe includes a countdown timer and bar for your remaining shield orbs as well. The addon will also warn you if you are entering combat without your weapon enchants like Windfury or Flametongue cast on your weapons, a cardinal sin I have been victim to more times than I care to remember. ShockandAwe’s priority ability meter has a default set up according to EhnSim but is fully customizable to your heart’s content.

I’m a big fan on ShockAndAwe because it is a one-stop shop for a good amount of the information you need as an enhancement shaman. Again, out-of-the-box addons that just work are worth their weight in gold. Addons that combine a great deal of information and functionality into a compact interface such as ShockAndAwe rank high on my list of favorite UI additions.

Download ShockAndAwe at [Curse] or [WoWInterface].

Death knights: One-Stop shop runes

While on the subject of one-stop shop addons, I cannot go another minute without letting my death knight friends know about Acherus Runes. Acherus is an addon that combines a death knight’s rune timers with disease tracking, runic power displays and proc alerting. Acherus is a great place to begin with addons if you are new to the death knight class or even want something fairly minimalistic to display a large amount of information in a small space. The proc alert component of Acherus Runes is hooked up to ButtonFacade, so you never have to worry about the sanctity of your coordinated buttons.

There isn’t really too much more to say about Acherus except that it does everything I’ve needed it to for my death knight and it has done it well. The addon works great out of the box and has plenty of preset options for the look and feel of the addon. Play with it to your heart’s content and hopefully it can replace a good deal of clutter on your death knight’s user interface.

Download Acherus Runes at [Curse] or [WoWInterface].

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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.

Ghost Wolf

Because mobility is key in PvP, and shamans have very few options when it comes to this, Ghost Wolf is an important ability that affords them faster movement across the battlefield. Almost all shaman PvP builds will have points in Improved Ghost Wolf, making it instant cast. A few funny things to remember: Ghost Wolf is a magical buff and not a form, so it can be dispelled with abilities like Dispel Magic and Purge; it does not remove movement-impairing abilities in the same way druid forms can shake off snares and roots; shamans in Ghost Wolf form can still be Polymorphed; the shaman becomes classified as a beast, making her susceptible to Scare Beast and Sap. Ghost Wolf has plenty of drawbacks. Pick one and abuse it.

Purge

This is my favorite shaman ability and is arguably the best PvP ability they have. While shamans are pretty limited in self-dispels — they can’t do jack against Magic effects, the most common type of debuff — they are extremely effective offensive dispellers. Expect a shaman to begin their assault with a barrage of Purges in order to strip you off buffs and shields. Even restoration shamans are in the habit of using Purge often as it helps their teammates greatly. There isn’t much you can do about this other than to pay attention and be prepared to recast important buffs such as Power Word: Shield at strategic moments.

Bloodlust / Heroism

Although this is on a relatively long, 5-minute cooldown, Bloodlust or Heroism can give the shaman an edge in the battle. Here’s a simple tip: it’s a magical buff. It can be dispelled just like any buff, or even better, stolen. If you don’t possess offensive dispels, you’ll be in a slight pickle considering it lasts 40 seconds. One quick note to remember against offensive-minded shamans (elemental or enhancement) is that the buff adds nothing to their defensive capabilities. Counter Bloodlust or Heroism with an all-out offensive yourself. Things change in team scenarios, obviously, as a whole bunch of enemies with the buff easily spells a quick death.

Grounding Totem

One of the shaman’s best defensive spells, a Grounding Totem can eat a powerful, long-cast spell or crowd control ability. It’s considerably weaker now than it used to be, as it dies even when ‘eating’ non-damage harmful spells, but always be mindful of its presence. Have a cheap, instant-cast spell at the ready to finish it off so as not to waste more expensive, longer cast spells. Use a /stopcasting macro, if you need to. Make sure the totem isn’t around when you blow a cooldown spell like Hammer of Justice.

The Earth Totem Trio

Shamans have three fun earth totems that provide utility in PvP. Earthbind Totems are the most obvious, providing a snare effect (and more, depending on the shaman’s spec) but there’s also the little understood Stoneclaw Totem, which shamans put down to protect their other totems. Its real value to shamans, however, is because of the Glyph of Stoneclaw Totem, which is the single best PvP glyph for a shaman. Unfortunately, destroying the totem will not remove the damage absorption, so don’t bother. It won’t be worth risking proccing the 3-second stun. Shamans can put down a Stoneclaw Totem to proc the shield and immediately replace it with an Earthbind Totem. Destroy that, instead. Tremor Totem is an anti-crowd control spell that shamans put down against warlocks and priests, so if you’re counting on a fear, charm, or sleep effect, make sure that Tremor Totem is destroyed before casting anything.

Wind Shear

Wind Shear replaced Earth Shock as the shaman’s interrupting spell and is off the global cooldown, so always watch for it if you’re a caster. It has a very short 6 second cooldown, so time your spells accordingly. It creates a 2 second school lockout, so try to bait the shaman into interrupting spells from another school if you have something important you need to cast. This along with Purge makes shamans quite a handful for casters.

Hex

Finally, shamans can turn you into a frog. Hex is a 1.5 second cast spell that has a relatively long 45-second cooldown and being the only crowd control spell shamans have, is a great candidate for a cc-break. It can break on damage, so removing it is purely discretionary.

Earth Elemental and Fire Elemental

These totems never see play in Arenas, which is precisely one reason Battlegrounds and world PvP are so much fun! You get to see Earth Elementals and Fire Elementals run amuck, and shamans don’t hesitate to blow these long cooldown spells to unleash them upon a crowd. Fire Elementals are the preferred elemental because of their high damage, but Earth Elementals come out when the shaman’s Fire Elemental Totem is on cooldown. There’s no one solution to these spells because the totems themselves have considerable health and focusing on them leaves you open to attack. Warlocks can cast Banish, though, which should lock up the elemental.

Frost Shock

This is old, but it really explains it all. I mean, Frost Shock! While all three shock spells share the same cooldown, Frost Shock is a phenomenal ability because it applies a snare that is not affected by diminishing returns. Theoretically, if you have no means of removing it, you’ll be slowed 100% of the time should the shaman elect to use Frost Shock over her other shock spells. We’re not even talking about Frozen Power yet. The debuff is magic, and if hampered mobility gets in the way of your play, remove it with abilities like Cleanse but never waste a trinket on it.

Elemental

After a series of guides featuring ‘pure’ classes, especially the past weeks’ pure DPS rogue, it should be noted that shamans are an exciting hybrid class from a purely PvP perspective even though they only fill two of the three archetypal roles. This is because the three specs fight considerably differently. Elemental shamans are casters in mail armor, and always prefer to fight at long range. Even though they have access to instant cast shocks, their repertoire will consist mostly of Lightning Bolts, Chain Lightnings, and Lava Burst, all of which have cast times and directional facing. Get in their faces, get out of line of sight, and generally try to interrupt their rhythm. An elemental shaman will always apply Flame Shock before casting Lava Burst, as it guarantees a crit. If you can remove magical effects, such as with Cleanse or Dispel Magic, be very attentive to Flame Shock and remove it as soon as it’s applied. It will be easy to identify an elemental shaman because she’ll be carrying a one-hander and shield with Water Shield up.

Elemental shaman are excellent kiters and have some cool tools that allow them to create some distance between themselves and their opponents. Earthbind Totem is a powerful spell that roots opponents for 5 seconds, thanks to Storm, Earth, and Fire. With Earth’s Grasp, the totem can be cast every 10 seconds, allowing root about 50% of the time, subject to diminishing returns. The drawback? Elemental shamans have very little by way of snare removal themselves, so they can be slowed and rooted as normal. Physical and magical crowd control works best, as elemental shamans have no way of removing this aside from the PvP trinket.

They also have an excellent peeling spell Thunderstorm and you should always be wary of fighting them in elevated areas such as the lumber mill in Arathi Basin or on the Dun Baldar bridge. Aside from this spell, which has a 45-second cooldown, the general idea is to get up close to an elemental shaman and disrupt her spellcasting. Even though they wear mail armor, they have few mitigation abilities and can succumb rather quickly to various forms of damage.

Aside from shocks and Thunderstorm, elemental shamans won’t have anything instant to worry about, so just keep on disrupting their spells. Their heals all require cast times and their damaging abilities require them to face you, so managing to position behind them will ruin their momentum. Note that stunning, fearing, or silencing them will only proc Astral Shift, so unless you can unleash major damage, it sometimes isn’t worth the bother.

Enhancement

Enhancement shaman are the easiest type of shaman to spot: they’re dual-wielding weapons. The odd enhancement shaman will be carrying a 2-hander, but most will have two weapons. As opposed to elemental shamans, however, who have basically one playing style and a rather narrow choice of PvP talents, enhancement play styles differ — some go for faster shock and Wind Shear cooldowns to harass casters even more, others dip into restoration for faster heals. Overall, the strategy against an enhancement shaman is opposite that of an elemental shaman — kite her.

This will be a tall order because enhancement has Earthen Power, which turns Earthbind Totems into snare removers. Here’s a tip: it only removes slowing effects, not roots. This means that abilities such as Entangling Roots and freeze effects won’t be removed. Don’t bother slowing an enhancement shaman. Root him if you’re able. Barring that, make sure to quickly target the Earthbind Totem and quickly reapply a slowing effect, although Earth’s Grasp will allow the shaman to put down another one relatively quickly.

An enhancement shaman can become truly dangerous when her wolves are out with Feral Spirit. My advice? Stay clear of them. Unless you have some means of crowd controlling them, such as with a mass fear or even a Hibernate on one, enhancement shamans with Spirit Wolves out can deal a whole lot of damage while being harder to kill at the same time. The wolves have fairly high health and it would be a waste of time to focus your attention on them. Unless you’re confident about your crowd control and/or ability to take some damage, it’s easier to avoid them at this point. If they manage to stun you and keep you in place, and blow cooldowns like Bloodlust or Heroism, they can take down pretty much most opponents with a flurry of magical and physical damage.

There is no strict counter to an enhancement shaman with Feral Spirit active, other than perhaps to crowd control the shaman herself and attempt to take down the Spirit Wolves before she breaks free. Enhancement shaman are fairly susceptible to crowd control and have no natural means to remove it other than with a trinket or the right totem (so make sure to kill it). Keeping the shaman out of play is your best bet, and if you’re unable to do that, it might be wiser to run away for a while.

Smart enhancement shamans will keep stacks of Maelstrom Weapon ready for instant self-heals instead of going overzealous with damage (although they can certainly do that, and it will hurt). If you have offensive dispels, use them on the shaman to prevent the stack from reaching 5. Most shamans aren’t in the habit of consuming the buff if it hasn’t reached 5 stacks because casting, however fast, resets their swing timers. Most play it safe and use the stacks for a heal at around 50% health or lower. Disarm effects work well against enhancement shamans, although they still have access to damaging spells and a few will have a weapon chain on their off-hand weapon to counter such an occurrence.

Restoration

Restoration shamans are identical to elemental shamans in that they will be sporting a one-hander and a shield. A tell-tale sign would be if they have Earth Shield around them, although most healers will throw this at another player instead of themselves. When under fire, they’ll apply the Earth Shield on themselves, and keeping it off will be key to beating them. It’s not a cheap spell, and it will cost them heavy mana to keep on re-applying it. If you don’t have offensive dispels, you’ll have your work cut out for you because Earth Shield will consume a large chunk of your damage.

Because of their support role, restoration shamans are masters of Purge. They learn how to use it more effectively than either of the other two specs because restoration shamans look to strip opponents bare for their teammates. Restoration shamans with a bit of Arena experience are well aware of enemy buffs and watch for openings. By the same token, restoration shamans often learn to /focus with Wind Shears by way of supporting their teammates, so always be wary of casting anything against them even if they’re healers. As with any healer, they are fairly difficult to kill, especially with abilities such as Nature’s Swiftness to give them instant recovery.

General strategy

Whatever the spec, shamans have a common weakness in that they are fairly easy to crowd control and cannot remove magical effects on themselves (although restoration can remove Curses). Aside from restoration, shamans generally have casting times on their heals, so they can be interrupted, locked out of the Nature school, and slowed down or prevented from healing themselves. Sometimes, these encounters come down to a mana battle and running the shaman out of mana will usually result in a win. They have various means of recovering mana, but the only one that can truly be countered is the restoration shaman’s Mana Tide Totem. Kill it. No, seriously, don’t even let it tick more than once or twice. Thunderstorm and Improved Stormstrike can’t be stopped (and return just a little mana), so don’t bother.

For all the danger that shaman burst poses — and they can kill just about anything if they pour it all on — again remember that they are completely vulnerable to crowd control. Make sure that you eliminate any of their defensive totems and control the match with any crowd control ability you have, however limited. Defensive totems are preventive and they can’t cast them when they’re already cc’d. Fears, stuns, charm effects, sleep… you name it. The only thing shamans can handle with relative ease are snares.

Looking to make more WoW gold?

Check out the secret tactics you can use to legally and easily generate up to 427 gold per hour or more in World of Warcraft without using hacks or cheats.

Get ready to make more gold playing WoW than you have ever seen before.

World of Warcraft In-game Leveling Guides

World of Warcraft leveling take a huge leap forward with Zygor Guides 2.0, the fastest, most powerful leveling guides in the world.

Leveling has NEVER been this easy! You will be leveling so fast with this, you might think you’re cheating. But you’re not, Joana’s leveling guide mod is 100% legal with Blizzard.

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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

Restoration:

• Improved Healing Wave: Five points invested in this talent can go a long way. A half second reduction on your big heal can be the difference between a tank dying and causing a wipe or saving the day.
• Totemic Focus: Reducing the cost of casting them is not as important as it used to be. You can ignore this talent, we will be spending these points elsewhere.
• Improved Reincarnation: The talent is useful when soloing and leveling, but otherwise the points are better spent elsewhere.
• Healing Grace:This is primarily used in PvP but there are some mobs that do purge your buffs off of players. It is highly suggested to ignore this talent unless you plan to do some PvP.
• Tidal Focus: 5% reduction in the cost of your healing spells can count for quite a bit. As a class that lives global cooldown to global cooldown, reducing the cost of your healing spells by any amount will be beneficial for you in the long run.
• Improved Water Shield: Every single one of your healing spells has a chance to trigger this upon gaining a critical heal. This talent is essential to your mana returns, the more you cast, the more you crit the more mana you receive from this talent.
• Healing Focus: If you find yourself suffering a lot of push back on your spell casts, this talent is worth picking up.
• Tidal Force: Being able to to increase the critical strike potential of your Lesser Healing Wave, Healing wave and Chain Heal every three minutes is amazing. This talent is perfect for when bosses hit soft enrages or there is gobs of raid damage that needs to be healed through. Don’t leave home without it.
• Ancestral Healing: This talent reduces the physical damage done to a target by 10% whenever you critically heal them. Any damage reduction to the raid will only increase survivability and is well worth the talent point investment.
• Restorative Totems: You are likely to have one of these two totems down at any given point in time, anything that increases their effectiveness is helpful to you. This is a must have talent.
• Tidal Mastery: This talent gives all your healing spells an additional 5% critical strike chance. This is another staple talent. It has a direct impact on your healing output and there is no reason not to take it.
• Healing Way: This can be extremely useful when you need to tank heal or for fights that can call for large nuke heals on a target in order to survive.
• Nature’s Swiftness: The talent has had it’s cooldown reduced by one minute down to two minutes. This allows you to turn any of our heals into an emergency heal as well as allows you more mobility on fights where you are forced to move but still need to lay down some larger heals.
• Focused Mind: While some fights may benefit from this in PvE, there are not enough encounters that silence or disrupt you that can justify taking this talent.
• Purification: This talent increases your overall healing by 10% if you put the full five points in. This is a must have talent as it does nothing but help your healing output.
• Nature’s Guardian:This talent remains primarily a PvP talent. The points are better spent elsewhere.
• Mana Tide Totem: This talent allows for you to recover almost a full quarter of your maximum mana in 12 seconds. Not only does it allow you to recover your own mana, but anyone in party with you will gain back the same amount of mana. No resto shaman toolkit is complete without this.
• Cleanse Spirit: This talent allows you the ability to cleanse curses, diseases and poison all with one spell. This makes you more versatile and is a must have talent for any restoration talent build.
• Blessing of the Eternals: This talent does two very important things. First, it increases your spell critical chances by 4% and increases the chances of applying the Earthliving Weapon heal over time effect by 80% when the target of your heals is at or under 35% health. This comes in very handy on fights where the raid can potentially take a lot of damage
• Improved Chain Heal: This talent does nothing but augment what is arguably our strongest heal. That 20% healing increase scales as you increase your gear and spell power. There is no reason not to take this talent.
• Nature’s Blessing: This directly increases your healing output and scales with gear. This is a must have.
• Ancestral Awakening: Every time you gain a critical heal with Riptide or either healing wave, this will heal someone for 30% of the amount healed. This is a free heal no reason not to take it.
• Earth Shield: A shaman iconic spell, this talent is a must have for every restoration shaman.
• Improved Earth Shield: Another must have, this makes Earth Shield so much more effective.
• Tidal Waves: This talent gives both of your healing waves a boost whenever you cast Riptide or Chain Heal. This talent does nothing but help increase your healing output, and should always receive a full five talent points.
• Riptide: This talent and spell has become a staple of shaman healing. This talent works to proc many of your other talents, is instant cast and gives you a heal over time. You will be using this spell quite frequently and you should pick it up as soon as possible.

Enhancement:

• Ancestral Knowledge: This talent increases your overall int, and has amazing synergy with Nature’s Blessing. This is a must have.
• Thundering Strikes: This talent gives you another 5% crit with full five points invested. Since all your best abilities benefit from critical heals, this talent is a must have.
• Improved Shields: This talent allows you to gain more mana from your Water Shield as well as increasing the healing amount of Earth Shield. This is something no restoration shaman should be without.
• Elemental Weapons: This talent augments the healing bonus of your Earthliving Weapon by an additional 30%, but the points can be used elsewhere if necessary.

As you can see we have a multitude of very useful talents that help to flush out our small list of heals into an impressive tool set.

Glyphs

Last week we talked about glyphs briefly. Today I’d like to take a little bit of a closer look at them and explain some of the choices. To recap here is a list of restoration specific glyphs.

Major Glyphs:

• Glyph of Chain Heal
• Glyph of Earth Shield
• Glyph of Earthliving Weapon
• Glyph of Healing Stream Totem
• Glyph of Healing Wave
  
• Glyph of Lesser Healing Wave
• Glyph of Mana Tide Totem
• Glyph of Riptide
• Glyph of Water Mastery

Minor Glpyhs:

• Glyph of Renewed Life
• Glyph of Water Shield

The most common choices for major glyphs among beginner shaman are Glyph of Chain Heal, Glyph of Healing Stream Totem and Glyph of Water Mastery. There is actually some pretty solid reasoning behind this.

Water Shield currently gives a passive bonus of 100 MP/5 whenever it’s active. With the Glyph of Water Mastery this becomes 130 MP/5. A lot of beginning shaman struggle with mana consumption and every little bit helps as you work to earn the gear you need. 30 MP/5 might not seem like a lot, but in a two minute fight that turns 2400 mana into 3120 mana gained. That can be the additional mana needed to keep the tank or the party alive, and all the difference between a wipe and a win.

Glyph of Chain Heal is very common among all levels of restoration shaman whether beginners or experienced raiders. The glyph adds an additional target to chain heal extending it’s reach from three to four. That means in most heroics, depending on positioning, you may be able to hit the entire party with one heal. This continues to be useful in the end game as increasing the number of targets healed by your Chain Heal can help get that little bit of extra healing on clusters of melee and ranged.

Glyph of Healing Stream Totem is often times overlooked, but is actually very useful. Restoration shaman can use Healing Stream Totem in many situations. There are several fights that force you to move or can temporarily incapacitate you both in raids and heroics. No matter what happens to you (short of dying) this totem will keep healing not just one target, but your entire party. The totem scales with your spell power so trinket procs and temporary consumables will affect it as well. Beginner shaman have found the use of this totem with the glyph to be helpful in evening out raid wide damage and assisting their healing. I’ve seen parses where this little combo has counted for 13% of the shaman’s healing or more, so it’s worth looking at when you’re first starting out.

As you progress in gear and start to define your role you may start looking at other glyphs. Glyphs should be used to fill in gaps and strengthen your weak points, or to augment your abilities to get that little extra out of them. Some may be situational useful and others may not be worth your time at all. Lets say you find yourself casting nothing but Riptide and Lesser Healing Wave, those two glyphs may be more useful to you than Glyph of Chain Heal. It’s all about finding what is most useful to you and the role you choose to play.

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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.

My goal in this article is to (1) break down the complex rotation into easy-to-remember chunks, then (2) put it together into a usable rotation that will work in most boss scenarios, and (3) explain why we do the things we do.

A shocking macro

There is one macro above all others that will simplify your life as an enhancement shaman. Even for the most anti-macro enhancer out there this little one will save headaches and action bar space. It is:

#showtooltip
/castsequence reset=18/combat Flame Shock, Earth Shock, Earth Shock

There are a few variations on this macro but for the purpose of this article I’m sticking with the one above. Some players prefer to separate the shocks on to different buttons, others (including me) prefer a more complex but flexible macro, but of all the shocking macros. But this macro is the best place to start. Learn it and hug it and love it and squeeze it with all your heart and call it George. George the Shock Macro.

The reason this macro is so important is because Flame Shock lasts for 18 seconds. If FS is reapplied before the end then it’s wasted DPS. This is like a pro-tip and a beginner tip rolled into one. Add George the Shock Macro to your macro book because we’ll be using it right away.

Break it down

The best way to think about the enhancement spell selection is to break it down into two parts: rotation and situation. Once it’s broken down into these two section you’ll see the rotation actually isn’t all that complex. But you should still [Feign Complexity](Rank 10) when talking to the filthy rogues in your guild. Don’t let them think you’ve got it easy. I fully expect you to go on and on about how you can successfully track at 15 spell rotation and still beat him in DPS.

Rotation

There are 5 spells in the rotation section. Commit these to memory. They are not cycled through in a straight sequence; instead, they’re used in a priority order. Go down the list until you find one that’s available and hit it. Then start again at the top.

This is the simplified rotation:

1. Lightning Bolt with 5 stacks of Maelstrom Weapon (MW5_LB)
2. Stormstrike (SS)
3. George the shock macro (FS, ES, ES)
4. Lava Lash (LL)
5. Fire Nova (FN)

After every cast start back at the top of the list and go down until you hit something off cooldown. It takes some getting used to so it’s worth it to hit up a target dummy and work through the sequence a few times. After some practice you’ll find a rhythm and spend less time staring at the action bar because you have a feel for what’s coming up next.

Situation

Everything else in the enhancement arsenal is situational. The general rule of thumb is use them as soon as they become available or to be need refreshed.

First up are the situations where spells need to be refreshed. When either of these spells run out they become highest priority on the next GCD. (PRO TIP: whenever I have a free GCD I refresh whichever one is closest to running out, that way I don’t have to interrupt my rotation as often.)

• Magma Totem (MT) – Keep this down at all times because when your rotation comes around to Fire Nova, if you don’t have MT down you’ll miss out on the FN blast. Plus the passive damage is FTW.
• Lightning Shield (LS) – Gotta love the Static Shock! Nine charges goes by pretty fast, especially if you have 2pc T9. The passive damage isn’t huge, but it’s important enough to keep this up at all times.

Next we move on to the special situation spells.

• Shamanistic Rage (SR) – Under normal circumstances this should be used at or below 30-40% mana. 45 seconds goes by fast (60 second CD less 15 second duration) so you’ll notice it being up often. If you have 2pc T10 then SR should be the very first thing cast after auto attack and then hit as the highest priority every time it comes available. (PRO TIP: with 2pc T10 create a macro to sync trinkets with SR)
• Feral Spirit (SW) – Wolves actively scale with your stats, meaning if you get trinket procs while they are active, their stats will increase with yours. However they should be out before Heroism/Bloodlust is cast to get the full benefit from the buff.
• Fire Elemental (FE) – On a 10 minute CD this spell should be available for most boss attempts even after wipes. As a general rule it’s not worth glyphing for FE. One important thing to note is that your FE does not scale once the totem is planted; this is the opposite of SW. If you are dropping FE in a fight then plan on getting some procs up first and then put the totem down.

Bonus point

If you want bonus points there’s a special situation in the rotation called ES_SS. This means if Earth Shock and Stormstrike are both off cooldown at the same time AND if the Stormstrike debuff is still up on the boss then cast Earth Shock first. It’s not essential to the basics, but it is a step in the right direction to maximizing output.

All together now

Putting it all together yields the crazy thing we saw at the beginning: SR, FE, SW, MW5_LB, MT, LS, ES_SS, SS, FS, ES, LL, FN. The spells in bold are the “rotation” spells, the others are all situation spells. I hope this helped you wrap your head around enhancement shaman spell selection. Until next time …

May all your hits be crits!

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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.

Hit

After the spec and glyphs are nailed down it’s time to dive into priorities. First and foremost, before doing anything, before you invest one single gem in anything at all: get spell hit capped.

• 341 for Alliance
• 367 for Horde

These numbers are for raid bosses and assumes you have a balance druid with Improved Faerie Fire or shadow priest putting Misery on the boss. Don’t worry about those debuffs with 5-man dungeon bosses because they are level 82 and their required hit cap is much lower.

Going over the hit cap is good but as a rule don’t gem or enchant for more than the spell cap. Hit the cap and any extra hit from gear is a bonus. And we don’t worry about the melee cap because we have other priorities than hitting 100% of the time with our off hand weapon; occasional melee misses are perfectly acceptable.

Expertise

Because you’re an intelligent enhancement shaman and took the above spec you now have the required 3/3 Unleashed Rage, which increases expertise by nine. You now need an additional 140 expertise rating. The end result is that upon opening the character sheet it reads 26 expertise.

Extra expertise over 26 is bad. Sometimes you don’t have a choice such as with trinkets and gear, but as a rule, if you can avoid going over exp cap, do so.

Crit

The third priority is crit. Get to at least 30% unbuffed physical crit, which should easy with all levels of gear. Once you’re at 30% unbuffed crit don’t worry about it any more.

Gems & Enchants

Once you start getting more into the ways of enhance you’ll come across two schools of thought: The AP stackers vs. the haste stackers. What’s best for you is really situational (you’ll hear “sim it” as the answer to just about every theorycrafting question), but since you’re just starting out here is my recommendation:

1. If you’re not spell hit capped, gem/enchant for Hit
2. If you’re not expertise capped, gem/enchant for expertise
3. If you’re not at 30% unbuffed melee crit, gem/enchant for crit
4. After that, gem AP (Bright) in red, haste (Quick) in yellow, one Nightmare Tear in a blue to activate your meta
5. Gem AP for remaining blue sockets
6. Use Relentless Earthsiege Diamond for your meta

Starting out I would suggest going the AP route — but not being maniacal about it — because AP affects your physical as well as spell damage (through Mental Dexterity Mental Quickness).

Weapons

Let’s talk about weapon speed. Enhance choices are slow and … slow. Let’s review: slow and slow. Slow is the way to go. If it ain’t slow then it’s a no. Slow fo’ sho’. Slow is pro. I can do this all day people. Go slow mo-fo.

Get the idea?

Fast weapons are for your filthy Rogue friends — not that one can ever be friends with a rogue with all that backstabbing and shadow stepping and vanishing about and such. But in so much as one can befriend a Rogue one should pass all fast weapons to them.

A few months back I ran some simulations using the amazing enhancement shaman simulation tool, EnhSim, trying to find the breakeven point for Slow/Fast. At that level the very best fast off-hand weapon was equivalent to Stalactite Chopper from Sons of Hodir rep. That’s right iLevel 200 rare quality rep-reward slow = iLevel 258 fast.

Slow/Slow is the only way to go. The reason has everything to do with Flametongue Weapon: “Slower weapons cause more damage per swing.”

Imbues

Speaking of which, weapon imbues are as easy as weapon speeds. Imbue Windfury on your main hand and Flametongue on your off hand. WF/WF was pre 3.0 and FT/FT with caster weapons was a flash in the pan for a hot minute. WF/FT is the way to go.

Totems

Standard Drop:

• Earth – Strength of Earth Totem
• Fire – Magma Totem
• Water – Mana Spring or Healing Stream Totem
• Air – Windfury Totem

Depending on the situation you will be responsible for putting down Tremor Totem or Cleansing Totem for your group.

Spell Selection & Rotation

I saved Rotations for last because they are the most complex part of playing an enhancement shaman. In total there are 12 spells to track, including Heroism/Bloodlust. I’m just going to give you the crash course in enhance spell rotations here, and we’ll save a more in-depth explanations for a later post.

Here’s the short list to get you started:

1. Drop your totems
2. Cast Lightning Bolt (LB) as soon as you have five Maelstrom Weapon procs (MW5) if you don’t have 5 just keep attacking
3. Use Stormstrike (SS) as soon as it is available
4. Cast Flame Shock (FS) and don’t use it again it runs its full duration
5. Cast Earth Shock (ES) in the meantime
6. Lava Lash (LL) if everything else is on cooldown
7. Fire Nova (FN) if everything + LL is on cooldown
8. Time your Spirit Wolves (SW) with Heroism/Bloodlust
9. Use Shamanistic Rage (SR) when you’re below 30% mana
10. Refresh Magma Totem (MT) and Lightning Shield (LS) when they run out.

Even typing that out makes it seem fairly complex. In fact it is complex and does take some getting used to, especially in the heat of battle. It deserves its own post.

May all your hits be crits!

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Leveling has NEVER been this easy! You will be leveling so fast with this, you might think you’re cheating. But you’re not, Joana’s leveling guide mod is 100% legal with Blizzard.

Related posts:

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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.

4. Stats to look for

Besides the ever-present intelligence and stamina, which will be on all the gear you want anyway, you’ll be looking for four main stats:

• Spell power. Obviously, you want a lot of it. More spell power equals more damage.
• Haste. Haste does two important things: increases your spellcasting speed, allowing you to fit more spells into your rotation in between cooldowns; and decreases your global cooldown down to a minimum of one second, allowing you to cast more spells in shorter periods of time.
• Crit rating. Besides the obvious factor of making more of your spells critical strikes, crit rating also helps keep important Elemental talents, such as Clearcasting and Elemental Oath, active.
• Hit rating. Elemental shaman should focus on hitting the spell hit cap as soon as possible. You want a total of 14 percent or 368 rating if you’re anything but a draenei, who need 13% or 342 rating. Remember: After you hit 14%, hit is 100% useless.

In terms of priority, it’s: Hit (until capped), spell power, haste, then crit.
5. Stats to avoid

Just as important as what to look for is what not to look for.

• Spirit. This is not a “shaman stat.” None of the shaman specs, Elemental included, have talents that give us extra benefits from spirit and, quite frankly, our built-in mana regen is plenty.
• MP/5. While it’s a good stat for Restoration, Elemental doesn’t need it. Avoid it.

There are exceptions to these rules, mind you — many of the first available post-80 badge rings have some useful stats (SP, haste/crit) but also have spirit on them. If they’re the best you can get or afford, it’s okay to have gear with a little bit of spirit or mp5 as a stopgap until you can get something better.

6. Typical PvE talent setup

The Restoration tree has no viable benefits for Elemental in the early tiers, so you’ll be sub-speccing Enhancement.

Here’s an Elemental sample tree. You have two points remaining, which can be used for either Improved Ghost Wolf (if you PvP), Improved Fire Nova (for extra AoE damage), or a few points in Convection (if you’re having mana problems).

7. Talent overview:

Elemental talents in italics are considered expendable. You’re free to move those points around as you wish. Talents that are struck out are ones you should avoid. For Enhancement, we’ll only be discussing ones that are viable talents for this spec.

Elemental:

• Convection: A small decrease in mana cost of spells. We only partially fill this one up, or not at all, as the points are better used elsewhere.
• Concussion: A must-have set of damage increases to your bread-and-butter spells.
• Call of Flame: A solid damage increase to Lava Burst and our newly-useful Fire Nova.
• Elemental Warding: Not a necessary talent for DPS, but it’s one of the few non-PvE/PvP-specific talents in a tree not known for bloat, and that 6% is handy in a pinch.
• Elemental Devastation: This is a purely Enhancement talent. As Elemental, you’ll never be using your weapons to melee. Don’t put points into it.
• Reverberation: As Elemental, Flame Shock is the only Shock spell you’ll be casting regularly; its direct damage is negligible and you lose DPS from the DoT when you recast it and clip it before it’s over. To that end, this talent is unnecessary.
• Elemental Focus: Vital! Clearcasting, the proc from this talent, is incredibly important in reducing our mana consumption. Each time you get a crit with a spell, the buff will refresh; with high enough crit rating, you can have almost 100% Clearcasting uptime, making all of your spells much, much cheaper.
• Elemental Fury: Another no-brainer, this talent doubles the damage bonus of our critical strikes.
• Improved Fire Nova: Given Fire Nova’s newfound usefulness and the lack of other, more compelling talents to throw two points into, this talent is a fine choice.
• Eye of the Storm: I originally had this listed as a don’t-grab, but many readers disagreed with me. If you find your casts getting pushed back often enough to merit a change, this is a fine choice for a few talent points.
• Elemental Reach: A range of benefits to your basic spells. Grab it!
• Call of Thunder: For one talent point, you get an additional 5% crit on your main damage spell. Definitely worth it.
• Unrelenting Storm: Sort of in the same boat as Elemental Warding — not a necessity, but there’s little else to put your points into, and additional mana regen on top of Clearcasting and Water Shield can’t hurt.
• Elemental Precision: Necessary both for the increase to our spell hit and threat reduction.
• Lightning Mastery: Reduces our base Lightning Bolt cast time to a maximum of 2 seconds, which is further reduced by haste. Necessary for a proper rotation.
• Elemental Mastery: Elemental’s only on-click cooldown, EM is best used early and often. If you have a lot of haste, you might consider not popping it during Heroism due to decreased benefit from the spell’s new haste buff, but as you run heroics or early raids, you may find the DPS boost pretty reasonable when used in conjunction with your other cooldowns.
• Storm, Earth, and Fire: Besides helping with AoE (Chain Lightning cooldown reduction) and emergency add rooting (roots on initial Earthbind Totem cast), SE&F also dramatically boosts your Flame Shock DoT damage, making this a vital talent.
• Booming Echoes: As Elemental, your use of Frost Shock will be extremely limited, but the direct-damage boost to Flame Shock is at least worthwhile enough to merit popping points into this talent.
• Elemental Oath: Vital! This talent is the equivalent to Moonkin Aura, providing you and your party members an additional 5% spell critical chance, but beyond that, it also grants you 10% more spell damage while Clearcasting is active. Like Elemental Focus, the buffs from this talent are nearly always active, depending on your crit rating.
• Lightning Overload: If you’ve leveled as Elemental (why?), you know how neat this talent is when you get it. At the level cap, though, it’s really just another DPS boost, albeit one you’d be crazy not to get. The second bolt that procs is threat-free, which is a nice touch.
• Astral Shift: A pure PvP talent. Not worth getting in a PvE build.
• Totem of Wrath: Get it. Performing the same functions as both Heart of the Crusader and Demonic Pact, this totem will be your bread-and-butter Fire totem unless you happen to party/raid with a very geared Demonology warlock.
• Lava Flows: Though the first portion of the talent is undoubtedly PvP oriented, the additional Lava Burst crit damage makes this a must-grab.
• Shamanism: An obvious necessity.
• Thunderstorm: A great source of emergency mana regen and a surprisingly useful skill if adds get loose. You can always glyph it to receive some bonus mana recovery and remove the knockback completely. If you’re a big baby.

Enhancement:

• Enhancing Totems: If you don’t regularly party or raid with death knights, this can be a useful talent to help your melee friends with a boosted Strength of Earth Totem. Definitely not a necessity, though.
• Ancestral Knowledge: Can’t argue with 5% more intellect. Grab it.
• Thundering Strikes: Doesn’t just boost melee crit — it’s all attacks, including spells. A necessity.
• Improved Ghost Wolf: If you do world PVP, this is a nice pickup for those shamans constantly on the move. If you have extra points lying around, that is. Remember that it doesn’t work indoors.
• Elemental Weapons: An additional 30% spell damage on Flametongue Weapon, the only weapon enchant you should rightfully be using as Elemental.
• Shamanistic Focus: Given that you’ll only really be casting the Flame edition of your Shock spells, this talent normaly wouldn’t be worth it — but at only one point, it’s a welcome addition to your talent repertoire.

8. Leveling as Elemental

In a word? Don’t. It’s incredibly tiresome and only picks up at two points: The first is when you first get Lightning Overload, and the second is when you get Lava Burst. Even with Lightning Overload, though, you’ll essentially be pressing your Lightning Bolt button over and over and over for 74 levels until you get Lava Burst. It’s not pretty, it’s not fun, and it’s certainly not engaging. Level as Enhancement.

If, for some reason, you feel that you absolutely must level as Elemental, then you’re at yet another disadvantage, because the shaman-specific Mystical Pauldrons of Elements and their companion chest are loaded with mp5 instead of more useful stats. Want to go to cloth? Too bad! Everything else has spirit on it. Given the mana issues that players of this spec encounter early on, though, you could do worse than some mp5. You could just certainly do better.

As far as weapons are concerned, while you’d normally go for mace and shield at max level, you’re better off using a Dignified Headmaster’s Charge to level with. Feeling concerned that your spec is one of the only ones that doesn’t really have leveling gear to support it? Just wait until you get to 80, my friend. Just wait.

Where talents are concerned, just fill in your Elemental tree first and then move down Enhancement. Nothing in Enhancement is necessarily a mandatory leveling talent.

9. Your basic Elemental rotation

Elemental, as mentioned several times above, has a very simple rotation.

1. Cast Flame Shock to apply the Flame Shock DoT.
2. Cast Lava Burst, which is a guaranteed crit on a target afflicted by Flame Shock.
3. Cast Lightning Bolt until Lava Burst’s cooldown is up.
4. Cast Lava Burst again.
5. Cast Lightning Bolt until the Flame Shock DoT expires.
6. Go to 1.

This flowchart, courtesy of Propaganda Hour at Something Awful’s WoW subforum, represents the rotation visually.

As you acquire more haste, you’ll be able to squeeze in more Lightning Bolts in between Lava Bursts. There’s little variation in this rotation until you acquire certain set bonuses which affect the way that Flame Shock and Lava Burst work.

Chain Lightning technically does more damage than Lightning Bolt, but has a considerably higher mana cost. If you can get to the point where you can Chain Lightning regularly without offsetting the mana cost with Thunderstorms, you can replace Lightning Bolt with it, but for most beginners, you’ll have a long way to go before that’s possible.

For AoE: you’ll be switching to Chain Lightning over the stock version and aiming for whatever has the most health. Drop your Magma totem in a convenient location and hit Fire Nova on every cooldown for maximum AoE damage. Unfortunately, shaman AoE is still clunky, and we’re essentially the only ranged class that’s required to get into the thick of it to maximize our AoE damage.

10. Gems

Basic Elemental gemming follows some pretty simple rules.

• Gem only for SP and haste. Reckless Ametrines and their blue-quality brethren are a fine choice for any slot, but you can choose to stack either one or the other if you’re trying to hit a certain landmark (enough haste for another Bolt between Bursts, for example).
• Never gem for crit. We’ll go into this at more detail at a later date, but the general idea is that you tend to have enough crit on your gear and with your talents that it’s less effective to gem it than SP or haste.
• Never gem for int, spirit or mp5. Int and mp5 are for Resto, not you, and spirit is objectively awful.
• Use the Chaotic Skyflare Diamond as your meta and Glowing Dreadstones to meet the two blue sockets you’ll inevitably find in your tier gear to get your meta bonus.
• For jewelcrafters: Use Runed Dragon’s Eyes in three available red sockets in place of whatever you’d normally use.
• Don’t worry too much about matching sockets unless the bonus is particularly good (read: it’ll offset the loss of stats from the gem you would normally use in that slot) or it’s to get a meta bonus.

11. Glyphs

There are a number of major Elemental glyphs, though some edge others out slightly in the late game. For now we’ll talk about the top four.

• Glyph of Lightning Bolt: A static 4% increase to your most-used spell. Should be on everyone’s glyph page.
• Glyph of Flame Shock: Remember, you should have close to 100% Flame Shock uptime, so this glyph adds a good chunk of DPS (usually around 4%).
  
• Glyph of Totem of Wrath: Whenever you put Totem of Wrath down, you get an extra 30% (84) of its spell power for five minutes. Just you, though.
• Glyph of Lava: This glyph is outclassed by the one above until very late in the Wrath game. You’ll need above 3900 active spell power for this one to be better.

As for minor glyphs, there aren’t any that really directly affect your DPS. They’re all quality-of-life improvements. I take Astral Recall, Water Shield, and Renewed Life.

12. Enchants for the endgame

• Mace/Dagger: Mighty Spellpower
• Staff: Greater Spellpower
• Shield: Greater Intellect
• Helm: Arcanum of Burning Mysteries
• Cloak: Greater Speed (or Lightweave Embroidery for tailors)
• Shoulders: Greater Inscription of the Storm (or Master’s Inscription of the Storm for scribes)
• Chest: Powerful Stats
• Bracers: Superior Spellpower (or Fur Lining – Spell Power for leatherworkers)
• Gloves: Exceptional Spellpower (or Precision if under hit cap, or Hyperspeed Accelerators for engineers)
• Belt: Eternal Belt Buckle (of course)
• Pants: Sapphire Spellthread
• Boots: Tuskarr’s Vitality (or Nitro Boosters for engineers)
• Rings: Greater Spellpower for enchanters

That should be enough to get you started.

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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!

GLOBAL COOLDOWNS
As a Resto Shaman, you’ll become highly aware of global cooldowns. We need to refresh Water Shield quite frequently (especially if we’re being hit by AoE or splash damage) and refresh totems if a lot of movement is involved in a given fight. We also need to refresh Earth Shield on the tank(s) and use Riptide at the most opportune moments. Global cooldowns will become a big part of how well you play and how well you can manage them. Many a time I have let someone die because of poor GCD management!

KEYBOARD TURNING IS OKAY, REALLY.
People get alot of flak for keyboard turning, but you know what? We’re healers. Keyboard turning is necessary if we’re using mouseover macros. A lot of healers tend to use Grid+Clique or similar setups, and we need to use our mice to heal raids since it’s much quicker and easier for us. This means our other means of movement is keyboard turning, an important thing to do if you need to maintain situational awareness (especially on fights like Professor Putricide, where blobs and missiles can easily come your way).

Hell, it’s PvE. You can get away with it.

STATS! OH MY GOD, STATS!
Personally, I’m a haste freak. I’m trying to get as much haste as humanly possible right now. Mp5 comes naturally with gear, as does intellect and spell power. Crit is also a nice stat. Basically, the only caster stats you don’t want are spirit and hit, which should be obvious anyway!

There will come a time when your Lesser Healing Wave cast time is faster than your global cooldown. This is a wall I hit a while ago and it did make things awkward. I think it happened when I reached around 700-800 haste. I’m approaching 1k haste now and I’m used to it. LHW is an awesome spell when hasted, for pew pew healing. Healing Wave has about a 1.1 second cast time for me with the 2 piece T10 set bonus and Tidal Waves up, which is also awesome. Resto Shamans make powerful tank healers (after Paladins) with this going on. Maybe I’m not accurate about the cast time, but I’m too lazy to check. Yes, I am lazy.

Either way, haste is awesome. You should download Qaurtz so that you can see your cast time latency and heal as quickly, as powerfully and as efficiently as possible.

Intellect is important for Resto Shamans. Mp5 comes naturally with gear, and so does spell power. Personally, I gem full haste. I’d recommend this of all Resto Shamans who are working on T9+ content.

ADDONS JESUS SHIT
I already mentioned Quartz. This is an awesome addon for casters, as it shows your casting latency. We all have latency, and knowing that latency and working with it helps massively.

Like a lot of healers I am a Grid+Clique hoe, so I’d recommend this setup. Grid is a lovely compact addon and Clique is just awesome. It’s extremely easy to configure, appearing as another tab in your spellbook and allowing you to simply choose your mouse/key bindings right there and then. Grid is also handy because it can show raid debuffs, which is important for healers. On Saurfang when people get Mark of the Fallen Champion and they need to be spammed, healers need to know who have that debuff. Usually assignments go like “healer A heals the first person with the mark, healer B heals the second person” and so on.

It’s also handy for Anub’arak 25 (heroic), where people get Penetrating Cold and are marked by the raid leader. You need an additional addon for both of these purposes (RaidStatusDebuffs and RaidMarks respectively).

I also use an addon called ShieldsUp, which tracks how many charges of Earth Shield the tank has left on him/her, as well as how many charges of Water Shield I have left. In the middle of combat it is easy to forget about your shields, the addon simply displays it for you anywhere you want on your screen.

TOTEMZ
Ah yes, those pesky totems. Usually I see if there is a DK in the raid before I decide not to drop Strength of Earth. Usually I use Stoneskin totem. Then I see if there’s an Elemental Shaman, who will most likely drop Wrath of Air and TOtem of Wrath. I’ll use Nature Resistance on the fights that require it instead, and I use Healing Stream Totem since a Paladin is usually around to give me Blessing of Wisdom. I’ll use Searing Totem or Magma Totem if there’s a ToW already down. Every little helps!

I have no idea why I wrote this guide. I’m not even sure how much of it makes sense. I could tell you about the different talents you need to pick up, but eh.

TALENTS
Resto tree is pretty bloated, and there’s really only one or two “correct” specs to take as a healer. My talents are probably out of date now, but you can find them here.

All of those talents are pretty much MANDATORY as a Resto Shaman, though you could live without Healing Way if you’re a strict raid healer, and if you’re just starting out, go for the reduced mana cost in totems on the first tier since mana is more of a problem early on than later, when you get more gear for it.

Focused Mind and Nature’s Guardian are more PvP-oriented talents. Cleanse Spirit, Mana Tide, Earth Shield and Riptide are essential, as you will always want to use these as a Resto Shaman. It’s also worth speccing into Ancestral Knowledge, Thundering Strikes and Improved Shields in the Enhancement tree.

Well, that’s all I can think of for now. I was really bored so I wrote this silly guide. Hope you at least got a laugh or two out of it, because I don’t know if my “style” is going to suit every Resto Shaman out there!

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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

by l4mebananas

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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.

Restoration Talents:

So the first thing you need to approach is your Talent Spec. I’ll start by linking the talent build that I use now. View it HERE. The major difference between this spec and what you used is that you take Healing Way instead of Elemental Weapons. The reason for this is the new buff to Healing Way making the use of Healing Wave significantly more viable. If you do not want to use Healing Way (it’s extremely heavy on mana). Then you can stick with the old spec which still is not bad. View it HERE]

I’d write a lot more on spec but there really isn’t much to say. Totemic Focus is more of a PvP talent, most of the time you will drop a few totems every couple of minutes and your use of Healing Wave will justify selecting that talent instead. If your tanks are not awful you will never have to worry about healing threat so Healing Grace is useless. Once again this is much more of a PvP talent. If there was a fight with a nasty unavoidable silence you might justify Focused Mind (say Gruul in TBC), currently there is no fight requiring it however and you will only take this talent in PvP. Healing Way is now taken because you can do extremely fast and large heals with the new buff. To wrap it up, take the first build I linked for general use and you can’t go wrong.

Restoration and Stats:

My stats and how they integrate with playstyle are something I have been wrestling with endlessly since the release of WotLK. At the start I maxed out my Intellect because on paper it was definitely the best all-round stat for a Shaman. After getting decent gear and realising mana was never going to be an issue I switched to full Spell Power to test that out. I continued with that for quite some time until the change to Priest and Druid AoE healing which I believed would allow Shamans to begin using Chain Heal once again. In Naxx up until this point, it was impossible to land a Chain Heal before people were healed up by Priests and Druids spamming Circle of Healing and Wild Growth. So with the nerfing of these skills I gemmed a lot more Haste, switched some gear and gave it a go. It worked for a while but during Ulduar, particularly with the huge buff to Prayer of Healing for Priests, it became pretty poor again and I maxed Spell Power until the end of Ulduar. Now in 3.2 once again things have evolved and Haste and Chain Heal are far more viable. This is because you can’t cap your LHW at the Global Cooldown anymore due to the change on Tidal Waves and because Healing Wave and Chain Heal are both buffed. This has meant that Haste has become an essential stat for shamans.

3.2 turned many things on their head, mainly this is due to the buffs on Chain Heal and Healing wave and the altering of Tidal Waves with LHW as stated above. When you are starting out many of the old principles still apply. You will need a basic level of Int, Spell Power and Crit before you can start stacking up on Haste. This is not a situation where it is Haste at the expense of all other stats. The amount of Int you need will depend on your mp5 on your gear but basically you just want to be able to sustain your mana over at least 6 minutes of constant spamming. The fights that run longer than this usually offer a mana break at some point. With high end gear I think that 30% Crit (on your profile) with 2500 Spell Power (with Earthliving) and a solid amount of regen are needed before you can start with Haste. If you notice I do not use only Haste items, I try to balance all my other stats and use the “extra” ilvl I have purely for haste. Using high ilvl items is something I will always promote because no stat is “bad” for a Shaman anymore really.

-Crit: Crit is important for 3 reasons.

• It will apply the 10% physical damage reduction buff on tanks that you critically heal which is very important. So unless you are running a Disc Priest (Holy Priests usually do not spec it) or a second Shaman you will most likely be the only person in the raid able to apply the buff.
• It will give you mana regeneration through Improved Water Shield and since your main spells are going to be Lesser Healing Wave and Riptide, critting these spells is going to provide a large amount of your mana regeneration
• To increase your HPS. Since Ancestral Awakening was changed in 3.1 those Lesser Healing Wave and Riptide Crits are going to provide a lot of effective healing without requiring you to re-target people. I actually found that the amount of effective healing I gained from this talent in 3.1 was massive. Also don’t forget it makes your heals bigger which you cannot discount!

-Haste: The Chain Heal Stat.

This is another section re-written for 3.2. This is mainly because it’s actually not “The Chain Heal Stat” anymore. Haste now counts towards all of your heals since your LHW is not going below a 1 second cast anymore. Healing Wave gains a massive amount from it due to the very long untalented base cast. In 3.1 you didn’t need this stat because you mainly just used LHW and instants, i.e. very short casts so you wanted your heals to be bigger instead of faster (hence Spell Power stacking). In 3.2 everything can be made faster and in this game healing faster is much more likely to save lives as a Resto Shaman. So yes this stat is now a lot stronger, yes Chain Heal and Healing Wave are now buffed and viable. This is the stat you start pushing as high as you can as long as your other stats are high enough to keep up with your regen and heal size.

-MP5: Mana please!

Since Spirit is completely useless for Shamans, this will be your other source of mana along with Water Shield charges (from Crits and environmental damage). How much you use is entirely up to you. I currently sit at around 275MP5 (with Water Shield) in my standard pre-Ulduar gear and I find that keeps my mana up pretty well. The amount of MP5 you need is going to be dependent on the length of the fight and the amount of Haste you have since Haste is the only thing that will cause you to burn mana faster.

-Balancing and Prioritising your stats:

There is no magic number of Intellect to get, it’s just an all around good stat. Along with Spell Power it’s just a stat you will naturally increase as your gear improves. The next stat you should be looking for on your gear is Crit rating for the reasons above. You should prioritise Crit over Haste and MP5. If you are not trying to use Chain Heal too much then Haste is not too important, I have around 375 unbuffed at the moment and that feels sufficient. It does not hurt to have more at all just as long as you keep your mana up but do not gem it. I would therefore look for MP5 more than Haste on gear however the important thing to understand is to balance them. Haste is better than MP5 if your mana bar is not empty. Continuing to stack MP5 when you don’t go oom on a 10 minute fight will serve you no good at all. So when using the playstyle recommended in this guide Int > Spell Power > Crit > Haste/MP5. The most important thing to remember is balancing them though, more Haste needs more MP5 and the more Crit you get the less MP5 you will need. You should be looking for 30 Crit (Spellbook), 350 Haste and 250MP5 as solid minimum stat levels to aim for! (self buffed)

-Stamina:

Last but not least never forget Stamina. You cannot heal people if you are face down dead on the floor.

Restoration Gems and Enchants:

Gemming became significantly more complicated in 3.2 because you now have more options:

20 Haste in Yellow Sockets.
12 Spell Power and 10 Intellect in Red Sockets
10 Haste and 5 MP5 in Blue Sockets
However, if you really lack mana then you should gem more Int and MP5. Do not use the 23 Spell Power gem, 2 hybrid gems give 24 Spell Power so you lose stats by using this gem. If you feel that your other stats are good then you can ignore socket bonuses and go directly for Haste pumping.

• Your meta gem should be Insightful Earthsiege Diamond (Int + mana restore proc). It is by far the best meta gem.
• Consider Stamina or hybrid Stamina Gems in Blue sockets if there is a high risk of death from raid damage on a fight.
• If you are going to only tank heal then Haste is not quite as strong so you might want to consider Intellect and Spell Power gems.
• If you are lucky enough to be a Jewelcrafter or Blacksmith I would suggest using your custom gems for extra Haste!
• There will always be people using different Gems, the important thing to do is always to gem how you feel best suits the gear you have and the way you play. If you have an excess amount of mana don’t use extra Intellect Gems, use Haste or Spell Power instead and so on … There is no 100% correct way above all others.

For my enchants it’s fairly straight forward. If you go to my armory.
Notable choices are that I choose 10 stats over 8MP5 on chest because I think that Stamina is a worthy stat to have and you should always give it appropriate weight. On boots I recommend always using Tuskar’s Vitality since you will no longer get runspeed from DK aura in raids. Survival is just soo important. With your head and shoulder enchants you have the option of Crit or MP5 as the secondary stat. You should always choose crit on this option though. Do not get 16 Int on bracers over 30 Spell Power, the enchant is significantly lower ilvl and it is a complete waste of stats. Stacking a particular stat for the sake of it at the expense of ilvl is not advisable for Resto Shamans since most stats are at least decent.

Restoration and Items:

-General

• I think many people in guides are going to write a list of the absolute perfect set of gear to get but again with playing a Resto Shaman you just need to adapt according to what gear you have available and using the stat advice above.
• Always take advantage of set bonuses, the Tier 7, Tier 8 and Tier 9 set bonuses are definitely worth getting. There are no items that are going to boost you sufficiently in order to negate the bonus of these sets. They should therefore be your primary goal with your gear.
• Be very careful about getting too much Haste and not enough MP5 and Crit to keep your mana up. In Naxxramas you can do lots of 2 minute fights so you don’t feel the effect of regen but in Ulduar it’s an entirely different story.
• If your gear is really lacking in some stats, use your Gems to compensate, they provide a huge stat bonus and allow you to specialise a lot more than it might seem.
• Picking gear with no Stamina at all is unwise. You need to stay alive and a “glass cannon” healer is not the way to go at all.
• There are many different Relics to choose from now. It’s entirely situational, use the one that you feel is directed towards the spell you use the most on a particular fight. At the point of writing I have not tested the new Chain Heal with Spell Power proc one but it could be good!

-Trinkets

I’d like to give special mention to trinkets because while weapon is your most important item, there isn’t much of a choice there. With trinkets, and especially with 10 man + 25 man, there are many, many choices. In the last version of the guide this was a very long section but I’ve cut this down a bit for 3.2. If you need mana then use an Int trinket such as the Pandora’s Plea or Meteorite Crystal. There’s also an easy to get trinket from the new 5 man instance at the Argent Tournament along with one from Triumph badges. All of these should only be used if you feel you need them to keep your mana up. Beyond that you should be going for Spell Power trinkets with MP5 side stats. These include the 10 man Thorim hardmode trinket. The Yogg-Saron 25 man hardmode trinket and the 2 trinkets from 25 man normal and hardmode in Trial of the Crusader. These 2 trinkets at the end will most likely be the best in slot trinkets since if you keep up the buffs together they offer 272 MP5 which is huge.
I don’t have a list of perfect gear yet since things are not fully updated on chardev.org. I’m going to be testing our Rawr since the developers asked me to look at the Shaman part but I have not had a chance due to the massive changes to our class recently. Suffice to say this perfect gear list is something I will be working on.

Consumables:

Options! While progress raiding I carry a huge number of options. Your main Flasks will be either 125 Spell Power (Frost Wyrm) or 38 MP5 (Pure Mojo). You should however carry 1300hp flasks (Stoneblood) and a variety of elixirs such as Lightning Speed, Guru, Mighty Thoughts.

The same goes for your food. Depending on the fight you should be selecting MP5, Haste or Spell Power food.

Restoration Glyphs:

-Minor.

I use Water Walking (for convenience), Renewed Life (to avoid carrying ankhs), and Water Shield (because it’s amazing!).

-Core

Earth Shield -> The absolute core glyph of playing Resto Shaman. You should always have your Earth Shield up on a tank and it will give very good effective healing. Use this 100% of the time. This is the only Glyph I would say is an absolute must have right now.

-Optional

Lesser Healing Wave -> If you are planning to ever heal a tank you should have this glyph, I don’t think I have ever been without it while playing Resto in PvE or PvP.
Riptide -> This one is used to be a Core Glyph but it’s now a lot less used. If you are only spamming Chain Heal and not tank Healing, you might want to consider it over LHW.
Chain Heal -> You want to use this one in if you are using Chain Heal a lot (most of the time).

At the time of writing I am using LHW, Chain Heal and Earth Shield. Some fights you can use the Healing Wave glyph but these are pretty limited. Perhaps Healing Stream Glyph will be good on some AoE fight where you only spam Chain Heal also.

Your Play-Style:

Well this is the most difficult thing to “Teach”. I don’t think I do this stuff perfectly myself at all but if you take some of the advice onboard your play will probably improve. This section has been completely re-written for 3.2.

-Spell Selection

There are far far more options now than you used to have in 3.2. All your heals are viable to be used and so you need to think a lot more about what heal to use in which situation.

Earth Shield should always be up on one of the tanks, if in the rare situation there is one tank and two Resto Shamans, put it on a healer or another caster with low hp for healing help and interrupt protection. A good example of this would be Razuvious, if the priest doing Mind Control is Holy they will have no interrupt protection so an Earth Shield will help them out. Another example would be on Phase 2 of Mimiron where you shouldn’t have it on a tank, but on a healer.

Riptide has multiple uses. It’s an instant heal in tight situations, for example a tank goes a bit low so you do a LHW then Riptide straight after to get as big a heal as you can in a short time. Where lots of people are taking consistent damage from AoE you want to try and use it as a HoT and therefore keep it up on as many people as possible (only do this if you Glyph it). Finally it’s used to make your HW casts a lot faster and your Crit chance on LHW a lot higher. The thing is that you are now using Chain Heal a lot more so you will be getting the same buff from that. Rather than spamming Riptide on cooldown, this spell is more often used on someone you know will take some damage over time or just to quickly top their health.

Lesser Healing Wave is your main direct heal still. This spell has not become bad, often you will not be able to land fully effective Healing Waves and this spell will be the better choice. Due to the very high crit chance on with Tidal Waves, it’s excellent for keeping tanks crit buffed. It’s still ok for raid healing but chain heal will often be superior now.

Always have Nature’s Swiftness ready for tight situations in conjunction with Healing Wave. Your Tidal Force cooldown is tricky to time. The best time to activate it is when you know that some heavy damage is going to be incoming shortly (to be honest, I often forget to use this ability in the perfect situation). I have now just put Tidal Force on my Nature’s Swiftness macro so that this instant heal has a higher chance of being a crit.

So Chain Heal is much more viable now. With a lot of Haste you will be able to land good Chain Heals on a lot of fights. I’m finding that this is making up a significantly higher portion of my healing output than before so definitely try it out. The same goes for Healing Wave, you will use it more but you will not spam it because this will just not work. Use it when you know you can land a large effective heal and only use it with Tidal Waves up.

For your totems you are going to have Wrath of Air Totem down all the time. Most of the time you can use Healing Stream Totem because your raid will have Blessing of Wisdom and they do not stack. For Earth Totem I use Stoneskin the most for reducing tank damage. On fire you can use Flametongue but your Enhancement Shaman will have a better one and more often than not there will be a much better buff being used in the raid (Demonic Pact, Totem of Wrath). Always watch out for Elemental damage and see if you can provide a resistance totem to counter it without sacrificing too much. All other totems are highly situational: Tremor for Fear/Sleep, Earthbind to slow, Cleansing to remove diseases and poisons.

Think about the length of the fight in regards to using your Mana Tide. If you are going to be able to use it multiple times within the length of the fight time it so that you do. Save your Mana Potion for if you go really low on Mana only.

-Character Control and General Tips

• Keybind your skills. Using the mouse to click skills will slow you down and misdirect your attention from what is actually going on with the fight. This is a very important aspect of the game.
• Do not backpeddle (this means using your back key to move). We all occasionally take a couple of steps to adjust but doing it consistently (unless tanking to keep front to mob for avoidance) is going to mean you move a lot slower than you should be.
• Do not keyboard turn, always use the mouse to turn your character and camera, it is significantly faster and more accurate.
• How you position yourself in the room is very important. You want to be in range of as many people as possible and in a safe spot. If your tank is about to move be ready to adapt to that movement. I like to just settle into a particular position on most fights and get comfortable with playing like that, but you should always be ready to adapt.
• Be raid aware. 99% of bad players are bad because they do not think about what is going on around them, they die to damage they should not be taking and/or don’t take notice of what their fellow players are doing. Tunnel visioning and playing only through your raid frames is a very easy thing to fall into as a healer and is a very bad habit.
• Never die with healthstone and potion unused. These are two lifesaving heals and you shouldn’t die without them being on cooldown/consumed.
• Always keep the boss in your Focus target with a big cast bar in the middle of your screen so you can see when they are casting their abilities.
• Always keep Water Shield up. Whenever you get a free global cooldown try to refresh it, even if it’s still on 3 stacks. Get into the habit of this because sometimes you will just not have time to refresh it and u need to take the opportunity when it’s there.

Healing theory is close to impossible to explain. We do not use many healing assignments, it’s all about feel and knowing when you can land a heal or not. Try to think about how your other healers are going to heal and adapt to make sure that your heals are as effective as possible. I hardly ever cancel heals on tanks because the damage they take will usually come in huge spikes and cancelling could mean that they die. Your character should be setup so that you can spam heal for long periods of time so do not be shy with your mana. Spam, spam, spam and make sure you get as much healing out as you can.

Restoration Addons:

How you setup your UI is always going to be personal preference. I’ll be making my UI available for download in the near future. For now though here are a few addons you might want to consider.

TotemTimers: I use this to monitor Totems and Shields. There may be better addons out there for this but I use this one.

Quartz: The standard castbar is pretty limited, this is the best one I have come across.

ScrollingCombatText: I believe there are many other options to this now but I use this, the default one has far too few options.

oRA2: Raid Addon for Main Tank targets and monitoring a few other useful bits of info, far from essential though

Forte Xorcist: I used to use this to see timers on Riptide and to monitor my cooldowns

Raid Frames: Well most people use Grid, I personally use sRaidFrames. Either is good just make sure you have something you are happy with and feel comfortable using.

You can download my UI here: http://www.ensidia.com/community/post/1681/ , it will be updated for 3.2 shortly

Conclusion:

There is no one right way to do a lot of things in this game. This guide should explain you the mechanics of the basics and what you should be aiming for.

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