by Rich Maloy
Being a hybrid class means there’s not a lot of wiggle room when it comes to making specs as one spec can serve us well through 10s, 25s, dungeons, and soloing. While PvE builds don’t leave much room for experimentation, I’ve seen far more variance in PvP specs, mostly depending on play-style.
Of course there are distinct PvP talents built into the trees and there are core talents for both PvE and PvP without which we’re just not enhancement shamans. But depending on your gear, team, and how your play you can customize your PvP specs for defensive, offensive, mana-rich, or anywhere in between.
Let’s start right out with the two of the more common builds right now:
PvE – 19/52/0 – this spec will serve most all enhancers well across all levels on content and is the spec I use on Stoney.
PvP – 16/55/0 – as I mentioned above there is far more flexibility in specs for PvP. I chose this one because it’s a good starter PvP spec that is highly mana-conservative and defensive focused. I’ve seen many different takes on enhancement PvP specs and experienced players will alter to suit their own play style. But if you need a place to start, go with this.
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by Brian Wood
today we’re going to run down the advantages of the tier 9 and tier 10 hunter set bonuses for each of the three hunter specs, and suggest which way you should gear your hunter.
Older Sets
We’re only interested in the tier 9 and tier 10 sets. Anything older isn’t worthwhile for hunters. We don’t even care about the tier 9 4-piece bonus (not even if you’re BM). The only other older set that we’d ever want to hang onto is the tier 5 2-piece (from BC raids) for extreme soloing situations (it lets us automatically heal our pets for 15% of the damage we do).
Before we get into the spec by spec details, lets hit a quick review of our tier 9 and 10 sets.
Tier 9: Windrunner
There are three versions of the hunter tier 9 set:
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by Fox Van Allen
As promised, follow me after the break for the shadow priest’s guide to the Icecrown Plagueworks.
Your Mission: Stay alive. Inoculate yourself and others against Festergut’s raid-wide mega-attack. Pull out all the stops to maximize DPS, cause dude needs to die quick. Marvel at the guest appearance of Koffing above your head.
Festergut, especially in 25-man mode, is a pretty brutal DPS check. This means, of course, that your entire raid could do everything right, and you can still find yourself getting wiped by the enrage timer. To add to the challenge, as a ranged player, you’ll find that there’s a lot of movement involved and your DPS will lag behind the melee classes. Still, shadow priests bring more to a raid than just DPS, and it’s that extra utility that lets us shine here.
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by Gregg Reece
1. Typical PvE talent setup
The base talent build we’re going to look at is a very retribution build of 5/5/55 which gives us six points to do with as we wish. Now, there are generally two viewpoints on what you should do with these depending on which type of utility you want to provide. If you want access to Divine Sacrifice then you’d go 5/11/55 with those six points all in protection. However, if you’d rather provide a little debuff to your target’s attack power as well as have a wee bit more survivability, then you’d take Vindication as well as fill out the rest of the retribution tree with 5/5/61.
2. Talent overview
Talents in italics are optional, and you can flex your build to pick up or drop these based on utility you want to provide. If a talent is struck out, avoid it, as it provides little or no benefit to you as a damage dealer. I’ll only be covering the protection and holy talents that are relevant for a ret paladin to pursue.
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by Daniel Whitcomb
One of the most important things you can do to become a good death knight is to solidify your damage (or threat) rotation or priority system so that you can consistently keep your runes on cool down and your damage high. That said, it’s far from the only thing that marks a good DPS or tank. Another thing is flexibility.
Death Knights have a wide variety of tools and tricks that can turn the tide of a battle. These tricks can be hard to weave into your existing system without giving up your rotation, but there are tricks to making it easier, and sometimes the benefit outweighs having to mess up your rotation for a few seconds. Let’s take a look at 5 specific buttons that more death knight should be pushing.
Rune Strike
I’ve heard complaints from some death knights that their threat just doesn’t measure up to other tanks. Most of those death knights, I think, probably aren’t make full use of Rune Strike. Rune Strike is, if nothing else, the best way you can spend your runic power if you’re looking to gain threat. To truly maximize your threat, you should pretty much be hitting it every time it’s available (That is, right after a dodge or parry when you have the runic power). Of course, one major problem here is that it’s definitely a pain to remember to press it every time. Luckily, that’s when macros come to the rescue. For all of your major weapon strikes, simply create macros such as this:
#showtooltip
/cast (Ability)
/cast !Rune Strike
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by Chase Christian
Tank death. It’s one of the worst ways for a raid encounter to end: abrupt and usually absolute. In a dungeon, you’ve typically only got one guy who can take a few blows, and so the enemy will start cleaving your soft DPS. Blizzard balances each raid encounter around the idea of having two tanks, so the other tank is often busy with their own duties, and can’t survive the double duty. With this era of multiple enrage timers and tight DPS requirements, there’s really no room for bringing a spare tank for the ‘just in case’ situation.
Holy paladins are uniquely designed to be the masters of tank healing. We’ve got multiple cooldowns we can use to reduce their incoming damage, and the most potent HPS toolkit available. A tank has to actually try to die when we’ve got the Holy Light firehose aimed at them. However, even with all these abilities at our disposal, a tank can still eat dirt halfway through an encounter if we’re not playing our best. Read on for a discussion on how to keep your tank up during high damage situations.
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by Joe Perez
The shaman toolkit might not have as many tools as say a holy priest, but the ones we do have are quite effective at their specific task. Each one is useful and colorful and we do have several that are quite unique. Lets take a look at them shall we?
Spells:
- Lesser Healing Wave: This is our version of Flash Heal. The cast time is 1.5 seconds and before spellpower and critical strikes, at the maximum rank it clocks in at just under 2,000 healing. This spell is fantastic for fast top offs and when combined with Glyph of Lesser Healing Wave can become a very effective tank heal. You get the first rank of this spell at level 20 and you will be using it pretty regularly as you level. It is a fast heal that does the job well.
- Healing Wave: This is our version of a Greater Heal. This spell comes in with a 3 second cast time and it is our nuke heal. Useful for fights where one target is taking a large amount of damage, it starts with a cap of about 3,500 healing before modifiers, but I’ve seen this spell hit numbers close to 40,000 healing. You start the game with this spell right off the bat, and you will see your first four ranks of it before Lesser Healing Wave becomes available. For early leveling as a healer this will be your bread and butter. During the end game, if you stack haste up to the soft cap, Healing Wave becomes a replacement for Lesser Healing Wave but we will cover more on that in a later post.
- Chain Heal: This is one of, if not the, most iconic spells a resto shaman has not only in look and ability but also in sound. Each cast is accompanied by the sound of rolling thunder. You get the first rank of this ability at level 40 and as soon as you are able to use it, it will become a healing spell heavily used in your selections. This spell has two modifies to it that increase the healing potential quite a bit. First off there is a talent which we talked about last week, Improved Chain Heal, that gives the spell a 20% increase in healing output. Second there is Glyph of Chain Heal which allows chain heal to affect an additional target. It is one of a shaman’s most mana efficient spells and in addition to being cheap and effective it is also a smart spell. It will always jump to the nearest target within the 12.5 yard jump range of the original target with the largest hit point deficiency. The spell will check for a valid target at each stop, so the third and fourth target (with the glyph) don’t necessarily need to be within range of the first target. Each jump calculates crit individually on the targets and each jump has a chance to proc weapon effects like Earthliving Weapon and certain items like that Althor’s Abacus. On top of all that it has a chance to trigger talents like Improved Water Shield. Once you have this spell you will use it heavily well into the end game.
- Earth Shield: Another iconic staple to the resto arsenal, you get this spell as part of our talent tree. You will have enough talent points to pick it up at level 50, and by 52 you can talent it to give you additional charges and improved healing. Earth Shield is a spell that places 6 charges (8 talented) on a target of your choosing, visible by a ring of floating earth surrounding your target. The spell is instant cast and it is a purely reactionary heal. Each time your target gets hit, a charge is burned and they are instantly healed with a cooldown of roughly 3 seconds between charge uses. The amount healed is modified by your crit, and spellpower at the time of casting the spell. It benefits the most from a high spellpower on the caster, so items that add spellpower like trinkets or temporary buffs that increase your spellpower are highly desirable before casting it. By default it healing is only augmented by 15% of your total spellpower, but with talents such as Improved Earth Shield and Improved Shields, you can push that to 35% of your spellpower. The spell also now correctly benefits from Purification. This can lead to some impressive and very useful shield procs. Normal placement of the spell is on a tank, but there are other ways to use it. It does reduce push back by 30%, so placing it on a healer or another caster when there is a lot of damage pushing their casts back. It can also be used on DPS who has a tendency to steal aggro. It might not be able to keep them solely alive, but it may give enough of a cushion to snap a heal off and keep them alive.
- Cleanse Spirit: This is a cure-all, or as close to one as you will see as a resto shaman. Cleanse Spirit effectively saves you button pushes, removing the reason to ever use Cure Disease or Cure Poison. The spell also allows for the removal of curses, which is incredibly handy in a pinch. While a resto shaman can’t remove magical effects, being able to remove 3/4 of removable debuffs with just one spell is pretty good. Another spell you receive from talent points you can pick this up at roughly level 44. Grab it as soon as you can and put it on your action bar, use often for great success.
- Riptide: This little beauty has become yet another icon of the shaman healing toolkit.You obtain this spell through talents and can snag it as early as level 60. Riptide is an instant cast spell that has a heal over time component. Heals a friendly target for 1604 to 1736 and another 1670 over 15 seconds. This is of course modified by your spell power and can produce fantastic numbers both on the initial attack as well as the ticks of each HoT. This spell also has a component that augments Chain Heal, increasing the amount healed by an additional 25%. This helps to increase healing output and also gives us mobility. Riptide also triggers many of our key talents and has cemented itself as a spell that should be used by each and every resto shaman
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by Dawn Moore
For now, I want to touch on some reasons why priests specifically would want to use macros.
Consolidating
Priests have more healing spells available to them than any other healer. Add into that all our offensive abilities and cooldowns, and our bars can get very crowded, very quickly. Macros are a great way to consolidate the number of buttons you need, as well as clean up your UI so things are easier to see. Since not every ability is used frequently, or some abilities are on cooldown, you can bind two or more abilities to one key. Adding a target condition will let you keep offensive abilities on your bars but out of the way; ideal for burn phases. Here’s an example.
#showtooltip
/stopcasting
/cast [help, nomodifier:alt, nomodifier:shift]Renew; [modifier:alt, target=player]Renew; [modifier:shift]Guardian Spirit;[harm, nomodifier]Holy Fire
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by Brian Wood
Trinkets fill a very special slot in our gear selection. Rather than just a collection of stats, trinkets are the one gear slot we can pretty much count on doing something special, be it crazy procs or on-use abilities. Of course because they aren’t just piles of stats, trying to compare one trinket to another can sometimes be difficult. Worse yet, they are some of the most difficult slots to fill, and we don’t want to waste our time (or DKP) with a subpar trinket.
Today we’re going to look beyond just ICC and examine all of the top hunter trinket choices, from Greatness to Deathbringer’s WIll. Furthermore, I’m going to go out on a limb and rank all the trinkets from best to worst for each hunter spec. So join me after the cut to see if that limb can hold up against some solid dwarven weight.
Evaluating Trinkets
Before we get into the trinket list, it’s worth taking a moment to explain exactly how we evaluate trinkets. For most gear we use spreadsheets to determine the comparative benefit of each stat. So perhaps we find out that 1 agility is equal to 2.4 attack power. We then add up the total value of all of the stats to get a number that we can compare to the total value of all the stats on a different piece of gear.
The problem with trinkets is they almost always have abilities, either procs or on-use, that are not always active. So what we do here is average the proc portion of the trinket. The key here is to find out what the typical uptime of a special ability is — and generally this is done by spending a crazy amount of time testing it on a target dummy — usually over a couple thousand shots.
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by Daniel Whitcomb
This week, the subject is the loot in the final section of Icecrown Citadel, the Frostwing Halls. There’s only a few bosses here, but you’ll find some great off-spec pieces, a few best in slots items, and some interesting weapon choices.
Valithria Dreamwalker
10-Man
The Oxheart, overall, probably isn’t as great for most 2-hand wielding death knights as Ramaladni’s. It has less expertise, and critical strike rating instead of armor penetration. That said, if the Ramaladni’s just won’t drop for you, this is still a more than decent weapon.
Taiga Bindings are likely to be better than anything a 10-man raiding death knight is otherwise wearing, although the haste is a bit lackluster death knight DPS at the moment. The red gem socket makes up a bit for the less than optimal itemization, at least.
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