I had originally vowed never to touch WoW again. Then I got back from dinner tonight and found that Blizzard had emailed me, notifying me that Imania had 7 free days to see the new patch content. Y? Y U NO PAY MY SUBSCRIPTION BLIZZARD, YYYYYY? Heh. Well anyway. I’ve been thinking for a long time: what do I want to do with my blog? I can’t just let it sit here. It’s depressing to see it getting 5 views every day from search terms that were so last year, like cata water zones. I mean really.. you haven’t seen them yet? Wow. I considered talking about beer. Beer is one of my new favorite things. I then realized I can talk about beer AND video games. I do sorely miss my shaman and my guild Karma Horde, and my raid group Aperture Science, that I never had the chance to lift off from the launchpad. On the other hand, I don’t want to spend money just to play. AND I have League of Legends, which is free. And which I’m decent at playing… (feel free to add me on there and hit me up for a game if you want to play, “robotunicr0n” is my name!) So at this point, I think I may pick up those free 7 days, take a look at the new content, get a feel for how much I want to sink money into the game, and then maybe bow out again and just stick to League of Legends. Or I may pick up WoW again and provide you all with some further shaman entertainment.

I am also open to your opinions. If you think I should stay away from the Woweroine, tweet with the hash tag #stayoffthewows! If you think I should start playing again, tweet with the hash tag #sellyoursoultomalganis! In the end I probably won’t listen either way and maybe just play again, but this could be fun, and I love making up random hash tags. At the very least, I will revive this blog. It may not be about shamans, but I’ll still be here!

Generally if you’re successfully and easily healing heroics then you are ready to raid. Of course healing raids isn’t as easy as being a heroic farmer; you have to have the skill to react to emergency situations and the situational awareness to stay alive yourself.

Cata heroics are a big step up from Lich King content and serve to teach a lot of raid skills, especially such important principles as don’t stand in the fire. These principles of raiding will come in time with practice.

Another important facet of healing that is folded into being able to heal heroics is smart stat gearing. If you don’t know your class well enough and don’t prioritize the correct stats you can easily fall short of making ends meet. Gemming and enchanting are another important resource to consider that can add some extra breathing room to fights like Admiral Ripsnarl. A good practice is to gem and enchant all 346+ gear and heroic gear as you’ll have those for your first couple weeks of raiding.

Overall you’ll know that you’re ready to heal when you feel that your gear is well put together and that you know your class well enough to comfortably heal hard encounters.

I’m interested to know for anyone following the blog through RSS which app you are using to aggregate so that I can add accessible links for the most used services. Either leave a comment or email me (email can be found under “about”).

Sadly this tooltip is a common scene among restoration shamans. Frankly, our mastery sucks. Priests get better absorbs and a HoT, Druids currently get bonus healing on targets who have their HoTs applied and Paladins make shields when they heal that absorb. Shamans get a heal that scales on how low the target’s health is and as far as my experience has gone we get little to no useful bonus from this.

As far as I’m concerned, if your party is low on health you’re either about to wipe or you haven’t been doing your job. Every other healing mastery ability focuses on providing some utility that directly affects -all- healing done by the beneficiary of said mastery. Restoration shamans kind of get the shaft as mastery applies in two situations. The first is a marginal increase in healing at or near mid-health level. The increase is fairly low, perhaps 200 or 300 extra health restored at the very most (the lower you go the more the numbers increase). The second situation is the “Oh Shit!” situation where your tank is dropping low on health. Even for the latter situation we don’t get much help because if the tank is low on health they are taking lots of damage. The Deep Healing effect at low levels of health restores under 1k extra. If we assume the best and give Deep Healing the benefit of the doubt that may increase our oh shit combination from a possible 24k crit to say a 26k crit (I’m making guesses at the math here because I’m not sure how crit and mastery work together but I’m assuming that the mastery increase is before crit on the base GHW spell and that the crit multiplier might throw it above 1k extra on the final number). Check out Vixsin’s beta post about Deep Healing for some rough numbers and math to see what I’m talking about.

That extra 2k on top of the healing combo for low health doesn’t make much of a difference with health pools exceeding 120k unbuffed on most tanks. The tanks that I heal have around 150k health and if they’re taking enough damage to push them down near 15k or 10k then even my instant cast GHW with Unleash Life is only going to pop them up to about 34k which almost any boss ability can destroy in one or two hits.

My point is not that Deep Healing is useless – as we can see 26k is more than 24k and every little bit helps, but it’s highly situational and if you’re in a raid where everyone is getting low on health then you better be pumping out 1 sec healing waves to get everyone up as this is the only time Deep Healing will shine and we aren’t loathe to use our mana inefficient fast cast Healing Surge to really reap the benefits. Even with Mana Tide and spirit trinkets it’s hard to justify pumping out 10+ Healing Surges.

That’s not to say that overall the state of shaman restoration is hurting. We aren’t doing amazingly well compared to other healing classes at high levels of content (heroic level raids) but having Mana Tide kind of gives us a free pass. How can we fix it? Here’s my idea but I think all of the restoration shamans in the WoW blogging scene should put in their two cents to get a non-situational mastery fix.

We need some kind bonus that will apply to all of our heals. Shamans aren’t oh shit healers. If we’re on the tank then we’re making sure they aren’t getting slaughtered and should be keeping them topped off. If they get low enough for Deep Healing to be useful, they’re going to die. Deep Healing could be more useful in a raid healing environment but with Chain Heal severely weakened and Healing Rain costing so much mana it’s unlikely that we’d be put onto raid heals.

Perhaps if our mastery was based around Riptide, a spell which we use all the time to keep the tank up, we could find some positive use for it. My idea is to have each tick of Riptide heal raid members within a certain distance for a small amount, say up to 5 other members. Riptide is on a cooldown already but maybe in return for the extra healing make it cost a little more mana. This will help keep everyone topped off and has a similar effect to a Beacon of Light. It’s much weaker, mind you, but it’s not supposed to be a copy of the Paladin’s ability.

I’ve been looking at restoration shamans that are part of big name raid guilds like Ensidia and Paragon and I’ve noticed that the vast majority of them are reforging mastery into spirit and haste, which is what I’ve done on my gear. Perhaps more intensive math will show that Deep Healing is more useful than we currently think, however I’m not holding my breath. What do you think?

Remember that post I made where I was lamenting the fact that elemental and restoration shamans literally could not run out of mana? Well I was certainly wrong. Now that Cataclysm has actually come and I’ve seen the changes, I’ve eaten my words. However, as far as I’m concerned at this point in time, the fact that I actually have to care about my mana again is a good thing. What does this mean for shamans? Well today’s post is mostly about restoration (one of my first), which is the spec hit hardest by Cata content in terms of mana reduction. Here’s why!

In Burning Crusade instances were fairly difficult. Crowd Control (CC) was a normal activity and one of the only ways to get through certain experiences. We saw a departure from the need for CC in Wrath of the Lich King, which made the game relatively face-rollable. There were many complaints that the game was too easy and that vanilla should be recreated. I agreed at the beginning of Wrath that the content was too easy, and when we got to the later tiers of raid progression (ToC and ICC) the availability of gear skyrocketed. You could farm random heroics for currency that would buy you the current tier of gear. In BC I would’ve been raiding Sunwell if that had been implemented but alas, I spent the whole expansion (I started near the end of BC… right before BT was released) raiding Karazhan and Zul’Aman. In Wrath after a raid went out of progression and we moved on to a new raid, hardly anyone wanted to do the old stuff. The gear level was lower and you could do a variety of things to get the higher tier gear. Perhaps these options were available in BC and I just wasn’t aware of them but regardless, I feel like many more people knew the gear was available in Wrath and that the old raids of Wrath were no longer run.

Thankfully with the release of Cataclysm we got content that was harder to get through and required skill. I maintain that if people would just learn how to CC then the content would be a breeze but I still get into randoms where the tank charges in and promptly dies because, well, I can’t pump her full of enough heals fast enough without going out of mana. If I don’t pump the heals she dies, I have mana, we wipe. If I pump her full of heals, she survives twice as long but not long enough, I go out of mana, she dies, we wipe. It’s a lose-lose situation until the other members realize that they have a spell called polymorph or hex or shackles or bind elemental or bind demon. Once they figure that out, we’re golden!

The requirement of CC is a great addition, but not the only one. The gear you get from quests is no longer enough to get you right into heroics. You actually have to work at it, which I admire. I finished up Uldum and started looking for places to get more gear. As I quested through Twilight Highlands I got enough enhancement gear to give it a try and as I did a few normals I got more gear but I was still locked out of queueing for heroics. Next thing I realized was that there were reputation vendors and they had gear that I needed. I went around and got enough enhancement gear from being honored with most factions to get into heroics. I noticed that as your reputation goes up the ilvl of the gear goes up noticeably. This is a nice feature to reward those of us who grind out rep like champs to get shoulder and head enchants.

While my mana was really suffering in dungeons I realized that there were a lot of things I -wasn’t- doing that perhaps I should have been doing. I’ll go over what I’ve discovered to help you figure out how best to conserve mana during normals and heroics. First of all let’s broach some general healing theory. It’s really very important to be situationally aware. Most times if you’re paying attention you can catch what the boss is about to do and prepare accordingly with your spells so that the tank doesn’t go down. A good example of this is the Crucible of Carnage when you fight Lord Geoffery Tulvan (the Earl of Evisceration). In his human form the damage is pretty easy going and relatively simple to heal through. I think there were a couple of times that he did some spike damage that we weren’t ready for but nothing traumatic and nothing I couldn’t heal through. When he goes into worgen form though there’s an ability he uses that is downright rough. I wasn’t expecting it the first time as we were doing CoC blind but the tank nearly died from his flurry. He hits really fast and does a lot of damage. My heart was pounding in my forehead as my clicking faltered and I accidentally put Riptide on our warlock who was sitting at a fine and dandy 95%. Luckily I managed to save him and was ready the next time Lord Geoffery used that move. After I knew what was happening I dutifully put Riptide on the tank before the frenzy started and then starting a Healing Wave. Since I was paying attention the first time I noticed the tank health going down quickly and heard the quick stabbing sounds so I knew something bad was happening. I used Unleash Elements and popped a Greater Healing Wave on him followed by a few Healing Surges (I should’ve done that the other way around though as while GHW was casting the tank went to about 3%). This is what I mean by being situationally aware. It helps if you know the fight already so that you can be prepared for something to happen but if you are raiding blind it pays to pay attention.

Another good practice of the healing arts is to be not casting as much as possible as this helps your mana to regen faster. Obviously I’m not saying to let your DPS die or your tank to get very low but if you know the damage is going to be relatively small you can avoid healing the DPS in favor of saving some mana for later. A lot of classes have abilities that will heal themselves and some have AoE abilities do damage but also heal the party (Divine Storm from Paladins).

It’s essential that you know and understand what spells you have available to you and how they work, including their heal amount, their cast time and how much mana they take. For a comprehensive guide check out www.totemspot.com under the Wiki. I’m not going to go over all of them right now but some key abilities that you may not think about as being heals are important to know. The first is Spiritwalker’s Grace which is a fantastic spell usable regardless of spec to heal while moving. This is great for movement heavy fights or situations where you are immobilized from casting by being moved. Examples of this would be the Mage fight in Nexus where she tosses you around a bit or the Twilight Terror in CoC who puts down stationary AoE damage. It’s great to be able to heal while moving. Unleash Elements has the guise of an elemental spell but it has an effect when you unleash Earthliving. It will do some instant healing and then increase the effectiveness of your next direct heal by 30%. I usually use this when the tank goes low suddenly I pop Riptide onto him and then Unleash Earthliving and use Healing Surge. The last I’ll mention is Healing Rain which is a new spell in Cataclysm that gives us a drop-and-forget spell. It’s similar to the Druid’s Tranquility but we don’t have to channel it. It comes with a heavy mana cost but if you need to pay more attention to a certain group or the tank then it’s great to put this down and let it tick up your DPS’ health while you focus on the tank. It doesn’t last very long and it’s a fairly small area that DPS seem to like to move out of, but in the long run it helps out a lot.

The best strategy of mana conservation I’ve found, by far, is to use Crowd Control. It’s simple, it’s effective, and everyone should know how to do it. Note that even you have a CC that you can use: hex. I’ve used it more than a couple of times at the request of the tank or the group leader to help cut down on incoming damage. The next best strategy is to instill in your DPS to not stand in the shit. This is an oft forgotten but specifically required principle of raiding since WoW came out. It reduces more damage than any healing will. Sadly we can’t control the DPS so if they stand in the shit you have to make a choice, and making a choice in the context defines your skill as a healer. Prioritize! The tank absolutely has to stay up. If the tank dies it’s very likely the party will wipe. The next most important person in the party is you. Many healers don’t realize this but you NEED to keep yourself healed otherwise you’ll go down. If you go down, the party will most likely wipe, though the healing role is more easily filled by DPS than the tank role (depending on the comp of your party). If one of the DPS is about to die and you are about to die, heal yourself! There’s a good saying that I didn’t come up with but it’s handy: If the tank dies, it’s the healers fault. If the healer dies it’s the tanks fault. If the DPS die it’s their own damn fault. This isn’t always true, but the majority of the time DPS have it in their power to reduce the damage they take. Not pulling aggro, not standing in shit – it’s a simple principle that any good DPSer has to know.

Being economical with your spells is pretty easy once you know the spells. If the party is taking almost no damage and the tank is taking minimal damage, I just use Healing Wave on the tank and spot heal and DPS that gets nabbed by an AoE or pulls aggro momentarily. Doing this keeps my mana topped off (I always have Mana Stream Totem up as I have more mana problems than getting enough heals off, though I may play around with Healing Stream to see how it works). If the tank takes some big damage I pop Riptide and keep pumping HW into her. If things get dire I’ll throw a Healing Surge or two onto the DPS or tank to keep them higher than lower and continue on with my Healing Wave spam. This usually allows us to end the fight with me above 50% mana and the party in good health, so to speak. I rarely ever spam Healing Surge anymore even though that’s what I did at the end of Wrath. Always keep Earth Shield up and Water Shield up and use Chain Heal sparingly as it doesn’t heal for that much even with Riptide buffing it. It’s better to pump Healing Wave with enough haste to make it NOT painful. For relevant stat weights check out Elitist Jerks or the Totemspot articles on the front page about Restoration. It’s not currently up to date 100% but I should get a guide up pretty soon with the relevant info.

If you have any questions about healing efficiency for shamans or how not to /oom midfight, leave me a comment or email me (click “About”). Happy HW pumping!

I feel none of dese tings today. I woke up from my slumba wit da screams of unimaginable pain from uncountable elements and da people of dis world. My people. I was sweatin’ more furious den when in da throes of passion and I had a feva most severe. When I stepped out my front door da world seemed normal. Da sun was yet to rise but da trees outside of my little hut in da stranglethorn vale quivered unnaturally. I had visions… flashes of de elementals becoming uncontained, da horrible misery of deir fires and winds, rocks and water bein’ uncontrollable. What can one shaman be doin’ to save dem from deir pain?

I untied me raptor Dezz’ilish from his harness bar. He usually be da bravest raptor I know but he was squirmin’ an’ trying to hide his head underneath me shoulder. I ran me hand down his neck and he calmed down a bit but he was whining, and when a raptor be whinin’ you best be plugging your ears. Dey loud mon. Me gut twisted and I knew I had ta get out. Somethin’ dangerous was comin’. I ran back into my hut and grabbed everyting that was precious to me. Me necklace dat my grandmotha’ had given to me along wit my gear and my bags. I ran back outside and Dezzi was running around frantically. I didn’t know what had set him off but I ran over and jumped onto his back. A raptor’s intuition is one ta be trusted. No sooner had I cleared da front of me hut, a flamin’ rock flew right into it. I tell ya mon, dat rock was big. At first I was angry dat some interlopin’ gurubashi ancients be attackin’ my hut. I only stole a few of deir shrunken heads and some of deir artifacts. Dat be no reason ta hurl a flamin’ rock into me hut. But den, as we was going down de path towards booty bay, I saw more of dose damn rocks flyin’ around. It was all I could do to move Dezzi out of da way and stay close ta cover.

When we got closa’ to Booty Bay I saw a druid. He was fightin’ some elementals and looked worse for da wear. I jumped off Dezzi and started healin’ ‘im. No point in lettin’ a good druid go ta waste. At dis point I be thinkin’ we be needin’ all da help we can get. After he finished off dem elementals he tanked me and we traveled to Booty Bay togetha’, watchin’ each others backs. Booty Bay was up in arms, dey were a chaotic mess. Da goblins were only lettin’ some people in. I talked ta one of dem and said I was an agent of da Warchief.

“Which warchief you talking about?” I couldn’t quite tell what he wanted to hear.

“Thrall of course, mon. I be insulted dat you tink anyone else could be considered Warchief.”

“What about Garrosh?”

“Mon, he ain’t Warchief yet. Let us in?” It seemed I had found da right bruiser. He let us in and showed us up ta da second floor tavern where da other horde were.  Dis is where we are now. I be writin’ this to da rumble of da earth beneath. Da elements still not be talkin’ to me and it seems da other shamans be feelin’ da same way. I’m just hopin’ dat Booty Bay doesn’t get hit. Den where else am I goin’ ta go?

Lightning Shield

I love the new Lightning Shield mechanic with all my heart. They actually made it useful and moved the water shield ability to be used by restoration only. I haven’t investigated a good restoration spec yet but I need to soon. The problem/awesomeness of the lightning shield ability lies in the talents. Rolling Thunder has a 60% chance on Lightning Bolt or Chain Lightning hit to restore some mana and charge up your Lightning Shield for some sweet damage bonuses. Even with Fulmination encouraging the use of Earth Shock and Healing Surge now in the game to boost your health at the cost of 1k mana, it’s nearly impossible to empty out my mana bar in all but the most intense of situations.

Usually, I sit between 80%-100% mana while chain pulling. I hate downtime so much that I quit my first character, a mage, in favor of a warlock because the downtime was much less. I think that every class should only have a minimal amount of downtime, but alas that is not the case. Even before patch 4.0.1 I had no trouble at all keeping a full mana bar as an Elemental shaman. I have tried enhancement post-patch, but when I was trying out the spec pre-patch I had to eat and drink after every pull. That is a magnitude of difference beyond what I think is normal between two DPS specs. It could be that I had a bad spec or wasn’t doing my rotation very well – and perhaps also that I didn’t use the mana regain spell that enhancement shamans had as often as I should have, but the fact was that it took a long time to get through Nagrand as enhancement.

How to fix it? Well I don’t have the context or information to suggest a finely tuned changed to the developers, but I’d say that maybe Rolling Thunder’s proc chance should be lowered to around 40%. I don’t want to gut the Elemental spec of its mana survivability and I think that Rolling Thunder and Fulmination are two of the best changes for Elemental shamans in the patch, but it needs to be toned down so that I’m not constantly at 100% mana. As awesome as that is, it’s overkill. I can shoot off a couple of Lightning Bolts and by the time the LB reaches the target I’ve got all my mana back. Another solution I suppose would be to increase the mana cost on some elemental spells.

Now, if you’re an Elemental shaman and you’re reading this saying “WTF is he doing?! Why would you want to nerf us!” Well before you go get a tissue and start nerfcrying, hear me out for a little game theory. What fun is a game when you are too good. I like cheats that are available in single player games because it’s fun to play around noclipped after I’ve beat the game or to get past a bug or issue I’m having a certain point that nothing in the game will seem to fix, however if you play the game with the cheats enabled, that ruins the fun, in my opinion. Part of the reason that I’m a gamer is because I like to solve puzzles, work out theories, do math and enjoy myself. If cheats help you enjoy your game, well go for it. But for me, gaming is more of an intellectual release for me. Perhaps that’s why I don’t like playing cutesy games or facebook games (for the most part). Now, I’m not saying that what we have in WoW as the shaman class is a cheat – that’s ridiculous. I am suggesting that we need to be balanced a little more. I’ve heard that some other classes are experiencing the same sort of unbalance and perhaps this is a provision in the design of the game to accommodate Cataclysm. If that is so, then we’ll deal with it (happily) but if that was not in the cards and we’re going to be way too powerful for the new content, then I think a balance needs to occur.

While it may be fun in PvP or in PvE to outperform the other classes and specs, if it is too much of an outperformance it takes the challenge away. I for one, would feel guilty being able to two-shot everyone.

Itemization (on old gear mostly)

I understand that it would be a lot of useless work to go through all of the Northrend gear and re-itemize it for specific class changes, but I’ve found that all the gear I’m getting is terrible. It’s hard, because spell mail is a very niche armor class and for that I’m thankful. I know of reforging but I don’t know anything about how to do it. I know that I can reitemize my gear and have even found guides on how best to optimize your end game gear for the last portion of this expansion, but in both cases I find it hard to care about making those changes with so little time left. Now, I know this suggestion/complaint is fairly useless because of how close to Cataclysm we are, but I felt that it needed to be said. Perhaps the class changes shouldn’t have come so early. Maybe two weeks or a week before the expansion came out. That would have given us less time to boggle over the changes and make awesome posts like the ones I’ve seen around the WoW blogosphere and perhaps made those last two weeks not as boring. Hopefully the Cataclysm launch event will be so engrossing that it will grab our attention and keep us busy right up until the new content is available.

Retaking of Echo Isles

I got to do all of the quests but the actual battle since I just hit 75 a couple of days ago. I’m kind of annoyed that it got removed from the game! I’m not a huge roleplaying fan but I love lore and being involved in new events that are helping to write the new lore. I leveled as fast as I could with homework and finals and dissertations etc. but couldn’t get to 75 in time to partake in what I hear was really awesome. At this point it wouldn’t make sense to put the event back in the game, so I’m not going to ask. I’m just a little miffed that I can’t experience the battle of my people for our ancestral home.

Shamans in Cata

At first I was really excited to take my shaman into the Cataclysm expansion. I was thinking that there would be a lot of elemental turmoil and that as a shaman there might be a couple of quests that resonate well with my character and her abilities. After a little while I realized that unless some changes are made, there’s going to be trouble! I should preface this by pointing out that I didn’t play in Classic and thus never raided Molten Core. I don’t know if Ragnaros was immune to fire damage. However, I’m concerned that shamans will have lots of trouble with mobs and raid bosses being immune to our spells. I’m always annoyed when I have to kill elementals because they resist or are immune to most of my damage types. I don’t want this to happen in top level content!

In other news, I’ll be 80 soon. Only 4 more levels to go! I don’t know if I’ll farm heroics or not; I’m not really sure what I’ll do aside from farming Netherwing. I would like to get the red proto-drake and possibly an Ulduar drake, so in that context I suppose I will be farming! :/ Also going to work on a PvP resto spec. Will blog about that when I get there.

The recruitment is slow. We’ve added one or two new people since we transferred (apart from the 4 that came with me) but as Cata draws nearer I feel like I’m floundering while trying to build a 10 man team. People who want to join aren’t what we need for the 10 man, but I feel silly not inviting them anyway. Then there’s the issue of being the raid leader. I can do it, I just haven’t had much experience and with that comes a lot of anxiety. Added on top of all of that, I’ll be one of the healers in our raid unless we find a lot of healers, so that adds to the stress level too.

And all this time I’m trying to find interesting topics to blog on. I like sharing bits of my life on here but I also feel like I’m boring anyone who bothers to read it if I’m not grinding out shaman topics and theory. Hopefully when my quarter ends in two weeks and I go home for 6 weeks of break, I’ll have more time to find awesome things to blog about. Hopefully…

In the mean time, if a good idea strikes my fancy, I will blog about it!

"Uh, Jinra, is that you shaking up the place?" "Nope." "Shit."

Finally, I have a little time to play WoW, which means, wabam, I have time to attempt to entertain you all with information you’ve heard a thousand times! I bet you haven’t gotten a sub-max level opinion on the changes though, so I’ll put some of that in this post too. As a short side story, I was in-game earlier and the world shook. My friend genuinely thought that I was using earthquake and he had just gotten back into WoW so he wasn’t aware of the world effects. The caption of the picture says the rest, heh heh. Anyway, aside from daft guild members and loads of ridiculous homework (can you believe I’m on academic alert for failing a midterm because they wouldn’t reschedule the study session to avoid my three hours of meetings and classes? ) let’s get to some meaty, shamany content.

So perhaps the first thing to do is discuss the new spells that I’ve found in my spellbook. However, before we get into that, while I was gone from blogging for a bit, Jinra took a wild leap into strange new territory and tried out enhancement. I’m pleased, to say the least, though that was pre-4.0 and I switched back to elemental after the patch came in favor of some lava blasting and checking out the new talents in familiar territory. Speaking of which, I’m finished beating around the bush. On to the talents!

I like images, so I’m going to try using more visuals in this post to see if it fits well. Here we go. Jinra is level 66 right now, so this is her talent tree for elemental:

65/66 Ele build

So there are quite a few new things here, some of which are a little confusing and some of which are awesome and straightforward. It’s like there was never anything straightforward before. Teehee. The first thing I want to look at is this new fangled lightnin’ shield that appears to be the new elemental shield. First, in going with our picture theme, lets look at the tooltips conveniently here.

So these are the same old shield we’re used to. The lightning shield, in history preferred by the enhancement shaman, deals damage on hit, consuming a charge. The water shield, historically preferred by elementalists and restoration shamans, acts in a similar mana, but increases the passive mana regen and gives back a little bit of mana on being struck. Here’s the problem though. Water shield is great for its 48 mp5, but if you’re playing correctly, you shouldn’t be getting hit too much. Obviously I’m not talking about leveling here, and perhaps water shield is still favorable for leveling, but in a raid environment, we use water shield for the mana regen and the odd damage here or there that might give us a little mana back. It certainly wasn’t something to rely on. Now with the advent of this talent, things have changed:

If I understand my spell progression at this level, I should be casting Lightning Bolt more than anything else, since it’s our bread and butter skill and has no cooldown. This means that almost every 2 seconds this ability has a chance to proc. The probability that it will proc is good, all things considered. It’s not 100% but 60% means that more than half of the time I will get that proc. Lets make a sample situation in which this skill may proc. Don’t worry about whether or not it’s the best configuration since I haven’t really had time to test anything else.

LB > LB > LB > FS > ElM > LvB > LB > LB etc.

Probability may not work like this in WoW, but assuming it does, this rotation would give me 5 chances to proc. Standard math dictates that out of these 5 attempts, 3 of them will proc Rolling Thunder. That means a total of 6% mana restored (which I’m going to go ahead and assume is from our total mana, though I’m honestly not sure on this one. Each answer would create a pretty different outcome. I feel like it’s base mana, but for the sake of the discussion, going with total for now) which with my current 7335 will give me  440 mana and I get another charge of lightning to build up for the second half of this awesomeness. Each LB is 2 seconds, FS and ElM are just GCDs and with ElM being cast, LvB becomes just a GCD as well. The last two LB have extra haste on them from ElM, but I’m not sure how to calculate the change in cast time so we’ll assume 1.5 sec for the sake of discussion. That means this rotation takes 13 seconds to complete. So that’s about 440 mana per 13 seconds.

If we use the water shield like normal, we get a static increase 48 mana per 5 seconds which nets us 124 mana every 13 seconds. Obviously there are other factors to consider, but in general, based on the statistics (assuming I haven’t botched up, and if I have please comment and tell me so – I want to have correct info in here), the lightning shield talent is a good choice. Taking a quick look at the talent that inherits privilege from Rolling Thunder:

This doesn’t say exactly how much extra damage it does, so testing would be necessary to figure it out specifically, but this talent is really neat. It keeps your original three charges after consuming and seems to make earth shock a good addition to the priority list for when you’re full up at 9 charges on your shield. I’ll be really interested in finding exactly how much extra damage this does. Next up on the list is Totemic Wrath.

This talent begs the question: do I use Flametongue still or can I now use other sweet fire AoE dps totems? Totemic Wrath appears to apply to the caster as well, so the question really comes down to how much extra DPS you can provide with your AoE fire totems over the flametongue spellpower increase. The 10% takes your total spellpower and adds 10% to it. So for Jinra’s 461 spellpower, Totemic Wrath would give her an extra 46 spellpower with a non-flametongue totem out. I’m testing these things in-game as I come to them and it seems as if Totemic Wrath overwrites Flametongue Totem anyway plus it’s got a wider range and more spellpower increase. So essentially this builds an upgraded version of your flametongue totem into any other fire totem you choose, which gives you greater freedom in choosing AoE flame totems for extra DPS. I like this talent!

The last thing to address in this particular post is the mechanical change of the talent trees. There are two ways to come at this change. The first is from the point of view of the hardcore gamer who is only really concerned with complaining to Blizzard that the game isn’t as hard as it used to be and that they’re nerfing the game to the point of it not being fun anymore. Part of me is in this group so I won’t criticize too much, but it’s clear that Blizzard has higher priorities than creating challenging content. They’re most interested in bolstering their numbers and getting more money from us. A complainer might rail off about how this change is just over simplifying the game. News: the game is changing, and most of us like it.

The second point of view is from the new player who’s played a fair amount. I fit more into this group than any other. We see this as a blessing and are thankful for the simplification. For me, the best part is that on some tiers of our talent tree, there is no option really. One could choose to place points higher up in the tree to unlock lower talents, but the tree is so small already that it’s hard not to fill up what you want without having to take too many sacrifices. I’m a big fan of the tiers that lock you into this; you have to get all of their talents in that tier before you can move on. This provides a more clearcut route for building your talent tree and will help newer players a lot more.

Another great feature is the bonus skills you get when you put your first talent in and choose your spec. Most of these skills didn’t used to be available until much higher level. Placing them at such an accessible level will garner more knowledge of class and how to play your character, an issue that has been around forever. Overall I’m in favor.

That’s all I can cover for today, but perhaps next time around I’ll have tested some more things out and can provide better advice as well as a max level talent tree!

If all goes well after that, spring quarter I should be in Prague for 3 months studying. Crazy couple of months coming up! Starting around Nov. 20th I won’t have any responsibilities besides maybe work, and so can become sufficiently addicted to WoW, this blog and the shaman community. Sorry for my absence!! I really tried to keep up to date, but so many responsibilities and dealing with some personal health issues has kept me from being able to focus on it.

Jinra, my shaman, will be 80 in time for Cataclysm, I’m sure, and from there I’m golden! Hope all is going well for you all and i look forward to being able to reenter the community. Thanks for your patience and support. I might add a small update about another venture I’m taking on at my school which requires a post on it’s own. It branches out of one of my articles, kind of, but is important nonetheless and won’t be uninteresting to those interested in feminism and human rights.