Segment 50: Add-ons for Shaman

I have been informed that, during the per-class segments, I somehow contrived to miss the shaman. Let’s correct that right now.

The shaman is a hybrid support class, providing DPS via spellcasting or melee, or healing. In addition, the shaman can place totems to provide additional benefits to the party or deal additional damage to enemies.

To help your shaman in his chosen role, I’ve put together a list of some well-regarded add-ons. All of these are available from Curse.com – see the segment notes for direct links.

First, we have SpellFlash: ReSham, a module for the SpellFlash add-on. SpellFlash: ReSham will provide visual cues for appropriate spells or abilities duing combat and out of combat. You can easily disable certain talent trees, and also disable it when out of combat.

TribalEnhancement is a lightweight add-on supporting all shaman specs. It provides totem, buff, debuff, and shield tracking using a “least intrusive” philosopy.

Tyler is a Nub is a simple add-on to remind you to reapply your weapon buffs. It also works for rogue poisons and warlock buffs.

SmartRes2 provides intelligent and co-ordinated party and raid wipe recovery. You’ll want every class who can rez to run this add-on, and then hope you never need it.

Lastly, we have Shaman Friend. This add-on is specifically designed for the shaman and provides lots of useful functions for all shaman specs. There are too many to go over here; take a look at the add-on page, as linked in the segment notes.

Music for this segment is from Jamendo.com and is entitled “Deranged” by Fox.

Download the MP3

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My colleague and Podcast Co-Host Modem might disagree with some of my selections here–especially since he has been playing a Resto Shaman full time–but this is the build that I would personally go with. There is definitely some room for flexibility in the Resto Shaman spec allowing you to focus on some utility type talents that you might prefer.

Below is my Shaman Restoration 4.0.1 Spec

Restoration Tree:
I’m going to highlight some of the talents that I believe are open to personal selection and debate.

Ancestral Resolve – I selected it, but I’m not convinced this is worth the talent points in PvE

Focused Insight – This talent is an interesting one. The potential of lowering mana costs of healing spells by casting a shock spell intrigues me.

Soothing Rains – I wanted to take this talent but opted not to. However, there may a lot of benefit from the extra passive healing of Healing Stream Totem or the healing from Healing Rain.

Cleansing Waters – An interesting utility type talent. Not sure yet of its neccessity.

Telluric Currents – I just don’t know how reasonable it is to cast a lightning bolt when you are healing in dungeons or raids in Cataclysm. Take it for easy-mode Wrath heroics.

Talents which I avoid:

Totemic Focus – This may be situational, but has always felt like a waste of talent points.

Nature’s Guardian – Over the years this talent never proved to me that it was worth spending the points in for PvE.

Elemental & Enhancement Trees:
Acuity – I opted to put two points in this now because Healing Crit is dropping by roughly 4-5%. This will restore some of that.

Improved Shields – I can’t pass up on additional mana restored from Water Shield.

Glyphs:

Prime Glyphs:
These three glyphs appear to be the most effective Prime Glyphs for Resto Shaman going into Cataclysm.

Earth Shield
Water Shield
Earthliving Weapon vs. Riptide – Depending on the composition of your raid you might want to select Riptide. Otherwise I think Earthliving Weapon will be the way to go.

Major Glyphs:
Major glyphs are typically your utility glyphs, but these three all affect healing and therefore I believe should all be taken.

Chain Heal
Healing Wave
Healing Stream Totem

Minor Glyphs:
Minor glyphs are still mostly up to player preference but I chose some because I don’t like carrying extra reagents.

Astral Recall
Renewed Life
Water Breathing

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Healbot is now the essential tool for raid healers. It allows up to 60 keyboard-mouse combinations to simplify casting; these combinations can include usable items, such as scrolls, potions, trickets, etc., and existing macros. Healbot can also track aggro, buffs, and debuffs, and perform many other functions, including synchronizing incoming heals with other raid or party healers. Healbot can also be used out of combat with the “SmartCast” option, to rez, decurse, buff, heal, or perform a user-defined action. Even more functions are listed on Healbot’s Web page.

Healbot integrates with both Fubar and Titanpanel; optional plugins for both are included.

You can get Healbot Continued through Wowmatrix, from Wowinterface, or from Curse. The author’s page with forums, news, and tutorials can be found at http://look4me.endoftheinternet.org/healbot/

Music for this episode is provided by FreePlayMusic.com and is entitled “Universe” by Paul Andrews.

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Grid is an essential tool for healers. Anyone who has been in a raid knows that, many times, there is way too much going on during a fight to look at the standard raid array to see who needs healing, who has a HoT on them, who needs a new HoT, and so on. Grid gives you exactly what the name says – a grid of party or raid members, showing their health status. The grid is clickable and allows you as the healer to quickly target the player who needs your attention right now. As with Decursive, Grid can make the second or two difference between a successful fight, and a wipe. One point I would make is that you will almost certainly want to change the default font size for text within the squares of the Grid; it’s easy, and it will make it much easier to read what’s actually printed.

Enhancements:

GridStatusLifebloom shows the Lifebloom counter, colored by the number of stacks on your target.

GridStatusHots shows your other HoT counters, colored by time remaining.

GridIndicatorCornerText allows you to add counters to the corners of your Grid squares.

Keeva has done a very nice tutorial on getting the most out of Grid, including a couple of enhancements. Follow the link below.

Music for this segment was furnished by ArtistDirect.com and is titled “15 to 20″ by The Phenomenal Handclap Band.

Download Grid from Curse or Wowinterface

Enhancements are linked from the tutorial by Keeva.

Download the MP3

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Let’s take a look at some gear you can get fairly easily if you’d like to give tanking a try as a Shaman:

Helm:
Deadly Gladiator’s Linked Helm (49,600 Honor or 58 Emblems of Conquest)
Meta Gem: Austere Earthsiege Diamond
Enchant: Arcanum of the Stalwart Protector

Neck: Shard of the Crystal Forest (19 Emblems of Conquest)

Shoulders: Deadly Gladiator’s Linked Spaulders (31,600 Honor or 46 Emblems of Conquest)
Enchant: Greater Inscription of the Pinnacle

Back: Platinum Mesh Cloak (25 Emblems of Valor)
Enchant: Titanweave

Chest: Deadly Gladiator’s Linked Armor (49,600 Honor or 58 Emblems of Conquest)
Enchant: Defense

Wrist: Titan-Forged Wristguards of Triumph (15 Wintergrasp Marks of Honor)
Enchant: Major Stamina

Hands: Deadly Gladiator’s Linked Gauntlets (31,600 Honor or 46 Emblems of Conquest)
Enchant: Armsman

Legs: Deadly Gladiator’s Linked Leggings (49,600 Honor or 58 Emblems of Conquest)
Enchant: Frosthide Leg Armor

Feet: Titan-Forged Sabatons of Triumph (15 Wintergrasp Marks of Honor)
Enchant: Greater Fortitude

Ring: Mark of the Relentless (Heroic Trial of the Champion)

Ring: Signet of the Impregnable Fortress (25 Emblems of Valor)

Trinket: The Black Heart (Trial of the Champion)

Trinket: Essence of Gossamer (Heroic Azjol-Nerub)

Weapon: Aledar’s Battlestar (Heroic Trial of the Champion)
Enchant: Mongoose

Shield: Crygil’s Discarded Plate Panel (35 Emblems of Heroism)
Alternative: Royal Crest of Lordaeron
(Heroic Culling of Stratholme)

Totem: Totem of Splintering (15 Emblems of Heroism)

There are always other choices for gear that you can make, but this is a list of some of the easier to get pieces to build your Shaman tanking set.

For pulling mobs, Lighting Bolt, Chain Lightning and Lava Burst will help you pull and build aggro. While in melee range you will be using Frost Shock on every cooldown and always have Lighting Shield up.

If you need to taunt, you will use Stoneclaw Totem, Spirit Wolves on non-raid bosses, and also Earth Elemental when you are in trouble. Stoneclaw totem can also be used for damage mitigation to allow you a few seconds to heal.

Healing Wave should be used to help heal yourself to take some pressure off your healer and it can also maintain threat. Hex can be used both for Crowd Control on multiple mob pulls or when you have no other taunt abilities available and need to save a party member’s life.

This is just a beginner’s introduction to Shaman tanking but hopefully it will help get you started.

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This is not a post asking what I should level up. I’ve taken my own advice and leveled up both of these classes to the 30s. Now I need to decide which one I take up next.

Basically, I’ve made a list of Pros and Cons about each class. What I’d like to see if you have anything you think I should add to the list.

I’ve taken some of the comments and added them to my list.

Shaman

Pros
Versitale (Ranged DPS, Melee DPS, Heal)
Dual Weild (apparently only melee)
Windfury
Interupt – 25 yards and off the global cooldown, 6 sec cd
Bloodlust/Heroism
Can use Shields, and shields look cool

Cons
Lost 4 bag spaces to Totems (apparently goes away at 30)
Limited instant casts Heals
not much mobility for resto/elemental
totems can be great or annoying depending (did the new totem changes, dropping all 4 at once help?)

Druid

Pros
Stealth
Can basically do everything (Tank, Heal, Melee, Ranged)
Flight Form
Cyclone
Better for PVP

Cons
Limited interrupt (long cooldown or requires combo points)
Forms – you get one look per spec and it doesn’t change based on gear
You rarely see your gear – Is this because they are limited to Leather?
too “spammy.” My mangle finger literally hurts after an hour or so on my feral! I hated that on my Warrior with Cleave/Heroic Strike

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If you are like me, you have been frustrated by running into a boss fight and trying to drop totems one at a time while waiting for their cooldown in between. This is especially frustrating for healers because you are trying to get your totems down and watch health bars at the same time. Can you imagine if other classes had to wait until a fight began before they could start buffing?

Our prayers have been answered with the implementation of the new totem bar. Once you visit the trainer you can train three abilities that allow you to have three sets of totems. Clicking the up arrow above a set or a totem allows you to set that as your current set or totem. You can then click the button for that set to drop all 4 totems at once. They’ve also added a button at the far right for Totem Call (with a redesigned icon) for calling back your totems.

I for one, am very excited about this change. No more running into fights like Kologarn or Hodir in Ulduar and trying to drop totems while the action is already underway. Thank you Blizzard.

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No, not those twinkies. These Twinkies!

I haven’t had a lot to say on the blog lately because rather than being focused on leveling my characters, I’ve been focused on leveling and gearing new and existing characters to do a little twinking in battle grounds.

Since the paladin that I blogged about for so long is an Enchanter, I decided I would go ahead and start up a few twinks to enjoy low level battle grounds like I used to on my mage. I never bothered doing PvP with Lexington because I just didn’t feel like doing PvP as anything other than dps and my skill with my Ret spec is lacking to say the least.

Lex also happens to be an amazing farming and grinding machine, so farming for specific items is pretty easy with him. That doesn’t mean that the items I am looking for are going to drop any faster or easier for me, but it does mean that I can do the farming itself quickly and with ease.

Belgawrath (Orc Shaman 36)
The first character I wanted to twink was Belgawrath. I have every intention of doing a lot of PvP with him in the 49 bracket when I can dual wield, but I also wanted to try him out in the 39 bracket while he is still using a powerful two handed weapon by already has Windfury to back it up with some insane attack power.

Even at level 36 with very little in the way of actually “twinking” the character, I already end almost every battleground in the Top 3 on the horde side. I have not yet managed to reach #1, though I have been #2 several times and come close to the first slot many times as well.

The most important piece of gear for an Enhancement Shaman is going to be his weapon(s). With dual wield out of the question, that means I had to look for a slow, powerful two handed weapon. So I turned first to WoWHead.com to search their item database for two handed weapons that were in my level range.

The first priority was weapon speed. The slower a weapon is, the more damage Windfury is going to deal. The slowest weapons in the game have a speed of 4.0 and there are only 3. Two of those weapons just happen to be level 39 two handed weapons: The Pacifier and the Pendulum of Doom. Both of those weapons happen to be BoE items, which allows me to farm them with my paladin, with Pacifier dropping from a rare spawn and Pendulum (PoD) dropping from trash mobs inside the Uldaman instance in Badlands. Windfury is the whole reason to be Enhancement, and weapon speed is a multiplier in the formula used to calculate its damage. So a slower weapon with less dps can still do significantly more damage than a faster weapon with higher dps.

The second priority was high damage. The more damage you can do, the faster your enemies are going to fall. You can’t count on Windfury to proc every time you hit, so you need to make sure you’re dishing out decent damage on normal hits as well, and of course the higher your damage the higher your crits. PoD has a higher top end damage as well as dps, but it also requires level 39 to wield it as opposed to 32 for the Pacifier.

After three days of farming The Pacifier I ended up finding two of them. They drop off of a rare spawn that only appears once every 24 hours, so he’s a little hard to catch sometimes. The good thing about that long respawn time though is that if you find him once you know when to look for him again the next day. The first time I killed him he dropped a pair of shoulders I believe, but the second and third time he drop The Pacifier.

After almost two months now of farming for the PoD I still have not seen it. I run this instance almost every day 1-12 times, killing every mob that it has a chance to drop off of. So far the dice have not been in my favor. But, I am going to keep on trying until I either find it or get so tired of looking that I swear to never step foot in the place again.

Here is a table showing some information about the weapons mentioned:

Because of it’s maximum damage the PoD ranks higher in EP Value than The Pacifier, making it a better weapon choice. The Pacifier can actually deal more damage from a Windfury proc than the PoD can, but in general it will do less damage overall. None of that though takes into consideration the Proc ability on PoD to deal 250-350 damage when you hit. When you add that into the mix you will see that the PoD does have more damage potential than The Pacifier.

If you want another way to judge which weapon might be better for you, then look at their average prices on the Auction House. The Pacifier sells for up to 500g, while the PoD sells for 10,000g. While the weapons are very similar in how good they are, the PoD’s ridiculous drop rate and brutal proc ability make it significantly more sought after than The Pacifier.

Initially I enchanted The Pacifier with Fiery Weapon because each hit from the Windfury proc is also able to proc the Fiery Enchant’s extra damage, and each Fiery proc has a chance to crit itself. There were several times that I scored hits with my attack, both WF procs, and three procs of Fiery Weapon in a single attack. Three times I was able to score a full crit (attack crit, both WF crits, and all three Fiery crits) for insane damage for my level. There’s nothing quite like one-shotting a yeti or ogre that’s 3 levels higher than you.

Right now I use The Pacifier with the Crusader enchant on it which gives me a chance to gain +100 Strength (equal to 100 AP) and heal me for 75-125 damage when I hit with it. I don’t want to waste the Mongoose enchant on The Pacifier since I know that I fully intend to leave the 39 bracket and would rather not waste an 800g enchant on a weapon I will discard for good in 4 more levels.

If I ever manage to get my hands on the Pendulum of Doom then I will enchant it with Mongoose for a chance to proc +100 Agility which equates to an equal amount of Attack Power but also increases my chance to Crit.

Silkendeath (Undead Rogue 18)
I still have a lot of work to do on the rogue here, but after getting repeatedly owned in Warsong Gulch earlier this week, I don’t think I’m going to keep him in the level 19 bracket and instead will push him forward either to the 29 or 39 bracket instead.

As I do more with Silk and get a better handle on how to use the class I will give more information on it. As for leveling the rogue, there isn’t a whole lot of advice I can give that’s going to really help.

I cheated a bit in leveling him by buying the two best daggers I could find from regular vendors (3.3 dps, level 3 required) and enchanted them both with Fiery Weapon (chance to deal 40 Fire damage when you hit). So leveling him wasn’t that hard because those weapons proc all the time and often allowed me to kill many of the mobs I faced with just 2-3 hits. The Fiery Weapon proc is also capable of critting, so it often jumped up to 60 Fire damage in addition to the regular damage from the weapon, so things just sort of died when I came in contact with them.

I used those daggers all the way through level 18 and am just now switching to other weapons with just a straight +3 Damage enchant on them until I find his twink weapons.

Hookum (Tauren Hunter 11)
Hookum is a hunter that I started a couple of days ago and plan to do battlegrounds with in the 19 bracket. I do like to have my own little power trips from time to time and after seeing how easily Silk died when he faced 9 Hunters and a Priest in a single battleground I decided it was time to roll my own.

There really isn’t a whole lot that you need to know about leveling a hunter during these levels. Basically just make sure you keep your distance and let your gun/bow do your job for you. Fire, move, fire, move, etc. Kiting is pretty easy to do once you get the hang of it, and that’s the only thing you need to do to get to level 10.

Since I’m only level 11 there isn’t a lot to talk about just yet on the Hunter. Pets are great, never being touched in combat is great, and the class can be “easy” to play if you’re fairly new to the game or new to the aspect of playing a dps character.

If you need to learn about playing a hunter, there are a lot of blogs dedicated to teaching you. I suggest you take a look at this series on Aspect of the Hare to start off with, and then there are plenty of resources for finding further information.

Posted in World of Warcraft Tagged: Farming, Hunter, PvP, Rogue, Shaman

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