How I Feel at Work Today
I love that one…
Knowing. Deciding. Raiding. Eating.
Lunchtime is one of the great times in the day. It interrupts the tedium of employment and allows for scrumptious eating (sometimes). Today I was set for Chinese food: General Tso’s Chicken, fried rice, crab rangoon… mmmmmmm. Then I walk past our kitchen area and someone is heating up an Italian dish and OMG I want Italian! Maybe. There’s a Noodles & Co. and their Parmesan Crusted Chicken Breast is pretty good. So now, I have to make a decision.
What I realize is that I do not like making decisions. I like knowing the answers.
Decisions are about consequences. Weighing benefits and costs. Answers are about facts. There is no relevant facts about lunch-I like both places and I will enjoy eating either. One costs more and will take longer to get, but the difference is negligible.
In WoW we face that same sort of issue. I like being the one that knows the answers, that knows the runs, that knows boss encounters and gearing, and, well, all of it. In that aspect, I think I lead raids well. I know the plan, I know the abilities we have available and I can communicate that.
But the other half of raiding, the deciding half, I hate handling. I hate putting the raid together because it is not a questions of knowing, but choosing. Is person A going to be useful in this raid? I can know the answer is "no," but the decision doesn’t stop there. Is there someone else who can fill the spot at all? What are the social consequences for passing them over or replacing them?
When the choices are made, we’re left with the consequences. When we have good results, that’s good, right? No one complains about getting more bosses killed or getting more epics. But what about when the consequences are terrible and you wipe over and over again on farm content and it isn’t because you don’t know how to do it, but because the choices made earlier are preventing you from doing it? How do you turn to your raid and your guild and say to some of them, "I don’t care what you think, I know you are not ready and bringing you again is going to hurt our chances to succeed?"
The StormSeekers has some exceptional people in its ranks, and some exceptional players. Some of those overlap. There is an increasingly widening gap between the top and the middle- Our efforts to move forward are being hit not by knowing how to do them- We’re not limited by answers- We’re restricted by choices and a guild culture that is not welcoming of the tough decisions we’re faced with. The culture itself being a choice we’re feeling the consequences of, the ripples and repercussions.
What the future holds for the StormSeekers, I have no idea. A lot of deciding needs to be done on both the leadership’s part and the members about what is important as individuals and as a group. We have made pretty big strides recently (three bosses in Zul’Aman, Lurker in SSC and Void Reaver in TK with Royal Steel, and completing Gruul’s Lair as a StormSeekers run (even if half the raid was out of guild)) and it seems a waste not to capitalize on those successes. The future for me holds Chinese food.
Meta-blogging
You know those days when you’re kinda hungry but nothing sounds good. Where any food at all sounds edible, but nothing to Wow you. That was my afternoon when I left work.
But you will never have that problem on my newly updated and somewhat organized Blogroll! Tons of links to satisfy any craving from RP stories, to humor, to intense theorycrafting. Enjoy!
And feel free to use this space to pimp your blog. There should be a box below for you to leave a comment. Impress us and we shall gift you with pageviews, and possibly a link (for anyone not already linked, that is).
Primal Tenacity vs. Nurturing Instinct
Someone asked on our guild forums what I though about these two talents in a one or the other context, saying he hasn’t found much serious discussion of them. I did a quick search of my own on EJ and at Emmerald’s and I couldn’t find much about them either. So this is purely my opinion incoming.
Primal Tenacity is a talent near the top of the Feral tree that increases your chance to resist Stun and Fear mechanics by 5/10/15%. How useful is that? It can be very useful. As a tank, the fear and stun resist allows you to continue building threat on the target, and maintain positioning. As DPS, resisting those effects allows you to continue DPSing if those effects are resisted.
The problem with this talent is two-fold: one, it’s only a chance to resist. Meaning it could NEVER EVER happen and still be working as intended. The RNG is not your friend (or, at least, is not MY friend, freakin’ T4 helm). Two, prior to 2.4.?, whichever patch it was, when they changed fear and aggro, this would have been mandatory for tanking. It was a 15% chance to not wipe a party/raid on a bad fear because the mobs switched from feared targets to non-feared targets. Many classes had to actively avoid fear resisting talents so that if the tank got feared, everyone did. Since that is no longer the case, fear effects can be bad for positioning fights, but are not so critical any longer. It also does not do anything against horror effects and some stuns cannot be resisted (think Maiden’s Repentance ability).
Why would you want this talent? Well, there are two aspects to dealing damage or generating threat. You have to use your abilities in the most effective way (DPS) for the most time (time on target). PT can increase the second one. For tanking, it is a small aid in those positioning fights like Nightbane. PvP is an arena more likely to utilize this talent. Aside from warlock’s Death Coil, there are no other horrify abilities (maybe Drums of Panic?), most are regular fear and stun effects. Since there are many more PvP encounters that are going to subject you to those, the 15% has more chances to occur.
Nurturing Instinct, in its current form, is not a bad talent for the form switching druid. Right at the front, these talent points are wasted for tanking-focused builds, put them somewhere more useful. NI has two uses: 1-Increase your healing spells by 50/100% of your agility; 2- Increase healing done to you in Cat form by 10/20%. Obviously, the first is only useful when not in a form, meaning tanking druids won’t have many occasions to use this. The second is only for Cat form, so no Bear love on that (though, if it did affect Bear, this would be a mandatory tanking talent).
While I have less than stellar DPS gear, I have a little over 450 Agility unbuffed, which would mean a buff of 450 +healing if I switched to do that in combat. That would net me additional healing in the following amounts:
| Spell | Coefficient | Bonus Healed |
| Healing Touch | 1 | 450 |
| LifeBloom (HoT) | ~.34 | 153 (total) |
| LifeBloom (Bloom) | ~.51 | 223 |
| Rejuvenation | .8 | 360 |
| Regrowth (HoT) | ~.7 | 315 |
| Regrowth (Direct) | ~.3 | 135 |
Druids having more Agility focused gear would net more benefit than I would.
The second part, increasing healing done to you by 20% is a little more complicated. Using numbers from our recent Lurker kill, here’s the benefit you would expect to see:
| Spell | Original | Buffed |
| Regrowth (Direct) | 2124 | 2548 |
| Regrowth (per tick) | 425 | 510 |
| Chain Heal (average) | 2287 | 2744 |
| Flash of Light | 1459 | 1750 |
| Flash Heal | 2213 | 2655 |
| Renew (per tick) | 762 | 918 |
| Prayer of Mending | 1717 | 2060 |
These are not inconsiderable benefits, if you would use them. For PvP, this is a very good talent. Either because you are switching forms to cast heals or because you are receiving them.
For raids it’s more debatable.
When putting together raid groups, it is important to plan healing requirements for the damage being done in the encounter. If the encounter is going to have considerable amounts of raid damage, part of the plan should be to have healers capable of handling that portion of the damage. So, how useful is the additional 250-500 health that this talent gives you if there is raid damage? Without knowing exactly how much damage you’d be taking, it’s hard to say. For this talent to be optimal, you’d have to be in cat form taking raid damage where the amount of damage is ~400 damage over the unbuffed healing values so that it only requires one, rather than two heals. If the healer would have to throw a second heal anyway, this talent is less useful. It would fill your health bar faster, but not enough to prevent that second heal.
What does all this come down to? For PvE there is slight benefit to either, and if your talent spec allows it, neither talent is bad for a DPS spec. For tanking specs, PT is nice, but NI is a waste of points. For PvPing feral druids, both have a lot of usefulness. Neither is a talent that is going to make or break a spec. Neither is going to substantially increase DPS, TPS, or mitigation. I would suggest, before taking either of these, you look at your spec and see if talents providing more benefit are being skipped. If you have some points leftover, or if you really enjoy PvP, either of these could be nice for you.
In interest of disclosure, I’ve never had NI in my spec, and I recently specced out of PT. It was rare that PT resisted a fear or stun in PvE or PvP, but that may just have been luck. I have not found its absence detrimental thus far.
A Raiding Shadow Priest’s Primer
Some of the information here is going to be my opinion, some of it collected theorycraft wisdom. Feel free to argue with the first, disagree, even vilify, if you want. However, if the Theorycrafting seems implausible to you, take your arguments (and math) to the appropriate places where they can set you straight. If I’ve missed something, you think something else should be added, you have additional questions, or you want to flame this, leave a comment.
What is a Shadow Priest all about?
A Shadow Priest is a priest who has chosen to focus their talents and gear into their Shadow tree to DPS, rather than heal. Currently, the Shadow Spec is one of the most important raid specs due to the extraordinary utility of the spell Vampiric Touch, which returns mana to the priests party while the DoT is on the target at a rate of 5% of shadow damage dealt. Often, a shadow priest’s personal DPS contribution will be respectable, though not at the top of the charts, but the combined benefits of the mana regen, the Misery debuff, and the Shadow Weaving debuff lead to incredible value.
Shadow Spec
There is always debate over what the most optimal spec is. One point here, another point there. For the Shadow Priest, there are a collection of talents in the Shadow Tree that are "must-have" talents. Aside from those talents, the points can be distributed as desired, though some specs are overall more successful.
Tier 1: Spirit Tap vs. Blackout
General wisdom is it does not matter which of these you choose. In terms of DPS, neither provides any tangible benefits. In some situations, Spirit Tap can provide benefits (boss with adds and having Improved Divine Spirit), while Blackout has no effect.
From the perspective of purely raiding, the marginal benefit of Spirit Tap is better than the no benefit of Blackout. For Soloers and Farmers, the blackout proc can be useful when targeting multiple mobs.
One other thing to consider is the impact of stun procs in a raiding environment. Being an uncontrollable phenomenon, it can adversely affect pulls. Whether that is something that concerns you is a personal choice or between you and your raid leader.
Tier 2: Shadow Affinity, Improved Shadow Word: Pain, and Shadow Focus
Shadow Affinity is one of the most important talents for a Shadow Priest. Not only do our damaging spells generate threat, Vampiric Touch generates threat for its mana return (in much the way Healing does) and Vampiric Embrace generates Healing Threat. A Shadow Priest doing a full DPS rotation will be one of the highest threat generating members in the raid and this is the only passive regeneration available. Other than this, ask for Blessing of Salvation if you get close to the tanks on threat.
Improved Shadow Word: Pain increases the number of your SW:P ticks from 6 to 8. At 6 ticks, SW:P already gains the full benefit of +Shadow Damage. This talent adds two more ticks at full damage, after talents and stats. This is a 33% buff to Shadow Word: Pain alone, and does not count the damage possible from having the extra global cooldown.
Shadow Focus increases you chance to hit with Shadow Spells by 2% per rank. Spells have a 17% chance to miss a level 73 target of which 16% can be negated. With a 10% improved chance for spells to hit, that means a Shadow Priest only requires 6% spell hit from gear freeing up more item value to be spent on +Shadow Damage. If you find yourself with more +spell hit on gear than you need, you can reduce ranks of this at 1 rank per 2% of unavoidable spell hit.
Tier 3: Mind Flay and Improved Mind Blast
Mind Flay is one talent point and is one of the mainstays of Shadow DPS. This is your Frostbolt. A frostbolt that is channeled and has a terrible damage coefficient.
Improved Mind Blast is used to reduce the cooldown on Mind Blast. The spell has an 8 second cooldown, and this can reduce it to 5.5 at max ranks. How many points you need in this is dependent upon a number of factors. 4/5 gives a six second cooldown which conveniently brackets Mind Blast around two un-hasted Mind Flays and is a very common choice. 1/5 reduces it to 7.5 which counts for two flays and an instant (or 1.5 second cast). 5.5 is useful if you have enough hast to bring Mind Flay to a 2.75 second spell, or do a Mind Flay interrupt rotation.
Tier 4: Shadow Weaving and Shadow Reach
Shadow Reach increases the range on Mind Flay to 24 yards. Sometimes those 4 yards make all the difference.
Shadow Weaving has a chance of applying a debuff to the target increasing all shadow damage by 2% per debuff, stacking to 5. This debuff is added to or refreshed by any Shadow Priest in the raid. The math works out that 4/5 is about the least you should go with to get that stacked as quickly as possible. 3/5 is workable if you will always have another Shadow Priest. 5/5 is the fastest you will put it up and the talent point is not a waste, though it may not be the most talent point.
Tier 5: Focused Mind and Vampiric Embrace
Focused mind is part of the mana efficient series of talents, reducing the mana cost of two of your most used spells by 15%. Since much of the purpose of a Shadow Priest is mana, being able to cast more efficiently for longer periods enhances your ability to provide Vampiric Touching to your party members.
Vampiric Embrace… even if you never, ever used it, you would take it because it is the prerequisite for Shadowform. But you should use it. Improved Vampiric Embrace is more debatable because it significantly increases threat generation when it is used. If you have tanks that can handle it, Imp. VE is quite nice to have.
Tier 6: Darkness
+10% Damage? Are you crazy? How can you justify not taking it? Most classes get 5% buffs.
Tier 7: Shadowform
This is why you became a Shadow Priest, because you wanted to be swirly purply bringer of death. +15% damage done, -15% damage taken. Pure win. Sure, you can’t cast holy spells (pfft! like you wanted to heal anyway), but you were brought in to DPS and this helps you do that. This is one of the two defining talents of the Shadow Spec.
Tier 8: Misery
This provides a 5% spell damage buff to your raid. Yes.
Tier 9: Vampiric Touch
This was the talent that took a sub-par DPSer that should be a healbot and turned them into one of the most desirable raid-specs in the game. I explained it above - your casters will love you. This is the other defining Talent of the Shadow Priest, and it is no coincidence it is the 41 point talent.
Outside of those, the talent points can be spent in a number of ways. The current "best" PvE spec is 14/0/47 (something more or less like this). This picks up Meditation (for mana regen) and Inner Focus (for free casting) our of the Discipline tree, and spreads a few more points in Shadow to fill it out.
Shadow Stats
Because it is mostly completely correct, I’m going to quote a section from the Elitist Jerks forum thread: Shadow Priest 101: How to Melt Faces Effectively:
3. What are the important stats for a Shadow Priest?
Spell hit: Point for point, 1 spell hit rating returns a larger increase in DPS than anything else. However, this is because spell hit can become capped, and IS capped very quickly for shadow priests. Against a boss type mob, you will have your spells resisted 17% of the time. 16% of this can be negated via spell hit. Of that 16%, ten can be negated through talents alone, meaning 76 spell hit rating is needed. For every 25 points of spell hit rating above this cap that can not be avoided, you can drop a point in shadow focus to spend elsewhere. However, never itemise for spell hit unless you need 4-6 spell hit rating to drop another point in shadow focus and have an item that gives a +damage bonus with a yellow socket.
Damage: Damage is your bread and butter stat. It, once hit capped, is the one and only stat worth getting in the sense that every other stat is translated to damage to see it’s value. For purposes of other comparisons, one spell damage will be considered the baseline. It does not matter whether the damage is shadow damage only or generic damage, both offer the same value and hence take whichever is higher (if all else is equal).
Spell Crit: Spell crit affects every single shadow priest spell that can crit. Yes, both of them. Only MB and SW:D are affected by spell crit, and they only crit for 150% damage, meaning that spell crit is a fairly weak stat for shadow priests. The current accepted conversion is roughly 6 spell crit rating = 1 damage. Yes, it’s that weak. And it does nothing if you are not using MB or SW:D.
Intellect: Intellect is only useful as it converts into spell crit. Assuming kings, it’s about 20 int per damage. Again, a weak stat.
Spirit: Spirit helps regenerate mana with Meditation (which is getting buffed in 2.3) and also adds damage via improved Divine Spirit. 9 spirit is equal to one damage, assuming kings, along with the regen benefits.
Mana per 5 Seconds: This helps regenerate mana. Good if it’s on a piece, but not needed.
Stamina: You only truly need a baseline hp level on Doomwalker and Naj’entus, both of whom you can wear PvP gear for. Ultimately, don’t worry about it too much.
The only thing I would mention, in addition to this is that, following 2.4, the passive regen provided by Spirit is affected by Intellect in a rather complicated fashion, and the relative values are more important for mana regen than the absolute values of those two stats. The more +Shadow you have, the more mana return from VT, and the less passive regen is important.
To make the math even easier on Spell hit, this table from Shadowpriest.com breaks it down for you:
Spell Hit Caps:
* 76 hit is the cap with 5/5 Shadow Focus
* 101 hit before you can go to 4/5 Shadow Focus
* 126 hit before you can go to 3/5 Shadow Focus
* 152 hit before you can go to 2/5 Shadow Focus
* 177 hit before you can go to 1/5 Shadow Focus
* 202 hit before you can go to 0/5 Shadow FocusAll numbers rounded up to the next whole number.
1% hit = 12.6 hit rating at level 70.
Shadow Method
While some classes can use a simple rotation of spells and abilities, Shadow Priests require a more flexible system. Most Shadow spells either have long durations, long cooldowns, or both! Instead of a rotation, Shadow Priests use a Priority System, where spells are arranged in a conceptual order of importance, and each cast is evaluated as to which spell is the most important at that cast time.
Vampiric Touch is considered to be the most important spell of a Shadow Priest, and on any boss mob you can, it should be up as close to 100% of the time as you can make it. It is important to be aware of its duration, as you want one cast to fully expire before the next one is applied for maximum dps benefit. You want to use a DoT Timer addon to keep track of its duration and allow you to maximize its uptime.
While VT is the most important spell, it may not be the first spell you cast. The other spell you want as close to 100% uptime is
Vampiric Embrace, if it is going to be used, is probably the next most important spell. This spell on its own generates no threat, but does put you on an enemies aggro table. You can cast this any time after the pull, even while waiting for the tank to build threat, so long as you do not begin dealing damage.
Shadow Word: Death can be used to increase DPS, however the resultant self-damage is hazardous at times. Generally, any time your damage is increased (during Curator’s evocation, for example) or there is raid damage, you want to avoid using SW:D.
If you are using SW:D, you are probably also using Mind Blast. Mind Blast is on a shorter cooldown, so I place at a lower priority because it will not be taken out of combat as long to begin with. Also, if using VE, the health boost from MB+VE can soak some of the health lost by the SW:D immediately prior.
Mind Flay is the bread and butter of your dps casting. when you aren’t doing anything else, eat this. Or, I suppose, have your enemy eat this.
Shadow Style
As was noted above, Shadow Priests first and foremost want to be at or near the hit cap. Point for point, spell hit is the most important stat on items. Once you are at the spell hit cap, the only important stat is +Shadow Damage, and the more +Shadow Damage you have, the more lackluster the other stats become.
Shadowpriest.com has two excellent guides to gear. So excellent, in fact, I won’t even bother to summarize them here.
Best Raiding Gear Available
Best Pre-Raid Gear Available
A lot of the craftable gear is exceptional, and those lists reflect that. If you are a tailor, the Frozen Shadoweave set, while not the best, can last you well into tier 5 and tier 6, as will the Engineering helm.
Gems and Enchants
Gems and enchants follow the same rules as gearing in general. Spell hit if you need it, +Damage beyond that. For slots where that is not available, anything that improves your ability to regen mana (mp5 or spirit), threat reduction or stamina would be your choices.
For a meta gem, the current gem of choice is the Ember Skyfire Diamond which conveniently requires red gems, since you will be stacking the "Runed" gems (Blood Garnets, Living Rubies, Crimson Spinels). You should only use a different color gem if the total spell damage you gain is equal from the gems and the socket bonus to what a red gem would provide.
Shadow Links
Shadowpriests have ShadowPriest.com as an excellent resource for all things shadowy.
The Elitist Jerks forums have thread dedicated to the theorycrafting of this spec: Shadow Priest 101: How to Melt Faces Effectively
Apanthrope has a Gear Longevity Chart that, while not ranking gear, shows you the ranges people actually use it in.
He also has some interesting thoughts on Shackle and Mind Control.
How to Not Suck at Shaman, Enhancement Edition: The Stats You Need and Why They Play Well Together
Introduction
Talent Specs and Important Abilities
The Stats You Need and Why They Play Well Together
The Shock and Awe of Shocks and Windfury: A How-to
Beating Other People With Sticks: Totems and Synergy
Enhancement Fashion: Loving Leather
It would be nice if this could be simply described. Get hit to x; get expertise to y; get crit to z. Unfortunately, Enhancement Shaman DPS is based on some complicated interactions of all of those elements. Judging from my own and others reports, regular melee attacks will be about 40% of your dps, Windfury will be 30%, Stormstrike, Earth Shock, and Flame Shock being the remainder.
Some stats benefit all of those (assuming the Mental Quickness talent), such as AP. Some benefit some but not others (hit and expertise). Some are a waste (spell stats).
The problem with being able to simply say that one crit rating gives you as much dps as 1.4 AP (made up numbers, by the way) is Windfury. As written, it is a normalized ability: by adding swings and AP it doesn’t favor any weapon speed at all. However, it has an internal 3 second cooldown that makes if function like an unnormalized ability, leaving it in a complicated place.
Without going into specific theorycrafting we can make some generalizations. Many Enhancement Shaman abilities are based on critical strikes. Flurry and Unleashed Rage both occur at a critical strike, as does the Focused effect. Roughly 80% of your dps is capable of a melee critical strike, so 1% increase in critical strike chance is .8% increase in DPS just from critical strike damage. The additional benefits of Flurry and Unleashed Rage improve that in ratios that differ depending on what your stats are at that time. AP benefits everything: it is always worthwhile.
Hit and Expertise sit in very strange positions. Going with a typical Enhancement/Resto build, you will have a 9% increased chance to hit while dual-wielding. With the way the attack table works in WoW, a normal single weapon attack has a 9% miss chance against level 73 targets (raid bosses). This means that Hit Rating, which only counters miss chance, won’t help 60% of your dps (Windfury, Stormstrike, and shocks). Ordinarily, a 1% increase in hit is nearly a 1% increase in damage, not so for Shaman. Expertise is slightly more beneficial since it counters dodge and parry, which will benefit 80-90% of your DPS. Only if attacking from the front of a mob, though, and most of the time you should be attacking from behind. It ends up more beneficial than hit rating, but not by much, and it’s tough to get much of it with current itemization.
Haste, like hit, only improves normal melee damage. It does enhance dps but due to the three second cooldown on Windfury, interactions of passive haste, weapon speed, flurry, and active hastes such as Heroism can result in poor swing times to maximize Windfury. It is thought that the dps gains from melee damage exceed dps loss due to Windfury existing outside the cooldown longer than it needs to.
Spell Stats are completely worthless, avoid them. Intellect, though, has an indefinable value. Like stamina, you need enough of it. Most accurately, 30% of your dps needs it. Normal mlee and Windfury chug along even without mana, and Shamanistic Rage is used to regain mana and scales with AP. More AP = more mana back.
In terms of what stats to look for, a general rule is to focus on Crit chance until you have35-40% buffed crit chance. Keeping Unleashed Rage and Flurry active as often as possible require crit chance in that range. More adds to DPS but provides diminishing returns on the crit-based effects. AP scales damage linearly. 14 AP provides 1 weapon DPS. Shaman only get AP from Strength (1 strength yielding 2 AP) and AP. For an enhancement Shaman Agility is only used to provide crit chance. More AP is always better. Beyond Crit and AP, Haste and Expertise are not bad, hit is not bad.
The only way to really know what stats should be pursued, is to use Yo’s simulator: Crazy Shaman’s DPS & AEP calculator. Because of the interactions of all of those effects, no simple formula can weight the stats. The simulator uses what we know of combat in WoW to run a simulated combat and look at the results.
The way to use it is enter your current stats in the list on the left side. These should be your base stats, unbuffed, from your character sheet. Check the Victim, Procs & Stuff, and Buffs & Debuffs tabs to make sure it has accurate information for the situation you will be DPSing in: if you will never have Blessing of Kings, don’t select it. If you will always have a feral druid, select Leader of the Pack, etc. Once everything is setup correctly, set your hours to something over 10000, select ‘Find EP Weights,’ and click Theorycraft!. Depending on the speed of your computer, it will process the simulated combat hours and generate the information on the right pane, detailing the EP Weights (enhancement points) of each stat. The stat with the highest EP value should generate the most DPS increase for you. This is the most accurate way to determine benefit without extensive testing in game. Unfortunately, the numbers will only remain valid for very small changes in the stats they are based on, so once there are differences, the simulator needs to be run again.
As you can see from the pic above, my best bet right now is pulling in some more expertise, then strength, then crit rating. Looks like it may be time to farm for the Shard of Contempt.
How to Not Suck at Shaman, Enhancement Edition: Introduction
Being a pretty committed member of the alliance, I had very little reason to care about the mechanics of Shaman before Burning Crusade. Aside from my hatred of them in PvP where they killed my poor little shadow-priest in about two seconds, I never encountered them. With the addition of the Draenei in Burning Crusade, and allowing them to be Shaman, the Alliance had to deal with integrating a new class with a new set of abilities into its mechanics, much as, I’m sure, the Horde did with Paladins.
Release day I rolled a Shaman and was pretty set on enhancement; I already had a caster so elemental was redundant and I don’t much care for healing. However, the complete lack of any role models or mentors in the play of shaman was quickly apparent. The changes to mechanics with 2.0 were still being learned even by the experienced Shaman horde side. After learning a lot of it the hard way and perusing the official forums (and more recently Elitist Jerks) I’ve gotten a handle on how to shaman.
This guide is not a guide on how to min-max an enhancement shaman for tier six or sunwell raiding. I hope anyone at that level would know as much or more than me about the needs of raids and synergies at that point. Rather, this is for shaman new to 70 or just starting raiding 
that might not have a more experienced shaman to learn from. I’m starting with Enhancement because that is what I play, but eventually, all three specs will be covered. There will be five parts to this guide:
Talent Specs and Important Abilities
The Stats You Need and Why They Play Well Together
The Shock and Awe of Shocks and Windfury: A How-to
Beating Other People With Sticks: Totems and Synergy
Enhancement Fashion: Loving Leather
How to Not Suck at Shaman, Enhancement Edition: Talent Specs and Important Abilities
Introduction
Talent Specs and Important Abilities
The Stats You Need and Why They Play Well Together
The Shock and Awe of Shocks and Windfury: A How-to
Beating Other People With Sticks: Totems and Synergy
Enhancement Fashion: Loving Leather
You might think it would be obvious that an Enhancement Shaman would have their talent points solidly in the Enhancement tree, but I though it would be obvious enchants that only proc off melee attacks are less than thrilling for hunters… what do I know? The Enhancement tree provides a lot of talents that enhance a shaman’s ability to engage in melee combat (mmmmmm bad puns). Not all of the tree is equally important, and there are some variations in spec, but here are the key talents:
Tier 1: Both pretty terrible. Take Ancestral Knowledge because more mana is good and you won’t be using a shield.
Tier 2: Thundering Strikes. 5% more chance to crit. This is pure win.
That gives you ten points, but the next important talent requires 15. To fill in the gap I suggest 
Shamanistic Focus (your high crit rates should keep this buff up for most of your shocks and makes it more mana efficient), Enhancing Totems (an additional 15% to Strength of Earth and Grace of Air isn’t a huge benefit, but it is a benefit when you use the totems), and Improved Ghost Wolf (instant cast Ghost Wolf… well, it’s the best of the bunch in my opinion). Instead of Improved Ghost Wolf, you might consider Guardian Totems, while Stoneskin and Windwall are totems I hardly ever use, the reduced cooldown on Grounding Totem has some benefit.
Tier 4: Flurry. After dealing a critical strike, your next three swings occur 30% faster. Much like Shamanistic Focus, your high crit rates will keep this buff active, effectively increasing your melee attack speed by 30% for a close to 30% increase to melee dps.
Tier 5: Here we start to have so much awesomeness it’s hard to pick and choose. We want them all! And we will take them. All of the talents from here to the bottom of the tree.
Spirit Weapons: Screw the parry, this is 30% threat reduction. Without this talent, you will over-aggro and die.
Elemental Weapons: Windfury is going to account for roughly 35-40% of your dps. Without this talent, that drops to 25% or so, without being replaced. This talent is an almost 15% dps boost.
Improved Weapon Totems: Sadly, this is a talent you will not benefit from, but one of your key roles is carrier of Windfury totem and this improves that totems and thence DPS that totem provides. A nice buff to raid dps.
Tier 6: Take them both, they are nice buffs for DPS.
Tier 7: Stormstrike alone will contribute about 10% of your DPS and buff damage from Earth Shock. Dual Wielding is a huge boost to DPS on its own, and Dual Wield Specialization increases chance to hit while dual wielding by 6%.
Tier 8: Unleashed Rage. With this talent, every time you crit, you buff your party with 10% additional melee AP. Not ten percent of your AP, but their AP. This is a buff that scales to be even better the better geared melee dps is in your raid.
Tier 9: Shamanistic Rage. Most of the stats you want as an Enhancement Shaman are not going to come with large amounts of Intelligence or Mana per 5. While the damage reduction is nice, this talent is all about mana regen and you will need it. Use it early, use it often.
Taking those talents will find you with 45 points in Enhancement and look rather like this. While you could throw the remaining 16 points to flesh out the tree, there is much more benefit to taking synergistic talents from the other trees. Both the Elemental and Restoration trees have useful talents. In the Elemental Tree you would spend your 16 points on Convection and Concussion for more damaging, more mana efficient shocks; Elemental Focus because it is a one talent point proc that will sometimes improve mana efficiency, and Reverberation to speed up your shock rotation from 12 to 10 seconds. A build like this improves your magic based dps from shocks, but I feel is weaker than spending the points in Restoration.
Putting 16 points in Restoration gives you Tidal Focus for more mana efficient heals (you will be healing yourself from time to time, perhaps even healing others), Totemic Focus to reduce the mana cost of Totems by 25% (Buy 3 totems get 1 free!), and Nature’s Guidance to improve
your chance to hit with attacks and spells by 3%. Nature’s Guidance and Dual Wield Specialization together provide 9% bonus to hit while dual wielding which is all the time. While this will be more completely covered when I talk about Stats, a 9% bonus to hit means your special attacks should never miss, Windfury and Stormstrike being those special attacks. That leaves three talent points you can spend as you please and I favor Totemic Mastery for wider totem radius and Improved Reincarnation so you can come back from the dead 33% faster. This is a pretty typical build, 0/45/16.
Enhancement Shaman gain most of their abilities from their talents, not from trainers. Totems are a nice party buff and shocks are a significant portion of Enhancement Shaman DPS. Heroism / Bloodlust is a great boost to party DPS and can sometimes make the difference between a kill and a wipe.
The High King Lives!
Despite facing the awesome wrath of a raid of eight glaring from outside his cave. Yep, we ended up 17 people short to attempt Gruul’s Lair. So we decided to kill some trolls instead.
We spent a lot of time talking and waiting for people to get mana back and all that, so we missed the first timer. We missed it by less than ten minutes, so I think we can do it once everyone is on the same page. Pretty easy tank and spank, got the same silly robes that dropped the first and only previous time StormSeekers had killed Nalorakk. A nice, morale boosting one-shot to counteract some of the disappointment of not doing a 25 man raid.
Then we clear over to Akil’Zon. We tried the gauntlet, twice. Utter failure, twice. Our DPS needs to get much better at assisting to get targets instead of just hitting whatever. After that, we used a phase-shifted imp to pull the tempest down the hill so we could avoid the spawning adds. After all, “If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying….” (that’s just about become my favorite quote now). Then we get to Akil’Zon. since I’m in just about the least progressed guild in WoW, I’ll assume most of you know how the fight goes, and for those of you who don’t waste your time in 10-man raids where the rewards don’t do you any good, here’s the WoWWiki link.
For a little perspective, we have some people who still have problems with “Don’t move during Flame Wreathe,” and “Run out during enfeeble,” so we tried to minimize the difficulty of the electrical storm by having everyone collapse to the tank a few seconds before. Tried five seconds, no one has to run that far. Wiped. Twice. Tried eight seconds (after reminding people that two attempts makes for no progression and it takes work) and wiped again. And again. But that time we got him to 3% before someone couldn’t run in.
A few more middling attempts, lost a couple of people. Attempt Nine:
We got the bastard down. No deaths. No one freaking out about being out of mana. (Though, most inadvertently, I tanked for one phase between electrical storms, oops.) Executioner and a Chestguard of Hidden Purpose. Stormseekers are now 2/6 in ZA.
PlusHeal.com!
New Healing Community: PlusHeal.com
Several of the most prominent WoW bloggers have gotten together and launched a community for healers: Plusheal.com, brought to you by:
Anna of Too Many Annas
Auzara of Chick GM
Lume of Lume the Mad
Matticus of World of Matticus
Nuetralise of Spirit is Your Friend
Siha of Banana Shoulders
Wyn of World of Matticus
(I sorted the list alphabetically - this is no expression of favoritism in the order)
Auzara and Matticus have introductions up about the forum-based community, but the best way to learn about it is to go, now, right now, and meet the authors on their blogs and meet the community they’ve started. Now if only there were places people could go to learn more about Paladin tanking, or tanking in general. Or Shadowpriesting. Or Feral Druiding. Or Rogueing. Or Rogueing. Or Huntering, and because hunters are so interesting, maybe even more Huntering. How amazing would it be for those sorts of resources to be freely available. You know, if anyone knows of any of those resources, let me know, and I’ll try and help get the word out.
Edit: Auzara, thanks for stopping by and yes, it is a shame that DPS Casters don’t have anywhere either.
