Unreal Realities

I’ve been spending a little time leveling a Horde Shaman on Nagrand lately. Why another Shaman you ask? Well, let’s face it, everyone other class just doesn’t stack up against a Shaman, they are, by far, the best class in the game. I’m pretty sure the word Shaman is French for awesome. But I digress.

It has, so far, been absolutely horrible. The changes coming in Cataclysm cannot get here soon enough in my opinion. Auto-attack and shock, that’s all there is to an Enh Shaman until level 40ish. I die a lot and it seems to take forever to kill anything. And I’m oom pretty much all the time. Not to mention the totem quest at 20, the worst class quest I’ve ever seen.

Glyphs are a complete waste of time. There are no Enh glyphs at early levels, except Lava Lash – which is great because you don’t get Lava Lash for ages. Why you can equip the glyph at level 15 is complete beyond me. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been playing a Horde Shaman today and am in the process of doing the quest to get my water totem. It is, bar none, the worst quest I have ever seen in any game ever. At level 20 I’ve had to travel half the world map – twice! – to get it done. I cannot imagine how horrible this was when mounts were available at level 40 instead of 20. I’m surprised there are any Horde shaman at all past level 20.

Worst. Quest. Ever.

In other news, Nasi threw up the Fraps of our Sindy Heroic kill. The first five minutes is painfully boring and the lack of chat on vent shows how frustrated we were. Rukiar takes control in Phase three and guides us home while Ghost was dead for nearly all of Phase Three. WARNING: Naughty words are used.

The new Shaman community, TotemSpot, seems to be going along swimmingly. There is still a massive amount of work to be done, but Shaman from around the world seem to be flocking to it. No doubt it will soon be THE place for Shaman to hang out.

While it’s great to have so many people, experts in their class, helping each other out though, there is one tiny little thing that bothers me – absolutes.

In recent times I’ve gone off of Eliest Jerks. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s an amazing community and the knowledge amongst the players is second to none but the information available there does not always relate to me as a raider. The vast amount of discussion there is aimed at 25s and you can make certain assumptions there – you’ll be raid healing and you’ll be doing it with CH 99% of the time. Read the rest of this entry »

Short and sweet – very very sweet! Totemspot has been born! A Shaman community website in very much it’s first stages, this will hopefully soon be the home for all things Shaman. Check it out, tell your friends, use it, live it, love it!

Pirates has started talking about classes and specs come Cataclysm – who wants to play what, how can we make it work etc etc. Nasi is keen to DPS rather than tank, Dimble seems set on rolling a Worgen Hunter and Rukiar plans to leave his DK behind to take up a Warrior.

Me? I’ll be playing my Shaman.

To be honest I’m not too concerned about spec. Resto is probably my preferred because now, after raiding as Resto for three-four years, it’s what I know. Oh, there will be changes no doubt, but the basics don’t change. Green bar goes down, green bar goes up. I’d be quiet happy to have a decent crack as Elemental as well and would go Enhancement in a pinch.

All three specs are remarkably different to play but I’ll quiet happily fill any of them. I won’t, however, consider a Mage, Paladin or Rogue. You see, after all this time, it’s not a Shaman that I want to play, it’s Serevok. Read the rest of this entry »

My last post covered the fact that I became extremely excited over the proposed changes to Rockbiter Weapon. Here I am going to look at the spells and abilities that could potentially make it possible.

SPELLS

For your totems you would probably use:

Earth-Stoneskin Totem: Extra mitigation.

Situationally Stoneclaw Totem – Our AoE Taunt and a handy defensive cooldowns for those “oops” moments. Glyph to increase range? Earth Elemental Totem is also a handy cooldown.

Fire- Searing Totem: Really needing threat generation here. Of course you can use Magma Totem for AoE situations and Flametongue Totem for extra spellpower (resulting in extra threat and heals) for when self-healing becomes important.

Situationally Fire Elemental Totem is a handy cooldown.
Read the rest of this entry »

With Cataclysm Beta starting and the NDA looking like it’s lifted it seems like a good time to revisit some of the changes coming to Shaman. When they were first announced I thought they looked ok, but nothing special. Since that time I’ve been thinking about them while raiding to consider what effect they would have.

First off, there are changes to both Holy Paladins and Resto Shaman that intrigue me a great deal. We raid with two Pallies and a Shaman so naturally I have some interest in these.

Shaman have always owned raid healing – with one brutal exception. When the raid is spread out Chain Heal just does not have the range. This is an issue compounded in Wrath with 10-man raiding because the room is the same size as in 25-man raiding. People spread a lot more, making Chain Heal the least cast spell in many encounters. The Paladin/Shaman combination looks to now be about the best combination available for close in raid healing. With Chain Heal and Healing Rain for the Shaman, coupled with Healing Hands from a Paladin (or two in our case) a stacked raid will be able to take a massive amount of damage with impunity. Read the rest of this entry »

It doesn’t take much to get me going and this is what got me started:

Imbue the Shaman’s weapon with the fury of the earth, increasing all threat generation by 30% and reducing damage taken by 5%. Lasts 30 minutes.
( Unleash Weapon : Unleashing this enchantment forces the target enemy to attack you for 5 sec. )
8% of base mana, Instant cast

Playing with the talent trees and its kinda hard to make a viable tanking spec. There is some very helpful bits and pieces, but stuff like this makes it difficult. Read the rest of this entry »

For most of my WoW life, World PvP has been a bad place. I remember leveling my first character, a Mage, and being camped by level 70s in Redridge. I remember Southshore being constantly attacked and the horror of Stranglethorn Vale. Griefing was commonplace and, upon reaching the level cap, I found that I was still easy prey, a PvE Fire Mage was an easy kill for nearly everyone.

My Shaman fared little better – although towards the end of TBC was pretty hard to kill. A Resto Shaman in full T6 might not kill a lot, but I could survive long enough for most people to just give up. With Wrath nothing much changed, even when I Dual Spec’d Enhance. Enhance is terrible at PvP and my gear was never much of anything. For three years, when coming across Horde in the open world, my heart has sank.

This has taken a sudden, and somewhat brutal, turn. Since changing my offspec to Elemental, I’ve become a very angry Shaman.  My PvP gear is capped, short of doing Arena which I don’t do a lot of because I don’t really enjoy it. That being said, with over 1k resilience, 27k health and a ton of burst damage I can hold my own against the vast majority of Horde players out and about in the world.

Many times, when farming herbs, I was killed for spawns, driven away from my farming routes. Now I’m a miner and the competition is much higher. Over the weekend I did lot of farming and was attacked no less then ten times in the space of two hours. Unlike previously though, I did not hang my head and wait to die, I fought back. And I won. Read the rest of this entry »

The other day I tried the random Battlegrounds feature recently added to the game. I’ve never been really been into PvP, with the exception of my Rouge that I’m currently leveling. I tried a bit of PvP on Serevok as both Enhancement and Restoration early in the Wrath expansion cycle, but other were pretty lackluster.  I’ve recently been inspired, however, to try Elemental PvP thanks to Wakdawg’s PvP video.

So, in mostly PvE Resto geared I respec’d my PvE Enh spec to a copy of Wakdawg’s Ele spec and jumped into a random. I found, much to my surprise, that I had a really good time. Ele Shammy seem to have come a fair way in survivability and they hit like a truck. I was running around thinking “this ain’t to bad” when I headed up to the Lumber Mill in AB. There I discovered how easy it is to blow Hoard right off the side with Thunderstorm. I giggled with glee, earning myself a rather strange look from my partner. Read the rest of this entry »