WotLK: Shamancrafting
Okay... I know there aren't many main shaman (other than the resto army) but I wanted to put down my thoughts on Enhancement in WotLK. My current idea for PvE level 80 Enhancement: 11/55/5 http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=hVhhZhxxcoxdIekgzVoV Big points of the build: 1) Take advantage of 100% of Intellect converting into AP, and 30% of AP converting into Spellpower - With Enhance now getting 1 Str = 1 AP + 1 Agil = 1 AP + 1 Int = 1 AP, I'm going to be looking at more "Hunter" styled gear choices. Current hunter gear supports Int and Agil with hit, crit, and AP on it. The Int buff will be biggest because I'll gain crit, total mana, and AP with every point. I should see shocks hit a little harder and have a bit larger mana pool to draw on. 2) Synergy of Lava Burst combined with Flame Shock (standard rotation) and Elemental Devastation - My current boss fight rotation is: SS > Flame Shock > Earth Shock > SS > Flame Shock. In WotLK, I'll modify to: SS > Flame Shock > Earth Shock > Lava Burst (guaranteed critical hit, activating Elemental Devastation) > Flame Shock > SS. The rotation will be toyed with since SS will go from 10 second cooldown to 8 seconds. But the spirit is there. I want to be Lava Bursting when I have Flame Shock dying off (3 to 1 seconds) and SSing when Elemental Devastation is up. In theory, I should have in the low 40% crit range after ED goes up. 3) Interplay of Elemental Devastation and Maelstrom Weapon - Naturally high crit, combined with the 9% ED buff, should allow me to keep Maelstrom Weapon stacked to it's full stack of 5. With a stack of 5, Lava Burst becomes instant cast. It takes 5 crits to build it up. Naturally I won't open with my standard rotation, but once threat has been established, and I have a 5 stack I can lock into instant cast Lava Bursts that are guaranteed crits refreshing Elemental Devastation which in turn should restack Maelstrom Weapon back to 5 stacks. 4) Feral Spirit - I get to be Thrall!!!!! OMG!!!!!11!!!1! Spirit Wolves FTW!!! ~~~~~~~~~~ Alternate Build 11/60/0 http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=hVbhoZhxxfoxdIekguVo Comments to follow later, just wanting to save this build

I'm gonna tame a wolf pet, break CC with it, and blame Stem. That is all.

The stat-->AP changes seem transparantly designed to make shammies use hunter gear. Then they only have three melee gear types: leather agil gear (feral druids/rogues), mail int/agil gear (hunters/shammies), and plate for warriors.

Just curious, why do you use SS, FS, ES? Wouldn't it be more beneficial to use SS, ES, FS so one of your SS charges is taken up by your ES and does more damage? Or does the SS debuff last long enough to hit even using ES after FS?

Contrail - You had your chance to tame the AWESOME looking ghost wolves in Dustwallow. Think that will be the model for the spirit wolves. And I'll still be able to blame CC breaks on the rogues. Bod - Yeap I agree. But that is good in the long run since I'll stop stealing all the rogue leather. Right now I wear 3 pieces of mail vs. 5 pieces of leather. Having more options is always a good thing. Having higher quality mail armor will be better for soloing (armor value), but will mainly be a boost to my mana using abilities. Talliara - The rotation develops during the encounters, sometimes I do get the chance to Earth Shock after a SS. Most often though my charges are expended by Bod or an elemental shaman. I don't see my SS lasting the whole duration very often. Plus I should say that when I start attacking a mob without fear of threat, my start attack macro is tied to my SS button. So sometimes I'm just white damaging and begin the shock rotation there. It'll probably become more important when my SS has 4 charges on it that I ES following so I can get some of my own buff.

Unfortunately, it looks like blizzard is using poor itemization to make early items worse than later ones, so we won't see excellently itemized stuff until a tier or two into raid progression. The BoE and 5-man blues that have been datamined are all things like Agi/Ap/Stam or Int/Stam/mp5, nothing with both Agi+Int, and very few things with 4 stats. Blizz does this because they want items to get better, but they're too chicken to use very high ilvls to accomplish this, so they put more and more stats on each item as you move up the tiers of epics, to take advantage of the many-stat discount. This is why we started seeing armor penetration, haste, and spell haste in ZA and T6, but not in Kara and T5. The side effect of this is that how you play your toon evolves as you progress, which you could see as a bad thing or a good thing. Hunters really feel this because of how retarded we are when it comes to haste, but we also feel it because Int becomes more available as the mail stops sucking. If the itemization retardedness that I've seen continues to the first tiers of epics, I really think we'll be downing the WotLK equivalents of Mag/Lurker/etc in Tier 6.

I rarely wrath on bosses and we are frequently missing an ele shammy. I think that Nuzzles (when around) uses most SS charges, and Thorns and Envenom probably the rest that you don't see Stem. Probably not the highest-dps use of them...

Well then I'll work on timing my ES a little cleaner so I can use up the first charge

Personally, I like the changes to enh and elemental in WotLK, as they seem, at least up front, to address the primary problems those classes have in pvp. I don't know exactly how well the changes will work in practice, but for now they look pretty exciting. If I end up doing pve with Nanika again, depending on the stats I am looking at, I may go either a variation of http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=hEh0qbdetMxsZZEbck0x (49/0/22 -- a decent number of points could go several places. I would more than likely trade a point from Totemic Focus into Nature's Swiftness, but I am too lazy to redo the build). Or, for a sort of quick fix for low spellpower, http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=hEh0qozetMxoZhxMI0VzI (43/28/0), which is actually an ele/enh build. As it stands right now, the latter set up will probably end up being something like the Arcane spec for mages at the start of BC; a quick way to some high spelldamage numbers (from Mental Dexterity and Mental Quickness synergizing with the high intellect of an ele shaman) and do nice damage early on. Unfortunately of course, being tied to a stat that will never really increase all that much from the level 80 baseline you get, means that the spellpower of 43/28 won't scale very well, whereas the build with Paralysis would actually scale with spellpower (and crit). There's also the 51/0/20 build, but Thunderstorm seems somewhat underwhelming for pve, due to the risk involved in an aoe that knocks targets around and possibly into other mobs. That being besides the fact that the talent you need to get to it is marginally justifiable in pve at best. But who knows. In any case, I am more excited about the shaman talent trees than I am the warlock ones, at the moment.

For elemental raiding spec I can't see how placing more points then are needed into Healing Focus and Improved Healing Wave would be worth it. The points would be better spent elsewhere such as to Restorative Totems or Ancestral Knowledge. While the mana contributions from both may be minor, the now increase to intellect from AK would boost Unrelenting Storms while RT would help your party slightly more, assuming of course that Blizzard doesn't mess too much with the totem categories and place something more worthwhile into water. As for the Elem/Enh, it does seem more worth it with leveling, but of course we can't tell much without seeing what Blizzard is going to be making gear for WotLK. Lets say right now though that beginning leveling in WotLK you have 1000 spell damage and 550 intellect, though can't say for certain my ap as elemental but as restoration it is about 312 I believe. With the boost from Enhancing Totems would bring you to about 525 ap, added with your ap from Mental Dexterity, would make 1075 ap and 30% of that is 322.5 making a grand total of 1322 spell damage. With the spec above and the additional 10% from Paralysis would give you 1100. However with the Elem/Enh you lose the reduced cost of totems, reduced reincarnation, 5% crit and totem radius. The extra 222 spell damage certainly seems worth it, though that loss to crit, totem cost and totem radius may keep it from being a viable raiding spec. Though this all depends upon what we will be seeing from gear, the bonus from Mental Quickness may diminish as gear gets better making the first spec the obvious choice. Or it may be the other way around, increasing the amount of spell damage from Mental Dexterity over that of the first spec, making its damage far superior. Restoration spec has been absolutely fucked with from the look of WotLK talents. What it appears they are trying to do absolutely destroys my strategy of watching TV and casting chain heal until my finger is blistered. Most new talents are focused around improving Lesser Healing Wave and Healing Wave giving bonuses from crits, yet by making us take more crit to get a better effect from these talents we're forced to lose something else unless all of our gear dictates crit at a raiding level in WotLK. Personally I enjoy the addition of Earthliving Weapon. As well the Spirit Link seems both good and bad. Linking three tanks together would make healing easier upon all healers since the damage is split between the three, as well allowing the shamans who may now be tank healers to Chain Heal and easily cover all three tanks (In fights where multiple tanks are needed and standing close together of course, such as Supremus, Lynx, Bear, etc). (0/8/63) http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=hZ0x0hZEfxuAeoxobIRx While the buffs to Chain Heal is gone, the added crit along with the new talents may make this a good spec for tank healing. (0/8/63) http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=hZ0x0hZEfxuAxoxorIRt Buffs to Chain Heal along with having Spirit Link. best bet for still being a group healer. Left out the increased stacking of Healing Wave since as group healer it wouldn't be stacking more then once anyways. Now about three talents I'm skeptical about. Improved Water Shield http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=16180 With three points invested it consumes a Water Shield Orb 100% when we critically heal ourselves with a heal, yay!... wait, what? Where the hell can this be useful? And to any spec might I add. Sure we can spam a Rank 1 Healing Wave on ourselves, but what the hell? Cleanse Spirit http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=51886 It clears a poison, disease, and a curse. This certainly seems useful, and for 7% of our base mana it doesn't seem too bad, but half the time we will be clearing only one of these, and our Poison and Disease totems are cheaper then casting the spells themselves assuming that the infected are in our party. I personally will leave the decursing up to the other classes, but if it is deemed necessary you can easily drop a point from Tidal Mastery (1% crit) to pick it up. Spirit Link http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?spell=51567 Lastly we have our big Resto tree spell. As said above it obviously has its abilities for tank healing and other such situations, but notice the one thing about it; "If any target takes a blow greater than 30% of their health, or shared damage would reduce a target's health below 20%, the link is broken. You can only have one link active at a time." Now against heavy hitting bosses this may be a problem. The link may be severed the second you put it up if the boss hits hard enough, meaning that the talent may be for nothing. But then again you can always throw it onto yourself and surrounding dps/healers so that damage doesn't kill Marlucia should he have aggro on a necromancer, lol. I'm not going to touch Enhancement for the moment, still trying to figure out the best way to go with it myself.

Lowers Healing Wave cast time by .5sec. I don't care what spec you are, if it deals with spellpower, that is a talent you want. There are a myriad more situations as an elemental shaman where getting a heal off .5sec faster is going to help you more than any other fluff talent you are going to invest in. Healing Focus is iffy, which is sort of suggested by the fact that there is only one point in it in the spec I posted. There are situations where being able to spam heal yourself with minimal risk of pushback is going to be a good thing (any time you have aggro on something that doesn't hit hard enough to insta kill you for instance). On the other hand, Ancestral Knowledge has its merits for throwing a few extra points you have nothing real to do with as well. I personally am going to go towards the gigantic self-preservation talents, because I have not had longevity problems since I got out of my leveling greens. Whereas there have been plenty of situations in every level of raiding where a faster heal has saved someone. Likewise, Restorative Totems is not going to be a worthwhile investment for an elemental shaman either. The resto's are going to spec that, and the totems don't stack. Those are points that go into Tidal Mastery. With one or two trash points the thing is going to give like 2 more mp5 per tick, and the only way to even take advantage of it (as the stronger totem in the area will take precedence) would be to run way the hell away from the resto shaman to drop it. At current WoW stat levels the spelldamage from the ele/enh spec is worth the crit for pve dps. It hurts burst of course, but would provide statistically better dps. This is of course assuming the points required for 1% of crit don't skyrocket in the next expansion. But then again, we're all just theorycrafting at this point anyway. I have delved only sparingly into the new resto stuff, so can't really provide any commentary there.

Yes, I can agree that a faster heal can save someone, but from what I understand we have 7-10 healers assigned to doing that, not the dps. And when it comes down to it if you want to quickly heal someone, Lesser Healing would be what you want to cast. And I don't believe you see exactly what I was saying about the spec. http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=hEh0qbdetMxsZ0bZybcz0x This is what I am thinking more towards. After placing 5 points into Tidal Mastery you have 2 points left over, these are the points I was referring towards. I wasn't saying entirely ditch Improved Healing Wave, just those points can be more beneficial. And now with Ancestral Knowledge being Intellect instead of just straight mana, it also adds to your crit as well. Or atleast I think it does, I can't remember. And the points to get crit most likely will skyrocket knowing Blizzard. Plus they are combining all critical ratings to just one rating and hit ratings to one rating right? Or something to that effect. Blizzard is just fucking with everything, lol. Edit: Actually this would make more sense http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=hEh0qbdetMxsZ0bZEb0d0x I just noticed that 3 of the points were into Improved Water Shield which is useless in that, while you can spam yourself with Rank 1 Healing Wave when you run out of mana, it should never come to having to spam heal yourself to get mana back.