Riptide always in check, I use power auras so i know when it drops.
Glyph of HW is a damn good idea ironzerg, i will have to make up some glyphs.
So far their strat is 4 healers into portals. We get corners assinged, but i find my orbs go away quick (or just seems like there should be more), or someone ninja'd. Do they "respawn" quick during each portal phase? So i dont have to worry too much about leaving my assigned "section"?
They respawn pretty quickly. I've only done it 10 man, so we use the pattern of going front to back, and then by the time we turned around the first 50% of the "front" path had respawned, so we could catch a couple on the way out.
The absolute most important thing is to make sure you grab an orb immiediately before the dream ends, so you have the maximum of 35 seconds (30 seconds in between portals) to get your stacks refreshed during the next dream.
If you can do that, missing 1-2 orbs per dream won't impact you that much. If you have your stacks fall off in the middle of the fight, you're in big trouble though.
I run it on 25 man with 2 paladins going into the portals as well. I have been competitive with them every time too. One thing to remember is to drop your wrath of air totem once you come back out, you can out range it very easily in the portals.
What rotation are you using on the dragon? I personally riptide then HWx3, I'm not quite at haste cap but I'm damn close. I've tried to use a LHW at the end instead, but it didn't give me the oomph I needed. By the end of that fight my healing waves are hitting right around 100k.
Thanks Ironzerg, that is good to know. I am sure that alone will make a huge difference for me next time. I was in such a panic to get orbs my first time!
And to answer you RedDawn, I "try" to Riptide then HW till tidewaves drop (usually 2, not much haste yet). But it was trying... I knew what I should of been doing but I caught myself LHW alot more then i should of been (I blame it on all the Heroics!) Hoping to curb that habit for raids, but for the time being for Dreamwalker i macro'd my Bar2 for (1) target DW cast Riptide (2) Target DW cast HW. So hopefully that will be my answer to my Focus frame problem.
Neyla, the first time I went into the dream, I totally f'd everything up...only reason why I can give advice now
Everyone throws up their first time....
And I hear you on the LHW reaction. It's something I tell new Shamans when they're working through Heroics. Avoid using LHW on the tank. It gets you in the bad habit of bringing it into Raids. Once you start getting decent haste, your HW casts so fast, especially with TW up, it's getting over that habit of LHW fast, HW slow. With good haste, LHW is very fast, and HW is fast enough.
I've just resubbed after ~14 months, and am trying to gear up my resto shaman. Any tips as to easy gear and more generally, what stats are good nowadays?
I've just resubbed after ~14 months, and am trying to gear up my resto shaman. Any tips as to easy gear and more generally, what stats are good nowadays?
As the title screams, GEM WITH HASTE, GOOSE! You have to hit an unbelievable ~1200 to hit the soft cap. Have fun.
I suppose if nova is talented, you could make a sequence...
/castsequence reset=20 Magma Totem, Fire Nova, Fire Nova, Fire Nova, Fire Nova, Fire Nova, Fire Nova
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GrobianWhat's on sale?Pliers!Registered Userregular
edited June 2010
You need a way to hard reset this. The reset timer restarts after every cast, so you could get stuck after say the 5th Fire Nova with Magma already gone in that macro.
I guess I would just do
/cast [mod:shift] Magma Totem; Fire Nova
So you can spam the button if Magma is down.
So...enhance is pretty ridiculous. Once you start to get the priority system down it's basically just lol big numbers. Just pulled 4.1k dps overall in heroic FoS with one piece of tier gear, a blue chest/ring, and a caster trinket. I can't wait to see what an optimal pre-raid set can do
If you're going to raid you need 8% melee hit and 17% spell hit, and you want to hit both caps as enhancement. You're Draenei so it's 1% lower on all counts, and if you raid with a boomkin/spriest knock 3% off the spell hit. You want 26 expertise to get rid of dodges.
You get 6% hit and 9 expertise through talents so it makes it that much easier.
I took a half-year break for WoW and before then I was told Elemental Shaman was the bomb for PVE with Flameshock + Lava Burst. It's also more convient that you only need to swap out a few gear to switch to Healing. I blew a lot of badges getting Charity Epics for that spec.
Two weeks ago I came back on and now my guildies are saying that Enhancement is the way to go and I'll be basically doing 3 times the amount of DPS I'm doing if I'm in enhancement. The problem is that now I have no enhancement Gear except for the blues I was lvling with.
is it really 3X the damage? I've seen some fairly high elemental dps on runs.
Honestly if you are worried about max DPSing, stick with your elemental gear and start saving up for an offspec Enhance set. Once you get enough enhance gear to make the swap worthwhile (when you'll pull more DPS) swap then. Don't worry about it until that happens though, and just make all the new gear you purchase with badges enhancement based.
Personally I swapped from Enhancement to Elemental, but that's because I have a Ret paladin already and wanted to do some caster type DPS for a change.
So I've been playing with RAWR to get an idea of upgrades for my enhancement shaman and...gearing is weird. In my current gearset it would seem that hit is ridiculously valuable, to the point where caster rings/trinkets are upgrades to more melee-oriented stuff I'm wearing.
Not that that would ever justify me rolling on caster gear over someone who needs it, I just thought it was a little funny.
I'm guessing it's just because MW lightning bolts are such a big part of enhancement damage that hit is so important to your DPS until you're spell hit capped.
Two weeks ago I came back on and now my guildies are saying that Enhancement is the way to go and I'll be basically doing 3 times the amount of DPS I'm doing if I'm in enhancement.
Either your guildmates are idiots and have no clue about the difference between the specs or you're horribly underperforming as elemental.
Two weeks ago I came back on and now my guildies are saying that Enhancement is the way to go and I'll be basically doing 3 times the amount of DPS I'm doing if I'm in enhancement.
Either your guildmates are idiots and have no clue about the difference between the specs or you're horribly underperforming as elemental.
As a corollary to this, if you underperform as elemental enhancement probably isn't going to go any better.
You probably wont do three times the damage but enhancement generally outperforms elemental these days assuming equal gear and playing ability, YMMV. Elemental is an easier spec to play well, though.
However, choosing based on guild need is the best path from a teamwork perspective. If your guild is heavy on melee and light on ranged, then raiding as Yet Another Melee DPS (my DK's guild has this problem) is probably not going to help as much as playing elemental, even if you'd do more personal DPS as enhancement.
What forty said. Chances are your guild has DKs to cover enhancement buffs, so if you don't have a raiding elemental, do that, because your casters and healers will want to cyber you and you know you want it.
I'm guessing it's just because MW lightning bolts are such a big part of enhancement damage that hit is so important to your DPS until you're spell hit capped.
Not to mention that a ton of damage and effects proc off white hits. Even after you're spell capped, hit can still help your damage significantly.
First of all, thank you for all the advice that was given. I'm at work now so I'll post my character when I get home.
1) My guild are basically defunct at the moment. This happens every time I took a break from WoW to study for the exam. I'm just doing 5 man heroics with my guild leader when this came up. I asked him for advice.
2) flame shock, Lava burst, chain lightning, lighting until you can flame shock and lava burst again? is that a poor DPS cycle? Yes Totem of wrath, Mana toten, Haste totem, and Strenght of totem unless there's special need like cleansing totem.
3) Choosing something by perceived power versus personal fun is a the epic path to awesome.
4) Enhancement playes like a rogue; Elemental plays like a mage. I got both rogue and mages at level 80. They aren't epiced out thou.
5) DPS is simple and mindless spamming IMHO, unfortumately I just can't maxmize my dps no matter what I do. I follow builds and DPS cycle excately and I still find myself underperforming. Healing, On the other hand, is my forte. I was complimented many times for my healing, getting party through dungeon despite the fact that I'm completely undergeared to heal it. I've kept party alive on the edge of defeat and wipes and managed to somehow muster enought heals to pull through. I have an 80 holy priest and an 80 tree druid. I was hoping I could heal as a shaman too. Unfortunately Shaman healing mechanics doesn't click well with me.
I guess I'll just have to wait till Cataclysm to respec enhancement again.
The elemental rotation is like flame shock > lava burst > lightning bolt til lava burst is back up then repeat when flame shock wears off. Something like t hat anyways.
The awesome thing about enhancement is that it benefits from every buff in the game. Int? Sure, pile it on. Spell power? Alright, that'll help. Attack power? Hell yeah.
In gameplay terms this usually means that in a balanced 25 man you will tear the ever-loving shit out of anything you are fighting. In my shaman's heyday, ToC 25, she was usually in the top 4 dps with the rogues and feral druids. She also brought a lot more versatility to any fight- wind shock is just amazingly useful for fights like Jaraxxus or Faction Champs. I wouldn't really say enhance plays like a rogue- it is far, far more versatile. A good enhance shaman is all about controlling the field of battle and improvising.
In 10 mans you get more of a mixed bag, I feel. You're still good but you will inevitably miss some of the buffs, and suffer for it.
As far as rotation goes, I prefer a challenge, and Enhancement is the most challenging rotation for shamans hands-down. None of them are super-complex, but Enhance does at least require some attention to things like maelstrom.
The awesome thing about enhancement is that it benefits from every buff in the game. Int? Sure, pile it on. Spell power? Alright, that'll help. Attack power? Hell yeah.
Not true! Divine Spirit does nothing for them. And... um... that's about it. Even spell haste can be useful on occasion.
Enhancement is awesome fun. I wish my heroic queues weren't so much faster as heals.
So I was disappoint this weekend. I was all geared up for portal healing Dreamwalker, and the raid skipped it and did Bloodwing instead! Hopefully next weekend I will have the chance to apply the knowledge you all shared with me. /fingers
But on another not, anyone Restro shaman pvp? I am starting to get into it and had a lengthy discussion with another guildie who occasionally pvp as restro (but primarily ele) about stats. He tells me to drop the haste and go for lots o stam and resil. I mean i can keep things alive well enough till I am focused on (little to no pvp gear). Thoughts? What stats should i look for?
Chain lightning is largely optional for single target, and eventually becomes a DPS loss at high levels. Other than that, yeah you're good.
I couldn't ever hit target numbers from spreadsheets or anything either though. I don't know what my problem is.
I think some of those spreadsheets assumed no latency when doing their numbers. Your dps was always really good knut so I wouldn't worry about it
Yeah it just always bugged me. One had a latency setting, but I still couldn't make it. I must be perfect!
Spreadsheets don't account for the fact that there are hardly any fights where you get to just stand there and dps constantly either. Go do Patchwerk and see if you can't hit those spreadsheet goals.
The awesome thing about enhancement is that it benefits from every buff in the game. Int? Sure, pile it on. Spell power? Alright, that'll help. Attack power? Hell yeah.
Not true! Divine Spirit does nothing for them. And... um... that's about it. Even spell haste can be useful on occasion.
Enhancement is awesome fun. I wish my heroic queues weren't so much faster as heals.
Having Divine Spirit means you can go for just a leeeetle bit longer before popping Shamanistic Rage again!
Though if you're in 2pc T10, you wanna pop that every chance you get anyways.
So I was disappoint this weekend. I was all geared up for portal healing Dreamwalker, and the raid skipped it and did Bloodwing instead! Hopefully next weekend I will have the chance to apply the knowledge you all shared with me. /fingers
But on another not, anyone Restro shaman pvp? I am starting to get into it and had a lengthy discussion with another guildie who occasionally pvp as restro (but primarily ele) about stats. He tells me to drop the haste and go for lots o stam and resil. I mean i can keep things alive well enough till I am focused on (little to no pvp gear). Thoughts? What stats should i look for?
Resto pvp depends on what you're doing. If you're doing arena, in 3vs3, you're probably better of spec'ing for healing wave, and gem / enchant accordingly so that you can pump those out quite quickly. Also, you won't have to go for survivability stats so much, because you ideally have 2 mates to help protect you.
However, if you're going to just do pug BG's, I'd probably opt for getting a reasonably big stamina pool and aim for around 1.2k resilience similar to what your mate suggests, and not get a HW build. You should get pretty close to that resilience value without really needing to gem / enchant for it too much, purely from having a complete pvp kit.
The reason you go for survivability in a BG, is that
you typically have little support,
you've got big old open spaces meaning you take more damage due to not having so much cover to hide behind
you can find yourself in uneven fights (i.e. 3 of you defending a flag, and 6 people attack)
Additional things; you should aim to get 4-6% hit, so your wind shears and hex's don't miss, and you need a little spell pen as well (around 80) to deal to some extent with resists (brought about by druids and mages; I should note that it's an odd stat in that it doesn't always help in fights).
Sidenote; healing in a BG is a pretty thankless / frustrating task, in that you're completely reliant on your dps. The upside is, that if it gets too annoying, you can respec to an elemental pvp build and do perfectly fine in a BG with very little in the way of re-gemming / enchanting / getting new gear.
I'd actually go so far as to say that elemental is better "support" in a BG; I'd say you've better survivability with earthbind rooting, and having 30% damage reduction (then there's also that 6% damage reduction earlier in the tree), and of course thunderstorm. Plus you can throw out the odd heal which can or cannot make the difference.
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Thanks Ironzerg, that is good to know. I am sure that alone will make a huge difference for me next time. I was in such a panic to get orbs my first time!
And to answer you RedDawn, I "try" to Riptide then HW till tidewaves drop (usually 2, not much haste yet). But it was trying... I knew what I should of been doing but I caught myself LHW alot more then i should of been (I blame it on all the Heroics!) Hoping to curb that habit for raids, but for the time being for Dreamwalker i macro'd my Bar2 for (1) target DW cast Riptide (2) Target DW cast HW. So hopefully that will be my answer to my Focus frame problem.
Everyone throws up their first time....
And I hear you on the LHW reaction. It's something I tell new Shamans when they're working through Heroics. Avoid using LHW on the tank. It gets you in the bad habit of bringing it into Raids. Once you start getting decent haste, your HW casts so fast, especially with TW up, it's getting over that habit of LHW fast, HW slow. With good haste, LHW is very fast, and HW is fast enough.
Gem for spellpower and haste mostly.
As the title screams, GEM WITH HASTE, GOOSE! You have to hit an unbelievable ~1200 to hit the soft cap. Have fun.
I guess I would just do
/cast [mod:shift] Magma Totem; Fire Nova
So you can spam the button if Magma is down.
Current armory
You get 6% hit and 9 expertise through talents so it makes it that much easier.
Two weeks ago I came back on and now my guildies are saying that Enhancement is the way to go and I'll be basically doing 3 times the amount of DPS I'm doing if I'm in enhancement. The problem is that now I have no enhancement Gear except for the blues I was lvling with.
What should I do?
Honestly if you are worried about max DPSing, stick with your elemental gear and start saving up for an offspec Enhance set. Once you get enough enhance gear to make the swap worthwhile (when you'll pull more DPS) swap then. Don't worry about it until that happens though, and just make all the new gear you purchase with badges enhancement based.
Personally I swapped from Enhancement to Elemental, but that's because I have a Ret paladin already and wanted to do some caster type DPS for a change.
Not that that would ever justify me rolling on caster gear over someone who needs it, I just thought it was a little funny.
As a corollary to this, if you underperform as elemental enhancement probably isn't going to go any better.
Choosing something by perceived power versus personal fun is a very dark path to start down...
Not to mention that a ton of damage and effects proc off white hits. Even after you're spell capped, hit can still help your damage significantly.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
1) My guild are basically defunct at the moment. This happens every time I took a break from WoW to study for the exam. I'm just doing 5 man heroics with my guild leader when this came up. I asked him for advice.
2) flame shock, Lava burst, chain lightning, lighting until you can flame shock and lava burst again? is that a poor DPS cycle? Yes Totem of wrath, Mana toten, Haste totem, and Strenght of totem unless there's special need like cleansing totem.
3) Choosing something by perceived power versus personal fun is a the epic path to awesome.
4) Enhancement playes like a rogue; Elemental plays like a mage. I got both rogue and mages at level 80. They aren't epiced out thou.
5) DPS is simple and mindless spamming IMHO, unfortumately I just can't maxmize my dps no matter what I do. I follow builds and DPS cycle excately and I still find myself underperforming. Healing, On the other hand, is my forte. I was complimented many times for my healing, getting party through dungeon despite the fact that I'm completely undergeared to heal it. I've kept party alive on the edge of defeat and wipes and managed to somehow muster enought heals to pull through. I have an 80 holy priest and an 80 tree druid. I was hoping I could heal as a shaman too. Unfortunately Shaman healing mechanics doesn't click well with me.
I guess I'll just have to wait till Cataclysm to respec enhancement again.
I couldn't ever hit target numbers from spreadsheets or anything either though. I don't know what my problem is.
In gameplay terms this usually means that in a balanced 25 man you will tear the ever-loving shit out of anything you are fighting. In my shaman's heyday, ToC 25, she was usually in the top 4 dps with the rogues and feral druids. She also brought a lot more versatility to any fight- wind shock is just amazingly useful for fights like Jaraxxus or Faction Champs. I wouldn't really say enhance plays like a rogue- it is far, far more versatile. A good enhance shaman is all about controlling the field of battle and improvising.
In 10 mans you get more of a mixed bag, I feel. You're still good but you will inevitably miss some of the buffs, and suffer for it.
As far as rotation goes, I prefer a challenge, and Enhancement is the most challenging rotation for shamans hands-down. None of them are super-complex, but Enhance does at least require some attention to things like maelstrom.
Not true! Divine Spirit does nothing for them. And... um... that's about it. Even spell haste can be useful on occasion.
Enhancement is awesome fun. I wish my heroic queues weren't so much faster as heals.
I think some of those spreadsheets assumed no latency when doing their numbers. Your dps was always really good knut so I wouldn't worry about it
Or the path to constant FOTM rerolling, I guess.
To the extent that enhancement hits things and elemental nukes...yeah they're virtually identical to those classes...
Yeah it just always bugged me. One had a latency setting, but I still couldn't make it. I must be perfect!
But on another not, anyone Restro shaman pvp? I am starting to get into it and had a lengthy discussion with another guildie who occasionally pvp as restro (but primarily ele) about stats. He tells me to drop the haste and go for lots o stam and resil. I mean i can keep things alive well enough till I am focused on (little to no pvp gear). Thoughts? What stats should i look for?
Spreadsheets don't account for the fact that there are hardly any fights where you get to just stand there and dps constantly either. Go do Patchwerk and see if you can't hit those spreadsheet goals.
Though if you're in 2pc T10, you wanna pop that every chance you get anyways.
Resto pvp depends on what you're doing. If you're doing arena, in 3vs3, you're probably better of spec'ing for healing wave, and gem / enchant accordingly so that you can pump those out quite quickly. Also, you won't have to go for survivability stats so much, because you ideally have 2 mates to help protect you.
However, if you're going to just do pug BG's, I'd probably opt for getting a reasonably big stamina pool and aim for around 1.2k resilience similar to what your mate suggests, and not get a HW build. You should get pretty close to that resilience value without really needing to gem / enchant for it too much, purely from having a complete pvp kit.
The reason you go for survivability in a BG, is that
you typically have little support,
you've got big old open spaces meaning you take more damage due to not having so much cover to hide behind
you can find yourself in uneven fights (i.e. 3 of you defending a flag, and 6 people attack)
Additional things; you should aim to get 4-6% hit, so your wind shears and hex's don't miss, and you need a little spell pen as well (around 80) to deal to some extent with resists (brought about by druids and mages; I should note that it's an odd stat in that it doesn't always help in fights).
Sidenote; healing in a BG is a pretty thankless / frustrating task, in that you're completely reliant on your dps. The upside is, that if it gets too annoying, you can respec to an elemental pvp build and do perfectly fine in a BG with very little in the way of re-gemming / enchanting / getting new gear.
I'd actually go so far as to say that elemental is better "support" in a BG; I'd say you've better survivability with earthbind rooting, and having 30% damage reduction (then there's also that 6% damage reduction earlier in the tree), and of course thunderstorm. Plus you can throw out the odd heal which can or cannot make the difference.