Totem Talk: Watching restoration's cooldowns in 4.2

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement and restoration shaman. Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration, brought to you by Joe Perez (otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticus and co-host of the Raid Warning podcast), shows you how.

Last week, we talked about some of the gear options for your restoration set you can obtain without ever having to progress deep in a raid group. This included new reputation gear, new crafted gear, and new gear that is purchasable with valor points that you can easily obtain through use of the Dungeon Finder tool. What's really cool about this gear is that many of the pieces can be updated to heroic gear levels!

This week, though, with patch 4.2 imminent, I thought we could talk a little bit about preparing for a possible shift in how you do things. A few changes as well as a new set bonus are emphasizing tracking of your abilities and cooldowns just a little bit more. Oh, and this week's image is a sketch by yours truly about how I want to fight Ragnaros, dressed as a hammer brother from Super Mario!

Mana Tide -- or just mana trickle?

I've been getting quite a few emails about the upcoming changes to our dear old friend Mana Tide Totem. We talked about this a little bit before, but with patch 4.2, our dear old friend mana tide will be getting hit with the nerf bat. It will no longer grant 400% of your total spirit as mana regen to everyone in range of the totem, but rather only 200% -- quite a big drop, but honestly one that I think we all saw coming. A lone shaman could use high spirit and a totem drop to become a mana battery for an entire corps of healers, while more than one shaman with average stats could chain their totems and break the entire mana curve for an encounter. I freely admit I abused this mechanic in any raid fight when I had more than one restoration shaman at my disposal.

While other fixes are in place to try to normalize mana regeneration, the change does mean we'll have to make a few adjustments to how we use mana tide. We are going to have to be quite a bit more aggressive with the usage of the totem. Where before, you could wait until you were sub-50% mana to use it, you may want to consider using it more often and then whenever it's off cooldown. This goes for both 25-man and 10-man raiding, as well as heroics. Having healed through some of the new raid encounters, I can assure you that there will be plenty of damage to heal through, so make sure to maximize your mana returns.

Let 'er rip!

Riptide is back to stardom in patch 4.2, especially with the new tier 12 set bonuses, where it takes center stage. The tier 12 two-piece set bonus allows for a chance to restore 1% of your base mana every time your Riptide heals a target. Consider that at this point, you are likely past your first haste cap and likely approaching your second haste cap. Every time the spell's periodic healing ticks, it has a chance to trigger. This set bonus makes the Glyph of Riptide worth its weight in gold because it gives you a few more seconds to possibly proc the set bonus.

The four-piece set bonus is also quite spectacular. Having Chain Heal no longer consume the remaining charges of Riptide in order to get the healing boost is really quite good. This means you can roll your Riptides and Chain Heals with near-reckless abandon without worrying about clipping short your own periodic healing.

Now, you should already be keeping up Riptide every time it is off of cooldown (you are, aren't you?), but with patch 4.2, it has become even more important to make sure you're doing so. Once you receive your tier two-piece bonus, you should make absolutely sure that you are using it each and every cooldown. If you aren't doing so, you are missing out on quite a hefty chunk of mana return -- and trust me, you'll need it.

Time is on my side, yes it is!

Watching for your cooldowns on Riptide and Mana Tide Totem has just increased quite a bit in importance, and managing all that can seem pretty hard to keep track of. There are, however, many addons that can help alert you to your cooldowns' being up and remind you to use them, and these addons are quite easy to use.

Totem Timers [Curse|WoWInterface] This is a personal favorite of mine for totem management. It gives you a customizable bar for all your totem needs. I've gushed about it many times, but it really is quite wonderful. You can resize each button and move them wherever you want, and the addon has a full complement of timers. It can be set to give you a very clear countdown on when your totem will be available and gives you easy access to cast it. Really, any totem mod will let you do it, but TT gets my highest seal of approval.Power Auras [Curse|WoWInterface] This is another favorite of mine and many members of the community. Power Auras can be configured to show you any number of things with both visual and audio cues. Traditionally, it has been used to show when certain buffs have become active, and even in Cataclysm, a form of it has been built right into the game itself. It is, however, incredibly handy with tracking cooldowns. In the options for PA, you'll see a tab for activation. There's an option on that tab labeled "activation by" and a dropdown menu immediately below it; if you select "action usable," you can then type the name of the spell or ability you wish to track in the box right below the dropdown menu. There is also an option on this tab for "Show when not active"; if you remove the checkmark from this, it will show you whatever graphic or notification you have chosen when your spell is off cooldown and available again. You can then select any graphic, animation, sound, or even a timer bar to appear, and position it as you want on your screen.OmniCC [Curse|WoWInterface] OmniCC is an addon that I've had in my UI for a very long time, and it has served me very well over the years. This little gem places a cooldown timer on all of your abilities whenever you place them in any action bar. It is compatible with most bar mods, and the cooldown timer is very clear. Size, color, and text can be adjusted to suit your needs and help make sure it fits with your UI. One of the cool things about this addon is that whenever an ability comes off of cooldown, it will pulse and shine to draw your attention to the button. It's just enough to remind you the ability is available, without being too intrusive or obnoxious.ForteXorcist [Curse|WoWInterface] In Wrath of the Lich King, this addon became quite popular for tracking cooldowns and abilities. Not only does it give you a handy listing of your abilities and cooldowns, it has a main bar on which you can watch the icons for your various abilities and cooldowns move from right to left. Once they reach the end, they pulse in a way similar to OmniCC in order to draw your attention to the ability.
Basically, anything you can do to remind yourself to keep Riptide active on every cooldown and let you know the moment your Mana Tide Totem is off cooldown will help you out immensely in the near future. It will help keep your mana levels high, help you push through all the damage in the new tier of raiding, and help you compensate for the reduction in Mana Tide Totem in earlier content and heroics.

So how do you track the cooldowns on your abilities?
Totem Talk: Restoration will show you the basics of endgame resto shaman play as well as how to find the expansion's best reputation gear for resto shaman and tips for easier leveling. Happy healing, and may your mana be plentiful! Tags: class-help, featured, guide, guide-to-shamans, resto, Resto-Shaman, restoration, restoration-shaman, restoration-shaman-column, restoration-shaman-totem-talk, shaman-guide, shaman-healing, shaman-info, shaman-restoration-column, shaman-talents, talent, talents, world-of-warcraft-class-guide, world-of-warcraft-guide, wow-class-guide, wow-class-help, wow-guide, wow-shaman, wow-shaman-info, wow-talent-guide

Filed under: Shaman, (Shaman) Totem Talk

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Totem Talk: State of the enhancement shaman address

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. On Saturdays, Josh Myers tackles the hard questions about enhancement. Can we tank? Can we DPS with a two-hander? How does one shot web? The answer to the first two is "no," and roll a hunter for the third!

Despising Blizzard Entertainment is easy. When things go wrong in a raid, when filthy boomkins and surly shadow priests pass over you on the DPS charts, or when buff homogenization leaves you feeling like there is no reason for your raid to bring you to progression content anymore, it is exceptionally easy to point to Ghostcrawler (lead systems designer) and say, "This is your fault."

The complaint I most often hear used to demonize Blizzard goes something like this: "Blizzard doesn't care about enhancement shaman. We're the redheaded stepchildren of WoW." Beyond just being offensive to the fiery-follicled and to stepparents everywhere, Blizzard does have a history of dealing with enhancement shaman issues.

So today, we're taking a journey of perspective. The Burning Crusade has long been heralded as the pinnacle of enhancement's glory, at least in terms of PVE. To me, it was enhancement's high school jock years. We may look back with fond remember whens and nostalgic feelings of pride and accomplishment, but the real thing will never measure up to the stories we tell about it.

The Burning Crusade: The pros

In many ways, The Burning Crusade is seen as the high point of enhancement shaman in PVE. In an era before buff homogenization, when totems and Bloodlust were both constricted to your party, it was nearly impossible to run a 25-man raid without an enhancement shaman buffing your melee group. Windfury Totem was not the raid-wide 10% haste buff it is today but was instead a mini-Windfury Weapon for your friends, offering them a chance on main-hand weapon attack to proc another attack. We also were the only party member who brought Grace of Air (+agility) and Strength of Earth (+strength) totems. Finally, we buffed our friends with the then spec-specific Unleashed Rage, as well as being the only melee spec to bring Bloodlust.

In The Burning Crusade, we were the exact opposite of Blizzard's current bring the player, not the class motto. You brought an enhancement shaman or your melee spent the entire raid whining to your melee leader that their DPS was too low.

The Burning Crusade: The cons

Unfortunately for enhancement, all that glitters is not gold. Enhancement's potential was limited to a 25-man setting and diminished in anything with smaller group sizes. A 10-man raid like Karazhan or Zul'Aman was not likely to be stacked with melee players, and in a heroic 5-man, you were almost guaranteed to not have all melee DPS. Coupled with the fact that enhancement had no crowd control in an expansion where heroics were designed around having crowd control unless you were best friends with a protection paladin, most enhancement shaman kept a healing set ready to get their daily heroics done.

Enhancement got the glory of being every rogue and fury warriors' best friend, but it was sort of being like being stuck as the perpetual wingman in every bar/party/social gathering you ever went to. Looking at logs for Brutallus, the last Patchwerk-esque fight of the expansion, three years ago, it was very common to see rogues with Warglaives of Azzinoth hitting 3,100-3,200 DPS, while enhancement shaman topped out between 2,000 and 2,100. In current content, a 1k DPS difference is paltry, even "balanced." In The Burning Crusade, a 1,000 DPS difference was around 33% less DPS than the top DPSers. In Cataclysm terms, that would be doing Pit Lord Argaloth in a 25-man raid with everyone in BiS gear and having a shadow priest do 30,000 damage per second while a flawlessly played enhancement shaman scrapes by at 20,000.

On top of that, the enhancement shaman rotation of old consisted of three main buttons: We laid Searing Totem once per minute, we hit with Stormstrike (a two-charge debuff that was largely consumed by elemental shaman casting Lightning Bolt and moonkins casting Wrath), and we cast Earth Shock. Beyond that, we totem twisted. Totem twisting was the highest art of playing enhancement in The Burning Crusade, requiring the enhancement shaman to drop Windfury Totem every 9 seconds. Since it buffed each of your party members with a 9-second buff, you would drop Windfury and then on the next global drop Grace of Air Totem so as to buff your melee group with agility for the next 7.5 seconds before you had to drop Windfury again. Only in between the gaps of totem twisting were you encouraged to use your own two damaging abilities. We also ran a Windfury Weapon setup on both of our weapons, as Flametongue Weapon scaled terribly. This meant more off-hand Windfury hits eating our possible Windfury main-hand hits, further hampering our DPS.

As if all of that wasn't enough, itemization for enhancement was miserable in The Burning Crusade. Since Shamanistic Rage was our only way to replenish mana and was on a 2-minute cooldown, we were forced to use agility/intellect mail, even though strength was the stat that gave us attack power. We had to primarily look for pieces that had attack power as a secondary stat, as our primary attributes gave us none. Strength/agility items like Karazhan's Mithril Chain of Heroism were uncommonly good for enhancement, but they didn't fit the normal gearing model and were few and far between.

Even worse, melee hit rating and spell hit rating were two different stats, as were melee critical rating and spell critical rating. Since we received all 9% hit we needed to hit melee hit cap through talents (six through Dual Wield Mastery and three from subspeccing into restoration and wasting points on non-DPS talents) and there was no spell hit rating on agility gear, we were stuck with a 14% chance to miss on our Earth Shock casts, as well as having a terribly low critical chance with Earth Shock. Also, since we shared gear with hunters, expertise rating was nowhere to be found on our mail gear, meaning we had to look to certain key items like Shard of Contempt and Skyshatter set pieces to even approach expertise caps. Unlike Wrath of the Lich King, there were no expertise gems in BC, making expertise caps much harder to reach.

This wasn't the worst of enhancement's itemization in The Burning Crusade. Case in point: the incredible two-piece Cataclysm Harness bonus, where your melee attacks had a 2% chance to reduce the cast time on your Lesser Healing Wave (now Healing Surge) by 1.5 seconds. That's right -- our two-piece bonus had absolutely zero influence on our DPS. Combine that with the Fist of Molten Fury, the off-hand fist weapon that was designed to accompany our tier 5. Despite looking like our tier gear, the 1.5 speed meant that any enhancement shaman raiding the content where those weapons drop would never actually use them.

Nostalgia can be a great thing, as happy memories are way more pleasurable than sad ones. Unfortunately, nostalgia in regards to World of Warcraft is often remembered while wearing rose-colored glasses. While there's truth that being an enhancement shaman guaranteed you a raid spot in The Burning Crusade, playing one was much akin to being the kindergartner who gets the gold star for picking up all his friends' toys but who never gets to play with them himself.

Because of the Industrial Revolution-esque working conditions of The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King was welcomed with open arms by every enhancement shaman leveling to 80. Nearly every issue we had in BC was addressed.

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