Thunderstruck: How does I make talents?

Tristan “Trustyn” Johnson is a shaved 300 lb gorilla trained from an early age to press buttons based off the outcome of some charts. Miraculously this attempt to train a gorilla to play wow has created a type of sentience in the creature and since then he has picked up blogging and podcasting, and writing about the only thing he knows, elemental shamans here on Thunderstruck.

Talents… Talents talents talents. Yes they are special little points; so useful and jubilant, and just fun fun fun aren’t they? Now if you’ve been living under a rock for the last 2 months you might have missed that the expansion coming down the turnpike is actually doing a revamp of the talent system, but that’s not the focus of this day’s article.

The article today is talents and which are good and which are bad. If you want to bypass the article and want a tl;dr version of the build without the explanation, go here and simply copy down. For the rest of you, let’s explain tier by tier.

Tier I

This is a pretty great tier with two 5-point talents and you basically want to get both right away. Convection, which is a flat out mana cost reduction to your elemental spells used to be kind of meh, and usually avoided, but since 3.2.2 and the buff to CL, you’ll want this to keep your blue bar going as long as possible. The second is this crazy talent called concussion that gives a 5% increase to all your elemental core spells. Highly essential, but highly yawn.

Tier II

There is only really one good talent this tier (RIP picking up Elemental Warding, that was so nice) and that’s the three point Call of Flame talent. It is a buff to lava burst and a huge buff to fire totems. Now that sounds pointless for those who have to drop totem of wrath, but the lava burst buff is worth it. And if you are not using a totem of wrath this means you can get a lot more out of your magma totem. This will be a little sexier with the 3.3 addition of Fire Nova.

Tier III

Two talents here, first of all we got Elemental Focus. Not only is this always up, great for your longevity, but it also buffs your dps further down the tree and unlocks several important talents. We also have Elemental Fury which will make crits go from 150% spell damage to 250%, for a class with a spell with 100% crit, this is very VERY nice.

Tier IV

Eye of the Storm is the only great talent here, but what a talent it is. Take notice in a raid situation how many times you are casting and doing damage and try to say that pushback resistance is not useful.

Tier V

Everything here is awesome, take it all. Elemental Reach so you can put some more distance from the things you damage. Call of Thunder because we all want a free 5% crit and it unlocks a good talent further down. Finally you have Unrelenting Storm, a scaling MP5 buff based on your intellect. I wish it was spellpower like resto shamans got but I’ll take what I can get.

Tier VI

Another TAKE IT ALL tier with Elemental Precision. Lightning Mastery is a pretty little talent that reduces the cast time on lightning bolt, chain lighting, and very curious to its name, lava burst.

Tier VII

Tired being told to take every talent in the tier yet? We got the big elemental cooldown Elemental Mastery, and instant cast spell and a 15% crit buff every 3 minutes (or sooner with the spiffy new 2-piece Tier 10 bonus). We also want Storm, Earth and Fire because more chain lightnings and more flame shock dot damage is our friend.

Tier VIII

Guess what? Take it all again here. We got Booming Echos giving us a reduced flame shock cooldown and increased initial damage on it. Plus for the occasional times you kite it buffs frost shock too. Elemental Oath, one of your raid buffs AND a 10% increase in spell damage if Elemental focus has procced. And we have Lightning Overload. Now what is better than casting a lightning bolt? Casting two lightning bolts at the same time. Get this talent.

Tier IX

You don’t need every talent point this time, but close. You want to pick up the legendary elemental spell Totem of Wrath if you like getting raid spots. Lava Flows gives a cool pvp buff and increases the critical strike bonus of Lava Burst by another 24%, taking us up to 274%..

Tier X

Shamanism! This talent is so awesome. It gives you a 15% increase in the amount of spellpower gained from bonus spellpower to chain lightning and lightning bolt. It does the same for lava burst for a whopping 20%. This is a huge damage buff.

Tier XI

Thunderstorm is a great move for regaining mana and is an awesome AoE, grab it grab it grab it!!!! SOME KIND OF SEXUAL REFERENCE!

Enhancement

Yes you should spend your remaining points in the Enhancement tree, trust me, some of this stuff is worth it.

Tier I

Ancestral Knowledge, 10% intellect buff… better than nothing.

Tier II

Thundering Strikes, a flat 5% crit buff, I’m not complaining.

Tier III

The final tier. These are the voyages of the… no we got two good talents here, one more so than the other. We have the sort of meh talent, but still really good Shamanistic Focus which cuts the mana cost of shocks in half. And last but not least we have Elemental Weapons; a talent that increases the spellpower you get from your flametongue imbue by 30%.

That’s all for talents, be sure to check in next week for a little bit of a shorter article where we will talk the oh so fun topic of glyphs.

Thunderstruck: The Elemental Cole's Notes

Tristan “Trustyn” Johnson is the blogger and host for The Elitists Podcast, a weekly Blizzard news podcast. He also gets down and dirty competing for top US spots for high end raid boss kills on his Shaman. This is Thunderstruck: a weekly article about the elemental tree, from the basic to the cutting edge in what everyone playing an elemental shaman or raiding with one should know.

Hello Healing Way readers and welcome to the first installment of a hopefully ongoing regular article on the strange and mysterious Totem of Wrath. It has been long theorized that these strange totems seen in raids may actually have Shamans attached to them. Upon first hearing this rumor I immediately went to WoWHead to search for this elusive type of Shaman.

My search led me to legends about a mystical talent tree, mysteriously unknown, where Shamans actually do a bulk of damage by casting spells at their enemies, and on top of that, they are powerful additions to their raids, but almost nobody has ever seen these “elemental” Shamans alive. So readers, what is this elemental tree and what would you need to know about them and their capabilities in your raid group?

First and most basic of all, elemental is the casting tree. Elemental Shamans don’t heal, or melee, or tank (though we do have shields). Elemental is in the same caster-hybrid basket as our friends the moonkins and shadow priests. Our role in its basest form is a balance of a decent amount of ranged dps, coupled with the very powerful raid buffs of a dps hybrid and the typical buffs of any shaman. So what are the major buffs an elemental shaman gives and who do they compete with?

Totem of Wrath: The iconic buff and spell of the elemental shaman is this very nifty fire totem. The buffs it provides are actually two fold. The first is a raid-wide 280 Spellpower buff. The only class that can match this is the demonology warlock and really, when was the last time you saw a felguard in a raid? The second buff is an AoE crit debuff that increases crit chances on any mob within 40 yards of it. Now this debuff is the same and not shared with the assassination rogue talent Master Poisoner and the retribution talent Heart of the Crusader, but, and this is a very big but, none of these other competitors can come close to giving this effect as evenly and to the same amount of targets as the great and powerful Totem. It is more or less why elemental gets raid spots.

Elemental Oath: An often-overlooked buff by elemental is a 10 second 5% spell crit buff aura given every time the elemental shaman lands a crit. This is usually overshadowed by moonkins, but it is a very good thing to note when playing the very fun game of stacking raids for the most amounts of buffs.

Other Shaman Totems: On top of Totem of Wrath, the elemental shaman also has its earth, water, and air totems wide open to add another round of totemy goodness to a fight. In a typical raid, one more healing stream, resist totem, or backup strength of earth, stoneskin, or even windfury is all available or more accessible to the raid.

Bloodlust / Heroism: For a shaman blog, this is a bit of a no brainer, but if you do not have an enhancement shaman in the raid, an elemental shaman casting Bloodlust / heroism can actually be a real treat, saving the resto shamans a good chunk of precious mana.

As far as competing with them for gear, keep in mind that the elemental shaman has peculiar itemization, and should not be treated like the typical caster. The most peculiar thing is the de-emphasis on crit. Elemental deals a lot of damage from Lava Burst, which has a 100% chance to crit, and despite the tier 8 set bonuses and the new flame shock glyph, crit is just not going to be as powerful as haste and spellpower.

That is about all the basics of elemental you’ll need to know if you aren’t one, but this article series is far from over. I have a lot of ideas for articles helping our elemental friends be the best they can be and keep you informed on the latest in discussion on their development. Next week will be a discussion of talents and the elemental talent setups.

Editor’s note: Coles Notes are the Canadian study aid on which the American Cliffs Notes are based.

Would you pay for a third talent spec?

Immediately upon the release of the dual-spec system, talk began of support for three specs. Because most classes are hybrids, the case for supporting two was pretty obvious. Prior to it, the thankless jobs of tanking and healing were made still worse by an inability to effectively farm up the materials used to feed the consumable-hungry high end raiding game. People kept farming alts. Because while a tank or a healer is critical to a group’s survival, ironically they are not well equipped to get by on their own.

Springing for the 1000 gold to buy dual-spec capability was a decision that took me less than one second to make. When patch 3.1 launched, I was at the Shaman trainer as fast as my little hooves could carry me. Guild chat in those early minutes of server availability rung out with a steady stream of achievement spam. Many were just as eager as I to unlock our lesser halves.

It didn’t take long before I saw people with two healing specs. PvE specs even, conforming to the variable challenges offered by Ulduar. Not just Priests but Paladins and Druids were doing it. People who saw the dual spec feature as a way to further specialize as healers. What I had taken to be the solution to the ineffective soloing problem, became something different in their hands.

Admittedly, the soloing problem is not nearly as crushing as it once was. A healer can get by questing or farming with a handful of hit rating items. But I’m not about to go double-dipping in the resto tree. Any guilt my brain tries to invent over this is easily assuaged by the inelastic nature of the Shaman healing tree. There just aren’t 2 different kinds of jobs Shaman healers can fulfill.

PvP healers would argue with me here, and they’d be right. I apologize. I’m PvE only. There are survivability talents in the tree useful if you need to repel burst damage. But for raid content, my point stands.

Now the possibility looms you could buy a third talent spec. I don’t see a need for it for myself. For others, I would understand. I wonder how many, like me, wouldn’t foot the expense.

Tanking and fun

Thinking about nebulous promises that Blizzard is trying to make the healing game more fun, a little while ago I asked a Warrior tank friend to write up a couple paragraphs about how Blizzard had improved the game for him in their quest to make tanking fun. A few minutes later, presumably after gathering his thoughts on the subject, he asked “Do I have to stop at 2 paragraphs?” As you will see below, he is quite effusive on the topic. Fustigator is something of a legend on my server. He manages to be both a knowledgable and magnificent tank and a wonderful human being. Now I will get out of the way and let him do his thing.

Fun and Tanking in 3.0.2

by Fustigator of Shandris

Tanking, especially the new redesigned protection warrior tanking, became much more fun in patch 3.02 (the one with the 51-point talents before WotLK). I started playing WoW a couple weeks after The Burning Crusade was launched, so it was all good news for prot warriors after that. I made my warrior a tank because my guild needed one; I quickly became hooked on tanking.

3.0.2 brought less button pushing to warrior tanking. Shield Block was redesigned from a 5-second cooldown to a 60 second (40 talented) cooldown, so instead of spamming it the whole fight we saved it for strategic moments when extra threat, damage, or mitigation was needed. This was more fun because it let us think about what we were doing, making the tradeoff of survival now verses survival later on the fly instead of building a Lego machine to hit our Shield Block key over and over. (NOTE: Using such a robot is against the Terms of Service.) This redesigned Shield Block was only possible because crushing blows were squeezed out of raiding, with (predictable) boss abilities replacing the old RNG burst of a missed key or rage-starvation induced Shield Block.

Stance dancing was all but eliminated for protection warriors, further reducing the need to push 3 buttons to accomplish one task. Warbringer let us move in combat instead of having to change to Berserker Stance, use Bloodrage, cast Intercept, then change back to Defensive Stance. Mocking Blow, our backup to a failed Taunt, finally became useable in Defensive Stance. In 3.0.2 Berserker Rage was given to all stances instead of just Berserker Stance, so to gain immunity to Nightbane’s or Auriaya’s fear we simply activated the appropriate ability. Previously we had to to change to Berserker Stance, activate Berserker Rage, then switch back to Defensive Stance so we could get back to spamming Shield Block before we caught a crushing blow. It now became possible to tank mobs with an instant fear with no threat or survivability loss, since before we had to change to Berserker Stance and risk crushing blows whenever the mob might cast fear.

Tanks could now do many things at once. We could keep up our full threat rotation and still interrupt a boss when needed since interrupts were taken off the global cooldown. On fights like Shade of Aran or Kael’thas in MgT, interrupters were forced to halt all GCD abilities while it was their turn to interrupt. This was less fun because being a good team player and interrupting required us to stop playing the threat and damage minigame and simply wait for a castbar to appear. Concussion Blow was changed to deal a large amount of damage (which caused threat) as well its stun. Thunderclap’s power and cooldown increased slightly, allowing warriors to slip in one more GCD ability into our AOE tanking rotation.

AOE tanking became possible for warriors! Not pretty, and not as good as a paladin’s or deathknight’s, but possible. No longer would warriors be turned down to tank Shattered Halls or Akil’zon trash simply because Thunderclap only hit 4 mobs. This was more fun for protection warriors because we got to play more, instead of sitting on the sidelines or respec’ing Fury for trash-heavy instances. Our new 51-point talent Shockwave gave us the much needed ability to frontload some AOE threat and keep trash packs in one place long enough for us to get down a Thunderclap and some Cleaves. Deep Wounds combined with Damage Shield and the increased incidence of Thunderclap and Cleave critical hits from the Incite talent gave protection warriors a passive armor-piercing bleed that could afflict anything that was near one of us. This scaled with attack power along with the new Thunderclap and Shockwave, allowing warriors to get more AOE threat with better gear. The old Thunderclap did fixed damage per rank.

Tank cooldowns across the board were pulled in line with their use. AOE taunts such as Challenging Shout were lowered to 3 minutes (from 10), Shield Wall and Last Stand lowered to 5 minutes (from 30 and 10 respectively), Mocking Blow was reduced from 2 minutes to 60 seconds, and Improved Taunt was rolled into the base taunt, lowering its cooldown from 10 to 8 seconds. All these lowered cooldowns gave a better incentive to actually use tank abilities, instead of saving them for later. Increased options and power gave tanks more enjoyment from tanking and allowed skilled tanks to really show off their mastery of their class.

All percentage threat increasing talents such as Defiance were integrated into the existing warrior defensive stance, druid Bear Form, and paladin Righteous Fury. This meant that Fury and Arms warriors could tank an instance without having to respec; All they had to do was swap gear. Tanking non-Protection warriors also benefitted from Shield Slam being given to all warriors. This was important because now dps-spec warrior who were tanking could properly use tank gear with block value to increase their threat while tanking with a shield.

3.0.2 protection warriors found ourselves with more rage which in turn let use use our abilities more. Shield Specialization rage gain was doubled from 1 to 2, Shield Block no longer cost us 10 rage every 5 seconds but became free, Sword and Board decreased the average rage usage of Shield Slam, and our outgoing white damage was increased considerably due to the re-itemized tank gear having more Strength. The Enrage effect from Improved Defensive Stance, rage from using (sometimes Improved) Charge in combat, the buffed up Improved Bloodrage, and the new Armored to the Teeth talent all contributed to additional rage gain. I was greatly disappointed to see Justified Killing (it granted 1/2/3 rage per dodge or parry) removed from the PTR version of this patch. A similar rage gain from avoidance is at long last due to be added to patch 3.2’s Shield Specialization talent. Additional rage let us push more buttons instead of staring at our rage bars and cursing at “Need more rage” messages while mobs got loose and killed our healers.

Rage is the heart of warriors and bears. It’s red, starts at 0, and you can never have more than 100 (no matter how hard you just got hit by Patchwerk or what kind of absurd Enraged TotT’d Hysteria-powered Positive Charge-fed slow-weapon white crit you clobbered poor Thaddius with). 25-man protection warriors will always have more rage than their 10-man counterparts in equal gear since 25-man mobs hit harder. As long as warriors, bears, and paladins have to rely on taking damage to generate power we will never be able to put out consistently high threat like deathknights. It’s a systemic problem in the design of defensively generated rage whether your rage bar is red or blue. Having too much rage is why warriors always need fast weapons to Heroic Strike more. The power of Heroic Strike scales up with faster weapons and with more rage per second (not with strength or block value). If protection warriors had a 0.5 second speed mainhand needle, we’d upgrade that Lego robot or just continue as we do now by binding Heroic Strike to the mousewheel and letting it spin while we focus on playing the game.

Water Shield Changes

No sooner than I posted a big analysis of Improved Water Shield, they go an change it all around. I concluded that it generally came out ahead for us. And here comes Ghostcrawler to make it unequivocal. All our healing spells, including Chain Heal, will proc the talent, which will return the same mana without consuming a charge on the shield. We will save a bunch of global cooldowns not having to refresh the shield continually, and our regen will be higher by whatever proportion of time you spend with the shield down. For me that will be a small number, but I gather it’s larger for many raiding shamans.

Speaking of global cooldowns, we will also gain spells to drop all 4 totems in a single shot. Which has pretty much been the dream of all Shamans since the dawn of time. Or at least the dawn of the World of Warcraft. There’s a UI to go along with this change, and it sounds almost exactly like Totem Timers. Which is great in a way, but also a little sad. To be sure, they are copying from the best. It probably signals the beginning of the end for one of the best addons out there, though. Some people are claiming they’ll stick with it. But moving the totems into the domain of action bars means Bartender/Dominos are going to slurp that function up. And a dedicated shield addon like ShieldsUp will cover the remaining function. Especially since I don’t have to call out raid totems anymore.

There’s some sketchy talent changes being outlined too. Chain Heal getting longer reach, out to 10 yards, is a welcome change. A nebulous buff to Healing Way. (I have always felt bad that I was unable to justify taking the talent from which I took the name of this site.) Nature’s Swiftness cooldown reduced to 2 minutes — to make Healing Wave more palatable. My read of GC’s comments suggests that buffs to all our heals are coming, so there will probably be more coming.

Look for PTR 3.2 soon. And with my time freed up, I should be able to poke around and report on what I see.