Stoneclaw Totem and Faction Champions

Graeme Guy nature photographyWhen the DPS turn their attention to you in the Faction Champions fight, as a healer it is your imperative to stay alive. Earth Shield yourself, Riptide yourself, and make a beeline away from the damage dealers (but still in range of the other healers). The other day I thought: Would Stoneclaw Totem draw the enemy’s attention away from me? It wouldn’t work in heroic mode, because the mobs aren’t subject to Taunt mechanics. But it might just buy me some time in regular.

Bottom line? I didn’t notice any benefit. The Death Knight was particularly clingy. He wouldn’t peel off until somebody death gripped him off of me. I’m guessing that the aggro mechanics in this fight are atypical enough that Stoneclaw’s special brand of taunting doesn’t catch their attention. I would have been better off plunking down an Earthbind Totem to slow him down.

Has anyone else had better luck with it?

Windfury or Wrath of Air

It’s been a hard night of wiping against a single boss. Everyone is still pushing hard, but you can tell that folks are dispirited. The raid leader announces that this will be the last attempt for the night. You think, “What can I do to make this last attempt a success? Would a different mix of totem buffs put us over the top?”

Most of the decisions about selecting totems are straightforward. If there’s an Elesham, he gets to drop Totem of Wrath. Don’t drop Mana Spring if a paladin is blessing Wisdom. And so on. The air category totems, however, have a longer decision tree than most. This is the one slot where we are forced to choose what subset of the raid we are going to buff.

First, we will set the stage with our actors. Windfury Totem gives 16% melee haste to the raid. Wrath of Air Totem gives 5% spell haste. In the back ranks stand the various situational totems: Nature Resistance Totem, Grounding Totem, and Sentry Totem. Take a bow, fellas.

Melee and spellcasters. Almost everyone in the raid is one of those. (Hunters are left out of both, sadly.) Where should you commit your resources to maximize the raid’s chances? Let’s go to the chart!

Update on Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 7:31PM by Llyra

Chart image corrected as per comments.

Update on Saturday, October 24, 2009 at 6:38PM by Llyra

Corrected another Death Knight issue, thanks to the Elsydeon.

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.

Patch 3.3: Ixnay on the Ire-Nova-Fay

I suspect you’ve seen the PTR patch notes already. If not, Rossi has already done a great writeup of the significant Shaman bits. Precis: Fire Nova is no longer a totem, it is now a spell. Seemingly an instant cast spell. Which is kinda cool, but there’s one strange thing. It requires you to be within range of your fire totem.

Any fire totem will do. Frost Resistance Totem, for example. I cannot for the life of me conjure a reason to put that limitation on it.

It’s certainly not a big deal. No game breaker. I won’t be starting up a windy petition demanding its change. I just don’t understand it. It will be the only spell in our repertoire range-limited by a totem.

As usual when I am baffled by a change, I assume it must have to do with PvP. But still… hurray! Fire Nova will go from a spell I never cast to one I rarely cast. It will be nice to be able to pulse Fire Nova while DPSing as Enhance, or to help out on XT trash when they try to run past me while I heal.

Totem Timers is back, baby!

A week away for Gen Con was just the ticket for letting the state of Shaman addons get settled. Blizzard’s totem bar is a double-edged sword for me. And as you know, Shamans can’t use swords.

On the one hand, I love the new spells. Calls of the Ancestors/Elements/Spirits are subtle game-changers for all Shamans. Saving 4.5 seconds at the start of combat is especially welcome for healers, owing to the frequent spike damage at the beginning of a fight. And we can chase a moving fight without losing 6 seconds every 40 meters to drop a fresh set of totems.

(Note: in Burning Crusade, dropping a totem would trigger a 1 second global cooldown. When patch 3.0.2 came out, I believe that distinction was removed. Dropping totems became noticeably slower. In particular, it looks like it takes the exact same time as any other spell cast. I’m eye balling it, though, so I could be wrong. If totems trigger the standard 1.5 second GCD, a full spread takes 6 seconds without the new spells. Otherwise, the time saved is 2.5 seconds.)

It is also a positive that Blizzard’s default UI now recognizes that the previously unconfederated totem spells are, in fact, related by their elemental categories. Mutually exclusive options are now bracketed as such, which will make life much simpler for Shamans tall and wide. The fact that Cleansing Totem replaces Healing Stream Totem will be apparent to all.

The trouble is, the Blizzard totem bar is an addition to the standard complement of action bars. As such, it falls under the domain of action bar mods, Bartender4 being my weapon of choice. And no action bar addon developer can afford to spend the time to make the new totem wharf as information-rich as Totem Timers was. After two raid nights of having my shields fall off, or my weapon imbue expiring in the middle of fights, I decided I needed my old friend back.

Thus I discovered with great pleasure that Totem Timers updated for 3.2 late last week. Praise to the ancestors. It even brings with it some new features. Crucially, it adds a selector button for the new totem Call spells. This works just like the Blizzard one except that right clicking it will Recall your active totems. There is now a blank entry selectable in each category for those times when mana is at a premium.

Weapon imbues now have a flexbar flyout selector now, bringing them into line with the totem selectors. Of note for our Enhancement brethren is the ability to select joint weapon imbues. Left click to refresh your main hand imbue; click again for off-hand. If you have struggled with “A more powerful enchant is already active” in the past, you will love this change.