I have been leveling my shaman with my girlfriend's paladin (well kinda. half the time we're playing on our own because we're not really home together at the same time except for 11pm to 2am. and 2am is when I sleep to get up for work at 8am the next day. yea kinda nuts.) and it has been a blast so far. as many of you know, I have leveled up a paladin as a tank a year or two ago and it was pretty fun to actually be able to kill several things at once, albiet slowly. with a ret paladin, I usually try to keep it to two mobs at once, but killing speed is roughly the same. I find mana management with the ret paladin a lot easier than with the prot paladin. earlier this year I started a ret paladin on a new server and leveled him all the way to 80. I really wasn’t planning to do much with him but to save up his triumph badges for some pvp gear and try out pvp a little. but this was before my gf decided to start playing.
Lately, the new server is basically where im spending a lot of my time when on WoW. over the past two and a half weeks, I've leveled up a disc priest to 30 and a resto shaman to almost 40 as of writing. The Warlock/Priest combo is on hold until my gf gets sick of the Pala/Shaman combo. although I highly doubt she'll stop playing the paladin, as she's already level 40. in a couple level's she's going to have a whole bunch of new spells and abilities that will actually make the paladin a little more involved. the only proc she really has to manage is Art of War. everything else are just new attacks or new seals, in which she's already familiar with.
Im learning to heal with my priest all over again. Its really difficult to heal in the beginning as most of my spells are not talented, my gear was crap and the tanks are all newbs. but as time progressed, I got a little better as well as the groups. things began forming and falling into place. no longer do I see fail groups. I see more competent groups as I continue to level on beyond the basics of RFC, WC, VC, RFK and Stocks. Actually, I've begun to see much more improvements to the groups when running RFK and Stocks and now, as im doing SM more often, I find that everyone, especially the tanks, know exactly what they're doing. well almost. there's still tanks with LOS issues, or tanks who don’t pick up the casters and whatnot, but they're still learning. at least, im not healing squishybear or onetargetwarrior. everyone's utilizing their AoE abilities and it rocks. Even the casters, who usually aggro on me when I heal, now are LOS'ed back to the tank, if not, I reply with a Wind Shear and they come running into the tank's Thunderclap or Consecration.
At around level 25, things began to take form as a disc priest. my shields are buffed, my healing is better, my mana and regen is a little better and my heals are a little more efficient. namely, I have flash heal sheild and heal ready to go. I don’t have my favorite moves yet (pain suppression, penance, divine aegis) but they'll come in time. Somehow im learning to heal with a disc all over again. it wasn’t so fun the first time around, but that's mainly because there wasn’t a random dungeon finder tool. but now, I queue up and I go. quests? what are those?
The same thing happened with my shaman at around level 25. He became much easier to play due to the addition of some abilities and spells. prior, I was using healing wave. that's the only healing spell I had. my totem selection sucked too. it was one earth totem, and one fire totem. I didn’t even get my water totem until about level 25. glyphed water shield is great as it returns mana to me passively and when I get hit. having four charges makes it even better. what I try to do is grab aggro from one mob first just to get my water shield charges to go off. In any case, mana regen is a lot better. additionally, with two healing spells and some very nifty totems, healing has become a lot more versatile. the addition of a damage buffer and a HoT from my Earthliving imbue makes healing even more involved. it is no longer cut and dry with just one heal and no real supporting spells/abilities.
But learning to heal with the shaman has got me thinking about the uniqueness of all the healing classes. Namely, how to use my totems as a supporting role for the group. Paladins have their blessings and hands. which is great. these are direct spells and such. priests have fortitude and a few other buffs. druids have paws (Mark of the Wild). But shamans have totems. and these totems do different things based on what I decide to put down. faster attacks? more spell damage? slowing mobs down? doing damage? adding armor? all of these things can be done with totems. and I get four differen types to play around with at the same time. fun times when you have another shaman in the group. I usually put down healing specific totems and overall support for the group. but my fire totem is always the magma totem because I find that a 6% damage increase to spellcasters simply isnt as great as having a 30% increase to all dps. what? yes. I do 30% of the dps in most groups with that totem. whatever gets us through the instance faster is fine by me.
now the fire totem, in this case, the magma totem is my fire totem of choice, always gets planted at my front left. and so I try to position myself close enough to the group to drop that totem as close to the group of mobs as possible. in a pull, I usually accomplish this even before I have to heal the tank. sometimes I can pull off a fire nova before I even have to heal. a fire nova is basically "activating" your fire totem to blow up things around it. this causes massive damage all around. and if the tank has 4 or 6 mobs on him at one time, I usually do awesome damage. sometimes I do pull aggro but that doesn’t last too long. the tank would pull them back a quick second later. what this does, however, is cause my watershield to pop, giving me a bunch of mana back. I do want this to happen. and sometimes I purposely pull aggro with my fire nova (although I sometimes get more mobs than I want) in order to get some mana back.
I find that with this method, I have very little mana problems. I often drink but I do know that when I do DPS with the totem, I am expending a lot of mana. I am not complaining, since healing alone would take up a small amount of my mana supply but remain pretty boring. im sure as I level on, things will get a little more exciting. I will have to heal more and use more spells. im anxiously waiting earthshield, chain heal and riptide. with those added to my arsenal, I hope to never have to use Healing wave again.
Q for all the shaman healers: How often do you use Healing Wave anyway? I would assume that Lesser Healing Wave +glyph is the way to go for quick healing, chain heals for multiple targets and riptide +LHW for big heals. this is my theory since I am unable to test any of this out at the moment. I am level 38 currently so I don’t have any of those spells to work with. I want to know this because I want to know if I should respec my talent points later on, meaning, once I get riptide, do I want to remove my talents from all the Healing Wave talents? the one that reduces cast time by 0.5 seconds? the one that increases healing done from HW by 8% per talent point? I find myself using Healing wave less and less. Much like how I don’t use greater heal at all on my priest. I use shield, flash and penance. on my druid, I use healing touch (the Healing wave equiv) only with swiftmend. Just pondering right now. not sure what to do, but im more of a ABC caster (always be casting), so I prefer to continually cast Lesser healing wave than to cast Healing wave, wait 5 seconds, cast HW again, wait 5 seconds, cast HW again.
Thanks in advance!
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