Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Ding 80 (again), more shammy thoughts. . .

Well, normally I wouldn't be blogging at 7:30am, but I'm home sick. I don't think it's swine flu (I've heard when you get that, you're freaking miserable), but I have something, so I def want to to get to the dr (hopefully while they're doing maintenance, I'm not an addict, I can quit whenever I want to).

So, I've been working on my Shammy for quite some time, and last night, while doing my dailies, I dinged 80 (and got the 50 dailies achievement, and the achievement for cooking lol). I promptly went and learned all my talents and re-specced from enhancement to elemental, and changed around my resto build. My resto build is pretty cookie cutter 0/13/58 with healing grace instead of elemental weapons. I have been convinced by people who say the benefit from elemental weapons is marginal at best and doesn't scale. As I will probably be running heroics with some inexperienced tanks, threat reduction on heals is prolly more beneficial.

The resto change was pretty minor, I've had a resto dual spec for a while and done some instance healing with it. While I like resto, I really wanted a caster DPS, so the change I was most looking forward to was switching enhancement to elemental. Again, I am using a pretty cookie cutter 57/14/00 build, with my main PvE omission being reverberation. I just don't see that as being very beneficial for the points, and I think the anti-puchback and mana regen talents are more useful.

Another thing I've been doing to prepare for the change is collecting some gear. I got cloth belt and bracers from reg ToC with +hit as well as Revenant's boots and chest. I have some other assorted blues to fill in, and I've been working rep with dailies. I am going to start doing the Wyrmrest dailies every day in addition to the 5-6 Ebon Blade dailies (the intelligence docs one is frustrating, I have a ton of keys, but finding chests kind blows and 35 copper after killing a bunch of mobs kinda sucks). Tonight when my titansteel cooldown refreshes, I will be able to make a titansteel guardian. I also sent 2 jewelcrafting rings, the spellshock ring, and ring of northern tears. I'm socketing the spellshock ring with a runed cardinal ruby since I don't think I'll be replacing it ever, and it can do work in my ele and resto sets.

I took it out to icecrown to test out on some mobs and OMFG!!!! I thought I killed things quick as enhancement, this is a whole other level. Lightning bolt for 2k, flameshock, then a lava burst for 5-7k, dead.

I have to give major shoutouts to WTFspaghetti, plusheal, and drug. As I'm not really an expert on any class, the majority of ideas I have come from other sources. Wow wiki has great talent builds, but the blogs and discussion boards really go more in depth.

Now I have to decide who's next: Priest (Shadow/Disc), Druid (Feral/Resto) or other. . .

3 comments:

drug said...

Healing grace is in fact a rather bad talent. The problem is, we healers are not threat capped. DPS take threat reduction talents, so they can keep up their top DPS rotation for as long as possible, even if the tank produces less aggro at some point in the fight. But heal aggro is minimal compared to damage aggro.

That's why threat reduction is useless. Whenever you pull aggro, you're going to pull aggro no matter if you have Healing Grace or not. Most of the time that's the case if a tank is bad at tanking multiple mobs or if someone pulls additional mobs. At this point you will always pull aggro, no matter if you produce 15% heal aggro more or less.

Elemental weapons is actually pretty good, when you just start out at 80. 45 SP is not too much, but it will help. As soon as your healing gear is getting better, drop the talent.

Joar said...

Gratz on 80 man! My shammy is currently sitting at level 26, so he's got a long way to go. Everybody is encouraging me to go full bore and that I'll love it! Sounds like I can add one more vote to that!

I'd probably do the druid next. They're really a lot of fun to level. Level 10-20 is a little bit frustrating in bear form, but after that it gets to be really fun. Almost no down time, and a really formidable instance and raid healer.

LawGirl said...

I leveled as enhancement as well, and then specd into elemental, also while having a dual spec of resto. I thought I would cry without my ghost wolves but I love the elemental spec. So far healing on my shaman is tons of fun, so I hope you enjoy it.

My shaman was probably one of the most fun classes I leveled.