Alternative Medicine pt. 1 – Shamans (Shamen?)
Knowing your class inside out is great. I certainly can’t say that I’m all over everything there is to know about druid trees, but I have been playing and studying the class for some time now and think I can at least hold up my end of the conversation on just about any Restoration Druid topic I can think of.
However, when it comes to my fellow healers, I have a much vaguer grasp of what they do and how they do it. Sure, I know the general things. Pallies are good tank healers with not a lot of spells to choose from. Shammies are phenomenal raid healers. Priests don’t want me rolling against them on cloth gear. But my deeper understanding of how they get the job done has been a bit fuzzier. It occurs to me that knowing how my raid mates approach the same job that I do can only strengthen me as a healer.
Therefore, I’ve decided to do some research on the other healing classes and post what I learn here, not only to help myself, but to help my fellow Druids out. This is going to be a four part series, covering Shaman, Paladin, Holy Priest and Discipline Priest Healing. Today… the Shaman!
Armor type: Mail, Leather, and cloth can be worn by shamans. They can equip one-handed maces, shields, staves, daggers, fist weapons, and one- and two-handed axes.
Stats: Shamans stack intelligence, as it increases their plus healing numbers, their critical strike chance, and their mana regeneration. Mp5 is also an attractive stat for shamans, more so than for druids. Shamans also benefit from spell power, critical strike rating, and haste rating, for generally the same reasons that Druids do. Spirit is a largely wasted stat for Shamans, and they do not stack it.
Utility: Shamans bring a gazillion different types of utility to a raid group. They have totems that increase raidwide healing regen, increase raidwide mana regen, buff casters, buff melee, buff tanks, break fears, absorb damage, generate threat, cause damage, slow mobs, dispell poisons and disease, increase resistances … their totems offer a huge range of options to optimize different encounters. In addition, they have the ability to self-resurrect, and resurrect others which can be extremely helpful following a raid wipe. They were given a crowd control mechanism, hex, in Wrath of the Lich King, which is useful on humanoids and beasts. They also have a shock spell which interrupts casting, and a debuff spell to weaken targets. They have self buffs which can help with their own mana management and proc HoTs on targets. Finally, Shamans can cast Heroism (alliance) or Bloodlust (horde), which increases the melee, ranged and casting speed of raid members by 30% for 40 seconds.
Healing Style: Shamans are a force to be reckoned with when it comes to raid healing. Their Chain Heal spell is a multi-target “smart” heal that can heal up to three targets in a chain. Each successive target is healed for less than the previous target. The spell has a separate chance to crit on each successive target. It also has a chance to proc Earthliving on each target, which is a heal over time effect on a healing target. Chain Heal is a very mana efficient spell that is the bread and butter of Shamans assigned to raid healing. They also have access to Healing Wave, which is somewhat similar to Healing Touch in that it is a big, slow, mana efficient heal. It can be paired up with Nature’s Swiftness, just like our Healing Touch spell can to make it instant cast. Riptide is a spell shamans receive as their 51 point Resto talent, and is somewhat similar to a Druid’s Regrowth spell, in that it has both direct heal and HoT components. Riptide, however, is instant cast. If Riptide is active on a shaman’s target and they cast chain heal on that target, the Riptide HoT will be consumed, but the Chain Heal will receive a 25% bonus (think Swiftmend… sort of). Earth Shield is not a direct healing spell, but acts somewhat similarly to Priests’ Prayer of Mending. It puts a shield up on a target that heals them when they are hit. It lasts for 10 minutes, procs every couple of seconds, and has six charges. It also alleviates spell interrupts. Shamans can essentially use this shield as an additional HoT. (Thanks for bringing it to my attention, Beltain!) Finally, shamans can cast Lesser Healing Wave, which is quicker, but less efficient and lower healing than their Healing Wave spell.
While Shamans typically shine as raid healers because of the great effectiveness of Chain Heal or a combination of Riptide and Chain Heal, they do also have viability as tank healers. They lack the ability of Druids and Discipline Priests to mitigate incoming damage on a tank. Therefore tank healing for them requires skillful use of their full range of spells to keep up with the sort of reactive healing necessary to keep a tank on their feet.
I just don’t know, though, whether they prefer to be called Shamans, or Shamen.
Edit: wowwiki informs me that the correct plural is Shaman. Whatever, amirite?
Another Edit: ShamanSnake stopped by and left a humongous comment packed with more information, insight and analysis of Shaman healing, so be sure to scroll down and take a look if you want to learn more. Thanks again, Snake!
Other posts in this series:
Alternative Medicine pt. 2 – Paladins
Alternative Medicine pt. 3 – Holy Priests
Alternative Medicine pt. 4 – Discipline Priests
There are 14 Comments to "Alternative Medicine pt. 1 – Shamans (Shamen?)"
From my somewhat limited knowledge of the healer shammys this seems like a good breakdown. The only healing weapon also in their arsenal that was overlooked, thatI can think of (having only ever played them in a DPS role) is their phenomenal Earth Shield to cast on a target. As a tree I am not entire sure how this healing shield works, but I think its a combination of a priest’s shield/PoM to mitigate incoming damage and a druid HoT. When getting attacked, it heals the buffed target consuming one of the initial stack of ‘shield-orbs’ – thingies. =) Apologies to my healer-siblings for not knowing the terminology very well.
ah, thank you so much, Beltain! I’ll do a little research on this and throw it into the mix. Not that the “shield-orbs” – thingies” description isn’t dripping with win! =)
Nice Shaman post, Syll. I especially like healing with Shamans because of their totems. Wrath of air, or whatever their totem that gives +gajillion spell power is a godsend.
Elk
Running Elk’s last blog post..For the Horde!
I’m so with you there, Elk! Sylly LOVES the totems! mmmmhmm. =)
Oh yeah, and as Beltain mentioned, their planetoids are really handy to have around.
Running Elk’s last blog post..For the Horde!
Good stuff! Learned a thing or two as well. Be careful what you say about shamans though, they have enough of an ego problem as it is!
Can’t wait to see what you say about holy priests, they is an interesting bunch. Mysterious ways. I know my top heal is just over 17k, but I also know a holy priest who can crit for 24k. Suspiciouser and suspiciouser.
lol I’ll need you to come check up on me when I post that one. I have Pallies to do next and after researching 2 other classes my brain may be mushified!
As Syllie’s resident shammy I can say, “Girl you got it down.” The orbs or planetary thingys (I love that) are called charges. Elk you are referring to the Flametounge Totem, its always a crowd pleaser. I will remain the happy shammy as long as I have my tree to heal with.
Love ya girl.
Girl, you are just the SHIZZLE! =) Thanks so much for coming by and making sure I had my shammy stuff down. You know I love you crazy! /hug!
p.s. you got fish feasts for this week? I’m down to about 7. lol!
Nice write-up. Want me to go into further detail on resto shaman? I bet someone out there does, so here it goes (warning – I am extremely bored right now so this might be long and will most certainly contain info you don’t care about):
We can also use 2-handed maces, but pretty much no shaman will ever use a 2-handed weapon. The only ones that could ever consider using a 2H mace or axe is a lower-level enhancement shaman that can’t dual-wield yet.
Intellect provides us more mana regen in one way: Mana Tide totem. Mana Tide is on a 5-min cool down. It regens 24% of your total mana over 12 seconds. It takes 6 talent points to get, as you have to take 5/5 in enhanced mana and healing totems to get to the mana tide talent, which is a major topic of whining for shaman – “Druids get intervate for zero talent points, blah blah blah”. INT can be said to give you more mana regen because if you have more INT, you have more mana, thus you regen more mana from this totem, but still 24% of your total. So INT sort of helps mana regen, but has zero effect on our MP5 when not considering Mana Tide totem. We definitely still want to stack INT. We have a talent that gives us 10% more INT, so each point of INT is really worth 1.1 INT, and 1.2 when you consider Blessing of Kings.
Crit is better for us than it is for (most) resto druids since, like you said, each bounce of chain heal can crit. Each orb on Earth Shield can also crit. Earthliving HoT cannot crit, nor can Riptide’s HoT effect. Pretty standard stuff. I generally have about 350 haste / 300 crit, though can swap out gear for 600 haste / 200 crit, or 500 crit / 250 haste. I usually get into my max-haste gear for heroics and stuff where mana isn’t a problem, as well as swap out my 43 mp5 trinket for my 84 crit trinket.
Healing Steam and Mana Spring are only party-wide, not raid-wide. However, in patch 3.1 this is changing. Mana Spring will no longer stack with itself and it will over-ride Blessing of Wisdom. This is sad for me because when I do 10-man raiding with co-workers, we always have 2 mana totems and BoW. So I guess I’ll lose about 200 mp5 with patch 3.1. I know, QQ some more, right? Haha. I could go into a lot of detail on all the totems, but that would take too long. I’ll just say a few things: Death Knights made two of our melee-enhancing totems no longer needed: Strength of Earth & Windfury. SoE gives str & agi, Windfury gives 16% melee haste (or 20% if you are an enhancement shaman with the talent). So if you care about melee & hunters and think that the shaman in your group should drop those two totems, be aware that a DK makes them not needed anymore. There are 4 schools of totems and you can only have 1 of each school down at a time. Flametongue is okay, 140 spell power, but if you have an elemental shaman, his Totem of Wrath over-rides it with 280 SP & 3% crit (I think those numbers are right). No need to have any Flametongue totems up when there is a Totem of Wrath up. Healing Stream is actually a viable totem now. It used to be so weak that it was worthless. Now it does over 1000 HP5, which can help on fights like Loatheb, Malygos, Sapphiron, but is still just party-wide until v3.1. Totems are annoying to have to constantly put down every time the raid moves on to the next mob pull. It takes about 4 seconds to get them laid down if you are fast. Each one triggers the GCD. Nice tanks will wait for totems to be laid down before he pulls. Poison & disease cleansing totems pulse every 3 seconds, so that’s why you don’t get cleansed right away usually. Tremor totem pulses every 5 seconds, which was bugged in 3.0.8 and pulsed every second. That was nice! Being feared for up to 5 seconds SUCKS! It breaks sleep too, sometimes. Our resistence totems don’t stack with similar effects, such as paladin auras.
Geez, enough about totems already, right?
Self-rez is nice but on a 1 hour cooldown (or 45 minutes if you take the talent, which almost no one does).
We have two shock spells that can interrupt: Earth Shock and Wind Shock. ES causes a good amount of dmg. WS causes zero dmg but changes the targets threat. It seems to be random as to who gets your threat, but it seems like it will pick someone and give them however much threat you had. I haven’t watched omen closely enough to understand the exact mechanics of it, but it works well to get those random mobs off of you (enraged fire blaze anyone?).
We have weapon imbues. Resto uses Earth Living Weapon, which gives you a healing bonus boost of like 140 – 180 depending on whether or not you take the talent, which is often times not taken for resto shaman. I think I took 2/3 of that talent. Don’t quote me on those numbers as I’m sure they are off, but close enough. Enhancement uses WindFury imbue, which gives melee haste. Elemental uses Flametongue imbue, giving spell dmg equal to what Earth Living does I think. Neither one gives spell POWER though, just healing bonus or spell dmg bonus.
The self-buff for mana management you refer to is our Water Sheild. Always gotta have WS up. It has 4 orbs (3 without the minor glyph but every elem and resto shaman gets that glyph). It does 100 mp5 default, 130 mp5 via major glyph, 140 mp5 via glyph & 2-set T7 bonus. An orb is consumed for mana whenever we take physical dmg or, via a talent, whenever we crit with Healing Wave, or 60% of the time when we crit with Lesser Healing Wave. There used to be a strategy for healing that involved spamming LHW and relying on consuming WS orbs for mana regen, because the talent used to be 100% for LHW instead of 60%. This was a good option for tank healing, but Blizz decided they didn’t like it and changed the talent, basically killing that whole school of thought. Refreshing WS constantly was annoying too, as it uses up the GCD.
Earth Living is the HoT that proc’s 25% of the time from HW, LHW, & CH. It can proc off any chain heal bounce. It ticks for about 600 healing, so it’s pretty weak but still okay. I think it accounts for maybe 3% of my healing. Maybe 5%. I forget. It can be glyphed to proc 30% of the time. One of our talents makes it proc 100% of the time on a target with Earth Shield when that target goes under 30% health.
Ahh yes, Earth Shield. 8 orbs total (with an always-taken talent). 1 orb consumed when target takes dmg. Can proc every 6 seconds I think, thus not on every hit the target takes. It heals for almost 3k or 4.5k when it crits.
Chain heal hits 4 targets via a “required” glyph. It will not consume riptide if the CH did not hit that target first. Like you said, it can crit on each bounce, as well as proc Earth Living.
Tank healing can be hard on our mana supply. I run out on Patchwerk if we are using only 2 healers in our 10-man group, and that’s with about 700 mp5 with buffs & totems. One of our best talents is Tidal Waves, which does this: after casting riptide or chain heal, your next two healing waves spells have cast time reduced by 30%. Therefore, our best tank healing cycle goes like: RT, HW, HW, CH, HW, HW, repeat. If you do that for about a minute straight, you can burn thru 22k mana easily and crank out 7000 hps (which I had to do on instructor raz when I noticed our healers weren’t going to keep the NPC tank alive).
Resto shaman usually use a shield since they are usually equivalent to an off-hand with 7000+ more armor and can be enchanted (+25 INT anyone?).
We have a talent called Ancestral Awakening. Each time you crit with LHW or HW or Riptide, you instantly heal the raid member with the lowest percentage of health within 40 yards for 30% of the EFFECTIVE amount healed. It has a slight delay, so sometimes I’ll get a crit heal, then riptide someone else right when AA hits them, so sometimes AA causes some overhealing. In patch 3.1, AA will calculate from the total heal, not just effective heal, so I expect to see AA account for a lot more of my overall healing.
I use the Healing Wave glyph, which gives me 20% of my effective healing done by HW. Most shaman debate over whether to take this glyph or the glyph that makes LHW 20% stronger. I rarely use LHW, so I took this glyph. It’s handy for 5-man especially, but also for raid bosses that I use HW on. Loatheb comes to mind, and Sapphiron.
Nature’s Swiftness is good for those “OH CRAP” moments. I, and many other shaman, use it in conjunction with Tidal Force (not to be confused with Tidal Waves). Tidal Force (copy & pasted from elitistjerks.com, which is blocked from here but I saved their webpage to my hard drive): Using Tidal Force gives you a buff with 3 charges. Each charge increases your chance to crit with lesser healing wave, healing wave and chain heal. Each crit consumes a charge — including each jump of chain heal. Therefore, it’s possible for one chain heal to use all three charges. Tidal Force is best used with Healing Wave or Lesser Healing Wave, as they greatly increase the chance for mana returned via improved water shield, and have a chance to proc ancestral awakening (if applicable). What EJ doesn’t say is how much it increases crit chance. I think it’s 60% on first charge, 40% on 2nd, and 20% on 3rd. I have a macro setup that does Tidal Force, Nature’s Swiftness, use trinkets, cast Healing Wave. Bam! Instant crit healing wave for 15k. Saved my tank’s ass (and my own) many many times.
Resto shaman have a talent called Cleanse Spirit that removes poison, diseases, and curses from the target. All shaman can do poisons and diseases via a spell and via totems. Only resto shaman can do decursing and there is no totem for it. Partially thanks to Healbot, I am the decursing king, muahahah. Allow me to toot my own horn please. Last time we did 25-man Obsidian Sanctum, we had 3 mages who constantly get harped on by our GM (former GM technically, his wife is now the GM) to do decurses, as well as 2 resto druids. Decurse total after clearing OS: Me with 35, 2nd place was a mage with 1. No one else had one. Now to admit some shame: last night we did 10-man OS and I was on my laptop that I rarely play on. I thought Healbot was setup all the way, but it wasn’t. I use SpartanUI with party frames off. I use Healbot for my raid frames. Well, if Healbot doesn’t tell me who’s cursed, I have no other way of knowing (other than graphically spotting the player turn color). You can’t config Healbot while in combat, so I had to open spellbook, navigate to Cleanse Spirit, put it on an action bar, try to see who’s cursed, target them, click on button on action bar. While doing this, our 2 pug’d raid members died, haha. Wouldn’t you know it would be the 2 pugs that die and weren’t in Vent so they couldn’t hear me saying “aww crap Healbot isn’t showing decurses and I can’t see debuffs any other way”. My friends already give me crap for using Healbot. Like there is something wrong with eliminating one button press for every heal, haha. We had a mage in the group, who I talked into getting Healbot for decurses since he’s a newb when it comes to anything other than spamming blizzrd and frostfire bolt, but he didn’t bother to setup Healbot. WHOOPS!
Holy cow, my post might be longer than the OP. Sorry! I told you I was really bored.
Can’t wait to get my level 17 druid up to 80 and try healing and off-tanking and stuff.
Love,
ShamanSnake
WOW! Thanks so much for all that information, ShamanSnake! I’m going to add a little tag in the post recommending readers find you in the comments for a wealth of further information and analysis. I feel like a very educated tree at the moment! =) Come on by and give a shout if you need any advice or information about your baby druid. Thanks so much for coming by and giving us drus some great insight!
Hello!
I’m an enhancement shaman that’s been following your blog for a little while now, mostly because it’s well written, and secondly, because my alt is a druid (although almost always feral). Anyway, I’m bored on patch day, and decided to post.
Until about a week ago, I’d always been off-spec heals in case i am really fiending to fight something and want in a PuG or just in case the guild needs an extra healer, so i’m not REALLY wasting your time unless you’ve been a resto shaman since wrath dropped and have all the resto talents memorized verbatim.
Between your post and ShamanSnake’s comments, you have pretty much everything you could want to know about resto shaman, certainly all that’s essential, until you get to the nitty-gritty, and everyone bickers and breaks out someone else’s theorycraft numbers (I’m most certainly not going to do that). However, I did want to focus on a few things you and snake glanced over, or simply rant, so here goes:
Thanks to the way Blizzard itemizes everything, shaman, like pally healers, will almost always use a shield. The only viable spellcaster’s 2h, the staff, always has spirit which is a completely wasted stat. Any shaman caught stacking spirit should be forced to reroll hunter, preferably for the opposite faction. That isn’t to say you can’t use a staff, shaman. It’s okay if you’re still building up your gear, and this is better than what you have, but eventually, you will have to switch to a 1h and shield. Itemization requires it.
Unlike pallies, shaman cannot use 1h swords, so we have to pass on viable 1h’s simply because we cannot equip the dang thing, but, 1h swords are mostly itemized for warlocks and mages anyway, because blizzard is making spirit a required stat for them, so you can generally watch these pass by without any hard feelings. Every once in a great while, you’ll watch something nice go by, like turning tide, and a tear will roll down your face, but remember, the more tides you see, the less likely a pally will steal your mace (druids and priests are still going to be all over it, though).
Chain heal: Ahh, blessed chain heal. It used to be that shaman were the premiere raid healers, and this was why. All you had to do was stack 4 shaman, keep the raid close, and bring 2 other healers to keep the tank up (any class plz!), and, viola! Bosses drop prplz! No one cared that shaman couldn’t keep a tank up even on trash, because we saved the other 23-24 ppl in the raid, and made it look stupid easy. That is no longer the case. Thanks to druid and priest raid heal abilities, it is often argued that shaman are now 3rd out of a mere 4 classes as far as raid healing goes. Oh, how far the mighty have fallen! Thankfully, we’re still better than pallies (our arch-enemies, or, at least mine…) and thanks to tidal focus and earth shield, are viable single target healers (which we NEVER were in TBC).
Sadly, we are still better for healing a raid than healing a single target tank, and so, we have quietly slipped down the list of healers. However, keep in mind, a good shaman will ALWAYS be better than a bad priest or druid, and no matter how bad we are, we’re always better than a Pally, because at least our names aren’t written in pink (this is okay if the person playing the pally is a RL girl). Blizzard still refuses to mitigate the skill of players, despite all the QQ you can find suggesting they do exactly that, and so, we garner raid spots through sheer ability atm.
Despite all the doom and gloom, shaman, do not fret! Blizzard is always adjusting spells, abilities and talents, and invariably makes the weak strong and the strong weak. We will once again see our day in the sun! Until then, know that you’re better than everyone else that doesn’t have your guild tag…
Totems: It is often argued that totems are the most broken mechanic in the game. Broken or not, all shaman agree that they are a terrible pain in the ass. Thankfully, Blizzard lengthened totem timers, so most of them last 5 mins and should only need to be refreshed once in any boss fight, if at all. When it comes to dropping totems, there are only 2 questions to consider: Are the minimal buffs worth the effort? Am i that bored? Trust me, you’d understand if you had to spend the first 5 seconds of every pull setting up, just to watch your totems languish as the raid moves on, so don’t hold it against your shaman friends if they’re not dropping totems as you burn through chain pulls in 10 man Naxx.
Anyway, just a few more things you probably didn’t need to know about another heal class, but here it is, nonetheless.
lol! thanks for the added info, Krumpus. I can report that in my guild it is rare for many healers to touch our shamans in terms of sheer healing numbers. The shamans more than clearly hold their own in terms of keeping the raid on its feet. While we don’t assign them as tank healers except in rare circumstance, they still are valuable additions even to tank health, in that they are assigned tanks to earth shield even while pumping out those huge raid heals. We have 3 very strong resto shaman healers and value having them on any raid they wish to heal. =)
…oh, and we mostly liked to be called shaman in all cases singular and plural. Shamans is accepted only because too many ppl don’t know or don’t care that it’s improper, and so, it’s too pervasive to correct, and shamen is witty, but a bit silly at the same time. Shammy is acceptable, and Sham always works, especially if you want to be mildly insulting at the same time (works for me!).
If anyone should demand you call them a shawoman, either because they are roll playing and think it’s clever, or because they are that amazingly PC, duty obliges you to promptly put them on ignore.