Twin Val'kyr

Well, I am a week late with this post because we had a bunch of regular raiders out last week which caused us to cancel a raid and wipe on Faction Champions with some friend ranks. Last night we went in with our regular group and cleared them in a few attempts to get to Twin Val'kyr. Our server was still undergoing maint as hour into raid time and even when it came up lag was terrible which set us way back for the night, so I did not get to see Anub yet. I assume we will kill him on Thursday and I will have a post about that as well.

So Twin Val'kyr is a fight where you have to worry about your "polarity". There is a dark boss and a light boss. There are also 4 portals in the room that give your character a polarity when touched. To DPS a boss you must have the opposite polarity of them. For example, the group on the right side of the room is the dark group and is tanking and DPSing the light boss. The tanks want to position them near the portal in the front of their side that is the opposite color they are assigned, so they can switch easily for vortex.

I assigned 2 healers on each tank and they stick with their group. We then had the 3 raid healers just choose a color to be and stand in the middle of the arena. From there, I could reach the entire raid. I mostly stuck with chain heals.

This fight is not very difficult, and I believe we 3 or 4 shot it. It is just getting people used to switching colors when they need to. A couple of our wipes were due to terminology used on vent when communicating what people needed to do. Here is how to deal with their abilities.

Balls of Light/Dark - These balls spawn and randomly move about the room. If one touches you that is your same color, you start to stack a buff on yourself. When the stack reaches 100 you get powered up and do double damage for a short time. It is nice, but it is a big DPS loss to ever go out of your way to collect them. Only bother if it is literally right next to you. Balls of the opposite color explode and do 12k damage to anyone within 8 yards. You have to keep an eye out, as several hitting you together can gib a non-tank.

Twins Pact - One of the 2 bosses will start to cast a heal called Twins Pact. This will heal for 20% and you cannot let this go off. The issue is they will put up a shield around themselves to prevent interruptions. You must do 250k damage to the shield before the 15 sec cast of Twins Pact happens and get off an interrupt. This is similar to the KT shield from Tempest Keep. You want all DPS to switch over to whichever twin is casting the shield. Ideally, the other color group will have time to switch colors and contribute, but even if they don't they can do toss in some DPS to help. We settled on yelling "DPS BLACK" or "DPS WHITE" over vent to keep this clear. We wiped twice because we would confuse people by saying "Switch to black" which can mean either DPS or switch your color. Ooops.

Vortex - One of the 2 bosses will start to cast vortex. This will either be Light Vortex or Dark Vortex. This will do a pulsing AOE that will easily kill someone if they are not the same color as the vortex. So when the Dark Vortex happens, everyone (including the tank) must click on the dark portal if the are not already dark. At that point the tank would then run to their original color portal in the front of the room and wait for the cast to finish, they would then switch back to their original color and resume tanking, dragging the boss back to the original tank position. The rest of their group needs to also switch back. We went to using the term "ATTUNE BLACK" or "ATTUNE WHITE" to make it clear what people needed to do.

Overall, not that difficult once you have seen it once or twice to grasp the color switching mechanic. It probably sounds more complicated than it is.

Faction Champions - You got your PVP in my PVE!

Another raid week, another new boss. This time it is a brand new type of raid boss, a PVP zerg. If you ever ran Magister's Terrace in BC, you should be familiar with this style of fight. However, this is the first time anything like this has appeared in a raid instance.

It appears this fight relies somewhat on luck of the draw. Some of the NPCs you have to fight are just downright nasty, while others are merely annoying. You will face a group of the opposing faction. It will be a random combination of classes and they will use all of their PVP abilities. This includes everything, like CCs, interrupts, totems, etc. They also are way faster than any humans in reacting to things. For example, if you totem stomp the shaman just instantly throws down another one. PVP rules all apply for CCs and diminishing returns, so it is very difficult to keep them under control for any length of time. Also, they will even dispel each other. Similar to real PVP, the plate DPS classes are disgusting. The warrior and ret pally both deal insane damage and if those two decide to kill a clothie, there is almost nothing you can do about it.

The general strategy is going to be to CC the healers and kill the DPS, or to CC the DPS and kill the healers. We tried both ways for a while and seemed to have more success killing the healers. We decided the best course of action was to kill the resto druid first, as he kept getting off his instant HoTs before we could apply CC. We then burned him down while trying to keep the other healers under control. I was purging him when I could, especially when the resto shaman gave him an earth shield. We worked our way through the healers and then started on DPS.

To help control the DPS we assigned a few teams to certain ones. We actually found our prot warrior MT could control one pretty well by himself. Taunt works, but as soon as the debuff wears off they will lose aggro. We had him and another of our warriors spec prot and put vigilance on each other. They then would taunt one of the dangerous melee DPS and get it away from everyone. They would then rotate between taunts and stuns on their target to keep them as under control as possible. So taunt a few times until they went immune, then shockwave, concussion blow, charge, and then back to taunts. This controlled 2 of the melee DPS and was a huge help. On one of the other dangerous DPS we had a tag team of a DK and a resto druid. They would rotate between death grip/chains of ice/taunts and cyclones to control another.

The overall key to this fight is control. It is not easy and required alot of coordination amoung a couple of people. I think the more we do it, the better we will get at working together in this more Arena style. It was a very satisfying kill and frankly I had a lot of fun doing it. Was nice that it was not just a faceroll too. How you handle the fight will depend on what combination you draw and what your raid makeup is. This fight required me to use all of my tools, rather than just standing still and chain healing. I was constantly watching my aggro indicator to know if I needed to ES myself and run. I was using Wind Shear whenever I saw the Warlock start to Hellfire to stop him. I was hexing, purging, and even throwing out frost shocks or an earth bind when I saw something chasing a clothie. You need to be on your toes and able to react to a dynamic situation to succeed.

Back to the healing side of the fence I go...

Yes, I believe I am once again throwing my hat into the ring as more of a full-time resto. I leveled this shaman when my old raid guild was starting in TK back in Burning Crusade. All of those trash pulls were just a metric ton of raid-wide AOE damage, and back in those days resto shamans were the solution. Unfortunatly, on the alliance side on my server you would find a Unicorn before a Resto Shaman. So I decided to slowly phase out my Warlock and take on the role of the lone bringer of the pewpewlazorheals. I joined Symbiosis after Critical Mass fell apart and stayed resto all through TK, SSC, Hyjal, and BT. I always felt I was making a huge impact on our raids with the raw healing I brought to the table.

Then along comes WotLK. Looking through all the new talents and spells, I was worried. Where are the Chain Heal toys? We get nothing?! I soldiered on and healed through our first clears in Naxx, but I was never satisfied. CH was in a sorry state and had fallen behind all the other pretty instant smart targeting AOE heals that priests and druids were tossing around. Meanwhile I am standing still, slowly ramping up a cast only to have it be sniped by someone else. Eventually, I all but abandoned CH in favor of Riptides and LHW to snipe what I could. Once it became clear how easy Naxx was and how I felt my healing was no longer making an impact to the raid, I volunteered to swap to Elemental. I quickly climbed to the top of our damage charts and felt like I was making more of a difference again. But that was not to last.

Going into Ulduar I immediatly felt behind. I kept getting gear upgrades, but my DPS was not really climbing like everyone else. Yes, I still was pulling over 5k, which in Naxx was top of the charts, but now everyone else was as well. In fact, as Ulduar was farmed and more people geared up, they continued to pass me. I pride myself on keeping my tight rotation and using all of my cooldowns and movement time as efficiently as possible...so what was wrong? It mainly comes down to the fact that Blizzard decided we would be the only DPS spec without a talent that gear scales. What I mean is, we have nothing that converts one stat (Int, Spi, etc..) into DPS unlike everyone else. So as we get gear upgrades, we are only getting a very minor spellpower boost. Everyone else gets the spellpower boost, AND the stat conversion boost. Also, our self-buffs (Flametongue weapon, ToW) do not scale at all either. So in the end this means we hit our peak very early in Naxx gear, and pretty much stagnate. Everyone else continues to improve.

So now I am back where I no longer feel like I am making a huge impact on the raid. I am just another of the "good DPS" that we have. I feel I am about as good of an ele shaman as possible, but that is not enough to make me stand out from the crowd. Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to say I must top the meters at all times. But my unique buff is no longer unique and is passed by the Warlock version. So in the end, I just contribute nothing more than solid DPS to the group. I want to do more.

This brings me all the way back around to resto. I had healed the new 10-man and some heroics, but had yet to really spend a full night healing again to get a good handle on my performance. Well this week I got the opportunity to heal all of Ulduar so far, and I once again felt the thrill of making a difference. Chain Heal is back to being an amazing spell, and I felt I was making a large impact with the amount of healing throughput I could deliver. I spoke to the other officers and indicated that I would be declaring resto as my main spec once again. I look forward to seeing some of the ToC hard modes and hopefully helping us get through. I will still of course build my ele set when I can, but I think gear will be much slower to get with the unified tokens. In the past it was easy once my token group all had main spec of a certain item, I could nab it cheap. Now, everyone will have to get every slot filled before I will have a shot at an offset item.

3.2 - First impressions

So 3.2 hit the servers last night, and I eagerly logged in to check out the situation. I immediatly was assulted by LUA errors all over the screen. Ah, how I love mods on patch day. After updating a few, disabling some, and using weird work arounds I had a mostly functional interface. Rather than just list the patch notes, I'm going to just provide an overall impression. I was able to run 2 heroics as a healer, the new 10 man as a healer, and the 25 man as a DPS.

Totem Bar:
I still have not seen the default version, as I use dominos for my action bars. I had 3 bars that I could place a set of 4 totems in. I configured my "default" totems to assume I had my normal raid buffs. I then made my second set the same but with a tremor in it for fights with fears. My final set I assumed I would be providing missing buffs in a 5-man situation. It is very easy to adjust these on the fly just by dragging a new totem to the slot, so I will be switching as needed depending on the group. It is very nice to be able to plop down a group of 4 in one GCD, and dropping my totems no longer felt like a chore.

Healing Changes:
Healing felt a bit different. First, the mp5 buffs seemed to make our mana go further. During the 10-man I kept thinking I should mana-tide soon but when I would look at my mana it was far higher that I thought it would be. I think the improved water shield no longer consuming charges probably helped as well, because in the past if healing got intense my sheild would fall off and I would not notice or have time to renew it on occasion.

I did not like the new LHW proc from Tidal Waves. I have gotten so used to perma-hasted LHW casts that it felt like I would healing in mud or something. Those casts feel LONG to me now. I was still using my old style of Riptide with LHW, but I was unsure now if that is the best way to go for tank healing. I imagine on raid heals where people are spread out you would still do that, but on a tank HW might now be back on top since it is only .2 slower because it still gets the haste proc. I will have to look into it a bit and do some more testing.

The new CH is awesome! Just the jump distance alone was a huge buff. I was far less hesitant to cast it. I even would throw it at the tank if I saw melee needed any healing as well. No longer was I constantly getting single heals, and it was reliably jumping to anyone else in the general area. I would really like to see Mimiron P2 as a healer now just to see the raw throughput I could generate with it.

New raid:
Only the first boss is available this week. I have to say.....disappointing. We went into 10-man an hour before our real raid so our GM and myself could get a look at it so we would be able to formulate our startegy. We did not expect to kill it, but just to start figuring it out. Needless to say, when all of them were dead at our feet on our second attempt, I was a little shocked. It was almost Naxx level difficulty. Hell, we probably could have 1 shot it if I had explained how to posion cleanse with the fire debuff before it was too late. I hope the second boss is a bit of a step up in difficulty. Of course we went in with the full 25-man and easily killed it as well.

Totem of Wrath, how I hate you

Today I want to briefly talk about the bane of all elemental shamans, Totem of Wrath. This totem is the core caster buff totem that ele shamans bring to a raid. It gives a better spell power buff than the flametongue totem, and it also provides additional crit on any enemies within it's range. So in theory, it sounds like a great thing doesn't it? The problem comes into the sacrifice a shaman must make to provide the buff. Ele shaman DPS appears to be balanced around the thought that we will be using searing/magma totem as an additonal DPS source. However, those totem share the fire totem used by ToW. So the only way to maximize our personal DPS is either to screw over the rest of the raid, or have an additonal person supplying the buff. That is just poor design. I can't think of a single other class that is forced to sacrifice DPS to provide a buff like this.

I ran a Patchwerk 25 last week just for fun, and was shocked to see we had another ele dropping ToW. I gleefully plunked down my searing totem and went to town. It sucks to see the extra DPS boost we SHOULD be able to use at all times. I ended the fight around 6.5k.

So how would I address this if I was Blizzard? The best solution would be something like this:

Totems of Wrath: All of your fire totems now also provide a 280 spell power buff to all raid members for 5 minutes when they are dropped. In additon, as long as a fire totem is active, increases critical strike chance against any enemies within 40 yards.

Or even better:

Brothers of the Flame: As long as the shaman has Flamtongue applied to his weapon he also gains an aura providing 280 spell power to all raid members within 40 yards. In addition, this aura provides additonal critical strike chance against all enemies within the raidius.

Either of these options would provide the same functionality as the current Totem of Wrath, and allow the shaman to actually USE his DPS totems.

What a difference a week makes...

As briefly outlined in my last post, my guild has been down in the dumps lately. Last week was terrible, as we struggled to fill our raids. Come the end of our 2nd night of raiding we still had 2 keepers up. It was very demoralizing to take such a huge step backwards. We had a bunch of emo convulsions from some less patient people and had a couple of people lay down an ultimatim to the leadership. Fix it, or we are gone.

To be fair, these people had a point. I think we had gotten far too lax about dealing with the problem as it was developing. When people started not showing, we kind of shrugged our shoulders and figured they would be back soon. This was a mistake. We should have aggressively recruited replacements. Well, after the disaster that was last week we did just that. We managed to pull 5 new recruits in to fill the gaps in our roster. We got some of them in for the final night of raiding last week and cleared the rest of the instance up to Yogg. Things were starting to look up a bit. But even that did not prepare me for last night.

Walking into a fresh raid week we immediatly filled up and had 2 people on standby. Already that is a great sign. For the last month we were usually starting FL with 20 people or so, and scrambling to find some friends or trusted PUG people to plug in. I also did not have to heal and was finally able to spend an entire raid night as elemental. Not that I mind healing, I just get tired of gearing one spec as my main, but constantly having to do another job. As we begin clearing the instance, you can just feel the difference a reinvigorated raid and leadership can make. Suddenly, we are one shotting every boss without issues, and chain pulling trash to the next boss while loot is being handled.

When we got to Kologarn and had 6 people doing over 6k DPS and the entire rest of the DPS around 5K or above, everyone started noticing that tonight was finally different. We cleared out all 4 keepers easily, and it was about 20 minutes until our normal stop time. So our initial discussion was if we should just call it there, or head back and clean out an optional like Razorscale since we had a bit of leftover time. We had never gotten all 4 keepers down on night 1, so we were already ahead of our normal pace. Our MT threw down the gauntlet and insisted we go for general. Some people were a bit nervous, as his trash sucks, and by the time we were going to be pulling him we would need to get him down in the first 2 or 3 attempts. Finally we decided if we were ever going to push Yogg seriously, this was the week to make it happen. General went down easily.

The point of this story is that if you have a solid core of people dedicated to the guild, you can turn it around very quickly as long as leadership makes an effort to fix the issues. I was seriously afraid this week might break our guild, but instead now we are looking at a full 2 nights to finally get Yogg down, rather than our regular hour or so. This guild has done great things on a short raid schedule in the past, such as downed Archimonde and went deep into BT before the nerfs. Last night I felt like we were back and having a great time again.

Summertime blues

Raid Update

The elusive Yogg kill still taunts me. Is it because we are scrubs and cannot figure out his mechanics? Is it because our DPS sucks? Are our tanks reatrded?

No my friends, it is the dreaded summertime. Filling raids has become difficult, as once 100% attendance college students head home or get summer jobs. Other people get busy with this thing call "Real Life". I hear it has good graphics. This basically means we always end up with about 20 people that are regular raiders ready to go, and then try and peice together the last 5 spots with friends that have no idea what they are doing. This is the unfortunate drawback of being in a non-hardcore style of raiding guild. We do not have strict attendance requirements, and we do not raid more than about 9 hours a week. This means we end up wasting a ton of time each week training people or making people play an offspec to fill a role. We wipe to stupid things like killing one of the 3 Freya adds, or not moving away from everyone when you have the General's life drain. We still clear everything up to Yogg, but we just run out of time for serious attempts. It is frustrating to take steps backwards when raiders disappear on you.

This last week was our first night with more than an hour of work on him. We ended up getting into Phase 2 several times, but we were still in the learning mode, so several people did not understand what they were supposed to be doing. It was still good practice, as I believe everyone now has a good understanding on how to deal with Phase 1. The fight does not seem overly tough, and I am sure we could have it cleared if we could just get all of our raiders to show on the same night.

3.2 opinions

I am sure by now everyone has been reading the 3.2 details that have been all over the place. I am not sure what to think. The shaman specific things are great. I love all totems on one global cooldown. It's about time! I also like the resto buffs, but am a little doubtful they went far enough with fixing Chain Heal. They needed to bump the bounce up to 15 yards or so IMO. I don't feel a few more yards will cut it. I have not seen any raw throughput numbers to know how good the 40% reduction per jump is compared to the current 50% Obviously it is an improvement either way, I am just unsure how much. Now if they could only make elemental provide the ToW buff and still let us use our DPS totems I would be happy.

As for the other big changes, I am torn. It just seems we keep sliding further and further into the "casual" side of the game. While our guild straddles the line between casual and hardcore, I personally dislike the constant dumbing down of everything. Having one token for your entire gear set? Letting everyone buy Tier 8.5 just from heroics? It is a bit much. When do we get a menu to choose whatever we want from the boss loot table? However, I applaud the move of splitting hard-modes into a seperate raid lockout with a pull-limit in place. Great idea to let everyone clear it the normal way for the week and then have a fresh instance just to work the hard modes.

DK project

In non-shaman related WoW news, my DK tank project has now hit the wall where I can only get anything by raiding after only 2 weeks at 80. I ended up tanking a Naxx 25 and got about 5 peices. While I am happy she is getting geared, I am not happy I have nothing to do once again but raid, or go level another alt. I guess with the badge changes coming, I can gear her up through heroics again and just hit the raids when I can on the weekends.

I dip my toe into the PVP pool...

I have to confess, I am not really much of a PVPer. I do play on a PVP server, but the random ganking that passes for PVP I just find pointless and tiresome.

As for battlegrounds, they are a mixed bag. I enjoy what I consider the real battlegrounds (WSG, AB, EotS) to some extent, but my enjoyment is almost always based on the situation. If I am with a random PUG group it is usually an excercise in frustration. I swear half of the other Alliance players are retarded. People not sticking together, not defending objectives, or ignoring the whole point of the BG and just fighting players in a corner drive me nuts.

However, if I am in a premade with some guildies, suddenly BGs are a ton of fun. It is nice having people follow a plan and communicate on vent. 95% of those games we roll a random PUG, but the times we come across a horde premade are a blast as well. The other 2 BGs are a bit too gimmicky for my taste. AV feels more like a weird PVE race, and I just am not sold on the vehicle combat stuff in SotA.

This brings me to Arenas. Arenas are fun and frustrating at the same time. I have never been a big arena player. I used to play on a semi-regular basis way back in season 1 on my Warlock. Since then, I have basically ignored them on the shaman. I had never even set foot into an arena at 80 until 2 weeks ago when I did a few games for the hell of it. However, this weekend my best friend (Holy Paladin) asked me to put a bit of time into trying a 2s team with him. I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. We went about .500 and worked our way up from 0 to close to 1000 rating over an hour or so. I was not unhappy, considering I have barely any PVP gear. In fact, what I do have was mostly some resto peices instead of ele, but I still wore it for the resilience. I believe I was sitting at around 300 resil, with 19k health. Almost every team we played had quite a bit more health and resil, so working at a disadvantage we held our own. Here are my impressions of playing an elemental in arenas.

First, our burst can be very powerful. I am pretty sure we won several games just because I caught the other team's healer offguard with my burst ability. I would generally pop Heroism immediatly to start the fight and hit ele mastery. A Flame Shock > Lava Burst > LB > LB combo could easily drop someone if they all crit and especially if a LB overload procs. Our pally would typically watch their healer and stun him as he tried to get off his first heal. It then became a matter of if my burst was going to be enough to finish them off before the healer could stop me. As an ele shaman, I do not play very subtle. I am going all out the entire time to try and overwhelm the other team with damage. I also found it useful to mix a Hex in during a rotation, especially on a healer. Our best healer kills were usually a pally stun opener, followed by my initial burst attacks, then a Hex, then finish him off.

Survivability as an elemental shaman I would put as not great, but not terrible. I have to give most of the credit to my pally, as he is quick to react with BoPs or Sacrifices to keep me alive. He also pops aura mastery to allow me to get my burst off without getting interrupted. Our two big tools as an elemental for survivability are the earthbind AOE root and the thunderstorm knock back. They are very nice to use in combination to get a pesky rogue or warrior out of your face. The earthbind is really great to catch a stealther as well. It should also be noted that one of the arenas you begin on an elevator and the opponents come up in another. That is within the range of an earthbind root, so always open with one right as you hit the top and you can usually catch a rogue out of stealth.

Our team seemed to have the most problem against priest teams. Disc priests seem to be super hard to take down, and excel at kiting in and out of LoS while keeping themselves and their teammate alive. I also decided DKs are the most annoying class in the world. Do they really need a pet that can stun, antimagic shield, a root, a pull, 2 different silences, plate armor, DoTs, and an overpowering smell? It is a little crazy how many tools they have to make my life difficult.

Overall, I will maybe keep up with the PVPing on the side and build a real set of gear. I think as we get some gear and practice, we will only improve. I will post an update on our progress after a few weeks, assuming we keep it up.

Elemental Hotfix incoming!

So it appears after much investigation, Blizzard could not find an actual bug with elemental DPS. However, they agree that we needed a slight boost. The solution is to give lightning overload a small boost. Instead of a 20% chance to proc an additional lightning bolt, it will be bumped up to a 33% chance. According to Ghostcrawler, this works out to about a 5% overall bump to a raid buffed elemental shaman's DPS. This change will be hotfixed into the game over the next couple of days. It should be noted that the tooltip will still read 20% until the next client patch.

I am very happy Blizzard is addressing us. While not an overwhelming boost, it should help us pickup a couple hundred more DPS. Even before this buff, I was in no way "terrible" like everyone on the forums seems to complain about. I came in 2nd overall for the night in our Ulduar last night. Most boss fights I was top 5, and usually hovering just under 5K DPS. A small boost like this will probably let me get back into the top 1-3 in most boss fights where I can stand mostly still and burn. Elemental still suffers somewhat in movement heavy fights.

Healing assignments for your raid

And now, back to a bit of healing discussion. As I said in an earlier post, I am now almost completely split halfway between resto and elemental. However, even when I am DPSing I have maintained my role as the healing officer for the guild. This means it is my responsibility to get healing assignments communicated to everyone for each boss fight. I used to not bother with assignments for Naxx trash, but several wipes in Ulduar taught me not to take that trash too lightly.

From a pure administration standpoint, I highly recommend you get a good mod to handle passing out assignments. I am pretty partial to surgeongeneral. It lets you easily assign healers and report it to the raid, as well as gives you support for multi-phase or complex fights. When I first took over I was using macros and paper, but an addon eases the burden considerably.

The real meat of doing proper healing assignments is to have enough information to make the appropriate choices.

1. Know the fight - You cannot assign healing unless you know what is coming. How many tanks need healed? How hard are they going to be hit? How much raid damage will be incoming? Is there a mechanic that may disable certain healers and someone will need to pickup their job? You should know the answers to these questions ahead of time if possible. If this is a new boss, you should always read up on strategy.

2. Know your personnel - You need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the players you have on your healing team. Some people shine in different situations or with different levels of responsibility. I always try and mix-and-match a weaker healer with a strong one. In general, none of our healers are "bads" as the WoW community loves to call people. But I do have a couple of stars that I trust to always keep up their assigned group or target. Rotate these people to where the real heavy healing will be in any encounter as much as possible. Certain fights that have spikey raid AOE, we will just assign general "raid" healing. But some fights the entire raid takes a huge amount of steady predictable damage, such as the frozen blows on Hodir. For a fight like this we find it useful to assign healers to keep up certain groups. This minimizes healing overlap and helps weaker healers not get as overwhelmed.

3. Know your classes - You should always know the strengths of each class and spec. In general, pallies should always be tank healing. They do not have a strong reliable form of AOE healing. I also prefer to have druids on the tanks as well, but they are now able to raid heal with the new tools they have since WotLK launched. Priests are a little different since they have 2 different healing specs. If the priest is specced discipline, you will want him on the tank. If they are holy, I tend to use them as raid healers. They are able to heal tanks just fine, but they can put out a lot of raid healing with PoH and CoH. While Shaman tank healing is much improved this expansion, I still prefer to always have them on the raid. If I have one resto shaman and we are assigning groups, I usually have them healing the melee group. Chain Heal is an excellent tool for this as melee tend to be clumped into a group and you do not have any bounce issues you may have when healing the ranged.

4. Be flexible - If you wipe, you should always take a moment to analyze what happened. Was it a tank death? If so, why did he die? Was it an avoidable mechanic, a spike that did not get handled, or was a healer dead/unable to heal? You need to understand what is happening before you can make adjustments. Don't be afraid to change healing assignments around depending on the last few attempts. We also have several DPSers with good healing sets and dual-specs, so we can flex our number of healers from 6-7 all the way up to 9-10 depending on who is in the raid. We typically run with 7 healers, but on certain fights we will go healer heavy if the enrage timer is not a problem.

These tips should get you going if you want or are asked to handle healing assignments. I'll probably be preparing a general raid healing tips for shamans next, but we will see where my whims take me.

Elemental Raiding - Or how to pewpew like a pro

Before I get into any specific Uldaur boss tips, I think I should cover basic strategy everyone should know on their job in a raid. I'll start with a quick overview of the basics of elemental DPS. As a note, right now something is wrong with elemental that has yet to be pinned down. Once 3.1 was released I noticed a drop-off in my personal DPS after going dual-spec. At the time, it was attributed to some bugs with the system that are now supposedly fixed. However, elemental DPS is still not back where it was. There are several massive threads on the WoW boards discussing the issue with multiple developer responses that seem to verify something is off, but they are not sure what. Hopefully they will fix the bugs or tweak our numbers up a bit to compensate. I used to be able to maintain 4k on a target dummy with only self buffs, but that has dropped to around 3.6k. It is tough to get a side-by-side comparison, as I have not set foot back in Naxx 25 to see my Patchwerk numbers, which was always the best measuring stick for pure raid DPS. I'm still able to do solid DPS since I know the class and try hard, but I am usually not top of the charts anymore.

Spec:
The first thing that you can do is to have a proper spec. I prefer a 57/14/0 build. Here is a link to my PVE raid build:
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#hEh0qcdItGfzAo0xxco:kbpcmM
This build basically takes all of the DPS talents in ele and skips the one talent aimed at enhancement and all of the more PVP focused talents. Moving over to the enhancement tree we snag the extra int just to move to tier 2, then you want the extra 5% crit from Thundering Strikes. In Tier 3 you can grab the extra spell damage from flametongue and might as well spend your last point to make your shocks cost less mana. When properly talented, elemental shaman rarely have mana problem due to all the cost reductions, regen, and clearcasting procs.

Glyphs:
Flame Shock - This is the bread and butter of your DPS rotation. You need to keep Flame Shock applied to your target at all times. This increases the duration, which is nice, but more importantly it does not make Lava Burst consume the DoT.

Lightning Bolt - 4% increased damage from Lightning Bolt. Since LB is a good chunk of your DPS, you need this glyph.

Totem of Wrath - Gives you a buff for 30% additional personal spell damage from your totem. It should also be noted this buff lasts 5 minutes, regardless of if your totem still exists or is in range. This works out to be more DPS than either of the other 3rd glyph choices (lava or flametongue).

Minor Glyphs - These don't really matter for DPS. Some people like the thunderstorm one to remove the knockback, but I find the knockback useful in various situations. I use it on Deconstructor adds that I see slipping through and on an occasional trash mob that I may have peeled off a tank by accident. I recommend the reincarnate glyph just to save the embarassing, "Umm...oops no ankhs."

Gear:
Gear is obviously an important part of your character. Rather than just naming off some best in slot list most will never gather, I will just briefly cover the relative importance of the DPS stats for an ele shaman.

Hit Rating - This is the most important stat right up to the point where you do not need it anymore, then it becomes worthless. Many people do not clearly understand hit and how much you need of it, so let me try and clarify. When fighting a boss, they are considered to be 3 levels higher than your character. This means assuming you are naked and have no buffs (sexy!), you have an 83% chance to hit your target. The first thing to do when building your gear list, is to get to 100% hit. Each 1% to hit translates into 26.23 rating. So in order to cover the entire 17% miss chance with hit, you need 446 rating (I will round them up like this from now on). Wow, that seems like alot! Ah yes my friends, it does, but that is assuming we have no buffs or talents. If you specced correctly, you will have elemental precision which is a flat +3% chance to hit. Next question, are you alliance or horde? Alliance means you are a Draenei and have Heroic Presence which gives you another free 1% to hit. So here are your hard hit caps:

Horde: 368
Alliance: 342

Those numbers mean you will never miss on a boss. But wait...there is more! Who do you raid with? Does your raid group run with a Shadow Priest or Boomkin? If so, they bring some additional hit buffs. Misery or Improved Fairie Fire both provide 3% to hit. Assuming you can rely upon your fellow raiders to be there and provide this buff, you would be wasting gear points on hit if you were at the hard cap I gave you above. So now what would you need?

Horde with raid hit buff: 289
Alliance with raid hit buff: 263

These are the hit caps I suggest you gear for with a well constructed raid. I actually carry an extra set of gloves that are enchanted and geared for hit for the few times I happen to be in raid without a Shadow Priest or Boomkin. When you are in Heroics or Naxx, you will likely have to gem for hit to make the numbers. Ulduar gear seems to have a few items that are heavy with hit, so that will change. I am a bit over the cap now myself with my 2 Tier 8.5 pieces.

Spellpower - The most important DPS stat after hit is spellpower. It affects ever single one of your spells. Any gems you do not need for hit should be spellpower.

Haste - Haste is the next best DPS stat after spellpower. I never go out of my way to find it, but Blizzard will give you plenty of it on your gear. It is never necessary to gem for it. As a note, hitting 500 haste is considered ideal for our rotation so we can squeeze in 5 lightning bolts before a lava burst. I will discuss the rotation more below.

Crit Rating - Never go out of your way for crit, but it will be on plenty of your gear regardless. While crit is always nice to have, it does not effect Lava Burst at all since we always crit with the spell anyways. So every point of crit is doing you nothing at all for those casts. It also does nothing for Flame Shock DoT ticks UNTIL you get 2 piece Tier 8.

Rotation:
The rotation and situational awareness are what seperates 2 equally geared players. This is the fabled "Player Skill" that everyone talks about. When someone is doing 1500 DPS in epics, they likely have no clue as to what their class should be doing for a rotation. For our rotations, you will usually lose DPS if you stick with a set number of casts for spells. In most boss fights you will have to move at some point, and that will throw everything off in the first place. Also any lag or varying haste levels or procs will throw everything out of whack as well. Therefore I live by the priority system. Basically, when all of your abilities are off cooldown, which order do you hit them in?

Flame Shock > Lava Burst > Lightning Bolt / Chain Lightning (filler)

Flame Shock should always be up and ticking. It gives you both the nice DoT, and is mandatory for Lava Burst crits. It is important to understand you only renew it when the last DoT ticks off unless you have nothing else you can do. It is more DPS to be Lava Bursting and Lightning Bolting rather than renew an already ticking Flame Shock that still had time to go.

Lava Burst is your free crit. Besides the damage it does it will always trigger your crit proc talents like elemental oath and clear casting. If it is off cooldown it should always be cast immediately (unless you need to renew Flame Shock)

Lightning Bolt - This is your main spam spell. While you wait for Lava Burst cooldowns or Flame Shock to tick you will always be slamming this button. Once you hit 500 haste you can typically fit in 5 lightning bolts during a full Lava Burst cooldown.

Chain Lightning - This is no longer "more" DPS than Lightning Bolt. It in only used to fill in a rotation at certain haste levels. It basically casts half a second faster than a regular Lightning Bolt. If you only have 1.5 seconds until Lava Burst is ready, it is technically best to squeeze in a CL rather than waiting or casting a Lightning Bolt which wastes .5 sec that should be going towards Lava Burst. While this is technically correct, it is difficult to get a feel for it and if you are new to raid DPS I would recommend going straight Lightning Bolt spam and ignoring CL. Once again, at certain haste levels you will never need to touch CL. I rarely use it outside of times it will hit multiple targets. If you want to completely maximize your output with Chain Lightning, spend a significant amount of time at a practice dummy getting it right.

General Tips:
A dead shaman does no DPS. The most important thing in a boss fight is to be aware of the abilities he is using and to react appropriately. This usually boils down to are you standing in something that is killing you? Then move!

Use movement time appropriately. If you have to run or are flying through the air from a punt, you cannot be casting most of your DPS spells. Use that time to renew your Flame Shock or re-drop totems if needed.

Use your cooldowns wisely (elemental mastery or trinkets). Always have your cooldowns available for use during heroism. You get the most out of it by squeezing in as many casts as you can while it is up, and heroism is your best opportunity. If you know it is going to be more than 3 minutes into the fight before heroism is used, than pop it early so you can use it multiple times.

Come prepared to every raid. Bring your flasks and food. If your raid provides feasts, it is usually good form to spend some time outside of the raid helping to farm up some mats for them. I also always carry potions of speed. It is a free mini-heroism for yourself. On a long fight, I time my cooldowns for the heroism, and then when they are back up again chug a speed potion while I pop them.

And from the grave, a blog arises.....

What is this? A new post? Why yes my friends, I have decided to make my triumphant return to the world of blogging. So why did I stop in the first place? I guess motivation can falter when you feel like you are just spilling your thoughts into the void of the Internet and they no one is reading them anyways. I think that is a challenge all beginning blogs have to struggle with. I finally decided I missed talking about WoW, and instead of filling my guild forums with my banter I will thrust it upon both of you readers! (Hi mom!)

So, what has been up with Syrinth in these past months of silence? Well, first of all Symbiosis is still going strong. We are working on Ulduar and have the first 9 bosses down so far. I truly think we are the best guild on our server for the amount of time we put in. The guild is made up of people that want to raid, but only want to spend a few hours at a time 3 days a week. The fact we are ahead of other guilds that spend twice the amount of time in there that we do says a lot.

Also, I am no longer a pure resto shaman. I have been cheating on my Chain Heal button with these funny icons that look like lightning bolts. Pewpew indeed! Once our guild was farming all of the pre-3.1 raids, we found healing was pretty easy and we lacked a solid raiding elemental shaman. I volunteered to make the switch, as we had another resto at the time. After I built my new set of gear, I was able to climb up to the top of the damage meters and am usually top 5 depending on the fight. I am now the best geared ele shaman on the server according to wow-heroes, which is amusing considering it was my second set of gear I built. I guess that mostly speaks that real good shaman on the alliance side are tougher to come by. I even had the uber guild on our server approach me about a recruit slot, but I enjoy the more laid back schedule and value my marriage. :)

Even though elemental is now my "main" spec I still end up healing far more than I thought. Thank god for the dual spec system. I believe I healed for every one of our progression kills in Ulduar except 1, and I healed when we were killing 3 drake. We no longer have the other resto attending raids, so there are several fights that chain heal is just too good. Kologarn is a good example of a ton of raid damage in a confined space that enables me to just slam chain heal and keep a lot of people up. I knew that Blizzard would end up going back to the heavy raid damage to make healers work for it, so resto shaman will once again be in high demand. I enjoy both, but feel like I make more of a difference when I can heal. The unfortunate thing is I am gearing for ele, but healing on progression and am not in the pool for the legendary hammer. Had I not made the switch, I would have been the default to get the hammer I am sure. But in the end, it is not that big of a deal to me.

Going forward in this blog I will be covering the shaman class from both resto and elemental perspectives. I will also be discussing raid strategy in general and plan on starting with my impressions on each boss in Ulduar.