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.