Shamanistic Rage

This post was inspired by a few lines that I put on my guild forums.

Hyjal has tons of raid damage, what do we do?!
Bring more Shamans
Oh Noes, BT has even more damage, and these pally healers fail! What do we do?
Bring even more Shamans
OMFG I AM SO QUITTING THE GAME BECAUSE I AM A DWARF PRIEST (NAMED MALLET) AND CANT HEAL THIS DAMAGE IN SUNWELL!!!! AGREED?!
No, reroll shaman, nub.

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For the past two weeks in my guild, I have encountered two members who did not know the following things:

1. Elitist Jerks
2. Loot Rank
3. Bosskillers

Naturally, I felt the need to go ahead and remedy the situation.

First, I started with a rogue called Theronin. Sigh, loudmouthed Ronin. Not only did I have to help him with shutting up, I also had to lead him to places where he could get better. I’m still wondering if it worked.

Next is Tuxedo, a druid who I have befriended over the past few weeks. After helping him get max Alchemy / Herbalism, he now has resecured his spot back on the raid, along with our new druid, yiffyiff.

No one in our guild wants to be the bad guy and tell players that they suck and need to do better. Instead of threateneing words though, they should just show them how to research and better themselves. Maybe I could help out mallet for his healing problems. c.c After all, we are not a babysitting guild, we want to raid, and raid hard.

Do….

1. Do give helpful suggestions when you are positive that it is needed.
2. Do let your tank know when a boss is positioned in such a way that it might kill you.
3. Do watch your threat.
4. Do appreciate your tanks, healers, and caster dps. We would all be dead if not for them.
5. Do communicate in party chat to organize rotations, such as drums or kicks.
6. Do be a man/woman and admit if you caused a wipe.
7. Do stand out of the fire unless the healers say that they can keep you up while in it.
8. Do repair Often.
9. Do use bandages and health stones.
10. Do thank your shaman for their totems.

Don’t….

1. Don’t blame someone else, ever. Things happen. If they did wrong, have proof and only then, use constructive criticism.
2. Don’t pull aggro while trying to top meters. Just don’t.
3. Don’t forget your resist gear in the bank.
4. Don’t tell the healers how to do their jobs.
5. Don’t throw a fit because a druid won your item. It’s DKP, deal with it.
6. Don’t skip enchantments/gems because you are broke. Ask your guild for help.
7. Don’t try to take the raid leaders job. You will find yourself gkicked.
8. Don’t complain that we are running Hyjal again. We can always find someone else to raid.
9. Don’t Stand in front of the boss except in rare cases. E.G. Prince Malchezaar Shadow Nova.
10. Don’t ever yell at your shaman to put down a totem. You will get wrath of air instead.

There is my top 10. Anyone else have anything to put forward?

A month and a half ago, I was just a little level 1 shaman. One I hot 70, my first priority was to get gear as quick as possible so I could raid with my current guild, Carnage. After reading yet another post of Matticus,I decided to write this post, to share my experiences. Keep in mind, this guide is for those who’s guilds are helping them intensely, and not for the solo grinder who wants to get into a Hyjal guild.

Required Professions

You NEED Leatherworking and Skinning for this. Neither Engineering, Blacksmithing, nor Jewelcrafting, which you may also benefit from, does not give you as much variety as skinning and leatherworking.

Required Instances

Run Karazhan, Gruul’s, and Bagtheridon every week. Those badges will help you a lot. Get revered with Keepers of Time and Cenarion Expedition, and exalted with either Scryers or Aldor. I will not list anything you can get from SSC / TK / Badges, as this is meant to go straight from Karazhan to HYjal / BT. This is just a basic list meant to serve as a guideline. Always follow the Tier 6 EP System and never choose gear just for hit, you will get the required 100 hit rating through any gear you get.

Gear List

Head

• Cyclone Helm
• Gem with Relentless Earthstorm Diamond and a Strength Gem
• Enchant with Glyph of Ferocity
• Drops from Prince Malchezaar

Neck

• Mithril Chain of Heroism
  
• Drops from Chess Event in Karazhan

Shoulder

• Shoulders of Lightning Reflexes
  
• Crafted, BT/Hyjal Pattern drop. Ask your guild if they have any spares. If not, prepare to spend a pretty penny.
• Pur your respective Scryer / Aldor shoulder enchant on it.

Back

• Farstrider Wildercloak
• Enchant with 12 Agility
• Drops from Prince Malchezaar
• Replace later with Dory’s Embrace or Shadowmoon Destroyer’s Drape.

Chestpiece

• Hauberk of the War Bringer
• Gem with your respective strength, strength / critical strike, strength / stamina gems for your meta gem activation.
• Drops from normal Magister’s Terrace, from Kael’thas.

Bracers

• Bindings of Lightning Reflexes
• Crafted by a LW
• Enchant with strength

Gloves

• Gauntlets of the Dragonslayer
• Drops from Gruul
• Enchant and Gem as needed

Belt

• Belt of the Black Eagle
• Crafted by a LW
• Strength Gems!

Pants

• Rip-Flayer Leggings
• Drops from Netherspite
• Gem and use a weak leg enchant, you’ll replace it soon enough.

Boots

• Boots of the Crimson Hawk
• Crafted by LW
• Boars speed

Rings

• Any dps ring that drops from Karazhan will do.

Trinkets

• Shard of Contempt is a must!
• Drops from Arena Event in Heroic Magister’s Terrace
• Use any dps trinket you can find.

Weapons

• Double Decapitator
• From Prince Malchezaar
• Mongoose is <3

Relic

• Stonebreaker Totem
• 20 Badges from badge vendor in Shattrath (I know I said I wouldn’t link badge resistance, but this is the best totem for us)

And there is is, the basic list. From then on up, use websites like lootrank to help determine your upgrades.

The war has long been going on.

We were safe from the fires of battle before.

Now the battle has come to our doorstep, as healers and dps in carnage break bubbles.

I am trapped in the middle, what do I do?

My good friend Matticus has already posted his thoughts and notes on Bloodboil for healers. Now here is my perspective, from an enhancement shaman.

Firstly, here are my notes.

• Melee here sucks, especially for an enhancement shaman. You are easily threat capped (even with tranquility totem down!). As such, i found myself healing 60% of the fight.
• Your fury warrior can and will cause one or more of your melee to get the Acid Breath, along with him. Bring a lot of potions.
• If you are an enhancement shaman, and get fel raged, put on a shield and pop SR, then PRAY!
• Bloodboil moves a lot, making it a nightmare for melee to avoid his breaths and his smash.
• If you are enhancement, expect to sometimes have to toss a few heals to the melee, the other healers are busy.

That’s all the notes I have, otherwise I feel we did a decent job on Bloodboil. Lets just hope we can keep him down in the raids ahead.

Raiding Enhancement Shaman don’t have it easy. Not only are we just buffbots in the eyes of the melee DPS we buff, but also a source of ridicule in things like 5 man groups and speedy ZA runs. Now, this is not always true, some people have it lucky, and are not thought of this way. Luckily, for myself, I have the chance to prove that I am there on raids for more than just because I happen to be apart of the fairer gender.

I’m getting off track, anyways, we enhancement shaman did manage to get a break when it came to our rotation for our own damage. We have…

Windfury Weapon

Feel like punishing the DPS for 60 seconds because they treated you like dirt, well just switch that windfury totem out with wrath of air. You don’t care, because you have the incredibly awesome Windfury Weapon Imbue, guaranteed to be the envy of everyone out there, especially when you take over the pool of awesome.

Stormstrike

Our only ‘controllable’ melee buff. This is a blessing and a curse in disguise. The Blessing? It helps increase our earth shocks in our Fire Shock / Earth Shock rotation. The Curse? Any nature magic user in your raid (Elemental Shaman, Boomkin) will eat your stormstrike debuff. Oh well, it will be more a benefit for them to use it, but still! They should ask first.

Fire Shock

The third spell is Flame shock. Now, for enhancement shamans in sunwell, specifically on brutallis, you all know to avoid this. The reason why is, if one is suffering a problem from debuffs getting knocked off, then Flame shock is counted very low on the debuff filter. So, if you can’t use it, don’t, otherwise, use this thing every 12 seconds!

Earth Shock

Our fourth spell. Earth shock is the great eater of the stormstrike, and the interrupter wonder. In the FS/ES rotation, we see most of this dps used just before our second SS debuff fades. Some people like to mix it up with using ES/FS instead, but I found that it helped buff dps more if I used the former. Sometimes we have to not use any rotation so we could use the ES to interrupt, but you do what you have to. If you are mana constrained though (and by hyjal you better not be), use rank 1 for interrupts.

Remember, Stormstrike -> Flame Shock -> Earth Shock, rinse and repeat.

For your theorycrafting needs, read this useful thread for all raiding enhancement shamans.

Disclaimer: This is the result of boredom while my server is down.

Out of boredom and lack of ideas for Blog, I’ll be doing a live blogging segment of our (Carnage) night in Black Temple. Maybe one of these days, I’ll figure out how to live stream it too.

5:21 PM: Everyone in guild chat is getting ready for the raid. Invites expected to go out soon.

5:50 PM: People are Late, again…

6:19 PM: On the last pull before Najentus. I learned a lot of things so far tonight, such as that the little poison elementals can be kicked / earth shocked. I made the melee set up a drums of battle rotation, so we wouldn’t waste drums. Now who to be my spine buddy?

6:23 PM: About to pull Najentus, macro ready!

6:28 PM: People’s games keep crashing, come on! Lets pull this guy already. T_T

6:30 PM: While waiting, I have experienced first hand just how rowdy and full of angry energy the melee is full of. It’s kind of terrifying… Yet I agree in.

6:40 PM: Najentus down, Rising Tide dropped. I didn’t go for it as I’ll have better soon. We did a good drums of battle rotation, the rogues gawked at their 1000+ dps a second. I cried at my 800+. 

6:54 PM: Stunned melee can’t say no.

7:06 PM: Why can’t hunters who tank the flying guys pull them back so they land?

7:08 PM: Discussing Supremus boss strat. Melee is expected to die.

7:22 PM: Wiped on Supremus, everyone started the blame game. I won’t let Melee instigate it anymore. They can eat shit before I let them start blaming people.

7:44 PM: Syphon dropped. I passed it, it got sharded. Oh well, Vanir’s set > Syphon / Rising Tide. People just don’t seem to get that.
8:13 PM: Akama is my sugar daddy? No, thats Ahnon. c.c

8:14 PM: Pulling Akama fight.. thing?

8:20 PM: Akama is down, this is a warrior night for drops.

8:24 PM: Heading to a quick kill on Rage Winterchill.

8:40 PM: Rage Down, more warrior lewts. Raid over.

A day or so Ago, Matticus linked me a blog post about how the class clowns always had the insightful blogs wow it was the Valedictorians who always had the most boring and underwritten blogs. Maybe this is why I can never post here, as I start writing, sigh as I think its wrong, delete it and start over.

Maybe I shouldn’t have strived to being such an overachiever in school, since I did get Valedictorian for 8th - 12th grades.

As you may notice, my post title states it is day 2. Now why did I put day 2? Because it would have taken more than one day to evaluate how I feel enhancement shammies can do in raid dps.

Firstly, my predictions were correct; I would not be anywhere near the first in Damage Done, though it doesn’t mean I won’t try.

Secondly, both tests have been in hyjal, which means that I have odds stacked against me.

However, hopefully the damage of my party members was increased. I’ve been working on getting totems down quicker. At least the second time around, I died only once, I believe.

Better blog post coming later, been busy with pvp. ^^;;