Totem Talk: All about Healing Tide Totem

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement and restoration shaman. Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration, brought to you by Joe Perez (otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticus and content creation at InternetDragons.TV), shows you how.

This week, we're going to talk a whole lot about Healing Tide Totem. Why are we going to spend that time discussing this resto shaman healing talent? Well, because like with everything else lately, there is a hot debate springing up about it. This has to do, of course, with the upcoming patch 5.4 that is currently being tested on the PTR. Again the information we have on this is subject to change, but we can still talk about it until things go live.

Since the start of the expansion, there has been a love hate relationship with HTT. The debate started day one with if this talent was mandatory for restoration shaman and how much of our healing truly relied on it. After just a little bit into the expansion's first tier of raid content, the debate intensified and has been going on ever since.

A rising star, or a falling shaman?

The beginning of the expansion is always a time to see what our new goodies will bring us and what type of impact they will have. From the get go HTT was a curiosity. The talent seemed strong and was often times compared to a druids Tranquility of a priest Divine Hymn, and it gained the ability to utilize our mastery Deep Healing. It gained about 48% of our spellpower, and while that was great, it still didn't compare to other raid cooldowns that would get 85% or higher of the caster's spellpower. The downfall was that basically as other healers got gear, and as players learned not to stand in bad, the cooldown would slowly dwindle in power. The problem was, well, it hasn't quite worked out like that. A considerable amount of our healing throughput has wound up tied to HTT, especially at the beginning.

Personally I know the very first time I used HTT, the other healers pretty much had a cow when they saw how much healing it did by itself during Feng the Accursed. That's been pretty much the curse of this cooldown from the start. It does so much of our healing by itself simply because there are so many fights where everyone is broken down into much smaller groups or simply can't stack on top of each other and take advantage of Spirit Link Totem or Healing Rain like we did throughout Cataclysm. That's been one of the largest complaints among the respectful punch of our healing brethren, that so much of our healing is on this cooldown. There are fights, like Tortos, where HTT is counting for almost 35% of the healing we do simply because of how spread out everyone is. This wound up making the talent pretty much mandatory for that tier choice compared to the other two.

This of course presents an issue on two fronts. First, if the healing cooldown doesn't scale quite as well as other cooldowns, it will eventually fall out of favor and become much less useful. Second, with so much of our healing on certain fights deriving from that, what does that have to say about our healing longevity as a class when compared to other healers?

Will this change?

This is a difficult question to answer some times, but overall, it's not a great place to be where a cooldown like that becomes something you rely on so much for certain fights. We can already see that there are things in the works to make this not the case, or at least attempt to. The new Glyph of Chaining is an attempt to make our beloved Chain Heal more viable in fights were we are going to be spread out, which from all appearances will be happening again in the coming tier of raiding. The new Glyph of Riptide is going down the same road by lessening the initial blow of the instant healing effect. The idea will be that we can start to rely on them a little bit more on those fights where people are spread out.

The second part of this equation is a redesign of the other talents from that tier of choices. Conductivity has been updated so that casting Healing Wave, Greater Healing Wave, Healing Surge and Chain Heal will increase the duration of Healing Rain by 1 second. Conductivity has been one of those talents that has pretty much been written off since the start of the expansion, and this is an attempt to make it more viable as an option when compared to HTT. Will this change be enough to knock HTT out of the spot as a mandatory talent? I'm not entirely convinced. While increasing the duration of HR is nice, it is going to depend on how much stacking we're going to be able to do in the next tier of raiding, and the jury is still out on that. Personally, I don't think anything is going to knock HTT out of it's place in our toolkit anytime soon, which is good and bad.

What about buffing HTT?

This is another one of those topics that has been debated. Half of the shaman healing community would love to see HTT buffed so that we can continue to use it competitively in the tiers of content to come. The other half think that doing so will do nothing but hurt us in the long run by making us so much more dependent on the cooldown for our healing throughput. In patch 5.3's release, a lot of other raid healer cooldowns got buffed yet our HTT did not get any increase. In a Twitter exchange, everyone's favorite crustacean Gregg "Ghostcrawler" Street stated that buffing HTT would only make it more mandatory for resto and that SLT was our raid cooldown. Later that same day however, patch 5.4 ptr notes showed that Healing Tide Totem was getting buffed to heal for 50% more. As it stands on the ptr, HTT will also gain 72% of our spellpower on use. That's a significant bump and puts it much more in line with other raid healing cooldowns.

In the end, I still have a love-hate relationship with the cooldown. I love it because I have a big soft spot for totems in general and I'll always argue for more and cooler totems for us to use. I hate it because I hate feeling like everything we do is tied up in a single cooldown cast every 3 minutes. It points out that we have some severe deficiencies when it comes to fights where we can't keep our raid grouped up. We tend to have to work very hard to keep up.While I love excelling at group healing fights, and I'm not opposed to rolling up my sleeves and putting in some hard work, I hate feeling pigeon holed. My hope is that shaman healing will get another close looking over in the very near future. I still love being a shaman healer, I think we're still a great healing class, but I feel like we have the potential to be so much better. Totem Talk: Restoration lends you advice on healing groups, DK tanks and heroics and mana concerns in today's endgame -- or take a break and look back at the rise of the resto shaman. Happy healing, and may your mana be plentiful! Tags: ancestral guidance, AncestralGuidance, conductivity, earthliving weapon, EarthlivingWeapon, featured, guide-to-shamans, healing tide totem, HealingTideTotem, patch 5.4, Patch5.4, resto, Resto-Shaman, restoration, restoration-shaman, restoration-shaman-column, restoration-shaman-totem-talk, shaman-guide, shaman-healing, shaman-info, shaman-restoration-column, shaman-talents, wow-shaman, wow-shaman-info

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Totem Talk: Restoration predictions and set bonuses for tier 16

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement and restoration shaman. Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration, brought to you by Joe Perez (otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticus and content creation at InternetDragons.TV), shows you how.

Recently we've been focusing a lot on the here and now, which is always good, but this week I thought it would be time to take a look at what's coming up. The PTR is alive with the sounds of music... or at least the thrashing and ravings of the soon to be defeated Garrosh. Patch 5.4 is starting to take shape with a the world receiving more changes for one particular area.

There are some very interesting changes right now for restoration shaman on the PTR, and they lead us to a point of speculation on what the next tier of raiding will bring for us. These are changes to glyphs and new set bonuses for tier 16 gear that may be portents for the future of shaman healing. As always this is information gained from the PTR and is subject to change prior to going live.

The Writing is on the Glyphs

This is one of those changes that I didn't expect, but I personally think speaks volumes as to what we can start to expect to see in the next tier of raiding. There are two glyphs in particular that received an update, Glyph of Chaining and Glyph of Riptide. So what are these changes exactly? Well, lets looks at glyph of chaining. It still increases your jump distance on your Chain Heal ability by 100%, but the penalty has been reduced by a considerable amount. Down from 4 seconds to 2 seconds, this is a very reasonable and manageable downside for the jump distance increase. Glyph of Riptide now sees the instant heal reduction moved down to 75% from 90%, and that is nothing to scoff at when you figure the stat jump we'll be making with the new gear available for tier 16.

These are really good changes for us, don't get me wrong, I just can't help but feel that these buffs to these glyphs are overpowered and at the same time heralding some difficult times ahead. Take a look at glyph of chaining. The reduction in the cooldown is a great incentive to take the glyph, I mean who doesn't want to have a chain heal that jumps 25 yards between targets? This is also the case with Glyph of Riptide, which while it is largely considered one of the best glyphs we have, having the instant healing penalty reduced begs the question why.

My prediction is that this is the first step in attempting to make our spread healing more viable than it currently is. Currently the hardest fights for us are the ones in which many people are spread out and can't take advantage of our group heals like Healing Rain. So changes to these two glyphs start to make me wonder about what we're going to be facing in the not so distant future. It speaks to the fact that we're going to have a lot more spread out fights, where our groups are going to have to stand far apart, or be divided into subgroups, for mechanic purposes. To me it means that we're going to be relying on these two spells more than we already do and that we're going to have our work cut out for us as healers very soon. Of course, these could change at any time, but at a first glance that is the impression that I get.

Set Bonuses on the Horizon

When looking ahead to the next tier of raiding, it's virtually impossible to do so without looking at what our set bonuses are going to be. Those set bonuses matter to any raider, no matter whether you're going through raid finder or fighting your way through heroic content. I personally like looking at them and attempting to figure out why those set bonuses in particular. What do they bring to the table for us in terms of healing? What does it mean to the type of damage we will be seeing or the encounter mechanics we will be facing?

Tier 16 2-piece bonus is actually fairly interesting as far as the choice goes. As it stands right now, the two piece set bonus makes it so that whenever Earth Shield heals a target, the target gets a shield that will absorb incoming damage equal to the amount of healing received. I say it is interesting because it winds up being sort of shieldception, basically where it is a shield inside of a shield. It's a good set bonus, and it basically lets you double dip on the shield which means it's going to be doing a lot of work, especially on tanks who tend to be our more traditional targets for ES. This leads me to believe that we're going to see some bigger tank hits in the next tier. I really like this set bonus and I'm looking forward to seeing it in action.

Tier 16 4-piece bonus, well this one I'm not sure if I like it or not quite yet. It's interesting for sure, it basically lets you summon a mirror version of yourself that will mimic all cast time targeted spells for 15 seconds whenever you cast Spiritwalker's Grace. There's still just so much about this that we don't know yet. Will spells like Ascendance interact with it? Will the heals that the duplicate casts benefit from Deep Healing? I could see it swaying us pretty heavily into the haste camp for secondary stats pretty easily. From my own limited testing so far, it seems to target your same target and cast your same spell, as long as it's something you have to target someone with like Greater Healing Wave and Healing Surge. This set bonus basically turns SWG into a tank healing cooldown if I've ever seen one, and while I've been asking for a tank healing cooldown for a very long time know I would really like it to not be tied to a set bonus or to SWG. I'm also not too thrilled with SWG continually being given things that make it a throughput cooldown. It then gets relegated to either you choose to use it to mobile heal or for big healing output, which sort of defeats the purpose of the spell in the first place. It is a set bonus that I will be watching very closely until it reaches live servers.

That's the initial reaction so far to what's coming in patch 5.4, but again things could still change. I know that I'm very intrigued to see what is in store for us, and how these changes will evolve before they reach live servers. I expect that these glyph changes will shift still, and the set bonuses as well, but only time will tell. What do you think of our patch 5.4 goodies so far? Totem Talk: Restoration lends you advice on healing groups, DK tanks and heroics and mana concerns in today's endgame -- or take a break and look back at the rise of the resto shaman. Happy healing, and may your mana be plentiful! Tags: featured, guide-to-shamans, patch-5.4, patch-5.4-ptr, patch-5.4-raid, resto, Resto-Shaman, restoration, restoration-shaman, restoration-shaman-column, restoration-shaman-totem-talk, Shaman Glyph, shaman-guide, shaman-healing, shaman-info, shaman-restoration-column, shaman-talents, ShamanGlyph, wow-shaman, wow-shaman-info

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Totem Talk: The Spirit of Restoration

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement and restoration shaman. Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration, brought to you by Joe Perez (otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticus and content creation at InternetDragons.TV), shows you how

No matter what expansion, and regardless of the level of content you're doing, one of the things that comes up regularly as a topic of discussion is Spirit. A stat that took over for MP5 as the hot regen item, and rose to even more prominence and popularity among healers with the announcement of fixed mana pools. It is something that has a presence you will always feel and will never be able to escape.

This isn't a bad thing mind you, but it sparks conversations and discussion about how much Spirit you need. What is the right amount? How much is too much? Is there such a thing as too much? Is it worth it at the expense of other stats? I know that many of the fine folks I talk to have had plenty to say on the topic recently, which lead me to today's post.

Mana Tide Totem: Blessing and curse

Shaman have a very unique problem, something that takes the form of a blessing and a curse for us. Namely, this takes the form of Mana Tide Totem. Our wonderful little totem has been with us for quite a while, it has done some wonderful things for us as healers and making sure we have a well of mana to drink from when we need it. It's a great totem, don't get me wrong, but it has a dark side. The ability allows us not only to give ourselves mana back, but also to restore mana to our raiding healing counterparts withing 40 yards of it. Combine that with the fact that it operates at 200% of your spirit total excluding short term buffs like trinket procs, and you have a very powerful raid tool that is very coveted. It's good, no two ways about it. However it has a bit of a downside as well.

Since the birth of this wonderful water world spirit, restoration shaman have gotten saddled in some folks eyes with the label of mana battery. Something that while funny at first, has sort of become something that many raid leaders choose to solely identify healing minded shaman for. It has certainly always been a personal grievance of mine when I hear people refer to resto shaman as nothing more than mana batteries. There is a school of thought that holds that stacking spirit is the most important thing you can do in terms of helping your raid team as a whole. That there is a certain amount of sacrifice that you need to make to your throughput in order to focus on having a ton of spirit. It is not a thought I subscribe to personally, but it is in fact out there.

Because of this cooldown, you may sometimes come under a lot of pressure to stack a ton of spirit and truly become that mana battery. It sounds like it may be something that isn't too common, but I get a lot of emails about this and it does come up in conversation rather frequently whenever I'm talking to newer healers or resto shaman that have just changed guilds or raid teams.

Throughput over longevity?

From the focus on spirit we come to the other school of thought, and that is where throughput is king of everything. This school of thought focuses on stats like Crit, Haste and Intellect. The idea is to make sure your heals hit for as much as they possibly can, possibly damning efficiency and scoffing at people's desire to even consider stacking spirit. It rests on the idea that you can use Glyph of Telluric Currents to make up for any missing Spirit as a major source of mana regeneration. The upside of this is that those same stats that you would look at to increase your throughput would also help increase the damage from your Lightning Bolt when you decided it was time to do a little DPS.

The part that makes this a little tough to swallow is that there are folks in this camp that take their spirit down to the absolute minimum. They will reforge out of it, avoid items with it on it and make sure not to gem or enchant for it. It's a little bit boggling to me, I'm not going to lie. Throughput is important, sure, but is it so important that you sacrifice all of your longevity to do it? Where is the cut off point? I get this type of question almost as often as I get the the ones about stacking spirit.

So what's the right answer?

That right there is the $64,000 question. Which is right and which is wrong? The answer is both for both. My personal thought is that extremes are bad. They shoe horn you and cripple you in as many ways as they may seem to help you. I personally don't believe that either extreme by themselves is the right answer, no matter how much people debate the topic or express their opinion on it. There is however only one right answer, and well, it is simply whatever lets you get the job done. In an average raid week, it is not uncommon for me to spend time reforging, re-gemming and shuffling things around to best suit the fight. Some fights will require some more spirit, others I'll stack some more mastery and take advantage of some Deep Healing. Some nights I will change my load out depending on what the healing team looks like for a night in order to better compliment the team.

As far as I'm concerned, at the end of the day it's about getting the job done however you need to get it done working with your team. Your stats may shift, you may change fight to fight, but you just need to be ready to do that. Do not become swayed by either extreme. If you find yourself hurting for mana even though you are rolling MTT on cooldown, stack some more spirit. After all you can't heal if you have no mana. If you find yourself with a mana bar that isn't moving and your heals are hitting like limp pasta, drop some spirit and look at some of your other stats. Find your balance, what works for you in your situations. Don't heal in a world of pure black and white, and swim in that gray area. As far as I'm concerned, that is the right answer. What do you think? Totem Talk: Restoration lends you advice on healing groups, DK tanks and heroics and mana concerns in today's endgame -- or take a break and look back at the rise of the resto shaman. Happy healing, and may your mana be plentiful! Tags: featured, guide-to-shamans, resto, Resto-Shaman, restoration, restoration-shaman, restoration-shaman-column, restoration-shaman-totem-talk, shaman-guide, shaman-healing, shaman-info, shaman-restoration-column, shaman-talents, spirit, stat balance, StatBalance, stats, wow-shaman, wow-shaman-info

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Totem Talk: Restoration and the Throne of Thunder, Part 4

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement and restoration shaman. Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration, brought to you by Joe Perez (otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticus and content creation at InternetDragons.TV), shows you how

Turtles and Hyrdas have a special place in the sewers of the Isle of Thunder. Their existence does sort of answer the question about what happens when turtles and snakes find their ways into the refuse of an empire full of magic and chemical experimentation. I mean, I know that was a burning question for me before this raid tier started. But now that you've stomped shells and knocked out a few one eyed monsters tentacle things, I'm sure you think you've done it all. Well, there's more to do still.

As you dive deeper into the sewers looking for a way back into the main castle, there is still a great number of horrors that await you. Well, rather, they're waiting for you so that they can try to eat you whole. The good news at least is that they mark the midpoint on the way to the final encounter with the Thunder King himself.

This will not be a comprehensive boss guide, instead this will be a quick run down on things that you, as a resto shaman, should be aware of or tips to help make your healing of the encounter easier.

Ji-Kun

This giant bird is one bad mother, I mean she literally is because she just leaves her eggs all around waiting for players to come by and make omelettes out of them on normal mode. The bird is also a colossal pain and deals a ton of damage. The fight is really divided into two parts, the main platform and the nests. There are some abilities that we will have to pay attention to regardless of our location in the fight. The first ability to take note of is Feed Young, where Ji-Kun will spit up globs of food to attempt to feed any of her hatchlings that have called out for food. This is an important ability for multiple reasons. When in the air, players who have gathered the ability to fly from the smaller platforms can intercept the feed before it can reach the young. These are giant green blobs that fire straight out of the bird's mouth. Catching them will give you the Primal Nutriment buff. The buff gives you increased healing and damage when you catch it.

As a healer, if you can manage to snag this you are doing nothing but helping yourself and your raid team for the entire 30 seconds that the buff lasts by increasing the healing you do. The other thing to note is that whenever a feed glob is missed, a Feed Pool will land on the ground around the main platform. Standing in the pool will deal damage over time, but if someone stands in the pool for 3 seconds, they will absorb the pool and gain the debuff Slimed which is a stacking debuff that deals damage over time. This is important to note because as a shaman you can use your cooldowns to absorb the pool and the subsequent DoT it leaves on you so someone else doesn't have to. Stone Bulwark Totem is amazing in this regard and if you combine it with Call of the Elements you can double dip on the totem and survive quite well.

Quills is an ability that deals high raid-wide damage every second for 8 seconds when Ji-Kun uses it. This is where you're going to need to use your Healing Tide Totem and your Spirit Link Totem. My suggestion on this is that you use HTT if you're on the main platform and SLT if you're on one of the egg platforms combined with Healing Rain. The last two things to really know are Caw and Down Draft. Caw is a small 8 yard AoE that targets a random player in the raid. For this reason your group will be spread out to minimize damage. As a result you will rely more on Riptide, Healing Surge, Greater Healing Wave and Healing Stream Totem. Down draft is where the boss will attempt to push you off the edge of the platform, this one is easy to avoid if you keep your Ghost Wolf on your bars in easy reach. Move in towards the center of the platform, pop ghost wolf and run. The fight isn't too terribly bad for us, it is just a fight in which we have to mind the fact that yet again we can't rely on our group healing to see us through. Managing cooldowns is key, and absorbing damage when we can so others don't have to makes us strong in this fight.

Durumu the Forgotten

This is actually the fight where I started making all sorts of comparisons between Throne of Thunder and Big Trouble in Little China. He's a giant eyeball monster that was created with the sole purpose of looking into the hearts of the Thunder King's Followers and seeing if they would betray him. Now, however, he lives in a sewer with only Mist Lurkers as his friend. The good news about this fight is that there will be a lot of times that you can stay stacked up and make full use of your Chain Heal and your Healing Rain. There are a few things to really pay attention to as a resto shaman.

The first is going to be the Light Spectrum, in which Infrared Light, Bright Light and Blue Rays will spawn. These are damage effects that split the damage taken evenly between the people standing in it. As time goes on, and the longer people stand in the beams, the damage taken increases. With these you have to watch how long people have been standing in them, and when the beams cross each other. These persist until all the Fog adds are revealed and killed. Try to save any big cooldowns like HTT or SLT until the damage either starts to stack way too fast, or when the beams are crossing each other. You can also utilize stone bulwark totem to mitigate some of your incoming damage. Otherwise, simply heal as normal through them while your DPS handles the adds. I recommend not using your Spiritwalker's Grace on this, because you're going to need it for another ability boss ability.

The second, and probably the most iconic part of this fight, is the maze phase. It starts with the casting of Disintegration Beam, where he will focus on a point with his gaze. Any players caught by it will instantly die. This is important to pay attention to where this beam is because it will rotate and follow the group. While staring intently at the group, his Cross-Eye will create a maze of Eye Sores around the platform. The trick here is that an opening will, well, open in the maze for you to follow at ranged and near melee. You have to run through the maze to stay ahead of the beam. There is still however damage being dealt as you go around so you will still have to heal while running. Make liberal use of your riptide and this is where you want to save your SWG for. Pop that, and just go to town while running. Use HST on cooldown and CotE to pop it back up if you need a little extra punch to make it through. You may want to consider picking up Echo of the Elements for this fight as well just to give you a little more healing when you're using SWG and running, it has served me well on this fight.

Both fights aren't too terribly bad compared to some others in here, though Durumu can often times be attributed to a whole lot of pain due to maze phase, they are not the worst, nor the best fights for us in this tier of raiding. I suspect you should not have too much trouble breaking through and getting closer to the king of the castle. Totem Talk: Restoration lends you advice on healing groups, DK tanks and heroics and mana concerns in today's endgame -- or take a break and look back at the rise of the resto shaman. Happy healing, and may your mana be plentiful! Tags: durumu, Durumu-the-Forgotten, featured, guide-to-shamans, ji-kun, resto, Resto-Shaman, restoration, restoration-shaman, restoration-shaman-column, restoration-shaman-totem-talk, shaman-guide, shaman-healing, shaman-info, shaman-restoration-column, shaman-talents, throne of thunder, ThroneOfThunder, wow-shaman, wow-shaman-info

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Totem Talk: 2012 for restoration shaman

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement and restoration shaman. Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration, brought to you by Joe Perez (otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticus and content creation at InternetDragons.TV), shows you how.

I like to do these at the end or beginning of every year. I always find it interesting to take a step back and look at how the events of the year unfolded. Every year is exciting, there is always announcements, class changes and new things to learn. It seems like it was no time before that we were talking about all the exciting changes that were ahead for us in then upcoming Mists of Pandaria expansion.

All the anticipation leading up the release of MoP and everything that has change and adjusted in the months following the release have been equally exciting. As the expansion rolls on we continue to speculate to what the future may hold.

The end of Dragon Soul

Dragon Soul was a raid that was good to us shaman healers. Resto shaman excelled in many of the fights because of the nature of most of the encounters. Even at the first part of the zone, the Siege of Wyrmrest Temple, started with an extremely shaman friendly fight in the form of Morchock and fights like Ultraxion that would later come to give us the base for one of our class defining abilities. It was a good time to be a restoration shaman, highly desirable, our cooldowns were great and our set bonuses were really well done. The tier 13 2-piece bonus was fantastic, making your healing spells cheaper for 15 seconds after your Mana Tide totem was cast. It might not seem like a lot, but with the haste we were rocking by tier 13, you could cram quite a bit of healing into 15 seconds. The tier 13 4-piece bonus was by far my favorite at the time. Every time you cast Spiritwalker's Grace you gained 30% additional haste for as long as the spell was active. I think it was a great bonus that made one of our spells even more useful.

By the time January rolled around, though, we had spent countless hours in the zone. As with every other raid content, no matter how good it is, it will eventually become a little stale for us. At least for a little while that is. But it was around this time that our focus started shifting to the isles out of time, that lay beyond the mists that concealed it. News about Mists of Pandaria really became the new focus for our healing endeavors.

All about the Mists

The vast majority of 2012, though, was spent waiting for Mists of Pandaria to hit release date. The first of it started with speculating about what healing would look like in mists, and what they would mean for restoration shaman. The new monk healing model caused most healers to start questioning if other healing classes would undergo under massive changes. That speculation though gave an opportunity to talk about what changes we would like to see come to our class and how we heal, I even submitted my own wish list. One of the first changes that was announced by the developers at Blizzard for restoration shaman was that the interaction between Chain Heal and Riptide. It was announced that Riptide would no longer be consumed by Chain Heal. It was more a quality of life change than anything else, but still a significant one. It has resulted in a nice constant boost to healing as long as you keep track of where you riptides go.

For the longest time, the Mists of Pandaria talent calculator was updated frequently while we waited for the next expansion. The talent system change was a big one, as big as the one that moved us away from the system that had been in place since Classic WoW and Burning Crusade. The news system sported 6 talents to choose from, with a completely new design goal. The idea was to make the talents fun and interesting without making any configuration outshine any others. Basically to give real choice and make it fun for the player instead of just having to look up which talent choices were going to let you do your job properly. Early though, there was no listing for our current level 90 talents, and it let to much speculation as to what they could possibly be. Of all the things I would wished for, I'm not certain I would have called what we actually have been given for level 90 talents.

Many other changes were also talked about, leading up to the release of mists, most noticeable was that some of our totems would be going away. A huge change for Mists was that static buff totems would be going away, meaning no more Strength of Earth or Mana Spring Totem. It was the beginning of turning our totems into mini cooldowns instead of constant companions and marked a huge departure and from something that was a certain way for us for so long. This lead up to right before release a bunch of us shaman types getting together to say one final goodbye to our totem forest before Mists pre-patch launched. Sure there's a glyph to make an illusionary totem circle, but it still isn't quite the same.

The big release, and the months after

So the big day came, and Mists was released, and everything that we had basically been waiting for was finally live. We survived patch 5.0.4 and started diving headfirst into dungeons and quests. Gearing up through dungeons was actually easier than expected, and even reputation rewards were fairly easy to obtain and find. It wasn't long at all before we started figuring out stat priorities, and healing through all the new raids. Finding places for our totems beyond healing and discovering new problems to overcome. We've been healing our way through forgotten tombs of a land we know nearly nothing about in the grand scheme of things, and we'll be healing our way through so much more. There are even raid encounters that seem like they were designed just for restoration shaman to do crazy good on. Honestly, 2012 has been very good to us healing shaman. With new raids on the horizon, and at least two whole tiers of content yet before we can even start considering the end of the expansion, 2013 could also be a really good year for restoration shaman.

So how was your 2012? What are you looking forward to in Mists of Pandaria for restoration shaman in 2013?
Totem Talk: Restoration lends you advice on healing groups, DK tanks and heroics and mana concerns in today's endgame -- or take a break and look back at the rise of the resto shaman. Happy healing, and may your mana be plentiful! Tags: featured, guide-to-shamans, resto, Resto-Shaman, restoration, restoration-shaman, restoration-shaman-column, shaman, shaman-guide, shaman-healing, shaman-info, shaman-restoration-column, shaman-talents, wow-shaman, wow-shaman-info

Filed under: Shaman, (Shaman) Totem Talk

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