I’m back with another class, a new class. We've done the druid, we've done the paladin, we're now looking at the shaman. And the shaman goes through so many changes. It is literally…
I can honestly say as a feral druid main, the shaman's a very close second in Wrath of the Lich King. I absolutely love it. I love healing on it as restoration, I love DPS as enhancement and spellhance. If you don't know what spellhance is, you're going to love the enhancement video which should be coming very soon in a couple of days.
But this one's restoration so we're going to look at what changes for a resto shaman. We're going to look at new abilities, we're going to look at talents. I'm going to talk to you about totems because they've changed quite drastically, I would say.
It's a big change from TBC to Wrath in terms of totems. We're going to look at some glyphs and that's probably about it. There's a lot to get through so make sure you like the video you'll probably like it. If you're a resto shaman, you're probably going to like it before we even start so smash that like button.
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I thought we'd get the important one out of the way first and that's totems. Now actually, at the beginning of Wrath of the Lich King, this hadn't changed but because we're more than likely going to get a 3.3.5 state because that's exactly how it's been for Vanilla and TBC in terms of Classic, you can only assume that we're going to get the final patch state in Wrath of the Lich King.
And actually, it makes even more sense in Wrath of the Lich King to get the final sort of class balance and class refinement because they went for a lot of changes, all the classes. Nearly every patch, at least one class got all their talents refunded and everything was shuffled around or changed or rebalanced and shaman is one of them.
So not only can you cast all four totems simultaneously, which also when it comes to totems remember, each class gets their own style totem as well. So for Horde for example, Troll versus Orc, your totems aesthetically look a bit different.
You're probably not bothered. But not only can you do that, you can also have three different sets. So you have Call of the Spirits, Call of the Ancestors and Call of the Elements. So you could have your Call of the Elements set up maybe as having Stoneskin Totem, Flametongue Totem and Mana Spring Totem and let's say Wrath of Air Totem.
So whenever you place this one, you know that it's probably going to be for your caster group and you haven't got Devotion Aura in the group for example, you could then change your Call of Ancestors to maybe be more melee-focused. So you might have Strength of Earth, maybe you need Frost Resistance Totem, a Healing Stream Totem and let's say that you would then want Windfury Totem as well.
So now whenever you place this one in particular, this will be for your melee group. And of course, the last icon here is Totemic Recall which gives you 25% of your mana and it gets rid of all of them at the same time.
These are abilities that are actually in your spell book, so you can keybind them just straight on your bar if that's what you want to do and then when you get rid of them, all your totems are gone.
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It's just great, it's an amazing way for the totems to actually function now which I'm sure if you've been playing a shaman throughout Vanilla and TBC, you're going to love this.
So we should probably first talk about some of the totem changes. Let's start with the Earth Totems. Stoneskin Totem used to reduce melee damage taken whereas now, it increases armor. You could almost consider it the shaman's Devotion Aura. The Strength of Earth Totem now increases strength and agility because Grace of Air Totem has basically been merged into this one totem so you get strength and agility rather than strength from one totem and agility from another.
Stoneclaw Totem had a very minor change where not only does it do the usual taunt in mobs and as a 50% chance for them to be stunned for three seconds, it also now protects all of your other totems causing them to absorb x amount of damage.
Oh, I should probably mention these totems now last five minutes instead of two minutes like they do in TBC as well. Other than things like Earthbind and Stoneclaw, those ones still obviously don't last five minutes, that would be broken.
But the normal buffing totems like Stoneskin, Strength of Earth, etc.
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The ones you're going to put down and leave down for the duration of a fight, as I say, they last five minutes now. When it comes to Fire Totems, not much worth noting other than the fact Fire Nova Totem has gone now.
Instead, what you have is Fire Nova as an ability which we will talk about very briefly when we get to the ability stage but basically, as long as you've got a fire totem down when you use fire nova, it will pulse around the totem to do the AOE. So now any Fire Totem you've got down, you'll be able to just do that AOE pulse.
The only significant change for the Water Totems is Cleansing Totem. So Cleansing Totem now removes one disease and one poison effect and this is from party members only. The reason it's important that I mention that one specifically is party members only is because the buff totems are all now raid-wide.
So if you put Strength of Earth Totem down for example, the strength and agility, everybody in the raid will get. But what you also need to consider is that you want the strongest buff. If you haven't seen my buffs and debuffs video up there, please do go check it out because it explains why you need to be careful with what totems you place in, what paladin blessings you're doing because only the most effective one will count.
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So if you're using Strength of Earth but you've got a DK using Horn of Winter, then your Strength of Earth is wasted. You might as well use Stoneskin but then if you've got a paladin with Devotion Aura on, then you might as well use something else or use nothing at all. So you need to be careful with what totems you're placing and sort of plan ahead.
Set your totem bar up based on what you know your raid composition is going to be. But yes, there's no more Disease Cleansing and Poison Cleansing, it's now just Cleansing which removes both but only from your party.
This is one that's going to be quite annoying for you melee who absolutely love Windfury Totem because Windfury Totem now is a flat 16% melee haste to all party and raid members. If you're an enhancement shaman, you'll probably take the improved talent so that gives 20% haste.
We'll get on to that more in the enhancement shaman video rather than the resto video but again you've just got to be careful when using this because if you've got a DK bringing Icy Talons which is 20% haste, you're not going to want to bother putting this down.
And when it comes to these, the only other thing worth mentioning is that the Windwall Totem is now gone. Let's face it, are you really going to miss it? I wouldn't have thought so.
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I would say that's totems. I feel like that's probably rounded totems up enough. You know which ones have changed, what's been removed, which ones have been amalgamated together. There's not massive changes, the totem bar is huge though. That's a great addition.
So let's move on to the new abilities. So we only really want to touch on the ones that are useful for the resto shaman. If you want to know more about any of the abilities that are for ele and enhancement, obviously look for that in a future video.
But for Hex, you now get a nice solid CC. So this transforms the enemy into a frog. While hexed, the target cannot attack or cast spells. Damage caused may interrupt the effect. Lasts 30 seconds and only one target can be hexed at a time. It's got a 45 second cooldown.
As you can appreciate, it is really strong in fights where somebody gets Mind Controlled for example, and you can hex them because it can take a bit of damage and not necessarily break. Whereas if you polymorph someone, they take damage, it breaks. So hex is actually really strong in any fights where somebody can get Mind Controlled and you want to try and sort them out.
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Lava burst, we're not going to talk about lava burst. That's for elemental but yes, you get a new pumpy ability for elemental.
Now, Wind Shear is a really interesting one. A six second cooldown interrupt. So instantly blast the target with a gust of wind, causing no damage but interrupting spellcasting and preventing any spell in that school from being cast for two seconds. Also lowers your threat, making the enemy less likely to attack you.
So a real nice dual purpose ability, not only so as a DPS . As an ele or enhancement, not only are you pumping and when you use it to interrupt, it's useful as an interrupt; you're also lowering your threat as well, which is really nice.
And it's worth mentioning this is off the GCD. This is off everything. So where ordinarily, you'll have to like save a rank one Earth Shock or something like that ready to interrupt. It does not work like that whatsoever.
In fact, let me see if I can find a critter and I'll demonstrate. If i was to spam heal myself or do anything, you can see it's not on the GCD whatsoever. So at any point, I could have this as a stopcasting macro as well. So if I was halfway through casting a heal, I might do it and it will stop casting and then interrupt. I'm a noob, I haven't actually got it as a stopcasting macro but you really should.
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If you're DPSing or you're healing or whatever you're doing, it's really not punishing to interrupt in the slightest. So like Cleansing Totem, you also now get Cure Toxins which cures one poison effect and one disease effect.
So this is your single target dispel, which you would use outside of your party. Your party would get a Cleansing Totem; anyone outside your party, you're going to use Cure Toxins on. We will talk about Cleanse Spirit when we get to the talent section.
The awesome one though, Earthliving Weapon, this is your imbue where at the moment, you're probably using Flametongue weapon or something like that. Now you can imbue the shaman's weapon with earthen life, increasing healing done by 195 and each hill has a 20% chance to proc Earthliving on the target, healing an additional 652 over 12 seconds.
So if we put that on our weapon and we just spam a few Lesser Healing Waves, it shouldn't take long before you see it proc. There we go, there's earthliving. So it heals 163 every three seconds. Like you can see, it's a lot more than 163 it's actually 583 because it does go off your spell power.
Outside of talents, ability-wise, that's it.
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But some of the real juicy things are from talents which you probably know of Riptide. If you don't know Riptide, you're going to love it, which we'll get into about now. Well not exactly now, let's start at the top and make our way through.
Now talent-wise, not much has changed for resto shaman which is both a good and a bad thing. It depends on how you see it. The one thing I want to touch on instantly because it's not been long since we were actually talking about totems, as you'll notice, Totemic Mastery is now gone.
So in TBC, you get Totemic Mastery that increases the range of your totems by 10 yards, taking them up to 30 yards from 20. We don't need that talent anymore because by default, your totems are in a 30 yard range.
But moving on from that… So most of this stays the same, so I'm going to brush over anything that doesn't change substantially enough to talk about because let's face it, we've got Improved Healing Wave which is exactly the same. We've got Tidal Focus which has just moved from tier one to tier two, Healing Grace which has just moved from tier three to tier two.
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This has just been a bit of a shuffle about. It's worth mentioning Improved Reincarnation though because it reduces the cooldown of your Reincarnation by seven minutes or 15 with two points and increases the amount of health and mana returned by 20%. Now you're probably thinking, this is exactly the same as in TBC.
But the cooldown has actually been halved in Wrath of the Lich King. That's part of the reason why it's 10 minutes each point in TBC and it's slightly reduced in Wrath because the cooldown is only 30 minutes without any talents anyway, whereas obviously in TBC, it's an hour.
So moving back to the talents, Healing Focus is the same. So the one that we've got which has been added, which is brilliant, is Improved Water Shield where this talent position here used to be a 3% hit but now, a lot more useful for resto.
So you have a 100% chance to instantly gain mana as if you consumed a Water Shield Orb when you gain a critical effect from your Healing Wave or Riptide spells, a 60% chance when you gain a critical effect from your Lesser Healing Wave and 30% chance when you gain a critical effect from your Chain Heal.
So this just makes Water Shield even more relevant. You keep Water Shield on yourself for mp5.
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It's great just for the mp5 but now actually, when you're critting, you're also consuming those charges. So now it's super important you're always keeping your Water Shield up.
We now have Tidal Force which is a three-minute cooldown but increases the critical effect chance of your Healing Wave, Lesser Healing Wave and Chain Heal by 60%. Each critical heal reduces the chance by 20%. So you can see how this plays nicely with Improved Waters Shield.
So not only is it a cooldown you'll use to try and pump some real big heals out, it's also something that you can use to get mana back at the same time.
Moving down, most of this is almost identical unless the changes to the talents are substantial, we're not really going to talk about it. For example: Healing Way, increases the amount healed by your Healing Wave spell by 25%, whereas the old Healing Way; your Healing Wave spells have 100% chance to increase the effect of subsequent Healing Waves on that target by six percent, stacking three times.
So instead of worrying about that being stacked up, you just get a flat out 25% percent more healing now. So moving down, everything's the same apart from now we get Cleanse Spirit.
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So this is what I was talking about when we were talking about Cure Toxins. Now Cleanse Spirit is the same as Cure Toxins but now removes a curse. Now this is one that you'll see quite a lot of resto shamans in raids not take mainly because as a resto shaman, you're not really there to decurse.
And I don't want it to sound like a negative thing. Let's be fair, if you've got a decurse, you should use it but there are better talent options than this. I take it personally because I like to have control of every situation, especially as a healer.
So if your druids or your mages are not very reliable when it comes to decursing, at least you can decurse yourself and know that it's going to be done properly. But ultimately, you can remove everything as a shaman now other than magic, so pretty good.
Now outside of that, everything's pretty much the same. You'll notice that Nature's Blessing only gets 15% of your intellect now rather than the 30% it gives in TBC but as you can appreciate, you're going to get a lot more intellect anyway in Wrath of the Lich King. So it all balances out in the end.
So let's start talking about the new talent. So we've got Ancestral Awakening is the first one to talk about.
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When you critically heal with your Healing Wave, Lesser Healing Wave or Riptide, you summon an ancestral spirit to aid you, instantly healing the lowest percentage health friendly party of your raid target within 40 yards for 30% of the amount healed.
You'll be starting to notice a trend here that shows how sort of important crit can be. But it's more early on that it's important which will make sense when we start talking a little bit more about how a shaman sort of plays.
In fact, I can just tell you now because basically, by the end of Wrath of the Lich King, you'll probably be pretty much only spamming Chain Heal because you'll get so much haste. You'll be Riptiding as well, obviously, and keeping Earth Shield up. But the majority of the time will just be Chain Heal, Chain Heal, Chain Heal, Chain Heal so you'll want incredible amounts of haste, whereas early on, crit is very good for your mana pool.
As you can see here, not only when you do a big crit, you're going to heal somebody else that you didn't just heal, you're also going to have a proc from your Water Shield for example to just keep your mana going. So as you can appreciate, Ancestral Awakening is very nice.
So we've now got Improved Earth Shield. Earth Shield itself has not really changed at all but Improved Earth Shield just increases the amount of charges for your Earth Shield by two and increases the healing done by your Earth Shield by 10%.
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Not really a lot to talk about there. Obviously, you're going to take it. Keeping Earth Shield on the tank is very important.
We've also now got Tidal Waves. So when you cast Chain Heal or Riptide, you have a 100% chance to lower the cast time of your Healing Wave spell by 30% and increase the critical effect chance of your Lesser Healing Wave spell by 25% until two such spells have been cast. In addition, your Healing Wave spell gains an additional 20% bonus healing effect and your Lesser Healing Wave gains an additional 10% bonus healing.
So now this is pretty cool because if you're AOE healing… Let me just cast a Chain Heal. So if we were to say I was Chain Healing into the melee, you're now going to get your Tidal Waves proc which reduces the cast time of Healing Wave by 30%.
So now you might be able to chuck a big quick Healing Wave on the tank. Or maybe after a Chain Heal, you want to use them both on a couple of quick Lesser Healing Waves with that increased crit, hoping that it's going to proc a charge of your Water Shield.
I do love the way resto shaman just… Everything seems to synergize together really well.
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Being able to go from Chain Healing the melee to then getting that buff to then be able to do a quicker Healing Wave on the tank, maybe that crits, maybe that gives you a Water Shield charge and it's going to also then heal somebody else to 30% percent of it from the other talent. So it's like everything just plays together so nicely.
And finally, Riptide. A shaman with a heart, two hearts in fact because if your Earthliving Weapon procs, you're going to have a HoT roll in and now you've got another HoT. So Riptide heals a friendly target for 639-691 and another 665 over 15 seconds. Your next Chain Heal cast on the primary target within 15 seconds will consume the HoT and increase the amount healed by the Chain Heal by 25%.
So this is great to cast on the tank, for example, because you would imagine that when you cast a chain here on the tank, you're probably going to heal all the melee. So not only have they got a HoT on them, as soon as the melee starts taking damage, you can cast that big Chain Heal into the tank to do 25% more and it will bounce all around the melee.
I mean there really are just so many ways you can use this. Even if someone just takes a bit of spike damage, you want to throw a Riptide into him.
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It might save him. That's enough because the instant heal part of it is actually pretty strong. And if it crits, you're going to get a Water Shield charge.
This is what I mean, there's just… It's so good, you feel like you've got so much control as a resto shaman in any situation. Outside of these talents, there's not really a great deal to talk about. This is a resto video so we're obviously going to focus on the resto tree.
But in enhancement, the only couple of things that you might want to think about is Ancestral Knowledge which used to increase maximum mana by 5% but it now increases your intellect by 10% which is nice because again, it will synergize well with the talent in resto, Nature's Blessing, which increases your healing by an amount equal to 15% of your intellect.
What used to be Improved Lightning Shield is now Improved Shields. So this increases the damage done by Lightning Shield orbs. But we're not interested in that, we are interested in increasing the amount of mana gained from your Water Shield orbs by 15% and it increases the amount of healing done by your Earth Shield orbs by 15%.
You're going to be using both those shields 100% of the time.
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So getting 15% bonus to both of them is brilliant. And then finally, Elemental Weapons, which you may look at and think this is a DPS talent but it does increase the damage caused by Windfury Weapon by 40% but it also increases the spell damage on your Flametongue by 30% and increases the bonus healing on your Earthliving Weapon by 30% It's the Earthliving section we're obviously interested in.
I feel like that is all the big changes that you need to know about. There could be some minor things but nothing that's going to be game breaking. For example, Flame Shock lasting a bit longer by default and minor changes to some of the spells that you're not even really going to be that bothered about.
In terms of resto, I feel like that's what you need to know. So finally, last but not least, let's have a look at all the glyphs, not all the glyphs. We're not going to look at every shaman glyphs but the ones that are useful for resto.
So first up, we've got to talk about Glyph of Chain Heal. So Chain Heal now just heals one additional target. That doesn't sound like a big deal but going from three targets to four targets, it's literally just extra free healing and almost going to be a must-have.
Then next up, we've got Glyph of Earth Shield. So Glyph of Earth Shield increases the amount healed by your Earth Shield by 20%.
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On the basis, this is going to be on the tank all the time. It's definitely worth using but the good thing about resto shaman is you have a lot of options.
Such as Glyph of Healing Stream Totem, where your Healing Stream Totem heals for an additional 20%. While we're on that, I should have really mentioned the difference with Restorative Totems where it increases the amount of your Mana Spring by 20% but it now increases the amount of your Healing Stream Totem by 45%. That's huge. Like, that's 45%.
Honestly, Healing Stream Totem, it's not an exaggeration; if you're half decently geared, your Healing Stream Totem can pretty much heal a heroic. You can just stand there and watch and I mean that. So again, Healing Stream Totem is one that you might want to consider.
There's also Glyph of Healing Wave which your Healing Wave also heals you for 20% of the effect when you heal somebody else, which in certain fights, you could see that being useful.
Glyph of Water Mastery which if you've got low gear, you might consider using this because it just increases the passive mana regen of your Water Shield spells.
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You've got Glyph of Lesser Healing Wave which your Lesser Healing Wave heals 20% more if the target's affected by Earth Shield. So you could see this being good on the tank for tank healing, especially in heroics. I don't really see it having much of a place in raids.
And then you've got Glyph of Earthliving Weapon which increases the chance of Earthliving Weapon to trigger by 5%. But overall, any combination of these which suits your play style, you could absolutely make work.
As for minor glyphs, there's only really a few worth talking about. Glyph of Water Shield is an absolute must because it increases the number of charges on your water shield spell by one. There's no reason why you wouldn't want to use this glyph.
Glyph of Renewed Life which means that you're not going to need a reagent when you Reincarnate which, again, just for the sake of bag space quality of life, you're probably going to want to use this.
The final two are Glyph of Water Walking or Glyph of Water Breathing. They both do the same thing, they just remove the reagent cost. Which one you use the most is probably going to be the one that you're going to want to glyph.
And that, honestly, is about it. As I say, I feel like we've covered everything that you need to know. If you enjoyed the video and you're looking forward to the enhancement and elemental videos, which I'm going to also try and get out hopefully this side of Christmas but might not be, might be the other side of Christmas.
We'll have to see how busy everything is but please do hit that like button, it helps more than you know. Hit the subscribe button, let's get to 30k ASAP if we're not 30k already by the time this video finishes. And I'll see you on the next one.
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