lørdag den 18. december 2010

Restoration shaman - Starting out in Cataclysm


World of warcraft Cataclysm so far has been quite entertaining leveling wise, I do admit that I never really enjoyed question, but I think some of the quests was quite enjoyable.
Heroics is quite good fun IF you tag along with friends or guildies who you know will know what to do or just thinks "Hey, crowd control might be useful " instead of the WOLTK minded people who go "AOE GO GO " that is doable when you've gather a bit of gear and got a decent tank and healer, but I still prefer as a healer to do some crowd control since I barely have to use any mana then compared to Greater Healing Wave spam when the tank takes on +4 mobs.
But so far I am quite happy with the current state of restoration shamans, and despite we are the "all rounder" I still think that tank healing and raid healing is both places where a restoration shaman is in the very top in both niches.
Since the expansion is quite new and there is +thousand theories on how to play and value stats - sadly quite a lot of those people is people who never will step into a raiding environment  before they are standing in "welfare" epics. I am not saying that my way of doing it is the correct one, but it is working for me, and quite well I must admit.
So stats on gear we have three options mastery, haste and crit and if you can get an item with haste on - then get it haste is your "primary secondary" stat if that makes sense to put it that way. After haste go for crit since crits is always nice, but due to the talents we also gain mana when critting with spells, but it isn't nearly as good as haste. Mastery isn't a bad stat, but your targets will have to be at less than 60% hp in order to start benefitting "enough" from it therefore unless you want to top meters on Chimaeron, but else you will gain more from haste and crit.
Primary stats is intellect and spirit which is on most gear and currently I have a rule of thumb - "Does the item has spirit? If not, reforge it by taking the stats in this order mastery > crit > haste" Spirit will become "less" valuable when you reach a certain level of it due to mana regn becomes less and less of an issue, I am currently on 2400 spirit unbuffed and the only way I go out of mana (oom) is if I use my spells foolishly or having to spam Greater Healing Wave (GWH), but spirit is a very, very good stat only surpassed in my opinion by intellect. This is due to several reasons 1st: higher mana pool which also grants more mana returned from replenishment, 2nd: your spells hits harder, 3rdly you gain some crit.
For gemming it is quite similar: red slots = +40 intellect unless you are a JC and then it is 67 intellect, yellow = 20 haste / 20 intellect not much to say boosts two of the best stats + you gain a socket bonus and it is almost always worth it. Blue = 20 spirit / 20 intellect unless you are freshly dinged you might want to put +40 spirit in, but I would suggest 20 spirit /20 intellect.
Concerning meta gems is there really only one option and that is +54 intellect +2% mana, if people start arguing +54 spirit +3% critical heal just ignore them your critical rating is currently so low that it extra healing on the crit is useless and when it becomes more efficient you will have such an amount of regn that the spirit becomes less valuable than 54 intellect. Again, if this is my opinion everyone is entitled to their own, but just because you read something on a forum does not mean that it is correct.
That will be all for now, I will post how restoration shaman has been so far raiding wise later on.

fredag den 10. december 2010

Small update


I guess an update is appropriate  so here comes.
Here is a picture taken about an hour before the launch:


(Sorry for the bad quality, but it was taken with my mobile phone)















And bam the time was 00.01 and the you were asked to logout in order to get into Cataclysm, but as a massive amount of players were spamming their "Login" myself and I along with thousands had problems logging in a range from 10mins to almost 1½ hour, I got in like 30mins or so after release so I was in the what I would call in the better part of people. since the amount of mobs / items and the respawn timer was horrible and what I was asked to tag along for a dungeon I lost the "advantage" I had while being in "the front". That slowed down my leveling quite a lot and I dinged 18 hours after the release and having played none stop.
So busy, busy quest, kill / collect, turn in rinse and repeat until you look like a madman and bam you are 85. The fastest person in my guild was 12 hours, I was a bit slower, but leveling as elemental was piece of cake.
So ding, ding, ding 85 and the next step was obviously to start gearing myself for heroics and I quickly found a group. in the guild, and we farmed dungeons until we were bored and decided to check out "Vortex Pinnacle" on HC. This was a quite fun instance the first boss was fairly easy and the second boss is just pure fun the first comment when we pulled him was "lol, this is awesome" and we eventually managed to kill the last boss. After this HC I've pretty much farmed HCs and they aren't really that hard except perhaps for Grim Batol we did spend quite some time in there, but eventually we pulled our asses together and cleared it.
The last two days I've been farming HCs getting hc gear along with Justice Point gear, and it is coming along nicely.
Currently I am valuing stats like this: spirit > haste > crit > mastery on items and gemming: red = 40 int, 30 spirit (no one got the "big one yet") yellow = 20 int / 20 haste and it works okayish.
For glyphs I've thrown away Earth Living since it is the least HPs increase from Riptide (which I've found after doing quite some HCs is always my 2nd or even 1st healing spell).

That will be all for now,  too many HCs to farm and stuff to experience.

søndag den 5. december 2010

Getting Cataclysmic !

Cataclysm is so damn close now that it is almost unbearable, but I guess we will have to wait the remaining 30ish hours.
So are YOU ready for Cataclysm? Have you stocked up on flasks, food and pots in order to make the leveling go smoother? Have you capped yourself with Justice Points and Honor points in order to grab some fast upgrades? I have - on two characters and there is a good reason for that, and that is not me being a brainless farmbot, but my guild is currently a bit low on healers, well a bit is an understatement we got 6 healers and one trial , and while we most likely will be progressing with 7 it seems that there quite easily could arise some annoying problems. The problems could be one of the healers being abnormally slow with leveling, another could be one person being unable to raid one day and thus we would not be able to make a proper raid. You might argue that there ought to be some people with a healing off spec, and yes there is people who play hybrid classes, but there is a huge difference between being able to spec healer and then actually play healer to a degree which is satisfying.
So I offered to play my resto shaman in the beginning of this expansion until we had gotten a few more decent healers to bolster our ranks, so I've decided that I will try to cover the beginning of the expansion from a resto PoV as well as mage.
So here goes resto PoV:
I've decided that this properly is the spec that I will be using in the beginning http://wowtal.com/#k=mvVjJ27r.a8t.shaman.Rc6inp some may argue that leaving out Improved Cleansing Spirit is stupid, but unless there is a heavy dispelling fight I would prefer to have 5% more Damage Reduction while casting. A talents which I am quite thrilled about is Focused Insight. You get an "on demand" burst which from what I've seen from videos and read will become quite handy and it is another reason to try to squeeze in Shocks, not only does it help downing the boss faster (And yes I am aware that the damage output is quite small, but a little damage there and a little damage there and suddenly you can notice a little change). A debated talents is Telluric Currents and despite the fact that I like the idea of being able to throw in a few LBs there isn't any talent from my point of view which can be changed in order to be putted in there.
Glyps: It is a matter of personal preference that I've taken Riptide over Earth shield, but also due to we will be running with atleast two resto shamans, possible three, and yes Earth Shield is nice, but it can only be placed on one target where Riptide can be used on every 25man along with the pets, and with the extensive amount of damage the raid will take I would prefer that over Earth Shield. Water Shield and Earthliving is a must have as well as the major glyphs.
Stats will look different that they do today and I doubt that you will find people stacking one stat as a madman since you will have to balance your int, spirit, crit, haste and mastery (which I doubt will be worth going for except you are healing tanks or a heavy AoE fight where the raid is below 60% hp for the most of the time). And you will want to go for socket bonuses the most of the time since it just is better than stacking one stat. Personally I will gem more or less like this: Red = int, yellow = int / haste, blue = int / spirit, but that is just my personal opinion and it might be altered throughout raiding and certain fights.