New to 80

[Taidaisher]

I just hit 80 on my Shammy.

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-s...&n=brakandaran

I know I am grossly undergeared, but like I said, I just hit 80. I've already purchased my dual spec talent and will be using to spec healing. I've been reading the stickied threads, the FAQ thread, and was wondering outside of those threads, do some of you more experienced shammans have any useful advice for a newb?

[Boathouse]

Elitistjerks.org , a lot of reading, and never be ashamed to ask for help. Only thing I can suggest to a new Shaman is the same thing to suggest to a new player, read , ask questions, read some more, ask more questions.

[evan_s]

Advice?

Try reading the stickies again, because looking at your character the only conclusion I can come to is you didn't get anything out of them. Enhancement shaman NEVER look for gear with spell power on them. Your spec (Eye of the storm???) and Glyphs (lightning bolt?) also has issues. If you have mana problems, which is common at that level, Imp storm stike works well.

At least your spell power gear will be a starting point for a resto off spec to get fast queues to grind badges and starting iLevel 200 epics to improve your gear.

[Daetur]

You're already on your way, since you seem to give half a hump about your own performance.

I play a resto shaman myself, and I think I can drop a few tips:

Blow Mana Tide sooner rather than later so that you might get it to come up again in a longer fight.

Unless you are, for some reason, a dedicated single target healer, the Triumph badge Totem tends to be superior to the Frost badge resto totem.

Try to learn to heal with Grid, or, combine the Grid and Clique addons. Healbot is also an option but tends to clutter your screen more and doesn't give quite as much raid debuff information. I also highly reccomend the Inline Auras addon- this tracks the cooldown of spells and the duration of self buffs like Watershield by placing an actual numerical count on the icon that is on your bars.

One of the MOST IMPORTANT things you can do is be raid-aware. This means, master healing OR dpsing while being able to watch your surroundings and think on your feet. It can take a while to get used to. Do not tunnel vision. A dead dps does no dps, and a dead healer will likely kill your raid.

When healing without a specific assignment, your priority is usually:
Deal with fight mecahnics (moving out of fire) > keeping self alive > keeping other healers alive > tanks > dps.

If you have a specific assigned job:
Deal with fight mecahnics (moving out of fire)> your assigned job > if assignment is in NO danger, help other healers.

If you are given a healing assignment, it is usually best to stay on that assignment rather than trying to do many things at once, especially in harder content. For example, if I am tank healing on Lich King, and I peel off to help the raid, the tank could die because the other healer(s) are(is) trusting me to take care of him.

Being able to make the call whether you have time to peel off your assignment is a skill that will come in time as you get more used to healing.

[Gunwolf]

New 80 resto shaman means you will probably be running alot of heroics. Some advice for you there is stick to riptide and chain heals mainly. Always drop magma and fire nova/ch lightning as much as you can to make things go faster. Drink in between pulls, drop mana spring. Earthshield on tank, water shield on you. Practice interupting/purging while still healing to reduce incoming dmg. First stat to focus on after hitting 80 is mp5, I think after you get like 350+ you can start working on haste....crit% should be around 30.

[Kraius]

One piece of advice I could give is if you have a friend or fellow guild member who is a tank. Try running chain heroics with them to help start getting badges; (the instant queue time will really help). Yes you will essentially be getting carried at first but with how over geared most players are now, it won’t make much of a difference to be that noticeable. During that time, it would behoove you to practice on your rotations and see what works for you and what doesn’t.

[Chronius]

Id kick back and just wait for Cata, this game is going nowhere until then =)

[Blah337]

Wow, leveling must have sucked as a melee in spell gear. I would have to say right now your best bet is to respec to Elemental with all that gear. As Enhancement, you don't want Spell Power, you want gear that has Attack Power and Agility.

The only thing I find scary is that you have an heirloom weapon, which means you have another 80. After leveling two 80s, I'd think you should have a little more knowledge of the game, and realize that you want attack power for melee.

If not, I apologize, but I'm really tempted to call you a troll...

Well he stated that he purchased duel spec and plans on being a healer. The fact that he has 0 agility on his gear would probably indicate that he is in his healing gear but never got around to respeccing.

If you need help with a spec Elitistjerks.com (as someone stated above). They have great recommendations for specs and practices that you can put into practice that will greatly boost your effectiveness in healing. Don't get too stressed out about the beginning because you may lose a couple tanks in heroics, you may get many complaints about your gearscore, but if you stick to it and actually work towards getting better then you will soon start to breeze through them.

[evan_s]

Well he stated that he purchased duel spec and plans on being a healer. The fact that he has 0 agility on his gear would probably indicate that he is in his healing gear but never got around to respeccing.

Problem is he is still dual-wielding 2 weapons. The shear amount of drops also indicate he has been been working on the spell power gear for a while too. Looking at the gear he is wearing the Belt, Boots and Legs all had proper mail gear as an option that he passed up on from the quest rewards.

[Sarella]

Enhancement Shaman:

Gear:
Mail - hit,expertise,haste,crit are ideal. armor pen stuff will do until you suck less.
Leather - if it's got haste on it, it's okay to take while gearing up. But due to int missing from leather gear it'll be lower attack power (which means lower spell power).
Stats: Get your expertise to 26, get your hit to 13% spell hit (enh shammies split around 65% melee 35% spell) so once you hit spell cap (taking into account misery/improved faerie fire and heroic presence) hit loses 3% of it's strength.
Once you get hit and expertise you'll focus purely on haste. Gear for it and gem for it until you reach 2 billion haste.

Spec: Take the point out of eye of the storm, stop being stupid! If you dont understand how maelstrom weapon works, please re-read it until you are 100% focused on the fact it makes your lightning bolts instant cast. Put it into improved stormstrike. While badly geared, a 2nd point in improved stormstike isn't too bad (take it from improved shields).

You put in glyph of lightning bolt - when you're properly geared LB glyph adds 4% of 10% damage so it's worth 0.4% total damage. That's crap. Run Stormstrike glyph and Feral spirit. The third is debateable from Flametongue, Fire shock and windfury weapon.

If you want more advice, i'd have to actually think you'd listen so i wont provide any more now!

[Primaryjane]

Wow, leveling must have sucked as a melee in spell gear. I would have to say right now your best bet is to respec to Elemental with all that gear. As Enhancement, you don't want Spell Power, you want gear that has Attack Power and Agility.

The only thing I find scary is that you have an heirloom weapon, which means you have another 80. After leveling two 80s, I'd think you should have a little more knowledge of the game, and realize that you want attack power for melee.

If not, I apologize, but I'm really tempted to call you a troll...

[Taidaisher]

Thank you for the responses.

@ evan_s & primaryjane,

I did read the stickies. The reason I have so much sp gear is because most of that gear also has +mana. As I was leveling I would continue to run out of mana, so I looked for +mana gear (which more often then not included +sp). Except for shoulders & chest, the gear I have is the gear I leveled with. While I was leveling I used the BOA chest & shoulder to benefit from the +10 exp. Once I hit 80 I replaced those items with my current items. I got the neck today.

@Blah337
Thank you for understanding, that I JUST got my dual spec and haven't gone resto yet.

@Daetur, Muriko, Gunwolf, Kraius, & Sarella

Thank you for the advice, I have been bouncing around the EJ forums, but haven't noticed any new posts there. The stickies, though I have been reading through them as time permitsm, are insanely long.

[evan_s]

Using gear for + mana or + mp5 as an enhancement shaman is a horrible idea. If you are having mana problems make sure to take ALL the mana regen/savings talents and worst case use water shield for a while. You can also use Searing totem instead of magma totem and skip Fire Nova unless you are aeing big packs to conserve mana.

Taking all that spell gear is completely killing your dps which will causing things to take longer to kill which means spending more mana and it is gimping one of your major mana regen sources as SR (shamanistic rage) regens mana based on your attack power. With proper gear you should be able to get from OOM to FM every minute with SR but lacking soo much attack power that isn't going to be the case. SR is the main reason any raid geared shaman can no skip almost all the mana regen/savings talents. Our mana pool is big enough to last the minute between SR uses.

[Taidaisher]

Thanks again for all the helpful advice.
I changed my Enh spec and filled my resto spec. Glyphed for both (Enh is missing a minor for now) and setup my gear sets for each (based off what I have available for gear atm).