Totem & Ankh: Recovering from Patch 4.0.1. as a Restoration Shaman
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Welcome to another edition of Totem & Ankh! Your beloved shamanista, Savoire, has been overwhelmed with the joys and wonders – and lack thereof- of the recent patch 4.0.1.
I was going along, enjoying my game, happy as a troll in Zul'Gurub riding a Swift Zulian Tiger (which wouldn't be me YET by the way) getting my Rusted Proto-drake (yay!) doing some pvp, and being pretty much oblivious to the patch. I learned long ago that rumors about a patch and what would happen and when were often wrong, so I don’t stress about it or worry. Very troll-like, mon.
When WHAM! The patch hit – my first dilemma was that it took me 11 hours to download. Then I had one problem after another. When all was said and done, it was 48 hours of fuss and bother later, with a lot of online help and encouragement from my guildies, before I was back online. Even then, I had no talents and I was clueless with what to do.
I feel like I had to re-learn how to be a restoration shaman all over again. Additionally, I had to redo all my addons and set them back the way I liked them. It was very annoying and I spent a great deal of time saying things like “I hate the patch.” I considered giving up WoW altogether and if it hadn’t been for the beloved and aforementioned guildmates, I would have. No, really . . . . well, I did think about it!
Once
I finally got back online, I realized I needed to do some research and figure out, first off, how to get Sav back into being a restoration shaman. The first thing I noticed was the big change in stats. No more mp5! Now shamans have spirit, which seems odd, but in practice acts the same as mp5 and it’s nice to have the stats combined into the same thing. Supposedly, mana will again be an issue for us healer types come Cataclysm. So far, in a week of testing in raids and dungeons, I not only never run out of mana, I rarely go below 90%.
The other major stat change to be aware of is spellpower is now all intelligence. With the total amount of mana available to you based on your int score, your mana pool will increase quite a bit with this change.
Haste stays the same as does crit. However, your crit will likely be lower than it was prior to patch 4.0.1. mostly because of the change in talents.
One new ability restoration shamans get is Meditation. This ability allows resto shamans to regain mana in combat at 50% of the rate as out of combat. As shamans get more spirit on their gear, the power of Meditation will increase. Check the character tab and find the statistic called Mana Regen. This is your out of combat mana regeneration amount. Just below that is a statistic called Combat Regen, which shows how much mana you get back while in combat. Don’t panic if the Combat Regen isn’t exactly half of the Mana Regen. Your Meditation is still working!
Which stats are most important to resto shamans? I’m still testing out what I want MORE of for Savoire and I know there are some caps for certain stats, at least until Cataclysm hits when all this goes out the window.
- Haste: still the top stat in my opinion. It’s even more valuable with the haste applying to heals over time. The new haste softcap is set at 1405 for Healing Surge. Having more haste is nice, but don’t stack so much haste that you’re out of mana or unbalanced with your other stats.
- Intellect: The amount of intellect will determine your total mana pool. You should have loads of int and loads of mana so you probably won’t need to make an effort to get more, assuming you’re in endgame gear.
- Spirit: With ICC gear, I don’t see a need to add more spirit at this point. I would remove spirit with reforging however – just keep what I’ve got and see how it goes.
- Crit: It’s a useful stat and for now, I think aiming for 14-20% is a good benchmark. We lost some from our talents for now, so we may simply be lacking a bit until we level to 85 in Cataclysm.
What about Mastery? That’s a question I’ve been asking myself and my shaman friends. The best answer we’ve come up with at this point is that it’s not worth pursuing at this point. Even though it’s tempting to try out the new thing from the patch, I don’t see it being a helpful addition to restoration shamans right now.
However, if you do want to Reforge, consider changing hit, crit, or spirit to haste. For the most part, this will be unnecessary and it would be best to skip the reforging for now because whatever gear you’re in now, will be replaced in a few short weeks. If you do play with reforging, remember to keep enough spirit to maintain mana regeneration and some crit.
Don’t forget to wear all mail gear for the Mail mastery bonus. I was using cloth hands, the Gloves of False Gestures, for a long time but now I’m back into the T10 hands.
For gems continue to stack haste with Quick King’s Amber in yellow slots and either Relentless Ametrine or the Brilliant Cardinal Ruby in the red slots.
Of all the classes and specs to have right now, Restoration Shaman is pretty good. We didn’t have huge, phenomenal changes and we can still do our jobs. I think one of the main changes will be an increase in the amount of dps we do while healing. The available talents and the spells we have seem to be pushing us in that direction, which could make our tasks in the raid a bit more interesting and varied. I used to keep myself from ever doing any dps during a raid because I didn’t want to be caught without mana. Now, I seem to have more mana when I do some dps, which is kind of fun.!
Last Updated on Wednesday, 27 October 2010 00:56 Written by Savoire Tuesday, 26 October 2010 23:27