Are you a shaman? Good. I need your advice.
After more than 2 years having a level 29 shaman parked away, my rampant altitis rekindled my interest with the class, mostly because I actually want to play a different PvP healer than my current main, a paladin.
Now while I will take the lazy road and continue down enhancement for several levels, chances are that I could get called to join an instance as a healer. I actually look forward to that.
Only thing is… how, in practice, does the effective shaman heal? Paladin is easy, mostly spam one single button early and often, and hope there isn’t too much splash damage.
For the time being I have two heals (and a totem), how do I rotate them for most efficiency? Should I downrank Healing Waves? By how much? How much mana and +healing should I assemble for a healing set around level 40 (assuming a second set becomes more and more important to heal for some effectiveness)?
Am I right in assuming LHW is going to be my panic button, the totem my overall foundation and HW my bread and butter?
Help me become a good shaman and share your experience. And while raid healing is interesting on an intellectual level, I have 41 levels before even starting to worry, so non-raid healing would help me a lot more 
On Similar Matters
Tags: Healing, ShamanYou can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Comments
5 Responses to “Calling all Good Shammies!”
Leave a Reply
Pipes up to say that he too would like to know this as he has been pondering changing over to resto once he gets to 50 or so.
Hey y’all, I’ll try to put something up today on this topic (in between meetings)…
I was able to heal SM,ZF as enhancement, Sunken temple I had a 60 tank and healed as enhancement but would have needed resto for a 50 tank.
I went resto for BRD 55-56. Then back to enhancement till 59. Ramparts(3x) as resto, Even as full resto and brd healing blues I had difficulty keeping a 59 tank with level 50 sheild alive in Ramparts. But level 60 brought new ranks of spells and it was a lot easier.
20g for a respec(at 60) isnt to bad compared to spending 20 seconds longer to solo a mob.
Ugh. I was under the weather yesterday (and a bit today also) so I didn’t get the post up. Muy sorry. I’m making notes today so hopefully I’ll getcha covered soon.
I’ve leveled two shaman to 70, one alliance, one horde. Horde, I bounced around a lot; mostly enhance, with a bit of resto until 55ish, and then resto to 60 pre expansion for 2 years of raiding. TBC brought enhance for 10 levels, and that’s where he sits today, capable of ~600 sustained dps in pre KZ gear.
My second shaman was kind of weird. She started out elemental, and was until 44. At 44, I respec’d enhance, and leveled that way until 66. I’ve been resto ever since. At lower levels, enhance is going to level very fast, especially once you have WF and can dual wield. Eventually, however, I find that survivability becomes an issue, and this time, instead of pressing on, I respeced, and the time I saved from corpse runs more than made up the time I lost leveling.
So, effective healing. Ultimately, it really depends on what you’re doing. It’s not single button like Paladin healing is. Chain Heal is your staple heal, backed up by Earth Shield, usually on the main tank to provide a small amount of buffer to his/her healer. Occasionally, Lesser Healing Wave will go out to a person who can’t wait for Healing Wave/Chain Heal, but will otherwise rarely be used. Healing Stream doesn’t come into its own until you have a decent amount of +heal; My 18/2 second healing stream @ 70 is good for 118/2 seconds. So, yes. LHW is a panic button for when someone doesn’t have the time to wait. When you have Chain Heal available, that is your bread and butter for group healing, although Healing Wave is preferred when Chain Heal won’t bounce at all.