Gevlon has a post up which touches on the expensive vanity Tundra Mammoth and Mekgineer’s Chopper. The whole thing came up by lots of people asking why he refuses to help people who want to learn how to make more gold in order to buy these vanity items. “What’s wrong with buying these items if I have excess gold?” they ask.
Quite simply, why does anyone ever buy any good, whether in WoW or in real life? I think no one will disagree with the following:
You would buy a good if the condition “Value of good >= Price of good” is satisfied.
Notice something about that equation? The amount of money you currently have is not involved in any way. I do not buy a Tundra Mammoth or a Chopper because it is not worth 18k gold. The fact that I have 125k gold does not change the value of the Mammoth/Chopper, it still does exactly the same thing (which is… nothing). My 125k gold also does not change the purchasing power of the 18k gold price. I could still buy Cold-weather flying for 18 characters, or 900 stacks of Icethorn, regardless of how much gold I have left after I spend that 18k gold.
In short, there is no reason to buy a Mammoth/Chopper just because you have excess gold. If it was a bad deal before, it is still a bad deal now. If it wasn’t a bad deal, you’d already have one, and the discussion would be moot.
So now excess gold is out of the way. The Mammoth advocates now say their 18k gold is worth it because of the convenience of having a reagent vendor and repair NPC. It takes less than 30 seconds to reach any vendor in any capital city, plus there is no faction discount for purchasing from the mammoth vendors. It is simply impossible to justify any amount of time/gold savings from this unless you intend to play WoW for the next 50 years, without even considering the amount of time most people spend AFK in Dalaran. This is also similar to paying 1000g for 2 extra bag spaces. There’s no way you can recover the cost of the additional spaces unless Blizzard starts having mobs drop vendor trash that sell for 20g each or something.
The value of a Mammoth/Chopper is not in the item itself, which is essentially the same as any other mount, but in the fact that it costs 18k gold in the first place and as such is just a sign of conspicuous consumption. If these players were the only players on their servers, and there was no one to look at them, would they still buy it? I seriously doubt they would. If the mount you rode was only displayed on your own PC, it would be worth the same as any other mount.
So what’s wrong with a Mammoth/Chopper? The answer is nothing. There’s nothing wrong with buying one, it’s not illegal. But there’s no rational reason to buy one either, as it is just a huge signpost saying “hai guyz i really want to look rich”. Just as there is nothing inherently wrong with buying a LV bag. It’s simply irrational behaviour that a lot of people display out of feelings of insecurity. Of course, if you ask the people who are carrying those hideous bags around, those things are worth their weight in gold. Those bags can protect them from ultraviolet rays, knock out would-be muggers in a single blow, and in the event that a meteor descends from the sky and raises a giant dust cloud that blocks out the sun causing all life on Earth to die out, the carriers of LV bags would be able to survive by gnawing on the genuine patent leather handles of their beloved bags.
Because to do otherwise would be to admit that they basically wasted their money, and obviously they wouldn’t be dumb enough to do that…
Side note: If people thought 10 USD for a horse in Runes of Magic was bad, isn’t 18k gold worth a hell of a lot more than 10 USD for a mount that doesn’t even have any additional benefits?
Filed under: WoW
Is most likely not what they need.
This is one of those unpleasant truths that everyone is actually aware of, but time and time again it slips from their minds. Most people are remarkably bad at making decisions concerning their own well-being. Just look at how many people still lounge around smoking 10 cigarettes a day, when they are perfectly aware of the consequences on their health.
I’ve seen many comments on the changes to emblems coming in 3.2, and one of the most common arguments for it is that everyone benefits from it, so why complain about it? It is seen as pure spite that some people would want to deny others the opportunity to get loot.
What they forget, or maybe do not want to admit, is that Blizzard sending out 50,000 gold to every character’s mailbox would also benefit everyone. Being able to buy a full set of epic ilevel 300 gear for 57 silver when you ding 80 would also benefit everyone. Would it be wrong to complain against these too?
I’ve actually stopped my subscription, not really in response to this particular change, but for a host of other reasons that I may or may not get around to writing about. So in reality I’m fairly ambivalent about this since I don’t particularly care if Joe Schmoe wants to farm Naxx for 2 weeks to get T8.5 gear. But the main point is that the change was totally unnecessary.
“Casuals” want amazing epic loot. But they don’t need it at all, unless the Argent Tournament scourge somehow got amazingly buffed since the last time I did those dailies.
Alt/new raiders want free epics to “be able to catch up”. But you can easily perform at 80-90% of a fully epicced out character with just boe blues and purples and some heroic gear. Unless you intend to do a full clear of hard-mode Ulduar with alt characters, you don’t need to be decked out in purples to down any normal mode boss. Back when everyone was making resto shamans in BT/Sunwell, you could just bring them along to farm bosses and they’d pick up 4 pieces of loot a night. And BT was a lot harder than Ulduar.
The problem is that because “it’s just a game”, some feel that they are entitled to getting all the rewards that they want, because they pay the same 15 bucks as everyone else. It’s a very true observation that no one will pay to play a game that makes them realise that they suck. What they need is to realise that Blizzard actually designed a great endgame that can be enjoyed by everyone (with a brain). Unfortunately the morons would rather stop playing rather than learn, so in order to maximise revenue Blizzard has no choice but to dumb down content.
It makes me wonder how long pure democracies can survive. “One man, one vote” is beginning to sound scarily similar to “I pay 15 dollars a month too so I get what I want”. I’m sure people would vote for a candidate who promises everyone a free car if they thought he could deliver on it, regardless of what his actual credentials are.
If you have a character with Enchanting who can DE Northrend greens, this most definitely isn’t the case.
My wife used this method to amass gold until she felt bored. It’s practically a cheat code for infinite gold. I used it as well while I was notching Blacksmithing.
The “secret” lies in the almighty Notched Cobalt War Axe. You learn this recipe from the trainer at about skill level 400 (not sure the exact point, just wowhead the item to be sure). It costs 10 cobalt bars to make one axe.
On my server, cobalt ore/bars go for roughly 1g apiece on the AH. If you’re careful, you can probably build up quite a stock for lower (50-80s per ore) since cobalt generally isn’t in high demand (jewelcrafters prospect saronite for better results). 1 cobalt bar is made from 1 cobalt ore so they are equivalent if you have a miner as well.
So, 1 axe costs 10g tops.
The axe disenchants into the following:
75% chance of 1-2 Greater Cosmic Essence (so average = 3/2 = 1.5)
20% chance of 2-5 Infinite Dust (so average = 7/2 = 3.5)
5% chance of 1 Dream Shard
On my server, Greater Cosmic sells for about 12g, Infinite Dust about 5g, and Dream Shards for minimum 15g.
So, your expected value from disenchanting a single axe is:
(0.75*1.5*12) + (0.2*3.5*5) + (0.05*1*15) = 17.75g.
This means that you can expect a minimum of 7.75g profit per every 10g investment. Furthermore, note that you can never lose money with this since the worst possible results from the disenchanting already sell for above 10g (1 Greater Cosmic/2 Infinite Dust/1 Dream Shard).
So, just buy up all the cheap cobalt, make tons of these axes on your blacksmith and de them all. Send the resultant mats to your AH character and sell them off whenever the market is good. Enchanting mats don’t even have a list price so feel free to put whatever price you want for 48 hours, and enchants are always in demand especially with all the free gear available nowadays. As usual check the price differential between Lesser and Greater Cosmic Essences and split/combine them accordingly.
Why farm when you can almost double your gold with a few clicks?
Filed under: (Dumb) People
Me and my wife are trying out another free-to-play MMO now. Since we were just starting out and pretty much clueless, she found a guide on the class I was playing and sent me the link.
The guy who wrote the guide did a pretty good job. He split the guide into sections with bookmarks, had some good comments on the skills, some starter combos, and explanations of how various things worked.
After he posted his guide in the forums, he got 2 comments. The first said the guide needed more pictures and colors. The second poster said he got bored halfway and stopped reading it.
It’s really pathetic how incredibly lazy and stupid some people can get. I mean, they clicked on a post titled “Guide to Thief class”, on an online forum. What did they expect, a streaming video and emo Linken Park music? Oh my god, a guide that contains words! Shocking!
Some people type literally in walls of text. Yes, that can be hard to read, especially if it spans multiple pages. But this guy’s guide was in multiple paragraphs, broken down into organised sections. It wasn’t even particularly long. It would take less than 5 minutes for someone to read through it from start to finish.
And someone got bored halfway through that? Has this person ever read a book past the first page? Do they refuse to use a dictionary?How are they supposed to get through school? Ok, the obvious answer is that they won’t. Sigh. Can we get basic literacy to be a criteria before being allowed to procreate?
If you can’t read without colors and pictures, you’re not old enough to be on the Internet. “TLDR” is like a signature saying “hai guyz lookit me im dum”.
Filed under: WoW
Just wanted to save a picture of Dunceykong…
He coincidentally amassed a set of gear that makes him look like Gopher in Winnie the Pooh. Now he’s chopping ankles and taking names in Grizzly Hills.
Filed under: WoW
Patch 3.2 notes have been released, and it looks like there are major changes coming up about almost everything (professions, new raids, new bg, twinking, class changes, more pets etc etc.) It looks to be something on the order of the Sunwell Patch. I’m slightly ho hum about this since we haven’t even cleared Ulduar-10 yet (actually I haven’t even done Malygos yet) but it still does look interesting.
I’ve said that I don’t see why Shamans are supposed to be weak, but apparently Blizzard has listened to the storm of QQ (hooray?) and given us a big bunch of buffs as follows:
Shaman
A customizable totem bar will now be available for shaman allowing the storing of 4 different totems. These totems can be placed on the ground at once in one global cooldown for the combined mana cost of all 4 totems.
That’s convenient I guess. Not really game-changing though since I tend to drop my totems as I’m running in anyway (flametongue+wrath of air first for the casters at range, then stoneskin + healing stream in closer for the melee). But definitely good, especially as you can save 3 separate sets of totems to drop.
All Shocks now have a default range of 25 yards, up from 20 yards.
Good change, I felt that I had to see the tingling hairs in Stormcaller Brundir’s nostrils before Wind Shock was in range.
Base health increased by approximately 7% to correct for shamans having lower health than other classes.
Nice, but note it’s base health and not total. So it’s not a 7% increase in health. If I have 10,000 hp naked this gives me additional 700. No, shamans still can’t tank. As a little jaunt down memory lane, in TBC people complained that Arena geared locks had 10k hp. In Classic, my 60 rogue in blues had just above 2k 
Chain Heal: Jump distance increased to 10 yards. In addition, the amount of healing now decreases by 40% as it jumps to each new target, instead of 50%.
Outstanding buff, makes chain healing fights where people like to spread out a lot easier. Also synergizes with the other resto buffs (Ancestral Healing and Water Shield)
Ghost Wolf: Can now be learned at level 16. While in this form, snaring effects may not bring the shaman below base normal run speed.
Zzz. Happy happy for low level shamans I guess, and level 19 twinks?
Talents
Enhancement
Shamanistic Rage: Cooldown is now 1 minute, down from 2 minutes. Successful melee attacks now have a chance to generate mana equal to 15% of the shaman’s attack power, down from 30%.
Seems like a good change. With the low base mana of enhancement shamans, popping Shamanistic Rage was often complete overkill in terms of filling up the bar. Now the mana regen is smoothened out, and I believe Shamans will now benefit from the damage reduction twice as much?
Restoration
Ancestral Healing: The buff from this ability now reduces the physical damage taken by the target by 3/7/10% instead of increasing the target’s armor.
Nice buff. Makes critical heals useful on non-tanks getting hit by adds. Previously, critting a heal on a mage was like putting an extra layer of paint on an egg. Before running over it with a truck. Carrying a house. Also scales better than a +25% armor buff since armor had a cap.
Cure Poison and Cure Disease: Combined into a single spell, Cure Toxins.
More of a levelling change. Any resto shaman that doesn’t have Cleanse Spirit should be forced to heal for a ret pally tanking without a shield in Utgarde Pinnacle. Repeatedly. And we all know that asking an elemental/enhancement shaman to cure anything is just asking for “lolwut? whut spell r dat, it’s not on me bars, does it do damage?!?”
Earth Shield: Dispel effects will now remove charges of Earth Shield rather than the entire aura.
I can imagine cries of Resto Shamans being overpowered in Arenas, since it means you’d have to spam dispel 8 times to remove my Earth Shield. And then I’ll just press 1 button and put up all 8 charges again. Free buffs are great.
Healing Way: Redesigned. Rather than providing a chance of increasing Healing Wave spells on a friendly target, this talent now innately increases the effectiveness of the shaman’s Healing Wave by 8/16/25%.
Nice. I’m rarely using HW and rely more on earth shield + LHW + glyph of LHW for tank healing. This means that the tank rarely has the Healing Way buff on them when it comes to ohshit moments, which is when you switch to HW (most probably with Nature’s Swiftness). This makes that first ohshit heal a lot stronger.
Mana Tide Totem: Totem health now equal to 10% of the shaman’s health.
Um ok. So my mana tide totem will have 2k hp. Still will get 1-shot by most opponents, and totems can no longer be targeted by totem stomper macros anyway.
Nature’s Guardian: Redesigned. Now has a fixed 100% proc rate, has a 30-second internal cooldown and increases the shaman’s maximum health by 3/6/9/12/15% for 10 seconds.
I don’t have the points to take Nature’s Guardian but anything that removes the randomness is good. Can be useful in PvE too but I prefer not to take talents that only benefit me when I’m dumb and stand in fire.
Nature’s Swiftness: Cooldown is now 2 minutes, down from 3 minutes.
50% more instant Healing Waves is obviously good.
Tidal Waves: No longer reduces the cast time of Lesser Healing Wave by 30%. It instead now provides +25% critical strike chance to Lesser Healing Wave, along with the previous 30% cast time benefit to Healing Wave.
This is still slightly up in the air. Personally, I like it. With Tidal Waves up, my LHW already has a 0.9 sec cast time. This can actually be detrimental sometimes as it’s shorter than the global cooldown, meaning I can sometimes miss out on casting a spell if I try to cast immediately after the LHW finishes. Having the haste not apply to LHW will make it slightly harder to heal on the move, but it makes the riptide+LHW combo heal a lot more and LHW is already fast anyway. On a tank with earth shield, the LHW can crit for about 9-10k. Popping Riptide + Tidal Force + LHW will also easily give us a 100% crit rate with average gear, meaning you can ensure a Ancestral Healing proc on the tank when you know he’s going to take spike damage (previously you’d only get a roughly 85% chance).
Since Improved Water Shield also doesn’t consume charges anymore when you crit, the extra crit also gives back significant mana at no cost. Improved Water Shield will also benefit Chain Heal (amazing buff since Chain Heal has multiple chances to crit, and any 1 crit will trigger the full mana refund)
Not much has been happening on the raiding scene, so I’ve been playing my latest alt a lot more.
The originally abandoned midget of destruction is now 72 and beginning his adventures in Dragonblight. Obviously I’m following my own path to 80 so that I get the most rep during the levelling process.
Solo questing is obviously a /facerolling affair, especially with a blood-spec DK. But I also managed to get into a UK and Nexus group, which was slightly more interesting.
Utgarde Keep
The UK run was pretty fail at the start. I was actually prepared to go buy my dual-spec and craft some cobalt tanking gear if they needed a tank, but the resto druid leader asked if the pally could tank and he said “sure, let me go buy a shield”.
Ok this should have set off warning bells in my head at this point (prot pally with no shield? wut?) but my brain was numb from the facerolling. We zoned in, and when I looked at the pally he was a) 53 points ret and b) wearing 0 defense. He “tanked” with no Righteous Fury and used Seal of Light.
“Ok, let me try tanking… it can’t be worse” So there I was with hardly any tanking gear and a non-tank spec. Surprisingly it actually went fairly well (with me popping all cooldowns) until that last pull in the dragon room, where we wiped because Healbot zoinked out on the resto druid and he kept casting slowmo Healing Touches instead of hots. The mage threw a fit complaining about people using mods to heal for them (had been complaining since the first pull about the pally as well) and left group.
Fortunately, the warlock kindly offered to come tank this with her 74 prot warrior (who actually had some tanking gear) and we got another warlock to replace the QQmage. This went much better and we cleared the rest of the place without much incident, although Dunceykong died to Ingvar’s axe whirlwind 1s after Ingvar died… Ended up topping dps with about 1k over the run.
Nexus
The next day, I saw the same druid healer in lfg for Nexus along with a bunch of others. I’d already done all the pre-quests, so we quickly formed up and got ready to go. The group was a 70 prot pally (yes he was actually prot, although still with minimal defense), me as 71 blood DK, another 70 DK who seemed to be unholy, a 76 hunter, and the 70 druid.
I had reservations due to the pally’s gear, but he actually seemed to tank fairly well. Perhaps the druid also managed to fix his add-ons. I helped along the way with Mark of Blood to make the enemies heal the tank with their attacks when he got low, but we killed every boss with only 1 wipe on the dragon due to the hard-hitting enrage.
The other DK, however, was a classic. He did about half my damage throughout the run, and was about a third below the pally tank. He had defense gems socketed in his dps gear. According to Recount, his top 3 damage abilities were… Auto-attack, Frost-fever (DoT) and Plague Strike (DoT). Judging from this, his “rotation” was probably
1) run up and Icy Touch
2) Plague Strike
3) Pestilence to spread diseases
4) eat sandwich
The best part was when he told me to stop using Death and Decay because “the tank needs aggro”. Since this pally tank actually had a brain and was using consecrate, he never had any aggro problems. So I happily continued using D&D while he happily continued auto-attacking.
Overall, I did about 1150 dps for the Nexus run. Sadly, the level 76 hunter did barely more damage than the pally tank, although based on my past experiences with hunters this isn’t really surprising anymore. Doing 42% of the group’s damage is quite impressive for a DK in quested greens randomly spamming Heart Strike and Death Strike.
I’ve since dual-specced and plonked points into a unholy tanking spec, as well as bought a set of tanking glyphs and crafted some cobalt tanking gear. Not sure if the opportunity will come up for me to tank anymore before I reach 80, but if it does I’m definitely prepared.
On Sunday, the guild finally managed to down 10-man Mimiron after his major nerf. Of course, the guild leader told me “he wasn’t nerfed that much, just that the tank won’t get 1-shot by laser barrage while the bottom spins madly”. I was like “yeah, that’s the whole reason we kept wiping on P4 wasn’t it…”
So with Mimiron down, we decided to head in to try General Vezax. Of course to get to him, we had to clear his/her/its trash…
*Cue Twilight Zone music* “OMG it’s Shadow Labs”
There are quite a few packs of Twilight buggers standing around, with a Fire elemental add as well. There seems to be a mix of ranged/melee/healer mobs in each pack. We were only running with a single tank since Vezax himself only requires one tank, and coincidentally none of the other tank-capable classes present had a tanking dual spec.
So… we actually had to CC!!! Mobs were actually marked, people pulled out sheep, freezing trap, sap and blind from their spellbooks. The raid leader assigned CCs… the rogue sapped his target… tank pulled… mage sheeped his star… and then everyone pressed their AoE button.
The “snikt snikt” of Fan of Knives mixed in with swirling yellow Divine Stooooorm and crackling Thunderclap. Both hunters tried to trap the same mob, only to have their auto shots break the trap immediately afterwards. Our shadow priest friend courageously tried to help matters… by putting SW: Pain on every mob that was loose. The mage tried to resheep his target, but immediately after it hit the warrior frantically charged over and devastated the mob.
Amazingly we didn’t wipe, but I think there were only 4 people left alive at the end of it. It was hilariously bad CC, and really showed how rusty a lot of people had become at CC. Or maybe they never knew how to, given that a lot of players in my guild are of the late-TBC or WotLK generation.
We did sort of improve over the next few pulls, but our hunters definitely did not know how to chain-trap properly and the warrior was obviously unused to working with CC. My shadow priest friend was playing around with Recount and proudly linked to me the damage meters showing him at the top, in reply to which I linked him the CC Breaking meter with him at the top as well.
We had quite a few tries on General Vezax but never got past the first Surge since a lot of people hadn’t bothered to read up on the fight and it took a while for them to understand what was going on. Despite Mark of the Faceless not being supposed to be cast on people within 15 yards (according to WowWiki anyway) I was pretty darn sure that he cast it on me a few times when I was right at his feet. And it was pretty sad seeing how so many people, especially DPS classes, failed at avoiding Shadow Crash despite DBM putting a GIANT BLUE WARNING on their screen. But at the end of the night, there was some progress made and I’m sure that we will get him down eventually.
But that first pull “with CC” was akin to a mass Leroy Jenkins zerg. I have no idea what the rogue was thinking when he stealthed up, distracted, sapped, then spammed Fan of Knives
As I’ve been levelling my cute little midget of destruction a.k.a gnome death knight, I’ve also been trying to keep up with his professions. Since my wife has stopped playing, I’ve chosen to go with Blacksmithing and Mining since I don’t have those two professions on my active characters now.
Mining was initially tough to level up from 1-300, but once you get it up to the same level as where you are questing it generally goes fine. Outland/Northrend are both very mining-friendly compared to Azeroth, so it’s pretty easy to max it out.
Blacksmithing however remains a royal pain. As expected most of the low to mid range crafted gear is worthless and you can only disenchant them in an effort to partially recover cost. Also, it takes a multitude of materials to make an item. The ores also have to first be smelted into bars, which can only be done if you’re a miner. The whole process is just time consuming.
This is largely true for most crafting professions, except Blacksmithing is exceptionally expensive. So it’s not surprising that many people ask for profession guides to level up their crafting professions. Just do a simple search on google and you’ll get tons of sites offering 1-450 guides for all professions.
Except that the vast majority of them completely suck.
You can break down 95% of guides into the following format:
1) At each skill level, list all the recipes that are orange.
2) Pick the orange recipe that is the cheapest in terms of mats, and make that.
3) Go back to 1)
This is exceptionally dumb, because first of all I have eyes. I don’t need a guide to tell me which of my skills are orange and therefore are guaranteed to give me a skill up.
Secondly, I’ve found that unless you are really close to the threshold where a recipe goes green, you are usually MUCH MUCH better off making yellow recipes since you get a skillup pretty reliably anyway.
And lastly, it is extremely short-sighted to simply craft orange items without any regard as to the market value of the item. I believe that this is the single biggest reason why most people complain so much about the cost of levelling up a crafting profession. If I’m making profit from an item, why does it matter if it is a green recipe? I could make 100 of them for 1g profit each compared to losing 50g on an orange skillup, and I’ll probably get a skillup anyway.
Another example is choosing between 2 items to craft for a skillup, one of which has a cheaper material cost. You might think “well duh, it’s a no brainer which one I choose to make then, I’ll make the cheaper one!” Unfortunately, you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake and it is very likely that every other person levelling the profession made the same choice, meaning that the item has next to no market value due to oversupply. Meanwhile, the other more expensive item may cost 20g more to make but sells for 50% profit (an example of this is the savage saronite pieces for Blacksmithing, everyone makes the cheaper pieces…) The initial cost doesn’t matter, what matters is the profit/loss per item. What does it matter if it costs 2k gold to make, if you can reliably sell it for 2.5k? (Don’t tell me you don’t have 2k gold in the first place…)
So this is why I would rather just open up wowhead or thottbot for a listing of all recipes instead of following a profession guide. There are of course some guides which are exceptions and provide extra information, such as estimated materials required (useful for advance shopping, though potentially inaccurate if the rest of the guide is just recommending orange items as usual…) or information on where to get non-trainer recipes which provide cheaper skillups.
Of course, if you are only interested in powerlevelling it to the skill cap in as short a time as possible, then just make anything orange and vendor it. But don’t complain later about spending 10,000 gold to level up blacksmithing when good old-fashioned research and planning could have made it a profitable enterprise instead.
Filed under: WoW
According to WoW Insider there’s supposedly a trend that resto shaman’s are considered a weak healer, especially in heroic hard modes. There are guilds who say that bringing a resto shaman makes it almost impossible to do blah blah blah achievement.
I have to say that a lot of WoW players love statements like these. They’ll jump all over them and start deleting their resto shamans and level a new priest from 1 to 80, bitching and swearing all the way about how Blizztard screwed them.
My opinion? Shamans are awesome to heal with.
My first full-fledged healer was my pally. He healed a lot of Karazhan alt runs and even a couple of T5 fights. But in WotLK he turned to being /facerolling dps because it was simply too easy and too good to resist. So I levelled a shaman to be my new healer.
To me, a shaman feels like a complete healer. Shamans have tools to fit any situation.
Want a hot? We have riptide, earthliving weapon, and if you’re Alliance, Gift of the Naaru.
Need AoE heals? Meet the original grandpappy of all AoE heals, Chain Heal. It’s mana efficient, intelligently selects targets, can put Earthliving hots on each target and can crit each target independently giving all sorts of yummy side effects like mana refunds from water shield charges, and 40% of the healed amount to the raid member with the lowest health.
Oh noes, movement fight! My Riptide is instant cast every 6 seconds, heals for about 3k upfront (4.5k crit) with a hot after and reduces cast time for my next 2 Lesser Healing Wave/Healing Waves. With the Tidal Waves buff, my LHW is about a 0.9 second cast time and Healing Wave is 1.4 seconds, meaning I can easily cast these on the move. We also have Nature’s Swiftness to plonk instant Healing Waves. Earth Shield also provides passive healing to your target while you have to move.
Tank takes huge spikey damage? Healing Wave hits for about 9k and crits for 14.5k. With the aforementioned buff after Riptide, it has a amazingly short cast time. With the Glyph of Lesser Healing Wave, a LHW on a target with Earth Shield up heals about the same as a non-crit HW. And each crit gives the tank +25% armor, which is pretty much guaranteed when you pop Tidal Force (+60% crit).
Yucky green stuff on the ground! The new all-in-one Cleansing totem meets all your needs, plonk it down and that’s the end of worrying about spending 5 global cooldowns = 7.5 seconds cleansing poison and disease debuffs. The new Purify Spirit is also a all-in-one remover of disease, poison and curses so you don’t need to have separate buttons for all 3 and figure out which debuff is which. Only thing we can’t remove is magic, but we also have Purge which is basically a offensive Dispel Magic to remove pesky buffs from NPCs.
What else do Shaman’s provide? 144 spellpower to everyone in the raid with flametongue. Healing stream totem which ticks for about 400 for everyone in the party like a passive hot. 3% spell haste from Wrath of Air. Group fear removal with Tremor totem (great for Auriaya). AoE snare for adds (XT-002 and Mimiron). A shaman put on interrupt duty in Iron Council makes Mr. Stormcaller QQ. We can even CC with Hex if we needed to. And even though mana management is a joke now, shamans can Innervate THE ENTIRE GROUP with Mana Tide totem.
And last, but definitely by far the most important…. Shamans bring heroism/bloodlust. Now that it can’t be chained, it has lost some of its power but it still remains one of the most powerful unique buffs in this age of “bring the player not the class”.
In all the fights I’ve done in Ulduar, I’ve never felt that shamans were at a disadvantage in any particular fight. Due to the vast array of tools we have, I’ve always been able to handle anything that can be thrown at the raid and make a unique contribution. Movement fights, AoE fights, raid healing, tank healing, resto shamans can do them all.
In comparison, holy pallies have no hots and no real AoE heals (although glyphed Holy Light helps slightly). Druids have no fast big heals once Swiftmend and Nature’s Swiftness are used and their hots need time to tick. Priests are quite versatile too in raw healing but don’t bring as much utility. The other healing classes may give slightly higher output in specific situations, but then they are frustrated in others due to their limitations.
The days of brainlessly spamming chain heal are definitely over (unless you’re in Naxx-25), but resto shamans definitely have the tools to compete closely with any other healer in almost any situation.
