Totem Talk: How to heal Morchok and Zon’ozz in the Siege of Wyrmrest

Shaman standing on Deathwing
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement and restoration shaman. Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration, brought to you by Joe Perez (otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticus and co-host of the For the Lore and Raid Warning podcasts), shows you how.

Dragon Soul is full of fire, black goo, explosions, dragons, and an odd shaman that have gone off the deep end and sided with some Old Golds. To be honest, it’s an impressive raid zone in both scale of story — and it’s one for sure that most restoration shaman should fall in love with. (For full details of the encounters or full raid strategies, please read Ready Check for WoW Insider’s boss guides.)

Morchok is an elemental baddie straight from the pits of Deepholm, the most powerful elemental still under the control of Deathwing. He’ll be your first roadblock on the highway to defeating the aspect of death — and honestly, he’s a fight designed with the restoration shaman in mind. Morchok’s bark is much bigger than his bite when you’re a restoration shaman. So what makes him such a good boss for a resto shaman healer? Well, the mechanics of the fight first and foremost lend themselves very well to your raid staying grouped up. This plays well the vast majority of our AoE healing spells.

Continue reading Totem Talk: How to heal Morchok and Zon’ozz in the Siege of Wyrmrest

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Totem Talk: How to heal Morchok and Zon’ozz in the Siege of Wyrmrest originally appeared on WoW Insider on Tue, 13 Dec 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Totem Talk: Mastery vs. haste for elemental shaman

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. Josh Myers once only tackled the hard questions about enhancement but has recently expanded his sphere of responsibility to all shaman DPS specs. (And no, two-handed enhancement is still never coming back.)

Those of you following my Twitter feed might have read how I managed to go an entire content patch without ever getting tier 12 shoulders for the main spec of my main class. So when I heard that Blizzard’s amazing idea for getting people tier gear more quickly was too entirely remove tier from valor point vendors, the part of me that saw something like two or three protector shoulder tokens drop in five months of raiding was very skeptical.

That said, there are already people running around Orgrimmar with full sets of tier gear. Between weekly Raid Finder and a weekly run of Dragon Soul, you have four to six chances to see your token drop, with even higher chances for gloves and legs due to Baradin Hold. This is really good news for elemental, because our newly lackluster tier 12 needs to be replaced as soon as possible with the very shiny Spiritwalker’s Regalia. The bad news? Everything you knew about elemental gearing in Firelands is gone, just like your permanent Fire Elemental Totem.

Those of you who played elemental at the start of Cataclysm may remember a time when mastery was as good as haste and balancing the two stats was ideal. With Firelands, mastery fell by the wayside. It was still a good stat, but it couldn’t compete with haste. Now that 4.3 has hit, we’re starting to see mastery coming back into the limelight. It’s like the Neil Patrick Harris of elemental stats — starts off strong, fades into the background for 10 years (or five months), and comes back to outshine everything around it.

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Totem Talk: Mastery vs. haste for elemental shaman originally appeared on WoW Insider on Sat, 10 Dec 2011 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Totem Talk: Restoration shaman 4.3 loot

Restoration Shaman 4.3

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement and restoration shaman. Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration, brought to you by Joe Perez (otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticus and co-host of the For the Lore and Raid Warning podcasts), shows you how.

A new patch has come and brought with it many new wonders. The final content patch of the Cataclysm expansion has finally gone live, bringing three new dungeons tied intricately with the story of the new raid zone. It’s an exciting time for everyone involved as stories come to a close, and there are many new toys to play with like transmogrification and the Raid Finder.

One of the greatest things about a new raid tier is the amount of new gear you get to play with. Each tier in Cataclysm has done things a little different with how you obtain your gear, combining valor points and tokens from raid in order to obtain your tier pieces and raid drops with off-set valor gear to fill in your gaps. This tier is no exception to the changing gearing climate, and the number of options is almost staggering.

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Totem Talk: Restoration shaman 4.3 loot originally appeared on WoW Insider on Tue, 06 Dec 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Diablo III game designers talk Inferno difficulty and twinking – Joystiq


PC Gamer Magazine
Diablo III game designers talk Inferno difficulty and twinking
Joystiq
Looking at World of Warcraft, I wouldn't be surprised by it though. The economy in that game was rather friendly towards the lvl19 gear that was good as it could be for it. It also sucked great big donkey things when, as a simple lvl 18 warrior,
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world of warcraft news – Google News

Diablo III game designers talk Inferno difficulty and twinking – Joystiq


PC Gamer Magazine
Diablo III game designers talk Inferno difficulty and twinking
Joystiq
Looking at World of Warcraft, I wouldn't be surprised by it though. The economy in that game was rather friendly towards the lvl19 gear that was good as it could be for it. It also sucked great big donkey things when, as a simple lvl 18 warrior,
Diablo III interview—What diehard Diablo II fans can expect from D3PC Gamer Magazine

all 3 news articles »

world of warcraft news – Google News

Totem Talk: Enhancement shaman, welcome to patch 4.3

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. Josh Myers once only tackled the hard questions about enhancement but has recently expanded his sphere of responsibility to all shaman DPS specs. (And no, two-handed enhancement is still never coming back.)

I’m going to start this post by talking about how excited I am. For those of you who’ve read my About The Bloggers, you’d know that I considered the last patch of Icecrown Citadel to be the absolute worst patch this game has ever seen. In hindsight, 4.2 was probably the second worst. Enhancement’s DPS was mediocre unless you abused a gimmick. Our AoE was pathetic. Firelands was an exercise in trying to discern how much red and orange the human mind could take in before making us go totally mental and putting a fist through the monitor.

But now, 4.3 is here! Fresh, new heroic 5-mans are here, complete with a beautiful new axe for enhancement shaman who couldn’t get Gatecrasher to drop. Dragon Soul has been introduced, offering various backdrops for your boss slayings, a new super-easy mode option, and mechanics that actually seem to favor having an enhancement shaman present. Most of all, though, we received a terribly needed buff to our AoE, breathing a new quality of life to being an enhancement shaman.

Continue reading Totem Talk: Enhancement shaman, welcome to patch 4.3

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Totem Talk: Enhancement shaman, welcome to patch 4.3 originally appeared on WoW Insider on Sat, 03 Dec 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Totem Talk: Mists of Pandaria talent calculator for restoration shamans – Joystiq


Gamebandits (blog)
Totem Talk: Mists of Pandaria talent calculator for restoration shamans
Joystiq
Well, since then, the official talent calculator for Mists of Pandaria have been released on the official World of Warcraft site. With it, there are a few surprises. It has caused quite a stir throughout the community, and many of the bloggers out
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Totem Talk: Mists of Pandaria talent calculator for restoration shamans

Restoration Talent Calculator

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement and restoration shaman. Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration, brought to you by Joe Perez (otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticus and co-host of the For the Lore and Raid Warning podcasts), shows you how.

BlizzCon 2011 was an exciting time with a lot of announcements for every class and for the state of the game in general. If you’re a regular reader of the column (and I hope you are), you’ll remember that we talked a little bit about the proposed talent system changes before and what it meant for restoration shaman.

Well, since then, the official talent calculator for Mists of Pandaria have been released on the official World of Warcraft site. With it, there are a few surprises. It has caused quite a stir throughout the community, and many of the bloggers out there have been sharing their thoughts on the new calculator and what it means for the future of their classes and specs. So today that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

We’ve talked about this before, but it bears repeating. Cataclysm brought about a pretty revolutionary (and at the time controversial) change to the talent system by breaking it down from what we knew for years to the 31-point talent system we have today. It allowed for specialization locking a player into a certain talent tree, eliminating hybrid talent builds, but in exchange giving players some key abilities as perks. It was the first step in streamlining the talent system.

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Totem Talk: Mists of Pandaria talent calculator for restoration shamans originally appeared on WoW Insider on Tue, 29 Nov 2011 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Totem Talk: Elemental shaman in patch 4.3

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. Josh Myers once only tackled the hard questions about enhancement but has recently expanded his sphere of responsibility to all shaman DPS specs. (And no, two-handed enhancement is still never coming back.)

This is it, guys: This is officially the last Totem Talk for elemental shaman I will write before patch 4.3 hits live servers. It might be this Tuesday, or it might be the sixth of December. Whichever it is, it’s pretty definite we’ll be seeing Dragon Soul within the next 10 days, barring a natural disaster, an alien invasion, or Mike Morhaime’s changing his mind, of course.

Elemental is going through a few significant changes in 4.3. Our AoE will be totally revamped; we’ll be dropping Fire Nova from our AoE rotation entirely. Instead, we’ll be falling back on spamming the now cooldown-less Chain Lightning. Also, we’ll possibly drop Earthquake, but only if we can guarantee the mobs don’t move for 10 seconds. Ground-based AoEs are still very unreliable AoE damage.

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Totem Talk: Elemental shaman in patch 4.3 originally appeared on WoW Insider on Sat, 26 Nov 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Totem Talk: Restoration healing blues

Winged Ghostwolf

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement and restoration shaman. Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration, brought to you by Joe Perez (otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticus and co-host of the For the Lore and Raid Warning podcasts), shows you how.

While the last few articles have been focused on the upcoming patch 4.3, lately there’s been a new set of concerns that’s popped up regarding healers, mana and restoration shaman abilities.

The official forums are a place that is both infinitely scary and amazingly wonderful all at the same time. You’re as likely to find the next greatest bit of news as you are the next and most terrible meme. That said, I find myself on them more often than not, digging around for the latest news and concerns from other players or just for a laugh. This past week, though, a thread sprung up about healers going into the future, and our own Matt Low has covered it in his post from an all-healer perspective.

The thread has a number of blue responses and many of the answers directly relate to restoration shaman. Over this last week, I’ve received a number of emails about this thread and thought now would be a good time to go over it and address some concerns.

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Totem Talk: Restoration healing blues originally appeared on WoW Insider on Tue, 22 Nov 2011 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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