Introductions and Guild

So if you’re a reader you’ll notice that in my character list there is a new name added. After talking with my guild, we decided it would be a nice idea to go ahead and make a new Horde chapter of our guild in the Nordassil realm, DHF. I went ahead and brought over my 70 Shaman from the depths of hell and made him the guild leader.

If you click on old Gamgam you’ll notice that he’s got pretty decent gear, probably the best geared toon that I have. He’s my first shaman and I love him for it. He’s gotten to see some stuff that none of the others have ever experienced. Still, I’m not bringing him over to do more end game content. I’m bringing him over to help my other guildies who have alts in Horde, level up faster and get the things that THEY need to keep progressing forward.

I’m going to keep him Enhancement since I know that I’ll be running instances for the low levels. It’ll be fun for me to give something back to the community that has shown me a lot of respect in my time with them.

Luciel, however, has been switched over to Restoration. My thinking behind this is as follows. While I highly enjoy the DPS angle of Shamans I know that my guild has other high caliber players that are equal to the task or better. Healers are a different story. Not only are we short on healers, many of our druids being tanks and priests being shadow, but also it takes a special dedication to stand back in a group and just watch health bars and heal on command. Many feel like nothing more than a glorified monkey with one trick to pull off. I’m comfortable healing, heck I was healing on some of the instance runs we did since level 65. It’s easier to just say, “We’ve got a healer” because then everything else just quickly falls into place.

The unfortunate thing is that I have a piecemeal healing set. So I’ve taken things that I know will help my healing stats but aren’t exceptional when it comes to armor. With my healing set on I have about 766 plus healing. A shaman going into Kara trying to heal should have at LEAST 1100 healing. That’s a big chore. So now the question is two fold. First, where do I get gear that is befit for a shaman healer, and not just a cloth wearer and the second is, how do I make sure that the gear that I get for that is going to amount to plus 1100 healing. Yes there are some enchants and of course there’s some drops from bosses as well as some quest rewards that may help along the way but…it’s tough.

While Gam’s got purple pixels, he isn’t geared to do anything but dps, so while having purples in some sense could basically put me in an end game guild, nine times out of ten they want the Shamans to hang back and heal, not something that I’m inclined to do really, at least not with Gam.

This is day three stuck at 69. Part of that is my own fault since I was REALLY excited about getting Gam over and starting up DHF. I spent a lot of time on the WoW website finalizing the transfer and whatnot.

The next post that I’m going to do is going to deal with the Restoration Tree. It’s a pretty clear cut tree that will obviously make you a trained monkey and while we’re not as versatile as a druid healer, we are the next best thing when it comes to group heals and over time heals. You’ll see what I mean.

See you then.

New Blogs

Sigh...I just typed something and it got wiped.

Lame.

Ardent and Honor's Code are two new blogs that I'm going to link. They deal with the Prot Pally in both factions of the game. I find that both players can shed some nice light on the game, build and overall atmosphere of WoW as we know it.

While this blog is the Hooved Shaman, I am going to start intergrating some Paladin information as well since I am going to be working on my MT Paladin for the near future. I need to get him ready for Guild runs.

If you enjoy this blog, if anyone reads it, then please continue to stop by and check in. These two characters are my mains and I will be jumping topics back and forth depending on my interactions with the game and the people in it.

On a side note: I will also be linking GamGam (Lv 70 Horde Shaman) to my toons shortly as I have decided to start up a Horde guild in Nord. should be up and running in the next few days.

More tomorrow.

Quickie

Short one today.

McGregor hit 69 during the Christmas break, this morning actually. I did some tanking and that was fun. Now I’m looking at upgrades for when I hit 70. I know that there’s things that you can get from PVP-ing and some that you can get by doing Heroics or even getting them crafted.

If there are any readers out there, what have you done for your toon that’s hit 70?

Also, after some thinking, I’m building a Horde guild on the Nord server. We already have a bunch of horde toons as players in either Gilneas or Nord, might as well have them under the same banner. It should be an interesting experiment.

I’ll do a real blog entry tomorrow, I’m debating on whether I can actually pull off hitting 70 today….

Building a Better Shaman: Down the Elemental Tree

I know it’s been a bit since I’ve continued on this series. I’ve been so focused on getting my tank up and running that I’ve put this on the back burner and for people that are actually reading this, I’m sorry.

Today we get back on track and we’re going to focus on the Elemental Tree. Now if Enhancement was the melee build then Elemental is the Caster build. It’s built for high output dps through casting. With ranged weapons being the main focus for this build, the talents that are available to you will reflect that.

Please keep in mind that I’m breaking this down with the assistance of some Elemental Shamans and have very little interaction with this tree in my Shaman playing days. So, take what I say as you will.

Convection and Concussion are the first two talents that are available to you on this tree. Both give an advantage to you with your ranged spells, just in different manners. Convection is the talent that reduces the cost of your spells (Shock spells and Lightning spells). So the mana pool that you have will not suffer as much as it could. Concussion is just like it sounds; it’s about increasing the damage of those same spells. Now it can be said that you can go ahead and spend ten points on these two talents right away as they are pretty much useful both ways but I urge you to look at the rest of the tree before you make that determination. Keep in mind that these trees are built for characters that were only going to reach sixty and we now have a level 70 cap. So you will have more points to put in other places later on.

Let’s move on.

Earth’s Grasp is the next talent and what it does is that it gives more health to you Earth totems, more precisely your Stoneclaw and Earthbind totems. Stoneclaw is useful to get a mob off of you, it distracts a mob off of you but is only good for that as long as its health. So if you’re going to become dependent on this totem then giving it more health is probably a good idea. I do know there’s a cooldown for Stoneclaw but I can’t recall what that is at the time. Earthbind is great because it slows down your mob. You can use it to slow the mob down coming toward you, giving you more time to range attack or keep the mob from running away and getting more mobs to pay attention to you.

Elemental Warding reduces the damage taken from Frost, Fire and Nature effects. So those mages that blast you with a frost spell will not slow you down as long. While this is good, I don’t really consider it something that’s incredibly important. However, that’s just me.

Call of Thunder, this is something that I consider important. It’s a five point talent but it increases the chance for a critical strike with your lightning spells. Since lightning is your bread and butter, it’s a must to have this talent filled. This also leads to a later talent that you’re going to want to fill up as well but that would be jumping ahead.

Improved Fire Nova Totem, I’m going to be honest and say that I used Fire Nova A LOT when I was in about level 50 to 59. It’s a cheap and easy little totem that gives a concentrated blast of damage to a mob. It’s on a delay, so there’s a chance to have a mob destroy it before it has the chance to go off, so there’s a bit of a set back to it. This talent will shorten that delay by a second per point put into it. So instead of a five second wait, it can go down to a three second wait. While that sound great, you have to read the rest of the talent, it increases the threat of your Magma totem. Magma is also handy as it ticks off damage for a certain amount of time. However, it’s already libel to get attacked and what this talent will do is increase that possibility, which will really just set you back. So you have to consider the good and bad of it and then decide if you want to sacrifice one totem for another.

Eye of the Storm is an incredible little talent. It’s a defensive bonus, so if you get attacked and receive a critical strike, it produces giving you Focused Casting. That means that no matter how many attacks you have on you, it will not lengthen your casting time. So you get a critical strike on you, you can cast a healing spell without having to worry about it getting lengthened because of another attack.

Elemental Devastation is weird. I say that in the sense that it gives you a higher percentage range to get a critical strike on a melee strike, after you get a critical strike with a spell. So it could be any spell, Shock or lightning, as long as it’s offensive. I don’t really know that an Elemental Shaman would really benefit from this…. It’s like they ran out of space on the Enhancement spec and just stuffed it where they could.

Storm Reach is a great talent. It gives more range to your lightning spells. They can increase as far as six yards. That’s a good clip longer.

Elemental Fury increases the critical strike possibilities for your Shock spells and Fire totems. This could work well with Elemental Devastation. It’s a 100% increase, that’s disgustingly good. This also leads into another talent later on in the tree.

Unrelenting Storm is a good way to keep your mana pool up and heavy. It’s five talent points deep. It will regenerate Mana, but it looks at your Intellect total. So depending on your intellect total, it will give you back 10% of that. Good way to keep a flush pool.

Elemental Precision gives you the better chance to hit a target with a shock spell and it brings down the threat level as well. This is something that you want if you’re running an instance and you’re dps. The last thing that you want is to pass the threat level of the tank, bringing the mob right to your doorstep.

Lightning Mastery is the talent that Call of Thunder leads into. This talent helps bring down the cast time of your lightning spells. Remember that I already explained to you that this spell was going to be your bread and butter, bringing down the casting time is something that you should really look into.

Elemental Mastery, if you took Elemental Fury, then you have the ability to take this talent. This is a spell that you activate and it has a 3 minute cooldown attached to it. If you use it, it’s a free attack basically and the attack has a 100% increase chance to become a critical strike. This far into the tree you can see that things are beginning to stack up. It’s all about getting a critical strike at the right moment for everything else to fall into place. This is a spell that can make everything else that you’ve given points to come together.

Elemental Shields gives you a bit of a break by bringing down the possibility of an attack against you being a critical one. Of course if you put points into Elemental Devastation then it’s counterproductive to even put a point on this one as you’re wasting your points on the other.

Lightning Overload is a free attack. It gives you up to a 20% chance to get a second attack that will not give you any additional threat but only causes half the damage of your original spell. So if you crit for 3000 on a lightning spell, then this talent will give you a second attack against the same mob for 1500.

That talent leads into Totem of Wrath and let me first say that Warlock and Mages will LOVE you if you have this totem and drop it for them when you’re in group. It increases the chance to have a critical hit by 3% and the casters love this totem for that.

This takes you through the entire tree but only up to level 60. The rest of the point available to you, those are up to you where to put them.

This concludes the Elemental Tree. I’m taking a couple of days off, spending time with the Hooved Missus and the little hoovies in my house. I hope you guys have a happy holiday and I’ll see you later this week!

Tanking to 68

McGregor has made it to 68. If you look real close at my last post about him it said that I was just starting work on him in earnest, he was 65 at the time. Now about half a week later, he’s a level 68 and he’s tank several instances in the mean time. If you click on his name you’ll notice that his gear is….alright. He’s over 10k armor and about 9k HP, so he is built to last a long time with elites. He usually runs about three or four mobs at once in an instance and the same out soloing. It’s a BIG difference from watching everyone’s bars to just watching my own. So far I’ve been able to tank: Underbog, Mana Tombs and Crypts. I did Tombs a few times, in hopes of getting that shield to drop from the first boss but to no avail. Rather unfortunate but what are you going to do.

The other endeavor that I tried to take on last night was helping another paladin get their epic mount. Now let me just say that the invite was out of the blue by a player that I’d never met before. I tried to be polite enough to pitch in considering that they were at the end of the chain.

Once we got to Scholo, where they are supposed to summon the horse and we’re supposed to destroy five waves of mobs, then fight a death knight to gain the ability to free the warhorse, it was obvious that this crew had a bit of an issue.

Example: A common term like, “Wait for the pats.” Was completely disregarded and the group went for a standing mob that was then joined by a pat, that was then joined by ANOTHER standing mob. After the fight was over I read, “What do you mean ‘pat’?”

Now take into account that these are not low level characters. The lowest level that was with us was a level 63 Warlock. So we had, 65 and two 68 Paladins, a 66 Hunter and a 63 Warlock. This is a high 50s to level 60 instance. We should have been sweeping the floor with these mobs, I mean SERIOUSLY not having any type of issue at all with this area.

We had one wipe.

Once we reached the basement, which is where the event is supposed to take place, this group was lost on what to do next. They ran around for while, and then decided that they were going to go to a completely different area of Scholo. I was done.

I hate leaving a group; really I do, because I hate leaving people in a situation that they are going to have a hard time taking care of. Still, with this group there were a couple of things that didn’t sit well with me. First off, they knew I was a tank but didn’t want me to tank a tanking role. They wanted me to hang back and let the hunter take agro. Huh? Right. The second thing that didn’t sit right with me was communication, as in, there was none. So they would leave a room and you were just to follow but no explanation was given.

Those, to me, are two factors that must be done well for any instance. I spent an hour with them, they didn’t even know about the event, and once they left the basement and decided to do something else, I bolted.

I pray that won’t come back to bite me on the read but you know what, that’s life.

Today I will put up the Elemental Tree, or at least the first part. So you have that to look forward to.