Cataclysm Shaman Talent builds

Check these two builds out: Resto (0/21/55) and Ele (55/21/0).

Dual-wielding caster builds.

I think I may just resuscitate my shammy.

EDIT: Hrm, not so much.  Looks like every caster weapon in the game is Main Hand, not One Hand or Off Hand.  A shame, that could have been a very impressive boon to the oft-shorted Elemental build.  Though I'll admit a Resto pimping Earthliving and Flametongue on each weapon might have been a tad powerful.

Leveling Feral

So with moving to a new server, one of the first things I did was to get started on an alt.  I mean, I'm not going to fork out the cash to server transfer everyone off Burning Legion just so I can have the benefit of having most every useful profession available to me.  What can I say, I miss my Tailor, Alchemist, Inscriptionist, and my still-in-training Jewelcrafter, so I'm going to have to replace those sooner or later.  Plus, a guy needs something to do in between raids.  So, I cashed in some emblems for a shiny new Repurposed Lava Dredger, and popped out a Druid.

Oh boy.

I'm now 33 and alternating between speed crushing Scarlet Monastery and prowling around Nessingwary's camp in Stranglethorn.  And I gotta say, it's good to be leveling a class with a decent variety of tools again.  I haven't had this much fun questing and world PVPing since I brought up my shaman last year.  I mean, the last two toons I spent any decent amount of time leveling recently were my priest and warrior, both of whom I brought up almost exclusively through the LFG tool.  Within those instances, they were like unto tiny godlings, unleashing their terrible vengeance from Gnomeregan to the Sunken Temple.  Good thing, since questing with either of those was a gruelling exercise.

Not so with the druid.  Sure, I like the occasional instance for some quick and easy blues to speed up my leveling, but really I could do just fine with only questing if I really needed.  I gotta say I'm a bit surprised to admit that, with how haphazardly the old world quests were laid out compared to the Outlands and Northrend options.  I mean seriously, spend some time in Thousand Needles, you'll hate yourself for it.  But yeah, Stranglethorn and Tanaris I can do.  And do well, for that matter.

But that said, I do still throw the dice and use that LFG tool any time I'm due a particularly useful upgrade.  And as often as not, I'm covering for a lackluster tank or healer who thinks they can queue as arms tank or retribution heals.  I mean, I'm under no delusions that I'd be able to solo feral heal, but I at least am able to fill in the gaps on huge pulls.  It's not like I'm able to AOE DPS yet anyway, popping a HOT on the tank is just about the most useful thing I can do in those situations.

And world PVP. Oh boy, world PVP. Prowl and Nature's Grasp just make it totally unfair. Ravage, shred, rake, and rip, then bounce back out of range while nature's grasp has him rooted, instacast a healing touch, and then either finish em off with some wraths while the bleeds do their work, or pop back into cat and refresh my bleeds.  That formula has worked every time so far.

And that's really what I'm looking for in a truly enjoyable class.  A solid variety of CC and utility powers to supplement the damage or healing output.  Something to be able to deal with an overpull.  Something to tilt the world PVP in my favor.  As close to fully self-sufficient as you can get, while also able to adjust to unexpected situations on the fly.  Some classes just have utility in spades; druids and shaman seem right on the sweet spot, as are frost mages and death knights, but rogues, priests, and warlocks are just awful.  Paladins, on the other hand, package up all that utility into one simple bubble that trumps all the rest of their tools.  I mean seriously, with a tool like divine shield, why even bother with hand of freedom, cleanse, or art of war-procced flash of lights.  I'm probably the only paladin on the planet who wouldn't mind seeing it go in Cataclysm, as was hinted with the class preview.

TL;DR version - feral droods r hawt.

Return of the Hybrid Role?

So the blogosphere is abuzz over the question of 10-man vs. 25-man tank capabilities and therefore related healer needs.  The question is, that if 10-man and 25-man bosses hit for the same amount of damage, and their accompanying tanks will have the same gear (and therefore the same health, mitigation, and avoidance), what will the extra tank healers do?  Will we see an explosion of raid damage so that the 25-man 5-7 healer paradigm stays in place?  Forever a Noob makes the following point:

Maybe raids in Cataclysm will have a lot more unavoidable raid damage. I don’t mean more pools of fire/slime/lava/shadow on the floor. Maybe more adds spawning or multiple mobs requiring dps to control/kite/evasion-tank/pet-tank/etc… Remember that all classes are getting larger health pools. It might not be out of the question for a rogue or shaman to have to pick up an add and off-tank for a few seconds.

I like this line of thought.

Now as a general rule, Blizzard has given us hybrids a fairly equitable stake in all raid roles over this past expansion, especially compared to previous content.  But as a consequence, the encounters have all been tuned to having those 15-18 DPS pretty much going full throttle blasting from pull to kill.  So we may be hybrids, but are we actually doing anything a truly versatile hybrid class should?  I mean, we're not popping out healing spells as part of our rotation, unless you count the pittiance from Vampiric Embrace or Judgement of Light.  Our "tanking" is more often than not grabbing a mob's attention and either running or burning, something any pure DPS class can do just fine.

But what if that weren't the case with Cataclysm?  What if we had boss fights that required a significant number of viable DPS/tank hybrids?  Or heal/tank hybrids?  I'm not just talking a DK popping icebound and deathgripping an add off the healers, I'm talking where every arms warrior, retribution paladin, and enhancement shaman switches in a shield to help offtank the onrushing swarms of adds without decimating those vital healer mana pools.  Think of the design space this opens up...

Imagine a boss with a special attack that afflicts a dimensional shift into the Emerald Dream, and for everyone alive in the dream, the boss hits for less damage and can be tanked by progressively defensively weaker classes.  In the dream, nightmare adds need to be tanked, controlled, and survived while the people outside burn the boss.  If you need a healer in the dream, you'll need that healer to take that melee hit... lucky us, both druids and paladins come equipped with a taunt, and the defenses to survive an early hit.  Later on in the fight, we'll have hunters misdirecting to the priests to keep DPS outside, and get those much-needed heals in the dream.

What strategy would be best used?  The retadin goes across first to burn adds quickly while self-healing?  Send a bear-form healer first to maximize early bloodlust/heroism damage on the boss?  And that's just one idea from a rank amateur; just imagine what the folks who do this for a living can come up with.

See, what we know for a fact is 1) that healer mana is going to be a greater factor than ever, and 2) that health pools will be much larger relative to the amount of damage taken.  We can also pretty safely assume that Blizzard wants to keep the proportions of full-time tanks and healers needed for a 25-man raid more or less constant.  So based on that, it's not too out of line to see hybrids fulling an actual hybrid role instead of streamline focusing into maximizing their DPS output.

It might not come to pass like this, certainly, but it's not outside the realm of possibility either.

Death of 25-man a bit premature.

I think the one factor that almost every blogger who has weighed in on the topic has missed is that people raid for easy top-quality loot.  Likewise, people do a daily heroic random for their Frost badges, again for easy top-quality loot.  Back in BC, people flowed into arenas, once again, for easy top-quality loot.  Loot is a tool, a reward offered from Blizzard to get the playerbase to enjoy the game in the manner that they are putting the most effort into.  People (and by people I mean the overwhelming majority of the endgame playerbase) will swarm to the easiest way to get their top-quality loot, to the best of their abilities.

If Blizzard wants to kill 25-man, they're welcome to do so, it's their game after all.  Shifting the effort-to-loot balance towards 10-man is a sure way to do it.  I, for one, don't think we'll see quite the abandonment of 25-man as is being feared... all it takes is one legendary item that only can be earned in 25-man and all the top-tier raiding guilds will jump on that like a puppy on an unattended turkey sandwich.

Not all the information is out.  Don't start making plans to dump 60% of your raid core just yet.  Blizz may yet surprise us.

Cataclysm Raid Lockout Change

Oh my.

For those of you who haven't seen the news this morning, here's the meat of it:

• 10-man and 25-man raids will share the same lockout.
• 10-man and 25-man raids will drop the same items.
• 10-man and 25-man raids will be tuned to as close to identical difficulty as possible.
• To compensate for the logistical difficulties of organizing 25-man vs. 10-man raids, 25-man will drop a disproportionately high quantity of loot / badges, making it the more efficient way to gear more people faster.
• Blizzard will be distancing themselves from the single epic 12-boss mega-raid, in favor of two or three smaller raids per tier.  More along the lines of TK and SSC, rather than the Naxx/Ulduar/ICC model featured with this expansion.

Huh.  Well, I like it overall, but I can't help but wonder how they're going to tune the specifics. 

Splitting tiers between two or more raids is certainly a welcome change. If my alt is pugging, I'd like to be able to pug more than just 1/3 of the bosses on a tier, then sitting around with a lockout that's never getting touched for the rest of the week.  On a related note, thank god I'll only have to do one raid per week per toon. TOC was horrid, four lockouts per week. Loot pinata or no, that was excessive.


How diverse of a 10-man lineup is raid difficulty going to be tuned to?  If I run three death knights, four priests, two warlocks, and a druid, will I even have a chance?  And if I bring in one of each class with every buff, debuff, and resistance available, will we destroy the content without breaking a sweat?  Not enough info here to make a judgment, but the fact that mages are getting Bloodlust implies that they're spreading the buff love around a lot more, hopefully making it easier to field an ideal 10-man raid composition.


I understand that they are going to need to offer some sort of incentive to run 25-man raids instead of the far more logistically simple 10-mans, so there would need to be a greater than 5:2 loot ratio.  An extra badge per boss almost goes without saying.  But if we end up with Legendary items only acquirable in 25-man in cataclysm, then 25-man will remain the standard for raiding guilds, and 10-man will be largely relegated to PUGs, alts, and casuals.  But hey, maybe Blizzard wants that distinction.

Battlegrounds, Resilience, and the Race to 85

A few of us were chatting in vent the other night about Cataclysm, and the accompanying World PVP hell that was certain to break loose the day it drops.  Now we're on a PVP server, but our guild is fairly heavy on folks who would normally only be found in a battleground with a child in tow, or to prepare delicious pig meat for the more martially-inclined.  Myself, I tend to go where the loots are, so for most of the expansion I've stayed pretty firmly in the PVE realm, with an occasional BG to blow off steam and grabbing the Challenger title with a casual (but rather capable) 5s team.  Nowadays, with the random BG tool, I find myself in there a lot more often.  Arena points for cheap 270s is always fun, plus free gems from honor does a lot to save cash when getting multiple gearsets raid-ready.

But talking about that race from 81-85 the first week or two of Cataclysm pointed out to me just how much getting some PVP practice in now can do for you, especially in Battlegrounds.  Cause face it, if you're on a PVP server, the gank squad will be out en force from day one.  But toss on a full set of Wrathful Gladiator gear, no matter what class or spec you choose to level as, and you'll find it a lot easier to turn the tables on anyone looking to get their frustrations out over not having the expansion on day one.  Or, for that matter, to proactively help secure the prime questing real estate for your faction, if that's your cup of tea.

You don't need a highly-ranked arena team to get 251s or off-set pieces, those will serve you just fine questing.  And if you have a decent PVE set, you'll do fine in a battleground, just expect a few more deaths than you'd see with a similarly-equipped PVP set.  Just do your research on what you need to do on the more complicated BGs, Alterac Valley and Isle of Conquest, specifically.  If you're a high-survivability melee class, just jump right into the fray, blow your damage cooldowns, and try to take as many people out as you can before you fall.  If you're a healer, keep your distance, and surround yourself with as many thugs as possible.  If you're a squishy damage dealer, either pick out weak targets in the opposition to snipe, or go for the opportunity objectives, like any unguarded flags you can find.  Cause trouble.  Even PVE tanks can play along as flag carriers, territory defenders, or most importantly, tanking the enemy general.  Anyone of any class and any spec can be useful in the chaos of a Battleground.

Put in the time now and grab that resilience gear, and you'll be thanking yourself when that 80 rogue whose parents didn't buy him the expansion yet is taking out his frustrations outside the quest hubs of Mount Hyjal.