First, Do Some Harm

Gone are the days of the pacifist healer sitting in the back row patching up the dpsers doing the dirty work. Come Cataclysm, with the new mechanics, abilities, and talents showing up in beta, it's prety clear that Blizzard wants us healers to get down off our high horses and get our hands a little bloody. So healers? Let's get ready to rumble.

Pre-Cata

Prior to cataclysm, most healers really only did damage when they were super bored. A healer spending mana on a dps ability would be pretty much unthinkable on a progression encounter, much less talent points, with only a few exceptions.

• Holy Paladins in Wrath got Judgements of the Pure, which, combined with Enlightened Judgements, allowed holydins to judge from a distance, and in fact, were encouraged to do so at least once every minute to optimize their healing.
• Holy Priests have frequently found themselves using their Shadow Word: Death backlash to force a stuck Prayer of Mending to bounce to another raid member.
• Holy Priests have Surge of Light, which prior to WOTLK could only proc a free smite, instead of a Flash Heal like it does today. This was generally regarded as a poor talent prior to being changed.

Other than those, most healers had no real incentive or reason to dps while filling a healing role. Even dead time was better spent regenning mana out of combat.

New Talents/Skills for Healing Classes in Cataclysm

In cataclysm, across the board, we're seeing dps talents showing up in previously healing exclusive trees.

• Shaman
  Resto shaman playing with a cataclysm talent calculator will find that it's nearly impossible to build a pve restoration build without being forced to take one of the new "hybrid" talents that encourage resto shaman to dps during periods of light healing.
  • Focused Insight allows you to get a cheaper and more effective heal after any shock spell (this does not include Wind Shear).
  • Telluric Currents gives you a portion of your mana back from casting Lightning Bolt relative to the amount of damage done. Interestingly enough, on beta, many shaman were able to get to spellpower levels that would actually cause lightning bolt to be a net gain in mana, although Blizz has since clarified that this is not the intended purpose and presumably the talent will be rebalanced as needed.
  I'm not crazy about either of these mechanics. For Focused Insight, I feel that Shaman have many other ways to "charge up" their next heal, including Tidal Waves and the new Unleash Life ability. Telluric Currents confuses me, because we're constantly being told by Blizzard developers that we've had it too easy in the past and they want mana conservation to be an issue going forward. Even if they're cheap, I can't see how encouraging Resto Shaman to waste mana on lightning bolts is part of this overall strategy.
• Priest
  Disc priests have always had the schizophrenic Penance which contextually heals or damages based on who the spell's target is. Now Holy is getting a somewhat similar spell called Holy Word: Chastise that is an instant damage ability by default, but can convert into either Aspire, Serenity, or Sanctuary, based on the Chakra state that you are in. The mechanic sounds confusing, and potentially a nightmare for keybindings/macros, but the abilities themselves look really cool, so it's definitely something I'm looking forward to playing with. Beyond that, priests of both healing trees are getting a lot of talents that encourage smiting.
  • In the second tier of the Disc tree, priests get a talent Evangelism which looks like a pure dps talent until you see it's dependent Archangel which restores mana and gives you a short healing boost. This definitely fits in with the "dps during dead time" model nicely, and gives you another nice mana regen and healing boost cooldown.
  • The disc-only talent Atonement is probably one of my favorites of the new hybrid talents; you heal low health allies near you when you smite. Simple and kind of fun. Dovetails nicely with Evangelism.
  • I'm not as excited about the Holy tree's Trinity because it is useless unless you have enough downtime to smite three times in a row, and your haste boost is only good for the next 12 seconds. You really need to time this effect right to make it useful, whereas Archangel is much more adaptive. Still, this talent is a prereq for the new Surge of Light, which most people will probably want.
• Paladin
  The aforementioned long range of Enlightened Judgements is now actually becoming baseline for all Paladins, which is kind of a nice treat. In addition, they get some new and somewhat confusing new dps/healing hybrid talents.
  • Denounce looks basically like the old pre-wotlk Surge of Light. At 2 points it reduces the cost of exorcism by 75% at its base, and gives your holy shock the ability to proc fee exorcisms. Additionally, the free Exorcisms can crit, allowing you to proc other talents like Conviction for free.
  • As I said before, the old Enlightened Judgements range became baseline, and the new one causes your judgements to heal yourself. Healing yourself is pretty boring, but it's not a bad filler talent, given that you have to judge at least once a minute.
  I gotta be honest, a lot of these changes confuse me, because I've never really raid healed on my holy paladin. I'm just gonna keep my mouth shut.
• Druid
  Druids, most dramatically, actually could only cast restoration spells in tree form in the past. Now not only can they cast all their Balance spells in tree form, but they even get a bonus to Wrath while in Tree form. Additionally, there is a new talent that encourages dps.
  • Fury of Stormrage makes Wrath FREE and allows Wrath to proc instant Starfires. While this seems like a strange mechanic for healing, any free spells are awesome. Not only does your mana regen continue as in out of combat, but I would assume that these free spells can still proc talents and abilities like Omen of Clarity. Anyway, this talent is a prereq for Malfurion's Gift, so I think all Resto druids will be picking this up anyways. Enjoy it you guys.

So as a whole, I'm intrigued by the hybrid aspect of these talents, and there are some of them that I think work really well without interfering in the primary role that healers signed up for. Obviously these will all be tweaked and edited and modified before cata goes live, but it's definitely something I'm keeping an eye on.

Reincarnation (not improved)

My life as a noob mage

So my cousin has been leveling on a different server, so I packed up some of my heirloom items on a middling toon and transfered over to try rolling a new mage.

I'm level 42 now, I've pretty much exclusively been leveling with the Dungeon Finder, and just some filler quests and profession stuff while I'm waiting for queues to pop. It's not as efficient as questing, but I just can't bring myself to kill coyotes in the badlands again.

I've found the mage super fun for the most part. I'm not sure either of my leveling specs are that efficient. I started with frost, and focused on aoe talents, thinking that I would be solo aoe farming more, but since I really haven't had long queue times in the LFD finder (Blackrock is crazy overpopulated, so I never wait more than like 5 mins), I haven't even been doing that much.

I basically Cone of Cold whenever its off cooldown no matter how many targets there are, and if there is only one target I frostbolt it, and if there is more than one target I Blizzard. If I pull aggro (which is likely with my half enchanted heirloom items), I frost nova the mobs, blink away, and pray my tank can pick up the slack. Ice barrier has saved me a few times.

When I hit 40 I had my transfer money so I bought my dual spec and got a fire build, but I don't know if I've found my groove with that spec yet. Most instances are just chain pulls of aoe, especially with pally tanks. I am hoping when I get dragon's breath I'll be able to aoe as much as my frost build, but right now I find that in between flamestrikes, I am just single targeting. I know I probably should be blizzarding there, but it seems strange, with my fire spec.

Can anyone recommend a good mage blog, particularly one with leveling theorycraft?

Cata talent preview

I also browsed the talent previews on mmo-champion. I thought the resto shaman ones were super boring, and I was a little perplexed by the priest "smite" talents showing up. For a second, I thought it would make holy leveling more fun, but someone on EJ pointed out that without the damage bonus of the masteries (that you only get in shadow spec), holy leveling will still be painfully inferior. So i guess it's for bored healers in instances to dish out a little damage when their tanks overgear the instance? Sounds kinda lame to me.

The only spec that interested me so far is the ele shaman tree. I do like that they're getting what looks like a flamestrike aoe, and there are some new mechanics coming there way that seem cool.

Zigi out.

I CAN HAZ DATAZ?

So I was going through my blog feeds, and I was sad to see that Olokoth's old blog that dealt with data mined from the armory was dead. I did some googling and found a new blog, that does the same thing, and quite well. I'm kind of totally obsessed.



Their methodology is basically that they have a script that goes through all level 80 characters on the armory, and looks at their spec, and then counts them. The data is then broken down, and you can get all sorts of neat view on the data, broken down by class, race, spec, etc.

They acknowledge that their methodology is somewhat flawed in that:

• They only look at active spec.
• They don't distinguish between 2 different types of the same spec (feral kitty is counted the same as feral bear).
• There's no filter for completely inactive level 80 toons.
• There's no attempt to separate PvP data from PvE

Still, it's a pretty fun look at the data. Shaman are one of the lowest represented class, although Resto is by far the most popular spec. Elemental is more popular than Enhancement, which surprises me for some reason.

I especially like some of the Shaman specific data. I always wondered how many people were taking things like Improved Reincarnation. I guess now we know: 13%.

Knee-jerk blue reaction: Improved Reincarnation

A recent blue post on the forums revealed that they are thinking of lowering the overall cooldown on Reincarnation to 30 minutes, which means that with the talent it will go down to 15.

Quote from Blizzard staff

Reincarnation cooldown
We might drop Reincarnation to 30 base, talented to 15. That's a slight nerf to the talent, but at the same time taking the cooldown that low might make an unattractive talent more attractive. (Source)

They hope that this will make the unattractive Improved Reincarnation talent suddenly popular. Now I'm not normally one to look a gift buff in the mouth, and if they give me a 30 min CD on base Reincarnation, I'll take it and be happy, but I still don't think this makes the Improved Reincarnation a good talent, or an attractive one to Shamans. To see why, you need only look as far as the iconic healing class and my former main, the holy priest.

Prior to patch 2.0.1, holy priests would rarely spec for the Spirit of Redemption talent. Back then it merely provided the pop-up temp healer effect, and had no passive bonus other than that. Even though that pop-up healer is extremely useful and can often make the difference between a progression boss kill and a wipe, it was referred to as "Improved Death" and was avoided except for very specific gimmicky progression fights. Finally after years of being an ignored talent, Blizzard buffed the talent in 2.0.1 and gave it an awesome passive spirit bonus. The talent became a spec-defining talent in the holy tree.

The main reason no one wants to take Improved Reincarnation or pre-2.0.1 Spirit of Redemption talents is that we're healers. Healing aggro is basically a thing of the past; the only way these talents could have any use is if we die, and more often than not, that would be our own fault. Rather than spec to improve when I fail, I'd rather spend points in throughput or mana efficiency talents, to help me NOT DIE IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Still, I feel like Shaman are very strong healers right now, and I'm not going anywhere. But I will be leaving that box 0/2 until they can find a way to design that talent so it doesn't just improve your fail. Cause Zigi don't fail. Zigi win.

-Zigi