Running Naxxramas with 16/55/0

You may recall that I opted for 16/55/0 for my enhancement build, dropping Shamanistic Focus and thus gambling that I would have enough mana. I ran Naxxramas on Thursday with this build (sort of) and can now report the results.

Kam was deployed for full melee DPS against Noth, Loatheb and some of Heigan (until most of the DPS and healers died and he did off healing instead), and all of the trash. We had replenishment up for most of the time, thanks to one of our mages.

On the bosses Kam had no mana troubles - I had to use Shamanistic Rage of course, but was keeping Lightning Shield up full time, and the combination of Mana Stream Totem, replenishment and Improved Storm Strike seems to have done the trick. Unfortunately we did not have another Shaman there, so I was using Flametongue Totem rather than Magma/Searing Totem. I expect if I had spammed Magma I would have probably had some mana issues.

On Noth, I used Magma Totem on the skeleton phase, which probably contributed to my personal-record-breaking DPS (3300 is the most I have ever seen). What is interesting is that the mana gained from replenishment in the Noth fight is only 23% of that gained from SR and Imp SS, so reckon I might be good without any replenishment.

Loatheb was similar - no mana troubles with SR coming up soon enough to use before Kam went OOM. This time replenishment returned 36% of the mana that Imp SS did, so again not a huge amount. Hopefully I'll get into a raid without any replenishment so I can see how Kam does there. I say hopefully, the best scenario would be that we always have replenishment!

The rest of the fights Kam was off healing in his not very uber healing gear and second talent spec, so his DPS figures are a bit poor ;) Finally, for comparison of how far we have come since TBC, here is an old report I dug out from an Illhoof kill where Kam was known as Ando.




From 585 to 3300 DPS in the space of a single expansion? My my how far we have come.

Kam gets some Enhancement

After healing a few instances and some of Karazhan, the recent nerfs to raid difficulty have given Kam the perfect excuse to finally try out the enhancement spec. After some research I've chosen this 8/53/0 spec, but clearly I didn't do enough research because this one looks better, with a full load of Maelstrom Weapon for 4/5 Ancestral Knowledge.


First impressions:

• Kill speed. Mobs are dying very fast, a shade faster than with elemental, despite Kam's enhancement gear being a lot weaker than his elemental gear.
  
• Top tier talent. Feral Spirit wolves are very nice, the 2 controllable spirit wolves almost make you feel like a hunter, except they don't last (shame). By contrast the elemental talent Thunderstorm is just not as cool, or useful in PvE. The knockback and AOE is pretty nice, but it's just not in the same league as your very own spirit wolves.
  
• Button mashing. Fighting as enhancement certainly requires more button pressing than elemental; stormstrike, lava lash and earth shock need to be used every time they are off cooldown, not to mention refreshing water shield and using Shamanistic Rage and feral spirit as appropriate. By contrast Kam's tactics for elemental was to pull with a few lightning bolts, then auto attack the mob, pressing flame shock every 12 seconds and occasionally lightning bolt.
  
• Taking damage. One bonus of elemental is that Kam generally goes around with a shield, so his armour is quite high and he doesn't take too much damage. Dual wielding means no shield so quite a lot of damage is taken. Luckily Maelstrom Weapon works with healing spells, so we can pop off an instant healing wave when needed. This damage taking is really only an issue when Kam gets jumped by a few mobs, for 1 mob it dies so fast that it doesn't get the chance to do much damage.
  
• Other. Another bonus of enhancement is that because a lot of the damage is melee, those pesky nature-immune elementals prove no problem.
  

An honourable mention must go to the Shock and Awe mod, which displays a handy hint for which spell to use next in a rotation. For an enhancement noob such as myself, its very useful indeed.


I'm not sure whether Kam will stay enhancement for levelling - to build a healing set will require lugging two completely different sets of gear around, whereas in theory elemental gear forms a good basis for a healing set. Except that currently Kam has almost 2 completely different sets of gear; one for healing that prioritises mp5 and one for elemental that prioritises crit. If shaman are to become crit-based healers then a set of gear with crit will do well for both elemental and resto, but I am not yet sold on that. I do however want to heal some instances so I hope the dual-spec feature is not too tardy.


I suppose the early Mail spellpower gear in Wrath will show Blizzard's intent - if it is all spellpower and crit then crit-based will be the only option, but if a lot of spellpower and mp5 stuff starts to appear (or heaven forbid they force us to choose between mp5 and crit for quest rewards), then I'll be horribly confused and have to strike some sort of balance.

The Price of Peacebloom

I saw on Random Ravings of Warcraft the news that our new talents and much more from the expansion will be arriving soon. Apart from the weeks of confusion over which talents to pick, one item from the features jumped out:

New profession: Inscription

No it's not the new hairstyles, although Kam could do with a Mohawk. No, Inscription! Denizens of Azeroth will be able to select Inscription as one of their two professions and level up to a skill level of 375. This means the price of herbs is set to go through the roof, as a legion of new Inscribers power level to 375. It may already be too late to gather a stock of low level herbs from the Auction House - usually when news like this hits the price goes up immediately in anticipation of the demand.

Interesting news. Now where's my hairstyle brochure...

Image courtesy of Thomas Mathis.

New Shaman spells in Wrath

As the beans have been spilled according to this Wow Insider blog from the WWI dev panel, time to talk new shaman spells.

Hex, 1.5 sec cast, turn an enemy into a frog for 8-10 seconds, 1 min cooldown. This looks similar to druid Hibernate, a short duration CC. I expect this to be used at the start of a pull to CC an add for enough time to DPS down another one, similar how we use Hibernate today (when the druid in question has trained it). It will also be really good for controlling unexpected adds, either to give time to kill the original target, or to leg it. Always welcome since my only escape option is Earthstomp followed by Ghost Wolf. I'd really prefer a better, more reliable CC like Polymorph or even Freezing Trap, but this reasonable if the cooldown stays short enough for it to be useful for every pull.

Combining totems, eg Strength of Earth and Grace of Air on the same totem. Interesting, this will lead to less spamming totems if we can put 2 down to cover what 4 did, but how will they explain putting an Earth and Air element effect onto the same totem exactly? Can you say Retcon?

Totems will affect the whole raid. This is awesome, along with news that windfury will affect druids in beast forms. It will help our raid leader figure out a good group setup, and probably make Shamans even more in demand in our 10 man raids.

Weapon enchants revamped, Rockbiter is replaced by Earthliving, which gives a +Healing buff. Yes please is all I can say, extra +Healing is always welcome, especially as I shouldn't be meleeing when in healbot mode.

So far so good!