Double post. Double stu.... Oh wait.

Double post time! Zomg lol roflmao nub.
Acronyms= Bad mkay?
I was talking to one of my friends on her vent channel, and as we were talking, we began using acronyms for our healing spells(she also plays a resto shaman). This is all well and good, allowing us to talk faster, and because it is just a habit we both have. The real problem came up when another good friend of ours joined the channel and popped in to chat with us. He play's a resto druid, and obviously doesn't share the same acronyms that we do. As the conversation goes on, he starts to get really quiet. We have to ask him a question directly to get an answer. I ask him whats wrong, and I get one of those responses that you get when the person isn't really listening to you. He was sort of distant, rude almost and then wouldn't talk again. So, being the jerk that I am, I completely ignore him, and keep on talking. What happened over the next two minutes follows.

"No no no. You focus the tank, ES him, RT him for TW and spam lesser or chain depending."-Me
"That's what I try to do, but I have to weave lesser's in between chains and I use TW way to fast to notice. I probably need to track those lol"-Her
"Are you doing most AoE healing or a lot of tank? Cause that's what I do for tank but I do weave lesser's in between chains on like twins and stuff.
"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TWO TALKING ABOUT!? Fuck this, im going to go talk to people that fucking speak with words."-Him

He blew up. And I mean he flipped a lid and ranted for a good minute until we could get a word in. And honestly, I completely understand why he did it. How annoying is it to be in a conversation and have no idea what is going on? So we started talking with actual words, and he joined back in to awe us with the massive numbers of HPS he can do on twins 25 man.

Moral for today: No one knows the acronyms for other classes(or maybe I just don't pay attention enough, I don't care). So talk with words, you know, those things you've been using since the age of two.

I hate other people.
I do, I honestly really hate other people. I ran into something that bothered me so much, that I considered reporting at least twenty people for it. There was a conversation in trade chat on a realm I have a few alts on. I was chilling in Org, fiddling with a spec, and what do I see? A conversation on why black people, women, handicapped(physical I'm assuming) people and anyone else that was "different" should have to have a label on their character names so that guild/players could do whatever it is egotistical pricks do. I nearly flipped my lid. I was on vent with the afore mentioned people, and I say to them, "racist fucks like this are the reason I hate other people". How horrible of a person do you have to be to degrade and belittle people in a game? Do you get off on it or maybe you are just too stupid to realize what you're saying? I'm happy to say that I didn't get involved with it, calmly walked away and nearly broke vent because I was swearing so much.

Triple post...Suck it.
Yeah...suck it go-- Oh wait right, yeah sorry.
So I just quick wanted to trow in another UI post, just to go over something that I recently started to do, and have found in extremely useful.
If you can see, which you might not be able to as the alpha is set to about 10%, I have my condensed action bars devoid of any non-macro'd spells. I have everything set up to my mouse and modifier keys, and the buttons I do have on my bars are keys near enough to the WASD pad, that I can access them easily. I used to have all my cooldowns on my bars, and all my CC/damage spells on my vars too. Recently, I've mapped them all to my mouse. I've already gotten feedback that I do better when I play like these. Better use of cooldowns and trinkets, faster movement, and somehow, faster reaction times(I don't know about this last one, but I'll take whatever compliment I get). But, I did move my bar so that whatever spells are on there, are a quick twitch of the mouse away.

So that's it for today, I bet you are so glad that you spent a shit ton of time reading stuff that had nothing to do with anything! Leave now, I have stuffing to do, and some sucking.

Because originality is what I do best.

Nearly every healing blogger has seen, done, or read the meme that isn't a meme, and as I love to be original and do new things, I thought I would join the wagon. And, as no one knows about this blog and I don't have the energy to try and get people to, I'll just pretend that I got tagged.

What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer?
Martik, restoration shaman.

What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)
Almost strictly 10 mans with a smattering of 25 man pugs.

What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why?
Riptide. Oh blah blah Chain Heal, yeah I know it's a good spell, but riptide is by far my favorite due to the HoT and the increase to Chain Heal.

What healing spell do you use least for your class and why?
Healing Wave. Don't get me wrong, this is an intense spell, but I usually forget to use it. /oh noes!

What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why?
Oh good lord could I get controversial with this one.Raid healing. Tank healing. Shamans are sort of the gimpy cousin of priests. We can raid heal and tank heal, but with Chain Heal, I would say raid healing is our strength.

What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why?
Ugh. I really don't know.If I had to, I would say the fact that we have one HoT that usually gets removed by Chain Heal.

In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you?
Raid healing. With Chain Heal being a smart heal with a large range and AA procs from crits, shamans can do some intense raid healing(druids need to stop beating me so I can feel good about myself, gawd).

What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why?
Discipline priests. Even when on the tank/off-tank, they have more utility than paladins and the damage mitigation really takes the stress off of the other healers.

What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why?
Well, I can't really answer this one. I love all healing classes, and it comes down to the person. If you play a class that could single heal a raid, but die in fires or stuff like that, I would hate you. If you played a class that needed two other healers to be effective but you were an amazing player I would love you.

What is your worst habit as a healer?
Not healing myself. I always seem to die because I am throwing heals on the raid like a madman but never on my self.

Using my cooldowns. In the heat of the moment, it's hard to remember that I have that spell that increases my crit chance by 60%.

What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing?
Other healers blaming a healer for a wipe or a death. If you saw that player going down and not getting healed, why didn't you try to help? Well Johny, I'm glad that you were first on the healing meters but if the raid wipes because you didn't want to help out a fellow healer that was stunned/oom/got disconnected, then I suggest you go die in a literal fire.

Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing?
Well.... Honestly, I think that shamans are slightly over-powered. A shaman that is skilled at rolling riptide on the maximum number of people and planning on when to use Chain Heal for the increased effect can cast a Chain Heal that will hit, with one or more crits for 25k effective healing done(I've seen it happen on twins 25).

We have so many talents to return mana or improve crit that we have near limitless mana and in my opinion, the second most versatile set of spells next to a priest.

What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer?
Recount. Specifically the healing done, over-healing done and mana return sections. I am usually near/at the top of the healing chart, bottom to middle of over healing, and somewhere in between on the mana gains.

I also look at what cooldowns I had to use or ask for. If I had to pop NS and Tidal Force than maybe I was lagging behind at one point. If I had to ask for Innervate than maybe I wasn't using the proper spells for the situation.

What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class?
That all we do is spam Chain heal. I weave as many LHW's in between Chain Heal casts as possible and riptide is use on every cooldown. Is chain heal a good spell? Yes. Is it the only spell? No.

What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn?
When to use the right spell for the damage taken. Many new shaman healers spam Chain Heal and get away with it until they raid and suddenly are like a fish out of water.

If someone were to try to evaluate your performance as a healer via recount, what sort of patterns would they see (i.e. lots of overhealing, low healing output, etc)?
As I said above, high to mid healing output, low to mid over-healing and a decent amount of mana gained. To be honest, recount isn't a good way to evaluate a healer. We don't have rotations, we are almost purely reactive players, and what we do changes minute to minute. If someone said I fail because of HPS on recount, I would probably laugh in their face.

Haste or Crit and why?\
Crit. Crit Crit and MOAR CRIT. I don't care what any other shaman says, but crit capitalizes on more talents and abilities than haste. I've tried haste stacking, and while I was at around 830, it felt wrong. I barely got mana returns and I seemed to always need an innervate. Once I switched to crit, my mana was always solid, my effective heals when through the roof and it was just a better play style for me.

What healing class do you feel you understand least?
Priests. If I had almost ten spells to juggle my brain would explode. And even if they had fewer spells, I couldn't tell you what half of them do.

What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing?
I have all my healing spells bound to my mouse, with some needing modifier keys. I use clique and grid for healing, and I have several macro's for ES, riptide and the like.

Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why?
As of right now, I stack primarily crit because it increases my throughput more than anything else. I try to balance it our with haste and spell power so that I don't fall too far behind in those, but it isn't a priority.

This wall o' text brought to you by: Egotistical Maniacs United- Because we're better than you and our moms can prove it.

Homesick.

It may just be me and my weirdness, but I miss the realm I started playing WoW on. December of '05 is when I rolled my first character, a dwarf hunter that never got above level 25. I started with a few friends on the Lothar server, and I'm happy to say that I still know people that play there. When BC was announced, Lothar was offered a free realm transfer to Drenden and I took it. Drenden was my real home, the place I got my first 70, the place I started my shaman, and the place I made some amazing friends. I know that there essentialy there is no difference in realms, and that if I wanted to, I could ask some friends to join my on Medivh, but I really do miss Drenden. As my guild begins to become stagnant, and my desire to raid increases, I keep thinking about Drenden and the time I spent on it. I have a feeling that Martik(name of my shaman) will be taking a trip home soon, hopefully meeting up with old friends and making new ones.

This very short wall 'o text brought to you by: Boring- because you had no reason to read this.

Get some dips.

On Friday night, with no prospect of raiding as a guild, our amazing hunter and I decided it was time we took a dip into TogC. We got invited to the same group, and decided we should both read up on the differences from non-heroic to heroic. As I'm reading, I can't help but say to him over vent that this is a little intimidating. Now as a dps, I don't think he really knew why I thought it was intimidating but I won't hold that against him. So we get onto the pugs ventrilo, and I prepare myself for utter failure on my part. To my surprise and delight, the Rl was polite, patient, and down right nice. He said we were going to take it slow, if we wiped so be it, and that if we made it two bosses in he was happy. On to the bosses.
Northrend Beasts
Gormok:
Impales hit harder and last longer. The fire applies a DoT that will kill you.
Worms:
Acid pools expand faster, toxin slows you down faster, bile can wipe a group if you aren't spread out.
Icehowl:No run-speed increase on his crashes.(hold down your strafe keys and don't be like me and enrage the boss)

Lord Jaraxxus
The only real difference is the you must kill the portal and the volcano when they spawn.

Faction Champions
You cannot taunt the nps's in this mode, which means that your lovely shaman healer will get destroyed by the death knight, the priest, the hunter, and the rogue(Yeah, I died in 1.32 seconds. Fun stuff). Other than systematically destroying people, this fight is exactly the same.

Twins
A de-buff is applied that will basically blow up people of opposite aura to the target of the de-buff. The orbs hit for more, and for some reason they seemed to float faster, but that may have been me.

That's as far as we got. Well actually we only got past champs, but I know the twins fight front and back, so I wrote about that one too. From what I hear, Anub is quite difficult in Heroic, and I am quite happy we didn't get to him because I had already had my fair share of "Oh shit" moments. Once the guild gets into TogC, I should have the full strats up and all that fun stuff.

This wall o' text brought to you by: I have nothing witty to say. You can leave now.

More In Depth:Haste

Haste: Increases the speed at which you cast.

Haste, when balanced, is an incedibly powerful stat for a resto shaman. The goal of stacking haste is two fold, to reduce you GCD and increase your cast speed. Shamans are not as worried about the first, so I'm going to ignore that aspect of it for now. A shaman stacking haste can, if they stack pure haste gems, get an upwards of 35% cast time reductions. Shaman only have one talent that truly plays off of or has an effect dealing with haste.


Tidal Waves- When proc'ed by either Chain Heal or Riptide, this talent provides several effects for Lesser Healing Wave and Healing Wave repectivaly. It increases the bonus healing effects your Healing Wave spell gets by 20%, and a 10% bonus for Lesser Healing Wave. It also increase the cast speed of Healing Wave by 30%.

This talent, while one of the most useful in the Restoration tree, can't be considered a "haste" talent. This talent doesn't provide a set percentage of haste, nor does it have an effect that benefits from haste. It only increases the cast speed of one spell, and only for a short time.

In order to understand the pro's and cons of haste, we need a scenario to use.

Location:Trial of the Crusader
Difficulty:10 man Regular

You are healing along side a holy paladin and a restoration druid. You have a haste rating that increases you cast speed by 30%. Lesser healing wave has a cast time of 1.05 seconds, Healing wave of 1.75 seconds(w/o Tidal Waves) as will Chain Heal.

In order to get such a large amount of haste, several other stats suffered. You only have a buffed mana pool of 23k, along with a 28% crit and 450 Mp5 while casting.

By the time you get to the Icehowl portion of the Northrend Beast encounter, you are at 30% mana and have already used Mana Tide Totem. After his second crash, you don't have enough mana to cast any spells and the tank dies while the other two healers are frozen in his breath.

From this scenario, you can see the downfall of an unbalanced haste stack.

This wall o' text brought to you by: Earth Shock-Sticking earth up your butt and shocking you since 2004.

More in-depth: Critical Strike Rating.

Critical Strike Rating: Increases the chance for your spells to critically hit.

This is an amazing stat for shamans, a fact some don't readily agree with. The purpose of this posts and several to follow is to explain stat choices and how they actually benefit you are a healer.

There are a slew of talents in the Restoration tree that deal directly with crit, the following are just the ones that provide a proc/buff/additional heal from critical heals.


Improved Water Shield-This talent is a staple in shaman mana conservation and regeneration. It allows the amount of mana returned from a destroyed Water Shield orb to be returned on a critical heal without destroying the orb. With a high amount of crit, this talent can proc on one out of every two heals cast depending on the spell.

Ancestral Healing-This talent is a shamans version of a disc priest bubble, albeit a comparatively weak one. In essence, this gives a base, 10% damage reduction on targets hit with a critical heal. In several 10m settings, it is possible for a crit geared shaman to have this effect on all members of the raid and one time, though this is not an often occurrence.

Ancestral Awakening-This talent is for all intensive purposes, an additional heal costing no mana after a critical heal. Consider this, a Lesser Healing Wave crits a raid member for an 8000 crit- this talent will provide an additional 2400 healing for no mana on the lowest % HP raid member.

So these talents deal directly with the benefits of having a large amount of crit, but the Restoration tree provides multiple talents that flat out increase our crit %.

Tidal Mastery-A flat 5% crit increase on all spells. A guarantee in all Restoration shamans.

Blessing of the Eternals-A flat 4% crit increase on all spells. Also as an added bonus an addition to Earthliving procs which is always helpful. This is a guarantee in a healing shamans build also.

Thundering Strikes-Though not actually in the Restoration tree, this is a talent taken by all Restoration shamans. Another flat 5% crit increase to all spells.

With so many talents effecting, and effected by crit, I'm always surprised that so many people don't know the true value of crit. Critical heals provide a restoration shaman with a mana return, damage mitigation and an additional free heal for 30% of the original crit. Would I say that crit is the most important stat for a resto shaman? I couldn't really say that because all healers have a different style of playing. I know some shamans the never use riptide but still are able to heal effectively. I know some that stack so much haste they have a Lesser Healing Wave that is under 1 second. Some stack so much Mp5 and Int that it is almost impossible for them to go below 80% mana. These are all different ways of capitalizing on the versatility of the restoration shaman, and all have their merit(except haste stacker's without Mp5 trinkets, faster spells means "SHIT no mana!" comes sooner).

Critical strike is the most prevalent, and in my opinion ignored stat for resto shamans. With the raid make-up I usually run with, I have nearly a 45% critical strike chance. This is an incredibly high amount, and I only wish I could get more. I know their are benefits to Haste, Mp5 and even Int stacking, but flat out Crit is usually how I go, because with so many talents that increase it and benefit from it, why wouldn't you want a lot?

This wall o' text brought to you by: "CRITICAL HEAL MUTHA FUCKER!!!!!!!" Also, the Shamans Association for voice-box replacement.

O Mai Freaking Gord.

Pet Peeve of Raiding #1: People that tell me how to play my class when they themselves don't play that class. Seriously? Fuck off and deal with whatever it is you do and leave me be.

Pet Peeve of Raiding #2: People of the same class/spec telling me how to do my job when I am doing better than they are. If I needed your help, I'd fucking ask for it.

Pet Peeve of Raiding #3:People I don't know sending me whispers asking for stuff while I'm raiding. Fuck off and die. That is all.

Pet Peeve of Raiding #4: People playing music over vent. If I wanted to hear Brittany spears distorted and garbled I would just go to my sisters CD rank and pop one of her many albums into the stereo.

Pet Peeve of Raiding #5: People that say, "Hey man are you rolling on ?". I might be. It hasn't dropped yet so why do you even care? Shut up and worry about the fact your dps is the lowest out of everyone including me. A fucking healer.

So that pretty much covers the major ones I have. I encountered all of these plus many more in a ToC pug I was in a couple days ago, and I nearly flipped out. I understand if you have a suggestion for me to increase my longevity or HPS, I welcome it even. Maybe you're on an alt and your main is the class I'm currently playing. Those situations are fine, you could even give me a really good tip to increase my effectiveness as a healer. But, please for the love of all that is good, have some common courtesy. I know for some of you elitists and twelve year olds that Ebay'ed and think you know everything this is hard, but it will prevent people like me, the ones with anger problems, from verbally cutting your balls off in vent.


This wall o' text brought to you by: Spiked Deathdealers-Roflstomping the throats of noobs and asshats alike since murder in a video game became legal.