For all of vanilla WoW, shaman totems looked the same no matter what race you were. Of course back then the class was restricted to the Horde so it wasn’t much of a big deal. I think it’s when the shaman class opened up to the Alliance faction, specifically for the Draenei race, that things started to change. They got a different totem art while the Horde races still had the same totem art for the whole faction. You could write it off as “a faction thing” at least until now.

Patch 3.3 is going to see changes in the totem …read more

Ever since I started enjoying healing back in The Burning Crusade expansion, I’ve taken quite a bit of interest in all of the healing classes. I started with a Holy Paladin back then and now have a Resto Druid as a main. Right now I’m leveling the paladin with the intent to stay Holy and be another healer but it seems like I won’t stop there. As I think about my characters and the plans I have for them, it hit me that in an ideal situation I’d like to have a Restoration Shaman and a Holy Priest as well.
The …read more

When Blizzard announced the Cataclysm expansion at Blizzcon ‘09, one of the things they also announced was the redesign of Hunters so that they use the Focus resource like their pets use instead of mana. This is a cool announcement especially because hunters have been complaining about their mana consumption and the mechanics of abilities like Aspect of the Viper to deal with this problem. The shift to focus will break their dependence on mana altogether and instead use something more reliable since Focus works something like the Energy resource that rogues and kitty druids use.
This switch to Focus come …read more

A thought just dawned on me last week as I was being convinced to level a priest as an alt to accompany some of my guild mates as they level their lowbies. If you were to ask me in the Vanilla WoW days about playing a healer class, my response would be anywhere between “never!” and “probably not”. In those days, my mage was my main character and had a few now deleted alts that were also dps classes or hybrids that were sort of a dps spec. But since these alts were so low level, the spec didn’t really …read more

I used to think that Shamans had so many totems and not enough space on their action bars to put them all. Whether that was really the case or not, it’s always nice to get something new to help things out. CM Nethaera just announced something quite exciting to help shamans out with totem management and to give some more customization and functionality. Behold the Totem Bar feature coming in patch 3.2!
The new Totem bar is a shaman specific interface that allows the shaman easier access to his totems. It will located in the left hand side of the screen …read more

After reading all the complains and angry posts that you see in the forums, you might be asking yourself “what are the devs thinking?”. While a lot of points may be just complaints that don’t really have much backing, there are some that are real concerns. That’s why it’s a great idea that Blizzard actually spent some time to share what the devs are really thinking by putting up a new piece in the WoW Community Site, the Q&A.
The first Q&A is all about the Shaman class and based on what Blizzard implies, they intend to do the same thing …read more

Over the years it seems that the shaman class has been the subject of a lot of complains a few more times than other classes. I’ve seen complains concerning their totems, their damage, lack of AoE abilities and a lot of other things for both PvE and for PvP.
One of the latest complains I’ve been seeing was about the damage output of Elemental Shamans especially in Ulduar. Well it looks like Blizzard listened and according to Ghostcrawler, they agree that shaman dps is indeed a bit low. A buff to the Elemental talent Lightning Overload is going to be …read more