Shaman Abilities

Date 10/24/2008.

Shaman abilities are divided into three primary spell trees, Elemental, Enhancement, and Restoration. Each serves a purpose in gifting the shaman with the ability to support or lead in a variety of scenarios. By harnessing all three of these the shaman becomes a true hybrid class, although many times we’ll require only one specialization in situations such as raiding.

The restoration tree is obviously healing centric, enhancement for those who like crushing skulls, and finally elemental (my personal favorite) for anyone wanting to nuke the target from orbit… figuratively speaking.

Even if you’ve gone 41 points into elemental however, you’ll still be needed to drop totems from all three trees depending on the situation. A specific talent in one tree can enhance them yes, but even un-improved totems present massive increases to damage, healing, or mana regeneration.

Elemental

Elemental is the ranged caster tree of the shaman, comparable to say a druid’s moonkin/balance tree, it’s just that we happen to avoid the whole turning into an oversized owlbear in the process, a definite positive.

This tree encompasses all of our shocks, such as earth shock, flame shock, or the ever so well known ‘frost shawk’ from ye old days of overpowered shamans. Despite the passing of our dominating era, shaman are still present as formidable opponents when correctly utilized, and that means using all of ours shocks dependent upon the situation.

Flame can be used to prevent rogues from stealthing, frost to catch someone/slow them down and prevent them from catching you, earth allows you to interrupt spell casting – this ones the most utilized in PvP. Finally the fire elemental totem enhances your ability to blast away at anything from players to bosses with massive amounts of burst damage.

Elemental is a large part of our viability whether you choose to pick this as your primary talent tree or not. Enhancement

Enhancement is our low intelligence high strength and attack power tree, to put it simply, how to hit stuff really hard and make it die. Enhancement is the primary tree for efficient leveling, conserving mana for only the necessary buffs and heals while using our potent melee capabilities to bring death.

Windfury is the primary weapon buff of choice when leveling enhancement, and for good reason too. Windfury provides you with a massive attack power boost, made only greater via enhancement talents, for two free attacks, procced quite frequently in fact.

With some luck you’ll find yourself mowing down even level or higher mobs without much trouble at all, and with some mana regeneration you’ll likely never have to stop as long as you take up a good pace, never expending more than you gain back between fights.

This tree also grants us an instant attack, Stormstrike, as well as a more than a few mana efficiency increasers and temporary damage buffs such as Bloodlust/Heroism. However what really rounds this tree out is the earth elemental totem, a great summoned tank for desperate situations.

Restoration

Restoration is healing, the thing that makes us so wildly useful in raids for our massive amounts of semi-AoE healing with chain heal spam. Restoration shamans are in high demand in raiding for good reason, we bring massive amounts of utility via insane healing capabilities and totems as a side-dish.

PvE wise we excel, all the current endgame dungeons such as Sunwell practically demand three shamans healers if not even more, and even in small time instances such as magisters terrace and so on you’ll find yourself quite capable of main-healing all the way through.

Our only problems emerge if you ever hit the arena, we simply lack the survivability inherent to most other healing classes and as a result get smashed the instant we show our face, skill alone will determine whether you thrive or fall in PvP.