Restoration???

So the debate is on. I've been Enhancement for almost my entire life except for a couple of months during my tenure of BC soon after I hit 70. I specced to Resto then and attempted to see what I could do. What I found was frustration.... I did well healing on group quests and when I would party up with my friends, but in instances I did really poorly. This is in part to not understanding a whole lot about healing and what spells and totems to use in what situations and such. I found I almost never used chain heal and this is probably the biggest reason I had difficulty. Now back then you also had to keep track of a lot of different stats and factors to ensure you were an efficient healer. Now though this isn't so true. With the changes that have happened since patch 3.0.2 and the release of Wrath of the Lich King Resto has a lot more ability to be offensive than before.

Blizzard wrapped up all the abilities like +heal, shadow, fire and such into spellpower. They also changed the co-efficeints and scaling this ability gets from gear. While the numbers look lower than what they were under the old formulas for BC, you are actually doing a little better in your heals and damage. The curious part of this is that very few people actually have figured out the formula's or affect this new system has on casters and healers, even though most people seem to really enjoy the added firepower they have so to saay.

For Resto shaman this does open the door to two things, more effective healing and being better able to level while specced Resto. Why? Because spellpower carries over to our offensive spells and totems as well. So depending upon how we build our talent trees this can be very beneficail in several ways. Another nice thing about the changes is that spellpower scales even better than ever before with our shocks and totems. Prior to these patches, we had to choose what we would be enhanceing with our gear. Most shaman just added overall spell damage and left specifics like +nature and +fire alone (although quite a few would do +fire) and that was if you were specced elemental. Resto shaman could not afford to do this so selecting any talents in the Elemental tree was futile at best. Now this isn't so true any more.

Depending upon what your intent is, you can build a hybrid Resto/Elem shammy that is capable of being offensively powerful enough to do all his quests solo and have enough healing power to keep a 5-man alive. This build seems well designed for the regular BG's as well, though I'm not so sure about the Arena's. Other variations in include builds that allow for shaman to go deep enough in the enhancement tree to get DW, and retain solid healing as well. All of this is possible becaue of the changes and Blizz allowing better scaling of Spellpower with talents and spells. As for the exact specifics of this scaling and such, I have yet to determine why this is so.

This has be definitely debating that I will change specs soon to Resto. I am doing more research and when I can get a good handle on how this all work, I'll make the change and level my remaining levels in that spec.

Dhar

Northrend and the Changes

Well, since I've last posted here many things have happened. Patch 3.0.2 came out with a free respec and then Wrath of the Lich King released. I specced back into Enhance to a full 61 pts and I headed off into Northrend to begin to level. This place is really impressive and I think Blizzard has done an incredible job creating this place. I've attained 71st level and I am making my way through the quests and hoping that I can keep a fairly consistent pace to level to 80. I really want to be level 80 before the middle of winter, but I am also not going to rush things.

I've found that since the changes for how the stats work what abilities are key for Shaman, that I beginning to not like enhancement as much as I used to. While I do have a huge array of offensive capabilities, I am finding it lack luster in actual practice. My spell rotations have changed some and with the added lava burst and spirit wolves, I find that I am really wanting to narrow my rotation tremendously. I've been toying around a lot with my spells and placement on my action bars, and I still have not found a comfortable way to do this. This has gotten me to thinking it may be time to try a different build to see what I think. Elemental really doesn't appeal to me a lot, but I'll look into it while resto does look better to me. A lot of me interest in trying Resto again is in how they have refigured the spell bonuses and such. With everything being consolidated into spellpower now, I feel that Resto is very viable way to go now given they should have more offensive firepower. Who knows, I'm researching it sitll.

Dhar