Leveling Restoration....

So you think that you can't level as Restoration?

You might want to reconsider this with the new changes from the release of Wrath. When I specced to Resto a while back, I fully expected things to go slower and that I would have to be a lot more cautious in how I went about completing my quests. Well this morning I learned something interesting. In 4 seperate engagements I had to fight more than one mob. In all of the fights I never died and one of those fight was against 5 mobs. Now one of the benefits of being Resto is that due to talents and such it is very difficult for a mob or another player to kill you. This is to your benefit in that it will allow you the time it will take for you to kill off the mobs.

The fight tends to go like this: Drop totems (Strenth of Earth, Searing Totem, Healing Totem and Windfury) then you'll probably rotate as needed among: Earth Shock, Flame Shock, Water Shield, and Lesser Healing Wave. As long as Water Shield is active (and given that you've talented for Improved Shields) you should not have mana problems even in the longer 4+ mob fights. Otherwise keep Flame shock active and Earth Shock the mob to death.

I did have to use my Flame Elemental totem during the 5 mob fight to help DPS the mobs down so that I didn't have to worry about taking each and every mob on at full health. And I followed the Elemental totem with Magma totem for the additional AoE dps numbers. This significantly affected how quickly and easily this fight went down. The key to these fights, like a lot of Shammy engagements is understanding and managing your totems and heals during the fight.