Totems

No, not the ones that a shaman drops every fight, although those have issues of their own. I'm talking about the ones you equip in your ranged weapon slot.

Frankly They Suck. In 3.0 Blizzard did do something pretty cool, and let them function as your Air, Earth, Fire, and Water Totems that we all quested for when leveling up. That freed up 4 bag slots. Unfortunately they still take up 4 bank slots. But that's besides the point. Rogues and Warriors get to equip guns, bows, and throwing weapons. While they are pretty much useless as a ranged damage dealing attack, they do provide very tangible stat benefits.

Lets take a look at a throwing weapon from Heroic Naxx.
Spinning Fate
16agi, 24sta, 32hit, 16crit, 62ap.
Using generic non hit capped EP numbers that weapon is worth 215.6 EP
Not too shabby.

However Shamans can't equip ranged weapons. So along with Druids, Paladins, and now Death Knights we use Relics. Thye are broken down by class into Totems, Idols, Librams, and Sigils.

Enhancement shamans have several Totems to choose from.
Totem of Splintering
Totem of Dueling
Deadly Gladiator's Totem of Indomitably
There is also the old TBC Standby
Stonebreaker's Totem
and finally
Totem of Hex deserves some consideration as well.

EJ has a pretty in depth breakdown of the merits of the various totems in the Theorycrafting Think Tank so I'm not going to get to into the mechanics of each option. Breaking it down in brief from EJ Indomitablity > Dueling > Splintering. The trouble with Indominatibity is that it is obtained through Arena play and requires a personal rating for 1930 (down from the original 2030) Many Enhancement shamans are unlikely to achieve that rating.(Myself included)

Anyways DGToI provided the best theoretical EP of 120. That's if Lava Lash is used right at every cooldown. In practice it gets used much less often. Theorycrafting has shown that LL is 4th in priority behind a 5Stack Lightning Bolt, Stormstrike, and Earthshock. Looking at the WWS report from my last Naxx 25 run. I have On Boss dps time of 26:33 and 67 lava lash hits. That works out to once every 24 second, or on average an EP value of 30.

Dueling drops off of Instructor Razuvius, and vary rarely off of Gluth as well. It finally dropped for us last week which I believe was our 9th clear. Wowhead reports a drop rate of 7% So statistically about 7 weeks gives you a 50/50 chance to have seen it. Not to bad. Dueling provides 60 haste when using SS which talented is every 8 seconds. So max uptime of the buff is 75%. Haste varies greatly in value depending on the rest of your gear and buffs. I've had it sim as high as 2.2EP and had it sim at negative values as well. So to be safe we will use the generic value of 1.3 Max genric value is 60*1.3*.75= 58.5 EP. In practice SS doesn't get used every 8 seconds on the nose either. Last week on Thaddius I achieved 37 Stormstrikes in 5:23 of dps time or once every 8.7 seconds or a 54 EP value on that fight.

Quickly to finish off. Splintering is purchased for 15 emblems of heroism. The extra ap on WF isnt worth all that much. In fact some people theorize that this is bugged and does not add any ap to the WF procs. Stonebreaker's is purchased for 15 lv 70 badges of heroism. It gives 110ap per proc. uptime is about 40% or 44EP value.

Doesn't an item that provides a constant 215 EP seem quit a bit better than our totems?

Ding!

So I hit 80 on Tormund last night. His gear is pretty lousy, but I did craft him a few pieces. Giantmaim Leggards and Ice Strider's Cloak as well is Virulent Spaulders and Swiftarrow Helm I alsp purchased a couple of BoE blues on the AH. The biggie though is Nesingwary 4000. I've got a guildie making that for me. Dropped about 700g in the AH on mats, not counting the Orb which I already had. Much cheaper than buying the gun which was up for 1350g.

I've been using my gorilla pet pretty much exclusively to level, so I need to level my other pets. Sadly I said goodbye to SerPounce my black panther. I don't want to spend days looking for the Spirit Beast to tame, But I think that the Cursed Offspring of Har'koa are even cooler looking.
Black with glowing red eyes > White with blue eyes in my opinion. I am planning on replacing my wolf as well. I had a Ghostpaw Alpha from back in Ashenvale, I replaced it with one of the pitch black worgs in the oilfields of BT, but when tamed the black went away, and its just gray. So I need to decide whether to get a black worg or a white worg. I'll probably go White and name him Ghost again. An Orc hunter should have a wolf pet.

Free Respec in 3.0.8

Shaman (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)

All shaman talent points have been refunded. Please visit your trainer to learn spells and abilities.


This I've been thinking about tweaking a couple of minor things with my spec anyways, so this works out nicely.
I'm probably going to go with This Build. I'll swap the 2 points I have in Convection into Call of Flame

Latest Phat Loots

Webbed Death and
Slime Stream Bands dropped last night. The wrists replaced my last blue.
Frosted Adroit Handguards Dropped last week.
That's three best in slot upgrades. Nice. Although BiS is really relative Hit halves its value after you get to 367, and expertise is worth virtually nothing past 214, so there is a lot of wiggle room in the rankings.

What I still need.
A better helm.
Blue Aspect Helm is the best by a fairly wide margin but I'd take T7.25 as well. Firstly it looks much better, and Secondly the 4pc T7 bonus is really really good. So I need the T7.25 Chest as well. The T7.25 Gloves would not be amiss either. I've never had a full Tier set and It would allow me to sub in the best non set piece like the Blue Aspect Helm.

The next biggest upgrade is still Surge Needle Ring, and Calamity's Grasp would be pretty nice to have as well even if it is completely ridiculous looking.

Latest patch notes

Shaman (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Elemental

Storm, Earth and Fire now Reduces the cooldown of your Chain Lightning spell by 0.75/1.5/2.5 sec (Up from 0.5/1.5/1.5 sec), your Earth Shock and Wind Shock range is increased by 5 yards and the periodic damage done by your Flame Shock is increased by 60%.

Restoration

Healing Grace now reduces the chance your helpful spells and damage over time effects will be dispelled by 10/20/30%. (Old - All spells)

Glyphs

Glyph of Earth Shock - Renamed to Glyph of Shocking - Reduces the global cooldown triggered by your shock spells by 0.5 sec. (Old - Reduced the GCD triggered by Earth Shock by 1 second)

I guess they couldn't fix the bugged ES glyph? This glyph is the only change that really effects Enhancement. And it just means that we dont have to keep waiting for it to get fixed.

In other gear news, I'm no longer in need of expertise. I aquired Ruthlessness and Mark of Norgannon last week, then finally got Valourous Earthshatter Shoulderguards this week.
So I'm now 39 expertise over cap. I could not use the trinket but that would leave me 30 short still. The ideal situation would be to get a better ring. Ruthlessness is a suboptimal ring, the Str is only half as effective for shamans as plate classes. But it was still better than what I had especially since no one else wanted it, and I was short on expertise at the time. The other issue is I'm now no longer hit capped. I'm sitting at 331, which is fine as I can eat 40 hit food and be capped.
So Get a ring w/ hit rather that expertise. Well the only rings 36 hit on it are pvp rings or caster rings. What I really would love is for Surge Needle Ring to drop. Its best in slot, and has 32 hit. I'd just need to swap out one gem to get capped. Cmon Maly. Daddy needs a new ring!

So long 2008

The year in WoW, 2008. Well 2008 was the start of my 2nd year playing WoW, and boy has a lot changed. A year ago today, I was still playing Bannonn, on Argent Dawn EU. I was doing my weekly Kara run at 7am Saturday morning. Running ZA, I think we had 3 bosses down there. I had some nice gear. S2 mace, The Decapitator, Bear Shoulders from ZA. S3 helm. Hourglass of the Unraveller. I was pretty happy.

Then my other American friends playing on AD approached me about rerolling on a US server. "But... But... I can't transfer! I'll lose all my stuff! I'll never get all this great gear again!" But in the end they talked me into it. We'd level up and farm kara and get new gear. Maybe we'd get a chance to do SSC and TK too. Mask of Sorrow, our guild on EU was work in T5 raids, but I only got to go in if I had a day off from work. I had done Leo, Karathress, and Hydross, I'd done Void Reaver, but I wasn't a raider.

So we rerolled on Quel'dorei. I rolled a priest. My friends said wtf? so I rolled a hunter. I got about 4 levels and realized, I was a Shaman at heart. So I rolled Baelor. He turns 1 in a couple of weeks. He's downed every raid boss in TBC, and every raid boss in Wrath. He had best in slot or near best in slot gear for pretty much everything pre-Wrath. My friends and I built our guild from our group of 6 into a guild of over 180 characters. We went from hoping to run Kara, to being the only Horde guild to down Kil'Jaeden on QD.

2008. It was a good year for me in WoW.