Just a comment, you probably shouldn't be giving anybody advice when your only team is a sub 1400 2s with barely any games played.

Edit: Misquote, fixed.

No, the point of my post was to solicit guidance from others...and hopefully have a better understanding of what a good build is before respeccing. I'm not trying to establish a new standard, I've never played ANY arenas on my shammy...only on my rogue and lock (and not at all recently). Thanks for your helpful comment. [yes, sarcasm]

Has anyone actually tried a hybrid Elemental/Resto spec and met moderate success? At this point, with how damage is in arenas, I really believe you'll have to at least invest 51 points in the Resto tree to be successful.

Since 3.0.9 just was released, I haven't been able to test against burst from various classes including Rogues and Mages, but it goes without saying that many of the deep Resto talents are just too good to skip. Riptide is incredibly useful, and so is Tidal Waves. Every 6 seconds you get a decent instant heal coupled with a HoT, and reduced casting time on your heals. With the [Deadly Gladiator's Totem of the Third Wind], I normally non-crit for around 5k on LHWs.

Now, where to place the rest of the points can be debated. I think the more efficient route would be to finish them off in the Enhancement tree. But you can definitely argue that investing points in Elemental Warding is a good choice because now it's a reduction on all damage rather than specific schools of damage. That's a worthwhile talent to invest points in as Resto. No disagreement there. But you're not always focused, and there are also great talents in the Enhancement tree that may help you out especially depending on who you play with and what brackets you play in.

Here is my build of choice: 0/16/55. This covers a lot of areas including granting you more crit/burst heals, Mana Tide for your mana-starved partners, dispel resistance, a little protection with Guardian Totems and Nature's Guardian, and a bit of efficiency between shocking and healing. Shamanistic Focus alone is really worth it considering interrupting is a such an important role no matter what spec you are.

My build is pretty similar to yours (I think I'm pve specced right now but I'll probably respec tomorrow) except that I put 3 points in Tidal Mastery over Healing Grace but that's because the team I play most frequently is a double healer 3s with a disc priest and a ret paladin so I find I have plenty of dispel protection.

To anyone wondering what arena piece to get first, I can pretty confidently say to get the totem no matter what the circumstances. It is a monstrous upgrade over anything else you can get and it's basically a good 200 spell power. I don't know about everybody else but the only time I really cast healing wave is when I need to use the heal/drink bug.

Yeah, it's basically personal preference for some of those talents. I actually would like to skip out on getting Mana Tide because in most games I can just use the heal/drink trick. But I play with a Shadow Priest in 3's, and he goes through his mana very quickly and a Mana Tide could make the difference.

Interchanging between many of the middle Resto tree talents is fine. There's a lot of good choices. Again, it depends on your partners. For example, I play with a Warlock in 2's so many melee/physical DPS teams can counter us. If you add a Priest or Shaman, that makes it a little harder so I grabbed Healing Grace to protect my spells. You'll find you might not need this as you play in other brackets such as 5's where you can definitely skip on dispel protection, especially if you play with another healer such as a Disc Priest, and you can also skip Mana Tide saving yourself 6 talent points and stock up more on crit.

And yes, to reiterate, [Deadly Gladiator's Totem of the Third Wind] is an amazing new piece of arena gear. This season everything is pretty typical and much like previous seasons. Our choices are +crit and MP5. And the spell power change has really given us an easier way of balancing crit and MP5 in our gear. The only slight change was our relic's mechanic. Instead of boosting extra resilience on whoever you cast your LHW on, it beefs up your LHW heals by a noticeable margin. If I'm understanding it correctly, let's say you have 1800 +healing. With this totem, your Lesser Healing Waves will heal as if you had 2067 +healing. The totem should definitely be a priority over many of the other pieces.

Well my spec certainly isn't 30/0/41 like the thread title, but you may be surprised how offensive you can be with a 16/0/55 spec. I plan to go more in depth with it once I prove myself in arena. My 3's team only has 3 playing sessions under our belt and we are 2135. I'm sure many people would attribute this to the strength and synergy of my mage/rogue partners but I'm think they would vouch for the number of times a cross-court spicy meatball gets the kill on a team that just peeled off my DPS dealing teammates and were preparing to heal a target back to full.

Here are some of my "requirements" for the spec:
-You want to be playing with teammates that can create clear and concise kill windows.
-Don't get caught up too much in DPSing, you are there to finish fights just like any other Resto shaman except you pack a harder punch.
-You should use the flame shock glyph. Personally I run with Flame Shock, Lesser Healing Wave, and Water Shield but only the first 2 are essential to the spec.
-Engineering helps and may even be essential. You don't have imp ghost wolf so rocket boots can help provide a getaway. I also just began using hyperspeed accelerators on my gloves this week and macro'd their /use with my lava burst keybind. I haven't decided how much I like these but the first night playing with two classes that were supposedly "nerfed" we went 14-3 so I think that is an ok start.
-Your mage should probably use the glyph that makes polymorph remove any DoTs. Sometimes I have a flame shock cooking on a target we might swap to but end up deciding to sheep it.

Some key points on why I think this is working well for me:
-Since flame shock on a target ensures a crit with the lava burst, I can count on mine hitting for 3.6-5.5k depending on the target's resil and defensive cooldowns.
-If you use a lava burst early you get 2 charges of clearcasting that reduce mana by 40% on the next heal or damage spells. Sometimes if I get a crit on my flame shock I will throw a riptide out to someone before doing the lava burst as to not "waste" one of the charges.
-I gem for resil because I am the target 70% of the time. I used to gem for more stam but I switched that up to accommodate the arcane mage nerfs and the fact that I have become more comfortable handling burst damage.
-6% damage reduction, pretty self explanatory.


Well that is some stuff to think about. I'll probably write some more once I get a 2s and 5s team up and running on this new server but for now I don't really feel as if I have the credentials to be telling people how to play. All I know is that I finally found a spec that fits the way I have wanted to play shaman since I picked it off the character screen nearly 4 years ago.