[Shaman] Resto PvP
 

I haven't seen any concrete posts on the forums lately regarding Resto Shaman PvP so I wanted to make one (correct me if I am wrong please).

I recently leveled my shaman to 80 and I want to make him my premiere PvP character. I played in Season 1-3 on the shaman and held a rating around 2100+ the entire time. What I want to know is what are the main differences in playstyle now vs back in S1-3.

Are there any drastic differences or just minor ones?

The specs I have seen have all been pretty much the same, as well as the glyph choices, so that seems basic knowledge. This is the build I am trying at the moment: 0/16/55

Any discussion on this topic would be helpful.

In my point of view, hex and windshock off the gcd are the main difference. Hex helps building many cc / burst opportunities. And with the interrupt off the gcd, it helps interrupting, even when you need to heal.

Rshaman are much better now than they previous were. Decurse, a Hot, Tidal Waves, Windshock, Improved watershield, and hex are all notable improvements.

Rshaman are pretty solid - though they suffer from some of the same problems other non-paladin healers suffer from: getting blown the fuck up by dps which scaled far more rapidly than defenses.

You can tank most single dps classes for a while, but eventually will get worn down by warriors and rogues. When you get 2 dps on you, particularly with a MS effect, it's lights out.

It might better suit you to drop three points in Tidal Mastery and put them in Healing Grace. The reduced chance to dispel is pretty nice for Earth Shield and Riptide now.

Shaman are much more viable now then they were in TBC so if you did decently then you should do well now. You have to play a little bit differently though. One mistake and you can get blown the fuck up by almost any class right now so you kind of have to play on the safe side rather than over extending yourself. We do have a lot more tools at our disposal which take a bit of getting used to. You don't really have to worry about your gcd usage when it comes time to interrupt because of windshock off the GCD. Hex is nice but it's different then most cc in that the person can still drop totems, spell reflect, bandage, drink and move while under it's effects (there are probably other things you can do as well that I just don't know about).

As for glyphs: The LHW wave is an obvious choice, it's pretty amazing. I really like the Flame Shock glyph, it's nice in that you can use it against rogues and force them to burn clos to vanish and you can use it on whoever your focus target is a bit before you plan to unload and you can have an auto crit lvb while still having your shock for an interrupt. That just takes some planning. For the third glyph a lot of people go with the WS glyph which is pretty decent I suppose but depending on your comp it can be unnecessary. The healing wave glyph is nice to have against warlocks and shadow priests(lol) but other than that kind of meh. I personally use the water shield as my third.

Specs: I change my spec around a lot but keep in mind that some of my choices deviate from the comp that I primarily play (it's resto/disc/retribution paladin right now; I don't really play much of anything besides 3s). My current spec of choice is along these lines:
WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Shaman -> Talent Calculator

Sometimes I switch some of the points out of Tidal Mastery or Guardian Totems into Elemental Shields depending on how I feel. With the comp I play there is virtually no point into speccing into Healing Grace since discipline priests provide a ton of dispel resistance. I find mana tide pretty necessary to have (with some coordination from your team mates+protecting it with stoneclaw I normally get the entire thing and in our type of comp it can make or break games). Your spec is really going to change depending on what comp you play. The rest of the stuff is pretty standard, there isn't a whole lot of deviation between resto specs in general.

If there is one piece of advice I could give you (this applies to anyone and everyone, not just resto shaman) is to be careful who you queue against. With the way your hidden rating works if there are not a lot of teams queueing and with how bursty the game is right now it isn't too rare to randomly lose one out of 5 games to a team much farther below you. Just this week my team went 14-5 and we went down in points because there was only one RMP queueing and they were terrible, we would beat them 5 out of 6 times and get 3-4 points each time and then they would RNG someone down and we would lose 16. If you are queueing only against one team that you are getting no points from stop queueing! You are going to get unlucky and lose 45 minutes of work. On the other hand if you are queueing against someone much higher above you, even if you are getting stomped every time, you may as well keep queueing. You may lose 2-3 points every game but if you get lucky in one out of 5 games and steal 20 points from them it is still a net gain. And with how quick paced these games are right now, it's not hard to get lucky.

I would like to get some feedback on the viability of the following spec:

www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/shaman/talents

This will be for 2v2 with a rouge where i'm likely to take a lot of damage, hence the elemental warding.

I've been playing a resto shaman on TR in a shmn/ret/hunter setup, and we do pretty well against pretty much everything except any decent warlock. How do you deal with a warlock with totem-stomping macros? I end up dropping tremor, casting a single spell and then dropping another totem only to get feared and have his pet rape my totem before it ticks. Is there anyway to stop this?

I found that a fear happy lock is a P.I.T.A to deal with. But you have it easy mode:

Tell your pally to dispel. If that fails, just shock/ground the fear as much ass possible, while you can choose to dispel your teammates, watch out for that one lock who is UA.

For warlocks who like to fear you, treat it exactly like polymorph and stay out of range and los; grounding/shock the ones that you are in range of. Be advised, it has the same range as hex, so it is very easy to stay away from with a 20 yard grace period for all your heals. Use tremor essentially only as a fear break on your teammates.

If you're able to play los games and shock fears against lock/hunter or lock/dk damage, I am impressed. Against most lock teams, even if we force the void, they put out so much damage that essentially at some point I have to stop and cast heals and once that happens it's howl -> fear and it becomes GG very quickly. That's assuming I can even heal through the damage while not CC'd.

Whats the verdict on the new Toughness for 3.1? Is it better than elemental warding? I guess it would allow you to take some sort of Imp totems or even Anticipation to get down to it. I am terrible at maths so I wouldn't know where to begin on making the comparison.

Edit. I'm apparently bad at spelling too.

I speced toughness on the PTR and got a whopping 1300 extra health. Wank.

For 5 points, I don't see it being worth the investment.

This is the comp i play with currently, honestly i wouldn't spend the points in elemental just have your rogue play more defensive and peel off you. Only real trouble we run into is good DK/Pally beats us without a doubt every time. But we win almost all other games so it balances out. I think your points are better spent elsewhere.

Also i spec'd into the new toughness on the PTR as well and found out i get 1500hp roughly, so idk if 5 points will be worth it. With the new Glyphs in 3.1 our ability to survive will go up and i doubt we will be needing to drop the 5 points down to toughness.

Anybody have any thoughts on the glyph of hex, I was thinking at first it looked good, but now i am not sure i will use it at all for pvp, since i run with rogue Sap>hex>blind and force the trinket in there on one hopefully the glyph would be almost always useless at all times. Thoughts?

Glyph of hex will pale in comparison to the other glyph options. I rarely find myself hexing the focus target, so the extra 20% damage they can take is largely meaningless to me. The glyph may be more appropriate for elemental shaman who are trying to 1 on 1 people in BGs... But jesus christ elemental sucks in pvp.

Personally for 3.1 I'm probably going to be running ES, LHW and Stoneclaw. And, in my 3s at least which is the bracket I'm most serious about, I play with a disc priest+paladin. I'm also in full deadly and that plus fort/kings gives me 1700 more health. If I do pick up toughness my spec will probably look something like this:

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?sham...0&version=9658

But I don't get focused much anymore so I don't know if it's worth it. You also have to keep in mind that s6 will most likely come with 3.1 meaning new gear which means more stamina.