Shaman Simple Questions Thread: Cataclysm Edition

This is the thread for simple questions that don't fit anywhere else. If your question applies to one of the existing thread topics, please post it there instead. If you expect to generate significant additional discussion, create a new thread. If, however, you have a simple question that only requires a simple answer and don't see a better place to post it, this is your thread.

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A search didn't help me find a recent confirmation for these water-totem questions:
A) Does healing stream totem benefit the entire raid? The tooltip says it heals *group* members, whereas the tooltip for mana spring totem says it restores mana to "all party and raid members".
B) Do healing stream totems stack, such that two shamans dropping this same totem would see double benefits?
C) Do mana spring totems stack, such that two shamans dropping this same totem would see double benefits?
D) Lastly, Mana Tide Totem is party only, correct? (As this is what the tooltip reads).
My thanks in advance.

A) That means it only heals group members not the Raid.

B) I'm pretty sure they do stack. Their pulses count as different heals (or so, I'm sure.)

C) I'm pretty sure these totems do not stack.

D) If the tool tip says party only, then you are correct.

Any data on how Val'anyr stands in Cata? At some point the loss of Int and SP would certainly catch up enough to out weigh the proc, but at what point does that happen?

Mana Spring Totem does not stack with other MP5 sources such as Blessing of Might. BoM now also provides the MP5 component that Blessing of Wisdom once did.

I tested Val'anyr on some trash last night and was disappointed to see that Healing Rain doesn't seem to apply the shield affect. Without this I'm not seeing any value in Val'anyr at 85.

Searing Flames is unaffected by Call of Flame. Searing totem damage and searing flames damage both generate threat on the shaman. The totem generates threat through it's presence (true of all totems) but the threat from the damage is attributed to the shaman. Magma Totem damage doesn't generate threat on you or the totem but does generate threat through it's presence.

In a multi-mob pull situation where some are coming by proxy and not through direct threat I will normally try to move in front of my totem (or drop them behind the tank) so my presence is registered before the totems to keep them from being whacked and killed off.

Am I using Healing Wave incorrectly? It heals for a hilariously tiny portion of any target's health. I feel like I can only do my job by waiting for health to get low, dumping a big heal on them and then waiting to tick up. I /have/ noticed that trying to keep everyone topped off is oom city, but for many fights if I have to heal anyone other than the tank I'm scraping for mana near the end. Mainly doing 85 normals and heroics here.

For single Target (Tank) healing the best thing you can do is use HW + Riptide for mana conservation, when the damage intake gets too big to heal up with the HW+Riptide combo, you can use HS or GHW depending on the fact that the target is about to die or not. Useally when the target is relativly safe and not about to die, I pop Unleash Life + Riptide + GHW, else just Riptide and HS spam untill it's safe to use HW again.

If other people are taking damage they are either doing something wrong, or else it's unavoidable AoE. If it's only 1 target taking damage, Riptide+HW alternating between that target and the tank would be optimal, just don't try to heal too soon on the topping off issue, there are 'smart/auto-heals' too.
Some encounters are really brutal though, where party + tank is taking heavy damage, and you are unable to utilize Chainheal and Healing Rain to it's full potential. (=people are too spread)
Then you can only hope that Mana Tide/Water shield will make your mana last long enough to finish the boss with 1 person alive. You can try asking people to move in your Healing Rain-zone too. But I'm having oom issues myself too.

Sorry to bother with such simple questions but I wasn't sure about how these have changed in Cataclysm, as some parts seem intact with beta changes and others not so much.

Feral Spirit- How are these functioning currently with bloodlusts and stats, do they take the stats you have when they are summoned or do they continue to scale when other trinkets proc / bloodlust?

Fire Elemental Totem- Same question as feral spirit, also just curious how much it fits into Enhance rotation.

Lastly, weapon enchants? Pre-landslide and once we actually have the crystals for landslide especially would be useful to know.

Thank you.

Hey, I was wondering which weapon enchant as is best, for Enchancement spec, the Enchant Weapon - Avalanche - Spell - World of Warcraft or the Enchant Weapon - Hurricane - Spell - World of Warcraft, using heroic blue weapons ilvl 346 atm, so Enchant Weapon - Landslide - Spell - World of Warcraft is a bit an overkill (and too expensive), any suggestions?

Got an elemental question. Why would I want Ancestral Swiftness as an elemental shaman? Is there a part in a raid or dungeon where going to ghost wolf would be beneficial?

You want the 15% run speed. Instant Ghost Wolf is just a handy bonus. Just to clarify, the 15% run speed applies all the time, not just when in Ghost Wolf form.

I was reading the sticky post about resto shaman and I have a question regarding the stats resto shaman need to stack mentioned in there. I know in wrath we need to stack lots of haste because mana was never a problem, so more haste gives better healing. But as of now, healer's mana problem is such a great issue, why is haste still more important than spirit? Haste gives faster heal but also eats up mana pool faster. I am just quite puzzled by this. Hope someone can give me some reason into this?

I don't believe it has been verified anywhere that haste is more important than spirit. If you read through the Restoration thread, you will see varying opinions on what stat to prioritize, including several people extolling the virtues of stacking Spirit and Crit.

In the defense of Haste, if you are casting a lot of Healing Wave, haste would be prioritized higher due to the long cast time and cheap cost.

I hope this isn't too hand-holding and infraction worth:

Considering our standard approved build currently includes fire nova talents in an expansion that has little "burn the trash" type moments due to CC being needed i'd assume it would be better to put the points into either Reverberation or Precision.

Precision would give us a bit more damage from everything but Stormstrike and white hits while Reverberation would increase the amount of shocks we can dish out in a given timeframe.

Would this not be a better spec to run over the one including fire nova? I've gone for reverb and 1/3 in Elemental Precision but i'm not so sure. The answer is of course "sim it and see" but i'm not sure our tools are updated enough to model/handle this well enough and there's not going to be MASSES in it.

How come enhance doesn't use Primal Strike?

Because Primal Strike and Stormstrike share a cooldown. Primal Strike is intended as a low-level ability for Enhancement until they can get Stormstrike.

A couple things I would like to nitpick...

First, I personally don't use Riptide + HW, it seems like a waste of TW to me. For tiny top off heals HW works fine on it's own, or even Riptide on it's own.

Second, I don't know if the casting order was implied in UL + Riptide + GHW, but Riptide consumes UL. You would definitely want to change the order to Riptide + UL + whatever heal you want, since Riptide's direct heal is rather small and you wouldn't see much of a boost from UL.

Third, if you're going oom too often get more spirit (obviously). Also, since you're not raiding, swap out that CH glyph for WS. WS may not scale, but the chance of landing all 4 bounces of a glyphed CH in a heroic pug are almost nil. That means that you're losing hpm on CH by having it glyphed.

Paddington_Bear, Unleash Weapon also affects the Riptide HoT, so it's not a bad idea to buff it. And while I agree that the CH glyph isn't good for heroics, you can't switch it out for WS, because CH is major and WS is prime. A likelier candidate would be Hex.

I was about to ask the following questions, but then I said: why not testing it myself?

Test environment
I was using a Warlock friend, who was keeping his health as low as possible with lifetap to fulfill two goals: Minimize mastery inconsistencies in data recorded, make CH cast on me proc a jump on him.
Didn't do a lot of tests (15 mins?) but I think it's enough to understand how certain things works.
Previously I did the same tests with Riptide, and found out the power up indeed affected all jumps.


Does the Unleash Earthbind buff affect all jumps of CH, or just the first?
From my tests it showed UE indeed affects all jumps.
Normal jumps were healing for averagely ~5.1k, whereas with the buff they were averaging ~6.8k

Does the Unleash Earthbind buff stack with the riptide powerup?
Yes, it does indeed stack with it, I was getting even higher numbers on jumps when I was consuming the Riptide buff cast on myself.

Does the Unleash Earthbind buff stack with Riptide?
This has been tested already but I had to test it again. It works with the initial part of the spell, not with the HoT.



Hope this will be useful.
Now a question for everybody else. The current Resto guide says that Ancestral Awakening cannot proc off Unleash Earthbind. Are you people sure about this? Because I got a couple of Ancestral Awakening proc from Unleash, when I was testing on my friend.
Or maybe it was just the old "lagged AA" bug, and what appeared to me as a fast proc from Unleash, was actually a very slow and delayed proc from the CH I cast previously.
Just wondering if this has been already tested thorougfully or not.



Edit:
From what I found out, it would be logical to assume that the Unleash Flametongue works the same way, hence, it should affect all the jumps of Chain Lightning. Wouldn't this make it an interesting option to use in situations where you want to maximize your CL damage?
I find myself using Unleash Flametongue a lot, probably more than I should be. But it sometimes represent a good filler to use before a Lava Burst, for those situations when you're waiting for cooldown, but LB would take too much, and the GCD of Unleash looks perfect, doesn't it?

Except Unleash Flametongue only affects fire damage and Chain Lightning is nature damage.