As if shamans still need more mana…

I can count with one hand the number of mana pots I’ve had to consume ever since the shaman changes in the 2.3 patches. Now, Blizzard thinks that we still don’t have enough mana and making us cast water shield every minute was a bit too tedious (well, it is annoying at times). Fear not! The new water shield changes in 2.3.2 will solve every woe you have against this already overpowered spell.

New Version – The caster is surrounded by 3 globes of water, granting 50 mana per 5 sec. When a spell, melee or ranged attack hits the caster, 200 mana is restored to the caster. This expends one water globe. Only one globe will activate every few seconds. Lasts 10 min. Only one Elemental Shield can be active on the Shaman at any one time.

Long before these changes were announced I recall discussion from the EJ forums that this was what the people wanted as an improvement to shaman mana conservation. Well, we have it now and it’s much more than the 25mp5 people wanted. In its 1 minute version, water shield would provide an equivalent to 50mp5 only if all 3 globes were unspent at the end of the minute. Now, we get this 50mp5 regardless along with any globes being popped or popped at the 10 minute mark.

Now you’ll need to time the water shield so that it will burst mid fight (if the fight doesn’t have any AE component) so that you can benefit from that 600 mana. In a fight where AEs don’t hit you, the spell has no difference besides you not having to cast it every minute. But in any fight where you might get hit by stray spells and the bubbles will pop, this new version will provide you with even more mana.

Also, Earth Shield’s mana cost has been halved on all ranks. Pretty much no reason to not use rank 3 now that it’s only 450 mana.

Of course, all these changes are only on the PTR and it’s subject to further tweaks and changes, but at least we can be all optimistic and start selling our extensive mana pot stashes.

Zul’Aman : Lynx – Hexlord

One more evening of wiping in ZA and two more bosses down, we got to see Zul’jin but due to members of the raid requiring early sleep on a Saturday night (wtf?) we had to end early.

Lynx Avatar

The trash is numerous, unintuitive, and annoying. The ambush mechanic is surprising if you didn’t read a guide and fun for the first pull, but then it becomes annoying, and soon it just becomes extra pulls to waste time for your time attack quest.

The boss itself is straight forward. If you have a decently geared feral druid tank (our feral tank was 2 T5) the boss damage is mostly manageable. You do need another person with high armor values to help soak up the saber lashes and tank the lynx spirit when the boss splits. This person is more important that your MT because the #1 accident that result in wiping is probably when the boss splits every 25%, the offtank fails at grabbing the spirit and it proceeds to gib your healers. If that is a problem, try having your main tank spam AE skills (cleave, swipe, consecration, whatever) to grab the lynx as it splits so that your offtank has a little time to pick it up.

Healer assignment should be 2 on MT and 1 on OT who also does raid healing. The saber lash CD is really quick and he can do 2 saber lashes in quick succession which can kill your OT if he isn’t well geared enough and you healer didn’t land 1 heal on the OT. During the split phase the two MT healers can split to heal both tanks because the damage on the tanks is relatively low whilst the raid damage taken ranks up here with all the shocks flying around so your raid healer will need to be on the ball. I used lesser healing wave (flash heal) extensively to help catch up on the healing. People were spread out to avoid the chain lightning totem so chain heal was too slow and ineffective (unless melee was getting hit). Your DPS will need to help kill totems quickly or else raid damage will become unmanageable in this phase. Otherwise, this boss only requires a little practice and is more of a gear check rather than skill check.

Hexlord

Depending on your raid setup this can get a bit annoying. Hexlord is just a random piece of bullsh*t. Seriously, he’s so random that the fight can either be relatively easy (depending on if you can deal with spirit bolts) to extremely hard, depending on the random adds, which people he decides to power drain, and your raid setup.

We had the following adds: Ogre, Snake, Elemental, Undead. We started off trying to perma-sheep the ogre and shackle the undead while we slept the snake and kill the elemental, then killed the snake thereafter. I turned out that for some reason the ogre was breaking sheep frequently and therefore after killing the elemental (we didn’t have a warlock) we killed the ogre and the mage would then sheep the snake so the druid can be freed to continue healing. Sheep on the snake and shackle on the undead was relatively stable.

Spirit bolts is probably the sole ability that is always here and also the sole ability that will wipe your raid. Basically he spits out an area wide AE per second that hits for 300 a tick (mitigated by shadow resist but increased by his stacking power drain). The problem with this ability is casting pushback. Even with 75% pushback resistance, casting is barely possible in the 15 seconds this happens. Therefore depending on your healer setup this can mean an automatic wipe.  Luckily, we had a CoH priest and a resto druid which can heal relatively well during spirit bolts, and I had to switch to having earth shield casted on myself (note that spirit bolts doesn’t cause the earth shield to heal you AT ALL) so that I can actually chain heal during the spirit bolts. We ended up with 6 stacking power drains (+60% damage) and the spirit bolt phase got very messy on the try we killed the boss.

The third ability is another random piece of crap and it’s his class drain ability. We had two priests and on one try he decided to drain either priest two times in a row and two members of the team perma MCed was just unmanageable. You’ll need a rogue to keep wound poison on him or warrior to keep the MS debuff on him because his heals are non-trivial (and according to my raid member’s report un-interruptible), and you should purge or have a mage spell-steal (best choice) his life-bloom if he drains your druid. If he drains the shaman (me) his heal seemed to be un-interruptible, but the chain lightning can be kicked and the totem only has 1 hp (lol). We didn’t have Paladins or Warlocks to see the crazy consecration and rain of fire. He’s laughable during rogue phase (dispell the wound poison) and is manageable in warrior (he has MS so be careful).

All in all this fight is very challenging and depending on the combination of the insane amount of random factors in this fight he can become impossible. He’s doable, but can become frustrating really fast.

Earth Shield in 2.3 : and I thought it was just me

I was curious why I couldn’t refresh my earth shield on my tank even though it was totemmed and I was full-buffed last night in ZA and the night before in SSC. I turns out there’s a bug indeed.

Blue post confirming said bug

Before the “future patch” arrives (I’m guessing 2.3.1, or the arena season 3 patch, hopefully), we’d have to do with the workaround: put the shield on someone else, then putting your totemmed/trinketed/buffed shield bank on the tank before the pull. During a fight, well tough luck.

Zul’Aman : Bear – Eagle – Dragonhawk

I must admit ZA is a pretty well designed instance. It’s the first time we went in, and just by reading some preliminary strats and then giving them minor tweaks as we experienced the encounter (and wiped), it’s all in all a pretty fun encounter. Our group make-up was pretty suboptimal (no pally, no warlock) but we still managed to kill 3 bosses on our first night.

Group setup : 2 Warriors (Prot, Fury), 2 Druids (Resto, Feral), 1 Rogue, 1 Shaman, 2 Priests (Shadow, 41Holy), 1 Mage, 1 Hunter.

Bear Avatar

Trash is simple, CC the casters tank and spank the melee. Note that most humanoid mobs can be MCed so if you’re short on CC that is an alternative. The boss himself is simple, two tanks stacked on top of each other to split his cleave, melee behind, ranged somewhere else. He charges around but doesn’t hit hard. Every now and then he will switch forms, other tank taunts, tank’n spank. He switches back and the first tank needs to taunt back. 2.3 taunt changes make this fight very non random. The DoTs on the bear form can get pretty painful on the tank so look out for that. In human form he’s not really a big issue. (Druid tank for human, War/Pal tank for bear).

Eagle Avatar

The trash here is actually more challenging than the boss itself. It’s gauntlet style ala Shattered Halls, 4 sets of 2 elites (windwalkers) on the road, every now and then non-elite eagles spawn from ahead and 2 elite reinforcements spawn from behind. Have a tank tank both windwalkers, kill them fast then move on to the next windwalkers, you don’t want to stay in the same spot for long. Reinforcements don’t hit for hard so just have another tank grab those and the eagles, AE down the eagles every 1-2 packs. Once you pull the tempest guy at the end spawns stop. I’m not sure if the gauntlet is supposed to respawn or not but we’ve cleared it once, it bugged out on us and spawned as we pulled the boss. We recleared the gauntlet, then after we wiped to the boss it didn’t respawn again. Rajaxx anyone?

Boss was simple enough once we got our strat done. At first we had no idea what to do, then we decided to all run into melee range once the storm ability CDed, but found out it was a bad idea when he lightning balled us to death without using his storm ability even after it CDed. Our strategy is as follows: 2 markers are placed on 2 ranged (ideally 2 ppl with better awareness and playskill), have them stand in separate spots and assign the ranged to be split into 2 groups and stacked on top of either marker (3-4 per stack) the two ranged groups stands in a “triangle” formation with the melee, 20 yards apart, that way only 3-4 people are hit by the lightning ball at the same time, nothing chain heal can’t remedy. A hunter and mage was assigned to kill the birds in the sky. The triangle formation makes it really easy to see where the storm is forming and everyone can easily run to the spot without much mistakes. The boss will run into the group so the two ppl with markers will have to reposition themselves and the ppl assigned to the markers will have to follow. If everyone can get that routine this boss is retardedly easy.

Dragonhawk Avatar

Fun. I’m sure there’s a way of skipping all the trash by abusing his mini-game ability, but we cleared the way anyways. The trash packs are relatively easy but for the scout mechanic. We managed to be killing 10 or so mobs at the same time just because of these scouts. What happens is that you’ll notice there are drums around the area and scouts patrolling the vicinity. If they aggro they will run straight for a drum, if they get one (yes one) successful bang on the drum 2 elites will spawn. They can be rooted, stunned, and slowed (at least via frost shock) and only have 6k HP so kill them before they reach a drum. They will spawn behind you so rogues/druids need to be aware and react accordingly. Note that they will run STRAIGHT for the drums, so becareful when there are pulls with scouts.

Boss has 3 abilities, flamebreath, the mini-game, and hatcher spawn. Flame breath is a narrow but long cone AE, just make sure ppl don’t stand on the same straight line with the boss, especially behind the tank. The mini-game he will close the 4 “exits”, then start throwing balls of fire on the ground, after a few secs they all explode and you’ll take 5-7k damage per exploding ball that hits you. You have plenty of free time to find the free space (there is plenty of room) to stand. The explosion is slightly bigger than the ball graphic so don’t risk it and find somewhere where there is actually some room between you and any ball.

Every now and then two hatchers will spawn, and run to the two extensions on the altar to hatch eggs. There are 18-19 eggs on eggs on each platform. Each hatcher will run to either platform and start hatching eggs, each time they cast hatching they will hatch one more until they are killed (1 egg first cast, 2 eggs 2nd, 3 eggs 3rd, etc). Our strat was to have our druid charge and stun kill one, and let the other hatch 10 eggs (4 casts), stun and kill him, then deal with the adds. You may need to adjust according to your raid set up how many eggs you can handle at a time (10 was ok for us with only 1 mage AEing). Occasionally the add spawn will overlap his fireballing mini-game and ranged will need to react and kill the hatchers from inside the game area before they spawn too much and wipe your raid. The boss has a 5 minute enrage timer and a 10 minute berserk (wipe) timer. After enrage he does hit quite hard on the tank so healers need to be aware of that.

At 35% he’ll hatch all unhatched eggs, so you want to be cleared or near clear both egg platforms (3-4 add spawns if you hatch 10 at a time) you’ll only be left with his mini-game and dragon breath to deal with. His dragon breath has a long CD and as long as ppl are topped off and nobody is stupid to get hit by a fire-ball in the mini-game, this boss is fun and easy.

You can reset this boss by running off the platform (unless the mini-game is in progress), but make sure you run off the correct side because the stairs are broken behind the boss and you need to run all the way around to get back to the boss.

Shaman healing in ZA?

In Karazhan, 2 healers was enough. At our current gear level (1/4 TK, 5/6 SSC), I’d say 3 healers is really pushing the mark. Bring 3. You’d still be raid healing but in many cases you’ll have to help out on tank healing as well (Bear avatar bear phase, Dragonhawk avatar). Otherwise shaman healing is fine and earth shield on your tank will help out a lot. The stationary nature of a shaman healer does affect us a bit (same as pallies), so I definitely recommend getting a resto druid to help out.

Concluding remarks

ZA is one incredibly fun instance but it does require a lot of communication (moreso than SSC and TK), so have everyone get on vent and talk. We didn’t make the first boss on time because of spending too much time observing patrol pathing, trash pack mechanics and so forth, but we’ll be looking forward to collecting the reward from at least the first boss next reset. I’ll write on the other bosses once we get a chance to try them out.

Patch 2.3 first impressions

Who needs mana pots anyways? The buffs to shaman mana regeneration was tremendous. First off, if you still wear T4, your mana spring went from 19/tick to 29 per tick: 25mp/5. Then we have the new water shield, which was only useful in some fights where area effects would cause bubbles to pop, it is now useful in every fight (600mp/min or 50mp/5) to being downright overpowered in fights where your bubbles actually pop, it’s fundamental that you get a UI to track your water shield status to remember to put it back up. Also, it’s mana cost is 0 now which means zero investment and free 5sr mana regen time.

On top of all this, for 20 heroic badges, you can now buy Totem of Living Water, which is around a 5% mana reduction on your higher ranked chain heals and a massive 10% reduction to your low rank chain heals. Note that increased healing (via maiden totem) scales less and less as your overall healing done is increased, while mana reduction is fixed and also increases the efficiency of your mana regen (so to speak). At low healing levels (1000-1500), I’d say the maiden trinket is better, but if you’re high on healing this totem can help you save more mana (of course, this is anecdotal advice, I’m too lazy to do the math at this moment).

With the opening of the doors of Zul’Aman (I haven’t been in there myself, mind you), as well as the new gear on the Heroic Badge vendor, mid-progression Shamans now have the choice of spell haste gear without having to half-clear Black Temple. I have yet to try any of this gear out, but my guess is if you can collect enough haste gear, it is worth it to pass some of your mana regen (which most haste gear sacrifices) to stack an amount of haste (160+). Why so? The key is to downrank. When you’re raid healing, it’s better to have smaller chain heals hit more targets in a set period of time. That way more targets get healed and your mana consumption should be relatively the same. I’ll have to test this when I get my hands on some ZA gear. Note that if you don’t have 160+ haste (2.5 to 2.25 cast time) the effects of haste are barely noticable and you’re probably better off going for more mana regen. It’s also of course dependent on the fight, so maybe in the near future we will need to bring a haste set and a mp5 set to fit to different fights.