It is time for Totem Talk to talk about totems, and the shamans who drop them, in PvP. Matthew Rossi takes his resto and enhancement shamans into PvP from time to time... the resto heals until someone decides to kill him, and then he dies because his teammates are ten yards away and could care less about him dying until they start yelling for heals while he sits in the graveyard back at the farm, which is why he prefers to play the enhancement shaman. Healing people hurts.

PvP is a sensitive subject among some shamans. Elemental shamans basically PvP with a specific talent build that allows them a large burst of damage up front (so specific that it was nearly nerfed, which would have gutted elemental as a PvP build), enhancement shamans have been complaining of mobility and dispelling issues with their abilities for some time (leading up to some as yet still intended changes for the spec in 2.4) and resto shamans heal things and get killed for it. Luckily, they've reduced the mana cost on Earth Shield, so that when it gets spell stolen or dispelled it won't cost as much mana.

To a degree, I feel like any shaman PvP discussion started by me should be titled "Don't do the things I've done". Don't go into AB and try and defend a flag solo as resto. Don't sign up for an arena team consisting of an enhancement shaman, a fury warrior and a mage. But we can probably cover all of that under the headline "Don't do anything really, really stupid" and move on from there. It's amazing how often I can use my life and my decisions to warn other people.

Amazing and a touch disheartening, but at least we can all point and laugh at me together. But before we do that, the lovely folks at The Bronze Kettle linked to this site, which is all about the trails and tribulations of a person multiboxing an elemental shaman arena team. So it seemed relevant to link it here, too.



For PvP, there are certain obvious things that I mention now to get them out of the way. First off, get resilience gear as soon as you can. This holds true for pretty much every class, so I won't pretend it's an ancient shamanistic secret, but still and all it bears repeating. It's never fun to somehow manage to kill that pesky warlock (perhaps he was at half health, or had just been hit in the back of the head with a warrior) only to die to his damage over time spells. However, keep in mind that the rise of resilience has its drawbacks for shamans, which we'll talk about later.

Also, you can't always just pick a build and run into PvP with it and expect to do well, especially if it's a PvE dps or healing build. There's no aggro in PvP, for instance, so talents like Healing Grace are less useful there. In patch 2.4 healing grace will also reduce the chance for elemental shields to be dispelled, so keep that in mind. An example of a successful enhancement build I've seen is this one, which as you'll notice dispenses with the usual PvE focus on restoration talents and goes up the elemental tree instead. I stole it from Push, a very well rated arena shaman. He used to have a more conventional setup, but he seems to be using this one now. Whether this talent build would be successful for you or not depends on your playstyle (I didn't do very well with it, but then again, I'm not a terribly talented PvPer at the best of times, and my particular strengths in that area don't translate well to a class with no means to snare or root and no means to escape snares or roots.) The build I usually use in PvP is this one, also stolen blatantly from the Elitist Jerks forums. It's much closer to a standard PvE enhancement build but de-emphasizes group buffs like Improved Weapon Totems in order to make sure personal DPS is heightened.

To be honest, I'm very interested in what you shamans out there PvPing more than I do use for your PvP builds, as I have a devil of a time coming up with good PvP ones. I've been toying with this one, learned by inspecting the shamans I know who PvP often, but I'm not sold on the 2 points in Convection. I personally have found the biggest blow to my preferred enhancement playstyle is that resilience renders my 2h weapons almost useless. If I can get a lucky WF proc and a crit at once I can do massive damage, yes... but with resilience, I'm not likely to see that happen.

For elemental, this is a standard 40/0/21 build that allows for Nature's Swiftness, used to allow for a very large burst of chain lightning damage by combining the NS instant cast with Elemental Mastery's guaranteed crit. I tried this build out as well, and surprise, not having a lot of spell damage gear meant it wasn't tremendously effective. If, unlike the author, you have the proper gear it can be a devastating burst damage build that hits nearly an entire team right up front. (It's very very good in 2x2 and 3x3 setups.) Once again, when PvPing as a shaman, just constantly keep thinking to yourself What would Matthew Rossi do and then do the exact opposite. I'm the George Costanza of shaman PvP.

I used to run resto in PvP with this build. I include it because it is a terrible build. We can all see that the attempt was to try and eke out some more surivivability with talents like Nature's Guardian, Shield Specialization and Anticipation, but I ended up lacking any real offensive punch at all while not really surviving all that much longer. With hindsight benefiting my analysis I would argue that what would work best for a restoration shaman would be to try and get synergy up the elemental tree instead of relying too much on the enhancement, at least until we know if the changes to Toughness and Improved Ghost Wolf are actually going to make much of a difference or not.

No matter what your spec or playstyle, a shaman has some powerful advantages to keep in mind in PvP. Our current lack of mobility aside, any spec of shaman can be useful in purging buffs and interrupting spellcasts with grounding totem and earth shock. While totems generally don't last very long in PvP, due to their being extremely easy to kill, a properly timed grounding totem/earth shock can keep spells interrupted for a decent interval, and doesn't really interfere too much with a DPSing or healing shaman's other spells. It's going to be hard for a melee shaman to close the gap a lot of the time anyway, and an elemental shaman will be waiting for NS to come off of cooldown to do his or her really big bursts of damage, so keeping a good interrupt rotation going is a decent way to help contribute in those times when you'd be otherwise frustrated. Also, when in doubt, drop a buff totem or a damaging totem. Sure, it will probably get killed fast, but better to do something than to stand around wishing you could close the gap.

Okay, there's actually a lot more to say about shamans in PvP. In fact, I'm hoping to see some good comments from good (read, not me) PvP shamans that I can use to help tell you what to to do instead of what not to do in the next installment of our discussion of shamans in PvP, due out next week.

Tags: pvp, Shaman

Filed under: Shaman, Analysis / Opinion, PvP, (Shaman) Totem Talk, Battlegrounds, Arena