Today is the 50th post of Totem Talk on this site. I haven't written all of them... I started out as the warrior columnist for WoW Insider (by the way, if you're wondering, yes the warrior column will be tomorrow, sorry for juggling everything) and only took over the shaman column because Robin Torres, our predecessor and the first person to give you a shaman column here, was unable to continue writing it. I snapped up the chance to take over, because the shaman class was the one that effectively saved World of Warcraft for me. (I promise, next week we'll continue our gear guide series, but this week I'm inclined to wax philosophical about shamans.)

It's not a secret that I play a lot of warriors, and tank a lot. For the longest time, my pattern was fairly simple: start a warrior alt to play with friends on a new server, blaze to 60 ahead of them as I am an expert on leveling a warrior, start getting bored waiting for them to catch up and end up going back to my original warrior because I have a reputation as a tank and get recruited to do it. I would tank for a while (in one notorious case, 'a while' was 'from Molten Core to Naxxramas) while waiting for my RL friends to catch up to max level so we could start running instances.

It got old. I enjoyed the tanking, but I hated the waiting. I'm not terribly patient. In one notorious instance I actually rolled another warrior, caught him up to them as they leveled, then leveled him to 60, meaning that I had two max level warriors rotting on Kilrogg. It got ridiculous. During all this time, I finally met folks who were playing horde side, and started a new toon to hang out with them on Malfurion. Yes, it was a warrior.

But a funny thing happened on the way to 60 on him. On a whim, I started an orc shaman. And I hated it.


I missed charge. I missed knowing where all the quests were (I was not only new to the class, I was new to the horde as well), I wasn't leveling super fast anymore. Instead it was a struggle to get him leveled. While he could heal himself, he was wearing leather and carrying a stick around, things often killed me before I could get a heal off. I didn't understand the class. The days of super-familiarity, of comfort zone leveling, they were suddenly ripped away from me and I was forced to grapple with new and different concepts. The totem quests were completely different than anything I'd had to do on a warrior.

In short, although I whined mightily, every night I logged on that shaman and doggedly fought to understand him. He slowly leveled up as I contemplated what had gone wrong in that abominable Wailing Caverns run or discovered entirely by accident how Earth Shock could interrupt spells. Yes, I know the tooltip tells you that. I discovered windfury weapon and equipped an axe I'd gotten in RFK, and suddenly, in a glorious burst of damage, I fell in love with the class. It was as if we were in a romantic comedy and shamans suddenly took off their glasses and shook out their hair while soft music played in the background, only with more burst damage and less "hey, wait a minute, she looks exactly the same without the glasses, why is he just now noticing she's hot".

The process of discovery had kept the game fresh for me while waiting to get to run the 10 man instances with my friends: it made interminable nights wiping on Gothik more tolerable, knowing I'd get to go play with my shaman when it was over. In short, the shaman class was the first one I was able to bring an alt to max level with. When The Burning Crusade launched and I got back into playing, I was faced with the obstacle of which characters to level, an obstacle I solved by leveling two warriors and two shamans to 70 first. Had to finally have an alliance shaman and introduce my old in-game friends to the glory of windfury totem, you see. Had to explore what dual wielding on a shaman was like. Had to relearn the class all over again, and had a blast doing it. Had to learn how to heal, and how to DPS at range. Playing a shaman isn't like playing three classes at once, but it is like having one character who can pick what class he wants to be from day to day in a way only a true hybrid can possibly experience. Despite some flaws, the totem system is still among the strongest group buffs in play at this time, and I've yet to hear anyone say "no, don't increase my spell damage by 101, I'm good'.

I've played the class as a main healer, as ranged DPS, and as a melee. The brilliance of the class, in my opinion, is its combination of versatility and purity of design. Restoration shamans can main heal 5 mans and substantially contribute to raidwide healing, elemental shamans can dish out significant damage and buff the DPS of other ranged DPSers, and enhancement shamans can take the words 'burst damage' to glorious heights while at the same time increasing the attack power of other melee and, of course, providing those lovely windfury and strength of earth totems. While it still has problems with mobility and being neutralized in PvP, for PvE raiding shamans are wonderful, they only get better the bigger the raid they're in. Shamans really start to shine once you take them into the 10 mans, where the lack of CC the class provides in 5 mans can be easily overlooked in favor of of their totems and their versatility (spell interrupts, the ability to backup heal or switch to DPS, the wide variety of cleanses and buffs like bloodlust/heroism) and this only multiplies when you make the jump from 10 to 25 man raids.

For myself, playing the shaman has really opened up the game to me. As someone who has always prefered the melee option, the shaman is a nice way to ease into other roles in groups. I can play a healer without abandoning my love for up close brutality. Even when I was fully restoration specced I kept a full set of enhancement gear and a big 2h weapon so that I could go blow off steam in close combat, or even pull out the fist weapons and take a fast respec to be able to really play with melee. Meanwhile, over on the alliance side of life, I've found it impossible to be anything but enhancement, as people scream in horror at the idea of losing an enhanced windfury totem. I had to sneak my elemental respec in on the side when folks weren't looking, or when I was able to play in heroics as my raiding role shifted more to tanking.

It's the shaman class I always come back to in order to learn more about the game, especially aspects like spell damage, how spell haste works, and other elements that as a warrior and a tank I'm not normally exposed to. I've learned more about DPS and threat playing a shaman than I ever would have thought possible, about how hard it can be to predict a steak of windfury crits, about how to try and anticipate threat bursts and get ahead of them. In order to learn the propery synergy between tank, healer and DPS, it's necessary to at least experience all three to even a small degree, and raiding on the shamans has given me a perspective that's mellowed me and allowed me to step back from my original bias.

Shamans have kept me playing this game. Having two shamans, one horde, one alliance, has given me the flexibility to do pretty much anything either of my guilds needs. I'm geared enough now that I can heal, ranged DPS, or go enhance whenever it's required. What does the heroic need? You're short a ranged in ZA? You'd like me to come on my shammy for this Kael attempt to give the rogues windfury? You want an elemental for Hyjal? I can do these things now. Even though I'm usually tanking in any/all of these situations, I've done all of them, and learned from all of them. (One of the things I learned was that it was a bad idea to hit a naga that hasn't been tanked yet while trying to kite striders. Oops.) I can hit a battleground with any spec I like, or even switch it up without respeccing. (I've lead AV in heals while enhancement... okay, so it's not hard to lead in heals when no one else heals.)

One of the things I've always tried to do with Totem Talk is give you the sense of the shaman class I have, of an as-yet unrecognized gem of a class. Not all is wine and roses with shamans, but in general it's the class that challenges me, asks me to understand new concepts, and keeps me interested in aspects of gameplay I'd never considered before I leveled one. It's the only kind of caster I can get into, it's the melee DPS class that feels the most fun, and it's the only healer I can stand to play. OP chain heals for life.

Thank you for the chance to tell everyone how much this class rocks. Next week, our 51st column will discuss leather and cloth for shamans, why do we need them, which ones do we need, and how can you choose between the mail options or one of the cloth or leather choices.

Tags: Alts, Draenei, Leveling, Orc, Shaman, Totem Quest, Totem Talk is 50 yay, TotemQuest, TotemTalkIs50Yay

Filed under: Horde, Alliance, Shaman, Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Classes, Alts, (Shaman) Totem Talk