Posts with tag water-shield

Healers play a game of covering the mistakes of others. Tank didn't get to his panic button in time? DPSers not controlling their aggro? Cat jumped on the keyboard? Your friendly neighborhood healer is there to smooth over those hiccups and keep things running smoothly. In today's collection of links, the first one is for everyone and should be committed to memory should you want to live through most encounters. The rest are aimed at specific healing classes to help them up their game. Enjoy -- and don't forget to thank your healer.

• Tree Heals Go Whoosh covers the new AoE healing spells available to healers in a visual guide to things your healer wants you to stand in.
• Tales of a Priest lays out examples of when to use Leap of Faith.
• Falling Leaves and Twigs exports their Power Aura settings for druid resto (and balance) spells.
• Blessing of Kings blesses us with a list of tips for holy paladins in heroics.
• TotemForest explains the math and glyphing of the shaman mana regeneration spell Water Shield

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Shaman news part two: revenge of Shaman news! You may still be reeling from the revamp to the totem interface announced earlier today, but Ghostcrawler presses on. In a thread bemoaning the current state of Resto Shamans, he pre-announced the following changes for patch 3.2:

• Healing Way changed to "work better" with Healing Wave.
• Improved Water Shield will also work with Chain Heal, and IWS procs will not consume a Water Shield orb.
  
• Nature's Swiftness cooldown reduced to two minutes "so you can HW more often."

The crab says they'll try to make a more comprehensive list of Resto changes soon. Class changes lists, you say? Is that a PTR I see on the horizon?

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Patch 3.2 will bring about a new 5, 10, and 25 man instance to WoW, and usher in a new 40-man battleground called the Isle of Conquest. WoW.com will have you covered every step of the way, from extensive PTR coverage through the official live release. Check out WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.2 for all the latest!

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Xalit is entertaining himself before the expansion by crafting some macros, and he's come up with a pretty clever one that will count the number of times you cast a certain spell. He's got a few different versions (including one that pushes the total out to "say" occasionally), but here's probably the most helpful:

/cast Water Shield
/run i="Water Shield" if ws==nil then ws=0 end t=GetSpellCooldown(i) if t==b then else c=0 end b=GetSpellCooldown(i) if b==t and c==0 then ws=ws+1 c=1 end

Which will both cast Water Shield for you (obviously, you'll have to change the name if you want to count casts of a different spell), and then use:

/run SendChatMessage(ws,"SAY")

To kick the count out to the Say chat channel. Naysayers among you may say "well that's pointless," and they're kind of right -- it doesn't really matter how many times you cast something, and the macro doesn't do anything else for you besides update a variable to keep track of that number.

But it is interesting to see just how many times, say, you pressed the Fireball button during the raid last night, and maybe there is some use for this information somewhere (maybe checking the frequency of use or viability of certain spells or trinkets?). Might be a good macro to have when you want to know more about what you're casting.

The inimitable Matthew Rossi, our burly Shaman and Warrior expert, had his hands full with the overwhelming number of Warrior glyphs that popped up in the new Wrath Beta build. Since the few Shaman glyphs this build got me a little excited -- more than the yawn-inducing Paladin ones last week, anyway -- I thought I'd cover this one while Matt does the heavy lifting with the Warrior changes.

Glyph of Water Breathing
Your Water Breathing spell no longer requires a reagent.
An excellent glyph. I'm a huge fan of these no-reagent glyphs for obvious reasons. Although Shiny Fish Scales are abundant and cheap, they do take up bag space. What I like about these types of glyphs is that they'll literally pay for themselves over time because there's a direct cost. The best part of this? It now works exactly like the Warlock spell and can be used as an additional buff in PvP without worrying about running out of Shiny Fish Scales (e.g., it still consumes a reagent in Arenas).

MMO-Champion got their hands on the Patch 2.3.2 notes and they contain many interesting changes. Some highlights include:

• "Withdraw Repair Only" control on the guild bank control panel that can be set by rank
  
• Many buffs (or un-nerfs really) for Hunters we covered in an earlier post
• Mana cost reduction for some Shaman spells as well as a change to how Water Shield restores mana
• Mage buffs we reported on earlier including Ice Block becoming a spell for all Mages and a replacement talent called Icy Veins.

There are many more class buffs, tradeskill tweaks, boss changes and bug fixes (including one for the button mashing issue). Check out the complete notes on MMO-Champion.

No word yet on when this Patch will hit the Test server.

EDIT: Hortus announced the PTR is coming up later today.

EDIT2: Not leaked anymore! Here's the official patch notes.

Following the trend of releasing information about class changes today, Eyonix has chimed in again to give hints of what's in store for Shaman shields in the next patch. Lightning and Earth Shield will both have their mana cost reduced. Water Shield will receive a change in its function to keep the poor shammies from having to refresh it all the time. Apparently it will still return the same amount of mana, but in a less annoying fashion. Eyonix suggests that it will essentially give a sizeable chunk of MP5.

I don't play a Shaman much, but I've been chatting with the ones in my guild about these changes. So far they seem most excited about the new Water Shield. What do the rest of you think?