Why chose a shaman?

Alterac Volley did a piece giving a thumbnail description of the classes. I'm not quite sure who the audience were for this - experienced players probably have a pretty good idea of what the classes are about, and new players will get more value out of the Blizzard descriptions (whatever their well-publicised shortcomings) and are more likely to find them. Two things did strike me though about these descriptions:

• they are applicable to levelling and PvP (where good players exploit the full abilities of their class) but not really to end-game raiding where players are far more pigeon-holed. In fact, very little prepares a new WoW player for what the end game has in store.
• the shaman description is way off. Are shamans really this little understood?

So, with a view to my audience (primarily me, and my constant alt indecision, with a view to who my main should be for Cataclysm), here's my view of what makes a shaman.

We're a damage / healing hybrid, with the emphasis on the damage. Sort of a reverse priest.

We have a strong healing spec, especially in small groups - we're better group healers than a paladin, better tank / burst healers than a druid.

We have good damage specs, and no aggro dump... so we probably cause tanks more problems than any class other than dps warriors! Elemental is a bit boring, and doesn't scale that well at high gear levels, enhancement is melee and therefore Blizzard (and raid leaders to a lesser extent) hate them. Still, we can do good damage, in distinctive and flavourful ways.

But what keeps me coming back to my shaman?

Reincarnation - with credit to Babasyzygy the "method school of acting feign death". The single thing that I miss most when not on my shaman.

Wolves - Ghost Wolf, especially instant GW, is my second favourite shaman ability. It's odd that I don't really have much interest in druid and their forms, but Ghost Wolf always cheers me up. Spirit Wolves are also deeply cool.

Water Walking - especially now that we can ride on water too. I have fond memories of walking across Darrowmere Lake as a shortcut to Scholomance, and since then it's never got old.

Totems - I wouldn't say that I "like a class that uses totems to support your attack", and their lack of mobility is a bit of a pain, but I'm rather fond of my cleansing and tremour totems. It's just nice to be able to drop these and forget about poisons, disease and fear (to some extent). If dispelling becomes less spammy in Cataclysm their advantages may become less clear cut, but they're invaluable at the moment.

To me those are the highlights, and the first two especially means I'll struggle to ever demote Grulnak from being my main.

Heroic tank

Grulgok tanked his first heroic last night, in the company of a guild healer and ret paladin, and two hunters from the Dungeon Finder. Thankfully the dps were fairly well disciplined and so the run went fairly smoothly, but it will be a while before I'm ready to throw myself into random heroics with confidence.

I'm hoping that the Dungeon Finder will soon let us add cross-realm friends, as a counterpoint to the existing ignore functionality, as I'm starting to appreciate the level to which it's the dps who make a run good or bad - as long as the tank is up to a certain minimum standard of compentance and gear. And as a corollary feeling slightly guilty of some of the instances I've run as an elemental shaman with more of an eye on my dps output than on my threat.

Level 80 (in plate)

I dinged 80 on Grulgok just after midnight last night, and have spent the day trying to get to 535 defence to be uncrittable in heroics. Despite having items such as Hellscream's Handguards of Conquest which were just not available to those who first hit 80, it's no easy feet.

A big part of my trouble is that, not having tanked at 70, the trinklet scene is looking very sparse. I am cheating a bit of course, relying almost exclusively on Polar's Easy Pre-Naxx Tank Gear List and some AH and crafted items, so I am trying to shortcut a lot of the grinding of the level 80 normal instances.

Overall I'm rather enjoying the tanking experience, although I'm not sure Grulgok will ever become my raiding main as my low attendance would be too problematic. It's good to be out ahead of the group, planning the pulls and so on, rather than just following behind and throwing heals. And bizarrely the frenetic nature of warrior tanking (compared to what I understand to be the more measured, rhythmic pace of paladins or death knights), which in turn leads to a feeling of better control (or at least lots of options) is a big plus of the class contrary to my initial expectations.

Loving tanking

I've pretty much settled on levelling to 80 with Grulgok, my orc prot warrior, and retiring Shank to the warmth of Booty Bay.

Thanks to the Dungeon Finder and the daily random (I still can't quite believe that I can collect Emblems of Triumph without even being 80 yet) I've been spending a lot of time tanking. In fact I'm barely questing enough to line up my next dungeon quests and do the non-dungeon quests that give good tanking blues.

Currently I'm glad to be an orc, and a warrior rather than a death knight at that. The prot tanking style is very (perhaps too) active in style, compared to that for DKs. While I'm constantly struggling against the global cooldown I do find that it is more proactive, more controlled and more fun.

And being able to charge while in combat - or even charge at all - is as great as ever.

At the moment I'm finding I have nice AoE threat, and most runs go fairly smoothly, although there are still the occasional bad pulls or over-eager DPSers. I'm not sure how much of it is due to my increased confidence, and hence less feeling of stress and inclination to blame myself when things go badly, but that certainly can't hurt.

I need to enjoy it while it lasts though - once I get to 80 I'm expecting that life will suddenly get much harder as the average DPS gear level will step up considerably compared to my own.

A question of roleplaying

I'm still struggling to decide between my various alts, currently my plan is to concentrate on just two characters, a tank and a healer. I've narrowed the choice down to: shaman and warrior (orc), shaman and warrior (dwarf, once Cataclysm arrives) or priest and warrior (Forsaken).

Dwarves are probably my favourite race in the game, followed closely by orcs. Having recently written the Alliance off as bland I probably won't go down that route, otherwise it'd be very tempting. The main appeal with the undead is that they're human-like, and hence seem to be better catered for by Blizzard. I'm often struggling to work out what my motivation is for some quests as an orc, whereas for a human / dwarf / undead it's more obvious. The drawbacks of this plan are several: I don't like the posture of Shank, my undead warrior; with a priest instead of a shaman I'd really miss reincarnation, water walking, ghost wolf and other flavour spells; and I'm not fond of the embittered outlook of the Forsaken.

So, I'm currently tending towards an orcy future, but I need to get more into the right roleplaying frame of mind. Because even though I'm on a PvE server, I don't want to play a MMOG without the RP.

More tanking practice

I've been trying to get a random group for Old Hillsbrad for Shank to tank, to compare with the death knight experience of the place. Since it still has an attunement it's not worked for me so far, but I do find the queue for randoms is quick.

There's still lots of room for improvement in my tanking - things like remembering to use Last Stand or potions (or even remembering to keep an eye on my own health), remebering to put Vigilence on someone in the group, and re-marking skull once the first target goes down (although frequently enough skull is the last target standing...!).

I also can't always remember which skills I have already on Shank, and which only on Grulgok, such as Intervene.

There are also various things about my setup to address, such as ensuring my camera is zoomed out enough to see caelNamePlates properly and what's going on in general. I also need to get a tanking configuration for Grid, especially to show me if anyone other than myself has aggro.

I'm getting there though - and finding warrior tanking a lot easier than in the old days (walking uphill both ways through snow, etc...). Thunderclap (and Shockwave where necessary) are amazing against large non-elite packs, such as the skeletons at the end of Auchenai Crypts.

Meanwhile Grulnak half way to friendly with the Ashen Verdict, in search of a rather nice ring upgrade.

My least favourite role?

Having decided to quit the Alliance I'm going back through my list of things to try out properly by doing some instances on my Night Elf hunter!

I wanted to make sure I had a decent view of the pure dps role, and ever since hunters were the definitive raid pullers (and the better ones the kings of crowd control) the class has appealed to me.

I'm glad to have tried it, having found that their utility and survivability - plus the tactical aspect of having a pet - makes them my favourite DPS class.

Thanks to Dungeon Finder I managed to find a couple of groups to Hellfire Ramparts. Although the main lesson there was don't use DF during daytime, with one of the groups turning out to be incredibly juvinile.

In one group the tank was very inexperienced - but was good enough to forwarn us of the fact - so I even got to do some old-school hunter pulling. The tactical view that you get as a ranged DPS, the ability to rescue the healer with your personal tank (and be gratefully noticed!), the ability to survive bad pulls - or even complete them yourself after a near-wipe - all add an extra facet to the DPS role that makes it more than about the numbers.

To do the role full time I'd need a lot more practice, but in the meantime I'm happy to put Adanadel to the top of my DPS alt list. And then retire him again.