Totem swappingFollow

Well, I generally do not switch totems, it's one or the other.

As an elemental shaman with resonable gear and a resonable mana pool (8618) I'd be using wrath of air & windfury totem. Wrath of air costs 240 mana whilst windfury totem costs 243 mana (this is with 25% totem cost reduction from resto talents), so what you'd be asking would be that every 9 seconds I go through the business of burning 483 mana (5.6% of my mana pool) in addition to 2 global cooldowns & ~1 second of dropping the totems due to lag.

So for both of us to benefit it would require me to waste 1/3 of my time dropping totems vs just sticking to one buff for one of us.

If you were tanking & holding aggro fine w/o windfury totem I would keep wrath of air up (unless I also had a rogue in the group who wanted WF), however if you're a dps warrior I would definitly drop WF and go without wrath of air.



Edited, Sep 6th 2007 6:53am by Tyele

LOL - I would never switch out like that, since im main healer, I focus on health bars during the fight, and If you are an elemental or enchanment shaman you should be focusing on dps.

Not to mention its completely mana inefficient!

If you want your WF totem then you should find 2 shamans, on resto and one enhance or elemental then you can have the best of both worlds.

I generally do not use WF when grouping because Its just not viable most times in a group. If you not using a 2 hand weapon its really not as useful as most would think. Using the AGI totem gives the tank around the same amount of DPS and it helps rogues/hunters as well.

Or I just use my +healing/spell totem. Sorry WARRIORS!

I didnt want to put much thought into this, I generally use my WoA, because in most cases I have more casters than I do melee.

So what your saying, I should be using WF over my GoA or WoA because it will help with threat generation for my warrior and quite possibly my rogue?

The reason why I see that WF is not useful for grouping is because if my rogue crits and he takes aggro my mana pool is screwed and we die.

So i see your point to the threat generation for the warrior, but quite frankly, I have a rather large problem with rogues lately stealing aggro, so it will be a cold day in hell before I give a demanding rogue WF.

Edited, Sep 6th 2007 8:20pm by lauisifer

Ahhh the good old (GoA vs WF vs WoA) fight.

The only time I will throw WoA is if there is 3 casters including the healer. If there is 2 warriors then I will throw WF. If there is only one warrior then I will throw GoA. I find myself doing a lot of guild runs and our dps usually consists of myself, a rogue, a hunter, and a warrior or druid as tank. So the GoA seems to just benefit more people. If you have a druid tank WF is out the door cause it does nothing for them in bear.

I think the rule of thumb here is to be smart about it. Throw whatever totem will benefit the most people in the group. I find that throwing WF for the one warrior in the group is kind of a waste. Sure it will increase his threat but if your smart that's not an issue for you. My personal experience I haven't been in to many groups that had a tank that couldn't hold threat. Sure if I went tearing in there smacking and popping CD I'm going to steal it but that's where smart playing comes in. I would much rather let the tank naturally grab the threat and have a huge GOA dps boost for the other 3 dps'rs. This may sound greedy and selfish but really, throw a totem and help one guy or help three. In my opinion it's pretty simple answer.

But with that all being said since I have started doing heroics lots lately as I now have all my keys a new strategy has risen. Heroics are a totally new ballgame when it comes to totem dropping. I have found myself more often than not throwing whatever totem will make up somewhere were lacking, and no longer throwing what helps the most people. If the tank is having to pick up a lot of guys and having threat issues than the WF goes down. If the healer is having issues than the WOA goes down. If our dps is to slow than the GOA goes down. And sometimes I even alternate them. Throw the WF off the start until the tanks got some good threat then swap it out for GOA and dps the crap out of them, and if were starting to run low on health chucking a WOA totem, etc etc.

I think heroics you really have to watch the group and just make evaluations and don't just stick to one totem the whole time. Theres a reason we have a whole screen full of them. Monitor the situation and drop accordingly.

And don't forget to throw some Grounding totems if there is some stupid caster picking on someone till the tank can grab them up. It's cheap and can eat a lot of damage. Grounding has a cooldown but I find I can eat up every 2nd bolt (1eat, 2miss, 3eat). And if your bold enough and know how to kite to the tank you can toss earthshock on the 2nd cast. This will help pull them in closer to the tank but they will also turn on you so be ready to start taking the blows.

In some fights I actually have to use tranquil air more often - Hydross the unstable for example has her aggro reset quite frequently, and so the reduction in threat is more useful to dps than extra damage which they would have to prohibit anyway.

But generally sword rogues (not dagger rogues, poison + GoA is better for them), warriors and in particular retri paladins (yes I went there) get so much out of WF totem that it becomes the obvious choice when there's one in your group. I think WoA is my least valued air totem - I'll only use it if there's 4 casters including me in the group. GoA is basically the inbetween totem if you randomly get stuck with a hunter and other combos which dont benefit from WF. However, unless you have 3 classes which will benefit more from GoA than one single WF user, WF will be better.

Just restating the important stuff :P As a shadow priest, I see a noticeable increase in my threat ceiling when our tank gets Windfury, which is really important as even with Tranquil Air on me and Misdirect rotations on the tank I'm regularly riding our warrior for aggro in what 25-mans we've done. Windfury = win.
As to the OP, my view is that it wouldn't be worth it except in a melee-heavy group (main tank, DPS warrior, kitty, rogue, enhance shammy), and even then I wouldn't force it upon the shammy but merely bring up the possibility. Otherwise, it just doesn't seem like the mana drain and time requirements are worth it.

Edited, Sep 13th 2007 9:23am by lsfreak

My air totem of choice has always been WoA. This is not primarily due to my elemental spec, but based on the group composition. If there are three casters, include myself and the healer, then WoA gets dropped automatically. I'd prefer to buff three players than two. It just makes sense to me. Plus, I figure that with SoE any rogue, hunter, warrior or feral druid is going to benefit anyhow. If the tank has the ability to hold threat easier that's great, but not at the cost of lower DPS in general.

If there were aggro holding issues with a tank, I would consider the WF totem option. However, I would also be considering a tank replacement or a request that the party pay more attention to their KTM.

anyone here that can put the whole totemtwisting in 1 post? (or pm to me)
So i can post it on our guildforum, because we have 1 enhancement shaman who is raiding regularly and a couple of shamans leveling so this would be very helpful.

Since Aetien asked for one concise post on Totem Twisting, here goes.


"Totem Twisting"

or

"How I Learned To Buff Better (And Give Up My Earth Shock Addiction)"

--------------

"Totem Twisting" is the art of getting around the fact that Blizzard can't quite figure out how to put good totems in more than one element. Since WF Totem is by far the best choice for Rogue & DPS Warrior buff, but we (and Druids for that matter) would much rather have GoA, we need to either deal with no air totem buff or find a workaround.

The only known way to get around this fairly brutal limitation is by abusing the 9 second duration of the WF buff from the totem. The way to do this is to make a /castsequence macro that will drop WF then GoA in succession. The macro is as follows:

/castsequence reset=8/combat Windfury Totem, Grace of Air Totem

(You can also add a key modifier to reset the macro if you'd like, such as "alt". That would look like: /castsequence reset=8/combat/alt Windfury Totem, Grace of Air Totem)

Hit that macro twice every time it's up, and you'll notice a sharp jump in your melee damage, the downside being that you'll find yourself going OOM with a quickness if you try to fit in any sort of shock rotation. The totem rotation takes about 5k mana every 2mins, leaving you with enough mana to Flame Shock a couple of times, but that's about it.

The question you need to ask yourself is "Just how much damage am I really gaining from my shock rotation?" I bet if you're honest with yourself you will find that it is less than your whole party gains from added agility (especially with 2 or more Rogues or Druids).

Totem Twisting is something that I think every Enhancement Shaman should try at least once in a raid. If you find that you're added DPS from shocks is higher than the boost from GoA to the whole group, feel free to revert. But I know that in my raiding it certainly isn't.

- Zarniwoop of Greymane