Day 2: A new revelation!

Etsuko is now level 12. I will begin with a complaint all shamans are familiar with: The Call of Fire quest chain sucks the ass of life. Hey Blizzard, if you didn't know, walking around in your expansive world kind of sucks.

I am very prone to trying to min/max, and last night I was trying to max experience while minimizing walking time. This lead me to, as I had been doing for the first 9 levels, shock-kiting with my teeny earth shock. This is akin to covering yourself in delicious sauces, running by some raptors, and then pelting rocks at them while you run.

For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, you essentially shock something as you run by, and keep running, and when your CD is up, you jump, spin, cast your shock, then spin back to the original way you were running before you hit the ground. This way, you keep going in the direction you want to travel while earning some XP. This works well at the lower levels because mobs don't run as fast as you. When they do, I throw down my earthbind totem.

However, because I'm a big noob, last night I died a couple of times while doing this because I was determined to take the shortest path to everywhere I was going, which meant I ran through a lot of mobs. And you don't want to be stringing extra mobs around when you're doing that, it turns out.

It wasn't so bad though, because I had a revelation as I took a spirit rez at the Razor Hill graveyard: Dying and spirit rezzing is the best way to travel. The penalty at this level is 1 minute of rez sickness and of course doesn't really cost anything, especially with Big Daddy supporting her. So in the next few levels, I plan to die a *lot* more often.

Picking a build

Before I have done any investigation into what Elem shamans are supposed to be working towards, what kind of equipment is out there, I have made a very rough Elemental build. I can afford to be elemental because my guildmates seem to have tanking and healing covered with their pallies.

The nitty gritty. The aim of this build is to have really good PvE viability without being gimped in PvP (it is a PvP server, after all). It really bugs me that I basically have one floating point in the resto tree that I can't decide what to do with. The main consideration in the Elemental tree is whether I want 3/5 Reverberation & 2/3 Eye of the Storm, 3/3 Call of Flame 2/3 Eye of the Storm, or 5/5 Reverberation.

Basically, I made the decision like this:

The usual rotation for Elemental Shamans in group settings is:

0s: Lightning bolt
2s: Lightning bolt
4s: Lightning bolt
6s: Lightning bolt
8s: Lightning bolt

If you add in Shocks, it would look like:

0s: Shock
1.5s: LB
3.5s: LB
5.5s: LB
7.5s: LB
9.5s: LB
11.5s: Shock

With 3/5 Reverberation, it now condenses to:
0s: Shock
1.5s: LB
3.5s: LB
5.5s: LB
7.5s: Shock
9.0s: LB
11s: LB

It's very situation, but my gut feeling is that fire totems could get troublesome in a lot of environments. 5/5 Reverberation seems to have just a wasted affect considering the GCD.

In the beginning, there was...

What:
A couple of guildmates from Dominicide decided that it would be kooky and fun (maybe just fun) if we created a new guild consisting of only Paladins and Shamans. Having no interest in pallies whatsoever (my main is a feral druid, so a tankadin was out of the question, and I hate healing), and since I had a great deal of fun levelling my 12th level Draenei Shaman on Lightninghoof, I rolled one up.

When:
I joined Yesterday. Currently it is patch 2.2.3

Where:
Horde-side, Twisting Nether (US). The guild is called Shocks and Seals.

Who:
Etsuko, current level 9 Troll Elemental Shaman
Her name means "Joyous child" or something like that.

Why:
I needed something new and exciting to do, and quite frankly the people who started or are members of this guild are pretty entertaining, so I thought I'd give it a try!


And thus, our story begins...