Why Shaman? Ideal dungeon dps pick for Clerics. Competitive & flexible st/ aoe hybrid with nice run speed and utility.
When 61 Shaman? On level 60+ It's a top shredder for Clerics and best used whenever you need something flexible and mobile.
On level 70 it also becomes 'painfully easy' so a #1 in the game to provide value while staying accessible.
1H or 2H? 2H is okay but try to get a totem from tdNM 1st (any version will do) Shaman always pursues a totem combo- you will feel the difference.
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Buffs: Furious Assault | Vengeance of the Winter Storm | Glory of the Chosen
There are three versions which do practically the same damage:
61 Shaman 10 Druid and then
5 points in either Oracle or Sentinel (f2p) for Spellpower. (Runeshaper is outdated)
Sentinel is the free2play version so I use this as an example. Healing Breath also is great utility everywhere (can prevent wipes)
Going with Oracle would simply ignore Bolt of Light. Insignia of Blood is a fully passive proc.
Free to play:
Spoiler:
Shaman tree f2p.jpg (272.07 KiB) Viewed 9093 times
Same buffs and basics as the normal version.
Only change: You want to use BOLT OF LIGHT (Sentinel) every 30 seconds on your active target (also before Deep Freeze)
All the other details below carry over.
Basics: Magical attacks buff your next physical attack by 30% with Frostbite. However, legendary changes give such a huge bonus to magical damage that Massive Blow is the only physical attack worth bothering with.
Every weapon attack proccs your Vengeances. Vengeance of the Winterstorm (snowflake) damage gets doubled with the Frozen Wrath dot active.
Frozen Wrath gets refreshed by Punishing Strike (65 Mastery)
Eruption of Life (green) proccs bonus damage on the target when attacked.
So Shaman usually wants to apply a couple ''carpet'' dots & debuffs to get the best value from its big hits.
This makes the opener/ switch to new targets the most ''complicated'' part. It is definitely worth practicing this since besides that, 70 Shaman more or less plays itself.
Macros:
Spoiler:
Those are mostly situational alterations and burst prep. It really is #main 90% of the time so don't panic
1) Eco (To not waste big cd's on unbuffed or nearly dead targets)
#show Deep Freeze
suppressmacrofailures
use Reliquary of Ingenuity
cast Massive Blow
cast Deep Freeze
cast Glacial Strike
cast Jolt
cast Icy Blow
cast Frozen Wrath
cast Ekkehard's Grasp
cast Rage of the North
Massive Blow: Your hardest hitting attack. Always crits with 100% damage done AGAIN as 3 second bleed.
Glacial Strike: Next strongest attack.
Jolt: Unexciting hardhit which does more damage after crits (Massive Blow guarantees the bonus)
Icy Blow: Quite potent default ''spammer'' which also buffs all magical damage by a lot-
Punishing Strike: Physical ranged attack, not worth chasing Frostbite for it. Its main purpose is to refresh FW and apply the druid's Combined effort debuff.
EoL: Eruption of Life. Debuffs the target for 20 seconds to proc extra damage called Life Surge.
Single target:
Spoiler:
Opener as used on a practise dummy/ boss
Numbers are the macro numbers from above.
From range-> Bolt of Light (Sentinel), Oracle has no extra action.
Fervent Strike > Icy Blow > #6 EoL Macro x2
> #4 DF Macro for Massive Blow > #5 ROS Macro for Glacial Strike (or any magical attack)
> #3 Main Macro 10 times (Massive Blow > Jolt > Icy BLow x4 > Massive Blow > Glacial Strike > Jolt)
> #2 Ps MAcro for Punishing Strike to refresh the Frozen Wrath dot
(See video)
From now on your will mainly use the #3 MAIN macro. Refresh EoL, Fervent Strike, Frozen Wrath (Bolt of Light) on demand.
The opener is designed to get the best buffs up while being compact enough to fit the whole Deep Freeze block into your 15 second Omnox- Trinket uptime. Ps before Deep Freeze gives too little bonus and just delays your best cooldowns.
- Fervent Strike - Icy Blow - Rage of the North + Frozen Wrath - Eruption of Life - Deep Freeze + Massive Blow - Furious Assault + Glacial Strike - Massive Blow - Jolt - Icy Blow x4 - Massive Blow - Glacial Strike - Punishing Strike - (Spam away and refresh)
The only complicated part is lining up your cooldowns and buffs for followup Deep Freeze- blocks. Best you reference the video for it to get an idea.
Massive Blow- and to ideally get 3 MB per Deep Freeze is the priority so avoid delaying DF if MB is ready. Glacial Strike is not worth delaying DF for (though lineups are preferable) hence the #eco macro.
Thanks to Shadowlion for questioning the value of clipping Brutalize by using MB. Turns out, using MB GS MB only misses one Brutalize tick but allows you to replace one Jolt with one more GS within the DF block.
1x Brutalize Tick + Jolt < 1 GS+Gs dot.
AOE:
Spoiler:
Vengeance of the winter storm: Procs on the target attacked by a weapon attack (almost everything in your arsenal). It's damage is doubled on targets with your Frozen Wrath dot active.
Damage benchmark- 100k / 200k
Vengeance of the primal north: Procs on the target hit from a weapon attack and +4 targets. (5 Avalanche Strike hits = 25 Primal North)
(No damage bonus from Frozen wrath)
Damage Benchmark- 80k (x5)
So on 3 targets or more, Primal North starts to run ahead.
2-4 Targets as found on the Tartaric depth Council:
Proceed with the single target rotation but replace the #3 MAIN macro with the #7 CLEAVE macro. It replaces your Jolt and Icy Blow with Avalanche Strike, hitting 5 targets.
You may now manually refresh Icy Blow for its massive 20 second buff.
Feel free to use one Strike of the Maelstrom to spread the Frozen Wrath dot and enhance Vengeance of the winter storm procced by Avalanche Strike.
99% of the cleave situations still have a priority target to focus down.
DO NOT use Avalanche Strike while having Rage of the North (crit buff) up. Avalanche and Maelstrom eat stacks/ hit that means they can eat the whole buff in 2 swings.
5+ targets as found on Raid trash or dungeon mass pulls:
Get the buffs from Fervent Strike and Icy Blow.
Buff Vengeance of the Primal north and ''spam'' Avalanche Strike (ca. 2.5m/ sec) with occasional Massive Blows (2 mil Massive Blow+ 2 mil dot > 3 mil aoe)
Optional: 1x Frozen Wrath > 1x Strike of Maelstrom and proceed with the above.
How FW spreading works: You need to hit a target with active Frozen Wrath with Strike of Maelstrom. FW will be spread around the target, where you stand or what else your Maelstrom hits does not matter, you only 'tag' a centered, affected target with it.
Know that the physical Strike of the Maelstrom does indeed benefit from Frostbite and Shamans used to alternate it and Avalanche Strike in the past, However, legendaries now buff the magical Avalanche damage so much that Avalanche 24/7 is the go -keep it simple here.
You can also use your Deep Freeze cd to protect allies with it's stun.
ONLY use Rage of the North on raw aoe when you have the freedom and time to ''waste it''. Avalanche Strike will consume 5 stacks at once!
Then ideally use it for a Frozen Wrath + Strike of Maelstrom (after FW+IB) to spread 100% critical Frozen Wrath. However this barely means 5 million for 1 sec gcd and Rotn best is lined up with Deep Freeze. Overall, stay away from combining aoe spam with your Rotn+DF.
Fun Fact: A proper ST opener with all cds can do more damage than Avalanche spam and more often than not, even aoe pulls have priority targets to focus (Legio transporter)
1H + Totem (Tenebrean Gear of the Overlord) prefered:
The animation and ability delay of 2h weps is slow af and causes DF to only affect 9 abilities all the time (this is a problem ever since); with the last DF ability being a GS or MB, this is a noticeable loss. Also 2x Stats runes scale better in raids while the Mace +OL totem combo grants almost the same base stats as the 2h Eternal.
The Tenebrean Equation completely ignores any damage modifier and will continue to hit with an average of 20k even with DF running. (which is bad lol)
Example: Dummy dps at 81.5k SP will have Teneb at ca. 0.3%. 414 SP of 85k is 0.51% (+ scaling/ multi effect)
The DF macro has DF BELOW MB for that reason. Even if MB activates before DF, it will only hit ca. 0.4 seconds later- enough time to get DF on target.
Mechanics to consider:
- Rage of the North increases the crit chance over cap; 55% crit + 10 Stacks = 155% crit. (so 4 Stacks is still ~100%)
- Massive Blow scales 1 spell crit stat like 0.65 spellpower, but ignores crit% - not consuming RotN stacks and not losing boni from the Steady Assault mastery. It takes so much from Spell Crit, that a 6k crit pot acts like a 3900 sp pot and naturally explodes with Bards (5%all stats double dipped by MB)
Massive Blow dealing cam 30% of your damage, frequently used crit pots effectively gain ~(very roughly)+1k SP.
- EoL, Frozen Wrath and Lightning Hammer used within the 100%RotN frame will crit 100%.
- Off gcd abilities in one macro will cause an additional artificial igcd between ogcd's, this does not occur when using ogcd's right after each other manually. -> relying on FW + DF in one macro will cause lag-like delays.
- One second gcd is not one second in real time. One sec gcd ~ 1.1 secs; 1.5 sec gcd ~1.6 sec. This is due to latency etc. If you watch closely you will notice a little hiccup lag in between 2 abilities on the 'gcd clock'. As a result, a 15 sec dot does not last 15 gcd's but only 14-13 and it just gets worse from there.
- Frozen Wrath ticks when applied, then every 3 seconds and as it runs out for 6 ticks total. Refreshed by Ps it also ticks and resets its tick-timer. Ideally you hit Ps right after the timer hit the 2 second up time left. That way you get 2 consecutive ticks and a slightly faster FW tick rate overall. But anything between 2-0 sec - and even refreshing it early if the cd lineups of Massive Blow and Glacial Strike demand it is fine really.
No Lightning Hammer and Ps in the opener:
- They are very low in the priority list and do not grant enough dps for how much they delay everything. Later on you can weave them in more smoothly while the money attacks are on cooldown.
- Lightning Hammer is only worth considering 5 seconds before a consecutive Deep Freeze. 1 LH does not more than a simple Icy Blow (but has 15sec to lose value from immunes or quickly dying targets). However, used 5 sec before DF has its highest lightning ticks (L sanction style) during DF, giving DF +0.5 of an ability to buff and making Lightning Hammer outperform an Icy Blow by 20%. We are talking + 200k dmg every 60 seconds. This is by no means mandatory. Definition of cookie cutter.
Ekkehard's Grasp instead of Lightning hammer as ranged spammer:
- Your Soul Collector mastery makes Ekkehard's Grasp apply Frostbite.
- Lightning Hammer + Lightning does more total damage than even Icy Blow but spamming 2 in a row already deletes any gain
- If you care about damage on that level, simply use a manual LH or Inquisitor
Crit Bottles = Spellpower.
Shaman (And Runeshaper) Are the ONLY ones making use of Crit pots. When any build chugs a crit pot, they get less than 0.5% crit since tehy will already be soft caped.
But Massive Blow (and Rune of Smiting) take Spell crit x0.65 like Spellpower.
So this
With it's +5400 Spell crit for 15 seconds effectively gives Massive Blow + 3.510 Spellpower!!!
REliquary and Prophetic pots give 6k spell crit but they are way more expensive. The visionary pots only take ressources (platinum and Xarthian Extracts) that are in overabundance anyway. Just ask around, most people sit on thousands of Xarthian plants and have no use for them.
The Reliquary is basically a flatrate 6k pot that does not get consumed but it's cooldown is long enough that you still want extra bottles anyway.
Recommendation for solo play and leveling:
61 Shaman 15 Druid 0 Oracle/0 Sentinel
Skip legendary Deep Freeze for getting both Legendary FS and Feary. Legendary Deep Freeze almost never sees value on solo plays (so that L. Glacial shield even becomes better) while still ''being there'' as normal Version anyway.
Please do point out mistakes, overlooks and ideas.
