Totem Talk is the column for shamans. With the new Random Dungeons and Dungeon Finder, healing has never been more in demand, and shamans find themselves faced with the dilemma: do I wait 10 minutes and go as DPS, or get instantly invited by being willing to heal? Matthew Rossi is impatient and terrifyingly willing to heal random strangers.
Ah, the Pick Up Group. Long a staple of our gameplay in WoW, Patch 33 revolutionized the way we do it with the new dungeon finder, giving us incentives to put up with fury warriors who rush the tank, ret paladins who forget to turn Righteous Fury off, and runs consisting of two DK's, a paladin, a warrior and a shaman where people ask the shaman if he's tanking. (Hint, he wasn't.) Other things the shaman will not be doing in a PUG include making a summoning portal, a mage table (it's got mage in the name what is wrong with you), casting combat res on the tank when he dies, summoning Army of the Dead (seriously, I can understand being frustrated that someone cast that and it dragged the trash around, but shamans do not generally summon forth armies of walking corpses), washing your laundry (that's just gross), making a pinhole camera, performing a complicated medley of Andrew Lloyd Webber's greatest showtunes (unless you catch me in a really good mood), or casting Divine Intervention
Sure, I realize these are all fine things, and it's a shame that the shaman or shamans in your group won't be able to do them. That being said, shamans do bring all sorts of fun things to PUG's. Things like hybrid magical/physical DPS, caster DPS, or healing, a plethora of totem buffs, a cornucopia of ancillary benefits like
Much of this comes down to common sense, of course. Shamans are fortunate in that they can be either healing or DPS at a time that healing is at a premium, of course. But it's good to keep in mind abilities like Hex, Earthbind, Frost Shock, Cleansing Totem and others are mostly not spec specific. Any shaman can drop a Cleansing Totem or a Tremor Totem, even a DPS shaman, to help out with poison volleys and fears and so on.
Shamans have a ridiculously wide toolkit, and while running a PUG it benefits the run if even the most focused DPS minded shaman is willing to sacrifice a little of that DPS to do things that buff and cleanse the group. You'd be amazed the runs I've done where a DPS shaman outright refused to drop a Cleansing Totem to help, for example. Putting a shaman's spell interrupt off onto its own cooldown with Wind Shear wasn't done so we could forget we had one. Make a focus macro if you have to, but don't just ignore the Purge button because it means you'd have to switch targets (as a healing shaman, I hate having to purge Nether Power, but sometimes I'm the only one in the 10 man who can do it). Basically, as a shaman, you often have a solution to a strange problem. Please don't forget or refuse to use them.
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