Oh help me Jeebus! I don't know where to spend my TalentsFollow

Okey, so I'm Now level 21... I've had talent points available to me for 11 levels now. I've not spent a one. I've looked the trees up and down and I honestly havn't the slightest clue what I want to do with them.

With my hunter it was easy, there's certain things I use every battle, so I enhanced those. But now with my shaman... well I never seem to fight the same way from day to day. I find that sometime I go heavy on the melee side, sometimes I'm more in a totemic mood... and then some nights I get asked to be pri healer in an instance.

So should I try to focus on one thing, or should I spread my points out evenly across the trees? Would it be less powerful if I were to spread them as opposed to focusing?

Oh I'm so torn apart I don't know what to do! I don't want to be lvl 60 with 50 unspend talent points!

First, decide what you want to do with your character. PvE or PvP? Solo or group? That will decide what you need to focus in.

For PvE solo, you want to strengthen your self healing and your melee, with focus on your melee. A good build for that is to put 21 in restoration (for NS) and 30 in enhancement. PvE solo doesn't tend to use too much of the elemental line, it just isn't mana efficient.

For PvE group, you're going to be casting a lot of heals. The above build is fine, and going even further into restoration is also a good plan.

For PvP solo, its all about shock damage for burst dps. In fact for PvP in general, 15 points in elemental for reduced shock cooldown is just about necessary. Opinions differ here, but good builds are 30 elemental/21 restoration (NS plus elemental fury and a lot of elemental skills), 20-23 elemental/7-10 enhancement/21 restoration (NS, improved ghost wolf, possible improved lightning shield), and 31 elemental/20 enhancement (elemental mastery, elemental fury pumping out burst damage and thundering strikes/flurry to boost melee dps). Really for solo PvP you *need* improved ghost wolf, so the last 2 are strongest.

For PvP group, you tend to use the same builds as above. IGW is less important, the shocks become even more so.

Tidal and totemic focus are both rather useless. People take them because they want to walk up the restoration tree a bit and the other options are even more useless. The shock talents and elemental focus are nice in PvP, but rather weak in PvE (in PvE you tend to get far more damage from lightning shield and melee than shocks, if you shock a lot you'll end up with high downtime).

You have your talent order mixed up a bit. Tidal mastery is a requirement for NS, not ILHW. If you want NS, you need to get it. If not, there's not much call for it.

Edited, Wed Jan 19 19:11:18 2005 by Javariel

No, you aren't the only one, NS is my favorite talent by far. I ignored it for a while and then re-speced to get it and it was probably the best move i've made. It's save me more times than I can count.