A little while ago I did a post asking for help with my shaman. I read through everyone’s comments on the post and read a post on Power Auras, and made a few changes to Mynn (special thanks to Lash who took the time in game to help me figure out configuring power auras!). Drug was curious on how my shaman adventures would turn out, so I thought that I’d give a little update!
First, let me say that I have not completely re-gemmed yet. Most of my gems are SP/Haste, but I know that I should rock straight haste gems in my yellow sockets. I’m a’workin’ on it! Oh…and while I did enchant my boots since my last post, I got NEW boots that need a gem and an enchant still. I’m a’workin’ on that too! 🙂 Ok, now that we have that out of the way!
I made a few changes. Most notably, I picked up Power Auras and made some very minimal settings for things that I needed help with. Such as:
Keeping earthliving on my weapon. This was something that I absolutely sucked at doing. I’d go an entire instance/raid without realizing that I had forgotten to put up/refresh earthliving. That is why this particular setting is massive and “in my face”. It only comes up when earthliving drops from my weapon, and it will stay on my screen until I refresh earthliving. Needless to say, my absentee earthliving days are in the past 🙂
The next setting that I did was to let me know when Riptide was on cooldown. While I had previously thought that I did a fair job about incorporating riptide into my rotation, I was flat out dead wrong. I had apparently been a riptide failure! I just didn’t realize it until I had something pointing out how god awful I was at making sure I kept riptide active. The actual text in this shot is from MSBT, I need to go in and turn it off, as it’s repetitive and un-needed, I just havent’ done so yet.
Much like riptide, I never really noticed how much I let my earthshield fall off until I had something pointing out when it wasn’t up. Now, I have GRID set up to show me when earthshield is active on a target but in the heat of battle would often look and see that it had fallen off, and I wasn’t sure how long ago. I also really struggled at keeping it up when I was in 5 man settings and not using GRID. This bad boy pops up when earthshield has fallen off my party/raid and needs to me applied. Much like my earthliving reminder, it will sit on my screen until I refresh it.
And lastly, watershield! Just like everything else, I was shocked to learn how frequently I was letting this drop. This reminder acts just as my earthshield reminder above.
So, how did that work out for me?
Well, here are a couple of parses from raids I did with Mynn since my post, and making the changes to both my healing and adding a few power auras settings (you will find Mynn only in the 25N ToC portion of these parses, and the second parse provided had a fair few of our progression raiders healing with me, which means I was much lower overall on the meters, but my personal performance breakdowns were still much better I feel). Overall I was quite pleased with the changes. My healing shows a much higher diversification of spell usage, and much higher uptimes on both my earthshield and riptide usage. The higher uptime on riptide also meant I had more uptime on tidal waves, which was significant as well. And while I know there is a still a long ways to go, I feel slightly more confident in my abilities to heal as a shaman, and didn’t feel as if I was floundering around quite as much!
Mynn is still a project in the works, but one that I feel some improvement on and that I’m starting to enjoy a bit more! As always, any additional suggestions on how I can continue to grow and improve are welcome 🙂
Falling Leaves and Wings 
An alternative is to use Shields UP (http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/shieldsup.aspx) to track earth shield and water shield. The mod tells you how many charges you have left (useful when you know that you are about to have to renew it… or you might want to renew early) and it gives a text message in the middle of the screen and a loud “SPRONG” when a shield drops off. (Or you can use it in addition to POWA, can’t hurt.)
I had heard a few suggestions for the mod shields up 🙂 But, as I was going to experiment with PowerAuras on Beru I thought I’d set it up for Mynn as well. I’m happy with how it worked out, but I may check out that mod in the future.
Thanks for the tip! 🙂
I’ve given some thought into incorporating Power Auras into Virile’s UI. However, I’m generally scared to make large changes once I get used to something. So I haven’t taken the plunge yet.
Do you use Power Aura’s with Beru at all? If so do you like it?
I did set up some basic things on power auras with Beru. Nothing too fancy, but I have WG cooldown, SM cooldown, NS cooldown, Innervate cooldown and 60% mana set up.
I actually think I set more up for her Moonkin spec than I did for resto 🙂
It’s a little confusing to set up at first, but once you do a couple it’s really easy. I even got kinda fancy setting up Dannie’s with nifty things like timers!
To butt in, I do use power auras on my druid. So far, I only use a shiny little “burst” on my character to show me when clearcasting is active (HUGELY useful, I’ll then toss a LB). This setting persists for when I’m in cat form. I also use Powa in cat form for when I’ve built 5 combo points (a little red glow around my toon).
I use tellmewhen for 4 other “important” things in tree form: 1. Is wg available, 2. is swiftmend available, 3. is nature’s swiftness available and 4. is innervate available. (p.s. tellmewhen hasn’t been updated in a while, but there’s a fan update that works well http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info13173-TellMeWhenFanUpdate.html ) I don’t really want those things “front and center” with power auras since I don’t necessarily want to use them right when they come off cooldown like with riptide in the above example.
Actually, power auras is highly configurable, and you can place the icons anywhere on your screen 🙂 I just have them “front and center” on my shaman because that is where I wanted them for her as they are things I need to remember to use more, and they are hugely obvious reminders for me where I have placed them.
Most of Beru’s and Dannie’s reminders are by her castbar, just under GRID, and largely out of the way but somewhere I can easily see them.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure I see the value of running two mods that do almost the identical thing! 🙂 Perhaps you could play around a little more with your power auras so that you can place the icons where you’d like.
Will probably try to do that with Powa like you said Beru. No point in running 2 mods that can do the same thing. I set up Powa so long ago that it’s entirely likely it’s gone through changes that I’m not aware of since then to make it awesomer.
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C is for Cookie!
OMNOMNOMNOMNOM
Best way to improve Mynn would be race change to orc.
. . .
Need more Coog, honestly! How else am I going to get 3 people in a group when I hit 80 so I can’t get vote kicked with my non-epic gear?! LEVEL FASTER BALLBOY! ❤
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I was wondering if you could post the settings you used to set up Power Auras like you did. I like the icons, text etc you used and without having someone elses settings to copy I don’t have the first clue on how to set up my own. Thanks in advance!