Shaman is the worst healer for ranked until you get full sovereign. Be prepared for that. With full sovereign you will have a slight edge against burst oriented setups due to having more panic buttons (crit shield, shrug it off).
Some tips for people who know the basics (most of them apply to Archmage as well.)
- Watch your hots. Shaman is the only destro healer that uses enchantments as hots. Meaning that a typical order setup with SM & KOTBS can remove your hots fast. In that case you need to adapt to a direct heal centric heal style.
- Your AP drain is an important tool for AP management as well as crowd control. Test at the start of a fight if the opposing healers cleanse regularly. Just throw some debuff on them and see what happens. If they cleanse you need to cover your AP drain with said debuffs.
- In general, you want to AP drain a DPS to reduce incoming damage. However, some DPS classes have larger AP problems than others. You want to amplify the AP problems of AP intensive classes for example Slayers and single target WL. WE/WH/Sorc/BW in general have fewer AP problems.
- Maintain your basic hot on all tanks and DPS but don’t do the same with “Do Sumfing Useful”. Use the toughness hot only on the targeted or about to be targeted player.
- Figure out who the next target will be before HP start to drop. Good indicators for an about to be focused player are heal debuff, armor debuff and other strong defense debuffs like Drop da Basha/Numbing Strike.
At the upper end you will also need to watch the punt immunities of the tanks. For equally matched groups nothing dies through guard. Typically.
- Run away from Rune Priests. If a RP starts to run in your direction, he probably wants to stagger you. Just run away. He will probably still stagger you in the end but it will either delay any coordinated action or it won’t be in sync with it. Meaning that you can still throw out your panic buttons before you’re useless for 6 sec.
Renown
Futile Strikes 4
Deft Defender 4
Crit heal 2
Gear
Full Vanquisher/Triumphant until you have at least 6 pc sovereign. After that its full sovereign until the end. I use the scenario staff due to AP management issue but you could make a case for the fortress staff.
Builds
6pc Sov Build
RR70 Build
For people interested: I have uploaded quite a lot of 6on6 (solo and group ranked) for shaman and archmage perspective both in vanquisher and full sovereign gear on youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmj9TZ ... w/featured
As for my expertise... well you can look it up yourself