Addons: Shamans only

This post will be all about addons that make your life as (resto) shaman easier. I will start out with listing the addons I use for Shaman specific abilities, mainly addons designed for the shaman class and one non-class specific (NeedToKnow) I use for my resto/elemental needs. At the end of the post I will list a bunch of other shaman mods, with a little description if I have used them myself or just as a short link/comment if I’ve never tried them.

The addons I use:

Totem Timers + Weapon buff tracker in action

TotemTimers: This addon is my companion nearly since I started playing my shaman and one of the first addons I ever used. At this point it’s simply the best addon out there to manage totems (if you haven’t all your important totems key-bound and have fast fingers + good brain-muscle memory), the author really keeps it up to date and adds features requested by the community. I’ll sum up the features that I just love about this addon:

• All totems can be selected by hovering the cursor over the main button of the desired totems element and totems you never use can be left out completely (bye bye sentry totem).
• Duration left of the totem you did cast and how many people are not in range of your totem shown in red numbers.
• If you hover over a totem you can right click on a totem and select it as default totem (default are the totems shown as tiny items in the picture at the right side) without casting it. TT generates a castsequence macro that lets you cast all totems you selected as default with one button for the elements you desire. I don’t include fire totems in my macro because I always raid with an elemental shaman. So most of the time my castsequence macro is Totem of Wrath -> Healing Stream -> Stoneskin. If I need to drop e.g. Fire Resistance, I can right click on that one and the macro will change to Totem of Wrath -> Fire Resistance -> Stoneskin. Sounds complicated? It is not, the addon is really self-explanatory.
• A tracker for my weapon enchants comes with the addon that lets me watch the duration of my weapon buff and recast it with a click.
• Three other trackers are available: Shield on myself, earthshield tracker and tracking of reincarnation timer. I have all of those disabled, for shield tracking I use Shields Up and I see if I can reincarnate or not when I die, that’s soon enough.
• Buttonfacade and ractionbuttonstyler can make TT pretty.
• Totems can be saved as sets. I don’t use that feature, I just don’t switch between specific sets enough.
• Excellent additional module for enhancement shamans to manage your cooldowns.

Water Shield, check! Earth Shield, check!

Shields Up: I use this addon for shield tracking. It will display my number of water shield charges, number of earth shield charges and the current target of my earth shield. Text and sound alerts can be set if any of those shields expires. This is all the information I need for shield management and fits my needs better than the Totem Timers Trackers.

NeedToKnow: This is one of the best addons out there. And I’m very happy, that the author has picked it up again and released a 3.1 ready version. NTK lets you show colored bars to track buffs and/or debuff on yourself, target or focus. I have set it up to show Flame Shock on my target (but only if cast by myself) for when I play elemental or if I want to do some dps. It will also show Tidal Waves and its charges on myself. This is very handy to keep the buff up as often as possible and keep those hastened HWs/LHWs coming. Last but not lest NTK shows healing way on my focus target. If I heal a tank I set him as my focus so I can easily recast my earth shield on him. At the same time this allows my to watch the healing way buff on the tank /focus with NTK.

NTK showing healing way and TW buff

The addons I used:

Shaman Warning: This addon is all about warnings for yourself or your group. It can warn you if your shields or weapon imbues expires, it can warn your group if you drop Mana Tide. If you play enhancement it will show your windfury damage and much more. For me it just doesn’t give any additional information I absolutely need.

Yata: An excellent totem manager, but just not as often updated as Totem timers and with a Totem macro system not as well done as Totem Timers. When I last tested it after 3.1 it was really buggy for me but I have seen several updates since then. For me, the best thing about a totem manager addon is a well done cast sequence macro and quick access to all my totems, and Totem Timers just does that a tiny bit better.

cTotems tracking Mana Stream and Wrath of Air Totems

cTotems: This is just a totem timer with no more functionalty than showing the time left on your totems and destroying a totem with a right click. I really really like the look and stlye of this timer and if I could somehow disable the time management part of Totem Timers I’d use cTotems for timing issues.

sTotemTimers: Just a Totem Timer, but a very good looking one. All sAddons need some basic .lua knowledge with the exception of sThreatmeter2, a good omen alternative which has a GUI.

The rest:

Totem Timers/Managers:

• Totem Manager: Looks functional and gets updated often, but the visual look of the manager is just not my cup of tea.
• RaidTotems: Addon made by the author of Totem Timers that lets one person set up the which shaman has to drop which totem and send that information to all shamans using Totem Timers (=Pally Power for shamans). Nice idea, but as the choice of totem is mostly an issue of talent spec, I don’t consider something like that as necessary.
• MooTimers:  Simple totem timer.
• TotemBox: All your totems in a…box? Not so much a screen estate saver.
• Totem Caddy: Sweet manager for totems and some other shaman abilities. I’d have a hard time finding the right totem FAST with this system.
• TotemGuru: This addon will help you see which totems other shamans dropped so your raid has all shaman buffs available. I drop all my totems all the time just to make my buffs available for the raiders in my range regardless of what other shamans drop, so I don’t have any use for this addon.
• Call of Elements: Added this Totem Manager because it would be really a shame to leave it out of this post. CoE has been around forever, I think I even used it for a short time when I startet playing WoW.
• LunarSphere: Thanks for the Tip! Many people love those spheric addons where you can just put everything you need in a small sphere. I did never try it out so I don’t know how easy it is to set up. I used Totemus way way back ago, which is pretty much how Lunarsphere should look like if set up for a shaman, and I really enjoyed it back then. Totemus seems to be abandoned though.

Various Stuff:

• Ankh Up: Reincarnation timer/Ankh management with this LDB/FuBar plugin.
• ShockAndAwe: This is not a resto shaman addon but I have to mention it anyways: excellent enhancement addon to manage your cooldowns.
• shaman_hep: It’s not a addon but very cool anyway. It needs a combat log of a raid, some configuration and a perl interpreter and then it can calculate hep based on your combat log/talent spec for your gear and talent points. How cool is that?
• Full Moon: This is an addon that will watch important buffs/cooldowns etc. What I really like is that it has a module for all three shaman specs, so you’re set and ready no matter what spec you play.

Pro Tip: If you have an actionbar addon like dominos or bartender and omniCC to show cooldowns on buttons, you can do a lot of cooldown watching with an additional actionbutton bar with some 2-3 buttons. I have 4 buttons at the left of my character to watch riptide cooldown, NS cooldown and Healthstone/Herbalism self-heal. If I’m elemental this buttons will watch Lava Blast, Chainheal, Elemental Mastery and Thunderstorm. Often like that you won’t need an additional addon to watch crucial cooldowns and having cooldowns near the center of the screen is often better than at the bottom, where actionbars often sit.

How my UI looks right now (all credits go to Dawn and his UI compilation as well as his oUF layout ouF_slim):

Ulduar just looks very nice

Additional reading:

Elitist Jerks – Shaman Addons thread

Elitist Jerks – UI Thread

UI Compilations for shamans:

IshtaraUi

Menkt UI

Lancan’s UI

FavUI

Suggestions to complete this post are welcome, as always.