Tips for leveling in Outland as a resto shaman

I'm about halfway to level 66 and can proudly say that, were I not so stubborn, I could have been at 70 weeks ago — but I have leveled Ahami to 65 and will level her to 80 as a resto shaman. From the moment she hit level 10, she has never been another spec.

And every time I go into AV and hit first or second on the healing charts with 200K+ healing at level 64 and now 65, or keep guildmates alive through a bad pull in a lowbie dungeon run, I don't really care. It's a good feeling. (Actually, it's a freaking great feeling when someone says, "Well, we're gonna wipe" on Vent and then we get through the pull without a single death. Mostly it's due to good tanks and CC, but I help!)

That said, leveling as a resto shaman gets extremely painful once you hit Outland. The mobs are tougher and hit harder, which slows you down like crazy, and with the patch changes, it's a bit easier to go out of mana, at least at this level. So here are a few tips I've been using for myself:

- Use Flametongue Weapon. Yes, we have our new, fancy weapon buff just for resto, and when you're healing instances or PVP, yes, use it. But when you're soloing, that extra damage from the flametongue buff helps a lot — more than Windfury, which does not proc regularly enough to be useful for us.

- Shields. You can really go three ways with this — lightning shield does extra damage, water shield gives you more mana, and earth shield keeps your health topped off. I personally was using earth shield until the patch; now I am using water shield and hitting riptide on myself when I start getting low, but I don't think this actually helps me save mana. No theorycrafting to back that up, just a gut feeling.

- Be careful when using magma totem. In many areas of Outland (and even in Felwood and Winterspring) mobs are pretty thick but a good number of them are not aggressive. If you use magma totem and a sporebat or talbuk wanders in range, then you've just added another mob to deal with.

- For mana conservation, tag the mob with a flame shock, drop a totem, and keep that up, and then just melee them down. Going this route, you can take on several mobs at a time (I can manage 5 or 6 level 64-66 mobs at a time), but it will go fairly slowly.

- If you are more into speed, bring along 3-4 stacks of water and a bunch of mana pots because you will need them. You will go much faster if you are working like a caster and spamming lightning bolts (especially now that interrupts seem much less devastating than pre-patch) than trying to be an enhancement shaman, unless you have an enh/resto hybrid build. Your best bet with this is to take on no more than two or three mobs at a time and then sit and drink — or, and this seems quicker to me, just nab one at a time several in a row. Drink whenever your mana pool is about 5-10 percent. (This is my preferred method; it seems to go more quickly than the multi-mob M.O.)

Basically, leveling from 60-70 seems pretty much the same as leveling from 20-60, just slower and with more need to be aware of your environment.