Some tips for battleground healing: Shamans

Coming soon: Druids
Coming eventually: Priests

Shamans make excellent battleground healers for a lot of reasons; back before the expansion we were great in AV and okay in WSG, but because of our lack of instant heals, we had trouble with other battlegrounds (or at least I did). But with the addition of Riptide, we can be pretty effective in any situation.

General tips
1. Earth Shield yourself. For a long time I advocated putting Earth Shield on someone else, and I still do in Alterac Valley most of the time — for the boss fights, for example, or if you are way in the back and none of the other team are getting to the healers through the DPS. If you are the only healer with your side's flag carrier, Earth Shield the FC. But in the other battlegrounds and situations, you just do not have enough protection to make putting Earth Shield on someone else worth it. If you go down, you aren't healing, and Earth Shield will help keep you up, as well as cut down on pushback if you've talented for it (and if you're mostly PVP healing, you should talent for it).

2. Don't forget your totems. They're not as useful in PVP as in PVE, but they can be pretty effective. If a hunter or warlock sets a pet on you and switches to another target (which seems to happen a good 80 percent of the time in my experience), drop a Stoneclaw Totem. If there's a melee'r on the other team running around taking out totems, keep dropping it because it will stun them and that's funny. Elemental totems can be pretty effective if you're short on people at a graveyard, flag or tower and get rushed by a group. Earthbind totem kicks ass in the WSG flag room.

3. Don't limit yourself just to healing. Farsight can help out in Arathi Basin or Eye of the Storm to see what's going on at another flag/tower. A lot of shaman abilities can prevent damage and can be really helpful in, say, Warsong Gulch. If you're with your flag carrier, drop Earth Shield and a Riptide on him, then Hex one follower and Frost Shock another, drop Earthbind Totem, etc. so he can get away. Your healing should take first priority, but if you can tangle up the other team a bit without losing your healing target, do it.

4. Shift + V. In PVP, you can't really afford to be staring fixedly at raid frames — you have to be able to glance back and forth between the fight and your tools. Shift + V shows all of the health bars above the heads of your teammates. While it's kind of obnoxious at first, it makes it much easier to see who needs a heal quickly while monitoring the battle and glancing around for any potential threats.

5. Don't be upset when someone dies. In PVE, the goal is to keep your team up through the fight because enough deaths mean a wipe. In battlegrounds, your goal is to keep as many of your team members up as long as possible while making progress toward the objective. A lot of times in battlegrounds, when a mana-dependent class goes OOM, they decide it's more effective or quicker to suicide than to fall back and drink. Sometimes the other team focus-fires on one person, or someone will suicide on purpose to take the heat off of other team members and give them a chance to regroup. This doesn't mean they're out of the fight — they'll be back sometime in the next 30 seconds, so don't freak out. The goal is to move forward or keep the other team from moving forward, and as long as you are doing that, deaths aren't a horrible thing — though the fewer the better, of course.

6. If you end up in a spot with a lot of line of sight issues, don't underestimate Chain Heal. I've occasionally managed to slam a heal to someone who won't stop going around the corner by hitting the closest person in my LOS with a Chain Heal, which then bounces around the corner. Even a few seconds of bought time can help.

Alterac Valley
Healing strategy is somewhat different for Alterac Valley than anywhere else. In AV, you're likely to have three groups through most of the fight — offense, defense, and recappers. As a shaman healer, you're more effective with either the offense or the defense groups; if no healers are with the recappers, you're better than nothing, but since those fights involve a lot of LOS issues in my experience (going into and out of towers, running all around), your only really effective heal will be Riptide (since your healing targets will go around corners right before you get off that chain heal or healing wave), and with the cooldown on it, a druid or priest would be better.

If running defense, Earth Shield yourself and set a healing focus — usually a melee person with a lot of nice PVP gear is a good bet. You'll have time to inspect them while you wait for the Alliance to show. Defense groups are usually smaller on Nightfall. Depending on who you face, you'll probably mostly be using Chain Heal and Riptide with the occasional Lesser Healing Wave thrown in. Don't worry if your defense team dies — the goal is to keep the other team's tied up as long as possible. If you can wipe them, awesome, but as long as you slow them down for a few minutes, you're doing your job.

If you're running offense, you'll probably be using Chain Heal almost exclusively; usually there are at least three healers with the offense unless you get totally screwed on raid makeup, so just watch the melee folks and try to chain heal them for as much effective healing as possible. Throw a Riptide or Healing Wave on a fellow healer if they need it or if an enemy breaks through to attack the healers, but mostly just focus on melee and let your druid or priesty pals take care of the casters — you can even plan it out ahead of time. Shamans should be taking melee whenever possible, because of Chain Heal. If I get in my usual group in the wee morning hours, we generally have me, a disc priest and a tree druid healing, so I take the melee, the priesty takes the casters and healers, and the tree druid HoT rolls. It seems to work out great.

Arathi Basin
Arathi Basin is my favorite battleground, but it sucks as a shaman because people don't see the rocks swinging about you and assume you're pewpew specced, I guess? Seriously, groups always fucking leave me alone at the lumber mill or something and I have to be like, "Um, guys? You fail at life, and I'm about to lose LM." And then I die.

But if you get a non-stupid group or at least one only tinged with failure instead of dyed in it, then it can be a blast. Why? Because good groups fight on the flag, meaning you can run back a few yards and spam chain heals the whole time, and everyone ignores you. It's kind of awesome. It's also pretty fun if it's just you and one other person (my favorites are mages or warriors), because you can just heal heal heal them, and then when focus turns on you heal heal heal yourself, and then when it switches back to your partner heal heal heal them some more, until you run out of mana or they're all dead. And my gear SUCKS but it still usually ends with them all dead before I go OOM. So I like it.

I don't have much in the way of individual strategy to offer here, except that in AB, your Earth Shield should never, never be on anyone but yourself, and if there are AOE'rs on the other side, run away a tiny bit so that they can't hit you and your healing target(s) at the same time. Also, Tremor Totem is very nice if there are priests, warriors and warlocks on the other side. <3 Tremor Totem.

Warsong Gulch and Eye of the Storm
These are pretty simple. Either: a.) stay at a tower/in your base and heal the people there, or b.) follow the flag runner and keep them healed. Use your totems to good effect — these are battlegrounds where totems can come in super, duper handy. Frost Shock too. Only ever put Earth Shield on yourself or a flag carrier. And beware of line of sight issues. Really, everything else that might be useful has pretty much been covered already.

The main thing about these battlegrounds are that they are the ones where it's most likely you'll have to throw out the occasional DPS and not just straight heal. Watch your mana and make sure that you're not ignoring healing altogether, especially if you're resto rather than a hybrid spec, because all those death knights and ret pallies can do way more damage than you. But if you're not seeing a lot of damage or even a lot of spikes in damage, take a second here and there to throw out some Chain Lightning, and use Hex whenever the cooldown's up for CC help. Otherwise, use Riptide, Healing Wave and, if people are clumped close together, Chain Heal.

Strand of the Ancients
Honestly? I don't do much healing in SotA, nor do I go into it much anyway as I am working on the Conqueror title on both of my 80s. So more on this later, I guess?