Today, my gentle snowflakes, we’re going to delve into one of the most intriguing, unique, and wonderful shaman healing abilities.

Meatballs.

Oh, they don’t call it Meatballs. No, they call it Earthshield.

But let’s be realistic. When cast, it surrounds the target with tiny, orbiting meatballs.

Meatballs = Earthshield. I can’t even imagine why they call it Earthshield – it looks neither like dirt nor like a shield. It DOES have a really incredible sound effect – a bit like overtaxed branches cracking and popping under pressure. But again, that’s not earth.

Meatballs it is.

So let’s take a look at the tooltip :

Protects the target with an earthen shield, giving a 30% chance of ignoring spell interruption when damaged and causing attacks to heal the shielded target for 270. This effect can only occur once every few seconds. 6 charges. Lasts 10 min. Earth Shield can only be placed on one target at a time and only one Elemental Shield can be active on a target at a time.

The tooltip is, specifically, for Rank 3. As always, I’m pretty much going to ignore the numbers – anything that changes with rank I’ll be sure to mention.

What does it Do?

Protects the target with an earthen shield
So right off the bat, we know that it’s a defensive ability. This isn’t offensive, nor is it a traditional heal. Let’s read more.

giving a 30% chance of ignoring spell interruption when damaged
Oho! Ignoring spell interruption, eh? That’s pretty handy. That’s one of the tricks that the priestly bubble has, and it’s a really nifty feature. Often, it’s overlooked in favor of the heal it offers – in my mind, this makes the spell MUCH more flexible. Your mages or warlocks taking a beating while you’re battling Illhoof? Toss this baby one of THEM, not the tank. They’ll appreciate the spell interrupt protection even more than the heals, I’d wager.

PvPing? Toss this on YOURSELF, giving you time to get that precious heal off.

Spell interrupt protection is vital, as any priest who has tried to get off a greater heal with an ogre attached to her casting arm knows.

and causing attacks to heal the shielded target for 270.
And now we come to the meat and potatoes of this uncanny healing spell. It’s a REACTIVE heal. Your initial cast isn’t what initates the healing – the spell is smart and only heals the target when they get hit. That’s pretty gosh-darned incredible, when it comes down to it.

Think of it like a land mine that only goes off when someone steps on it. This is one of my “cast it and forget it” heals that I adore so much.

This effect can only occur once every few seconds
Oh. Bummer. Well, you knew there had to be some small print in there somewhere. This isn’t BAD, mind you. It actually fires off pretty regularly, without too much delay between heals. But it does mean that my dreams of allowing my pallytank to gather up everything in the first hall of Heroic Shattered Halls, then dropping this reactive healing bomb on him are pretty well nixed. Slow and steady wins the race.

6 charges
It used to be 10 charges, and if memory serves, it got nerfed down to 6 because it was OP in PvP. They dropped the mana cost, too, so from my perspective, it’s a good tradeoff.

It does show that the buff isn’t limited by time (like a HoT), but rather by how many times it will fire. So instead of a single land mine, it’s six itty-bitty landmines, each waiting with both eagerness and patience for someone to bludgeon your beloved tank so it can explode with healy goodness.

Lasts 10 min.
Ten minutes is a pretty decent amount of time for a heal buff like this to last. It means that you don’t have to be paranoid about whether or not the tank is going to use all of the charges before the buff wears off – unless you have a lot of downtime, the charges will expire long before the timer does.

Earth Shield can only be placed on one target at a time
Yeah, well, we all saw that one coming. How cool (and totally overpowered) would it be to have this on multiple targets at once?!

A single target restriction is hardly mentionable, given the other benefits this heal has.

and only one Elemental Shield can be active on a target at a time
That means you can’t have two shaman stacking Meatballs on your tank, and putting this baby on yourself will wipe away your water shield buff.

Again, we all saw that one coming. Tanks with four tiny orbiting meatball landmines would absolutely dominate. I shed a tear for the carnage that could have ensued.

Extra Goodies
As always, not everything useful is in the tooltip.

Meatballs can crit. Unfortunately, it doesn’t proc Ancestral Healing when it does, but that’s still pretty incredible. I’m not sure if you buff your spellcrit before casting it, if each charge retains the original cast crit rating (that would be interesting to know), but since crit really isn’t a primary shaman healing stat (about on par with how important it is for priests, I believe, which translates roughly into ‘YMMV’) it’s not something that’s necessarily useful to know, so much as it is interesting. My assumption would be that it’s based on the stats at the time of casting, at least partially because of this next point.

Earthshield’s healing is affected by your +heal at the time of casting. This is definitely verified. If you want a particularly beefy Meatball (c wut i did thar?), make sure you slap any trinkets and shiny what-have-yous to boost your +heal before you cast it. If you’ve already used your trinket and the tank’s Meatballs are even halfway used up, I’d recommend recasting so you can net the bonus.

Aggro from the healing goes to the target. I’ll say it again, it’s like a sweet, sweet song. Aggro from the healing goes to the target. Bask in it. Swim around in it like Scrooge McDuck.

If you’re soloing, and happen to have to sets of gear, swap into your healing gear before you cast Meatballs, then swap back to your solo gear before you pull. That’s what we in “the healing biz” like to call a bait-and-switch technique. That’s right. We have a “biz”.

Downranking is super effective (as of this writing) since there’s no +healing bonus penalty. Same 26ish percent of your +heal goes to the Meatball, regardless of rank. That’s probably going to change with the WotLK though, bear in mind.

What it Doesn’t Do
It won’t do your dishes or make you dinner, but it just may kiss you sweetly and tuck you in at night.

This is yet another “smart” and wonderful spell in the shaman’s arsenal. It’s reactive and intelligent, and has a bad reputation for fooling the innocent shaman healer into thinking they can just roll their head around on the keyboard and be an effective healer.

While that may or may not be debateable when it comes to assignments in high end raids, let’s be realistic.

We’re not warlocks.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 17th, 2008 and is filed under Healers, Spell Review, ~ Vonya. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.