The resto shaman leveling guide lives. However, much like actually leveling a resto shaman, this guide is taking its sweet time. If we wanted a race to level 80, we’d all just roll paladins and apply some padding to our forehead. Today, lets look at levels 30-39.
In this range, you can still comfortably heal as an elemental shaman (although mana will increasingly become a concern), and that will greatly speed up your leveling time outside of instances. If you prefer to level as resto, you’ll want talents looking something like this at level 39. Note that we’ve only picked up two points in Ancestral Healing for now. It’s a great talent, but we can get more bang for our points with Purification, so we’ll come back to fill that one in later.
For an elemental build, try something like this. Most elemental talents are going to focus on pure damage. Unrelenting Storm will improve your mana regeneration a bit, and at this level, anything helps. You’ll have to cast more healing spells to top people off, since they are hitting for less than a true healer, and your spells will also cost more mana, because you’re missing out on some of the mana reduction talents in the resto tree. But, you can definitely still heal as an elemental shaman if you want to get some quick instances in while you level.
Level 30 comes with a whole bunch of new talents. Astral Recall is one of my favorites. It’s the kind of spell that you miss when you are playing your other characters. The spell basically gives you a second Hearthstone on a 15 minute cooldown. With a minor glyph, you can reduce this to 7.5 minutes, which means you can pretty much get back to your Hearthstone location whenever you feel like it. Astral Recall can be great when you need to head back to town to train new spells or unload some materials on the AH, and you’ll quickly learn to love the added flexibility. In fact, if you want to you can destroy your Hearthstone to save bag space (you can get a new one from any innkeeper whenever you’d like).
Reincarnation is a class-defining shaman spell, more commonly known as “Ankh-ing,” after the reagent required to use the ability. Make sure to keep a stack of Ankh’s with you at all times, or grab the minor glyph. There is something pretty cool about getting a do-over every 30 minutes should you happen to die. The uses are endless. While questing, you can Ankh to avoid a long, annoying corpse run. In instances, you can give the tank another chance to keep those mobs off you and save a wipe. In PvP, you can surprise an inexperienced opponent and finish them off before they figure out how you’re alive again. I’ve even heard enhance shamans refer to Reincarnation as their threat-reduction ability, which is a nice way of saying enhance shamans die a lot.
Earthliving Weapon will be your new weapon imbue of choice. You’ll want to make sure to have this up when you heal, and keep Flametongue Weapon up while you are out questing. Failure to use the right weapon imbue will really hurt your healing or DPS ability, so get used to using the right imbue for the situation. Earthliving will increase the power of all your heals, and has a chance to proc a 12 second heal over time on any player that you heal. It’s basically a free HoT, which you never want to turn down, since it can help even out the damage that you need to heal through. The Glyph of Earthliving Weapon was recently fixed to do what the tooltip says it should do, and it is a decent option while leveling or even when raid healing at level 80.
You’ll also train Windfury Weapon at level 30, but you can safely leave that one off your bars unless you’re an enhancement shaman. We don’t melee stuff if we can help it, and we certainly don’t want to be planning for it by putting this on our weapon.
At level 30, make sure to complete the Call of Air quest so you can access your final totem school. This will allow you to train two new air totems: Grounding Totem and Nature Resistance Totem.
Grounding Totem is a great tool for PvP, although it can also see some ingenious PvE uses as well if you plan ahead and think a bit outside the box. The totem will basically eat the next spell cast against you or a party member, which means it can be a great defensive ability. It’s kind of like a little secret service agent that will take a bullet for you, because you are such a big deal. If you see the boss winding up a big spell cast that can’t be interrupted, try dropping Grounding Totem and see if you can’t divert the damage. This won’t always work in PvE, and frankly I don’t use the totem enough at level 80 to tell you when it is most useful, but have some fun trying this one out as you level and see what it can do.
Nature resistance, like your other resistance totems, can be very situationally useful, especially in raid encounters that have a high amount of nature damage.
Lets talk about the game-changing ability Call of the Elements. Back in my day, we had to drop our totems one a time, uphill, both ways, in the snow. You could write cast sequence macros for common totem setups, but they would still require four clicks, and four global cooldowns, to get all of your totems down. That was annoying, at best, and meant you either had to be judicious with your totem drops, or wait a full four GCDs before you could really start healing. Thankfully, Call of the Elements now allows you to predefine a set of four totems that will all drop in one GCD. Take advantage of this gift.
You also gain access to Totemic Recall, which allows you to quickly pick up all four totems and get some mana back in the process. Try to get in the habit of recalling your totems before dropping a new set while you are instancing. It’s a small thing, but managing your mana efficiently means less breaks to drink, which keeps everyone happy. Keep Totemic Recall on an easy to reach keybind so you can always quickly make those totems disappear when necessary.
While healing at level 30, your default totem set should probably be Flametongue, Strength of Earth, Mana Spring, and Nature Resistance Totem (for lack of a better option). At Level 32, you learn Windfury Totem, which should be your default Air totem for now. Like Strength of Earth, Windfury Totem isn’t going to do a darn thing to help you directly, but it is a great buff for the melee members of your group if you don’t have an enhance shaman around to drop their souped up versions. If you do have an enhance shaman, you can drop Stoneskin and Nature Resistance.
Level 32 also provides access to Chain Lightning, one of my favorite shaman abilities. I tend to think of shamans as easy going, laid back types. But, if you piss us off, we will shoot lightning at you and three of you friends through our fingers. So don’t push your luck. Situationally fun to cast when you want to help out with DPS while healing (although at this level, probably best to save your mana), and also useful while out soloing anytime you pull more than one mob. Crowd control is not a big part of the game right now, but be very careful around CC’ed mobs, as Chain Lightning is extremely good at jumping to sheep and making them no longer sheep.
At Level 34 you get Sentry Totem. Reading the Wowhead comments is infinitely more fun than anything you will actually do with this totem. I recommend just removing it from your bars or totem UI so you don’t accidentally drop it and get confused.
Keep in mind that I’m only discussing new abilities. You’ll still want to hit your class trainer at level 36, and every two levels, in order to train new ranks of your existing spells.
Finally, at Level 38 you learn Cleansing Totem. Enjoy this one for the next few months, because it is going away come Cataclysm. For now, it’s a great totem to drop anytime there are disease or poison debuffs going out. Every few seconds the totem will pulse and cleanse one of these debuffs from your party members, leaving your GCDs free for casting healing spells.
That’s it for levels 30-39. As you can see, most of your new toys are front-loaded at level 30, so enjoy hitting that milestone and learning how to use these new tools. In our next edition, look forward to a thorough discussion of Chain Heal, which really is as much fun as it looks. 
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[...] I forgot how much level 30 rocks. You get your last totem, the ability to throw down all 4 totems at once, the ability to recall totems for some mana back, Earthliving Weapon, Reincarnation, Astral Recall, and Nature’s Swiftness (if all your points are in the resto tree). You also get another glyph slot, which I have filled with Glyph of Earthliving. Make sure you pick up some Ankhs so you can use your Reincarnation (You can get a minor glyph to remove the requirement for an Ankh, but Glyph of Water Shield will be more useful to you). If you want a guide for leveling your Resto Shaman through the 30s, Wugan at Flow has written a good one. [...]