Totem Talk is the column for Shamans. A lot of healing and caster mail dropped is weird when you're enhancement and you're running with two priests, a mage and a warrior.
 
    Being a shaman, like the other hybrids, means that you end up picking a role and dedicating your time to it. You spend your talent points in one of the trees, run instances, PvP, and raid for gear to supplement that role, and you find yourself with lesser viability in other roles. Enhancement shaman can still cast healing spells, but they're nowhere near as effective as resto shaman's heals. Meanwhile, resto shaman can still put Windfury Weapon on his Hand of Eternity, and often does when healing in a BG. This should not be taken to mean that he can actually melee as well as an enhancement shaman, and the bonus spell damage on his healing gear does not make up for the gear and talents, much less experience, of an elemental shaman.

    This is more or less how it should be, but it's an error to ignore the other specs too much. One of the biggest mistakes when playing a shaman was to focus too tightly on the enhancement tree and not looking at the others: as a result, may be fairly ignorant of how shaman healing worked an oversight when start healing. There was another shaman who refused to spec out of the resto tree even though he wasn't healing any groups, meaning that he leveled exceptionally slowly. You can level resto, certainly, but you should look into a few points in elemental (in my opinion) if you're going to do that, just to give your shocks and spells some more bite and lower manna cost.

    One of the reasons to collect gear for all three specs, and to familiarize yourself with all three, is to ultimately be of more utility to your guild once you start raiding. If your guild has the entire melee DPS in the world but is short on healers, then as many shamans before you it may be time for you to choose to be restoration to help them progress. A good guild will recognize that your heart may not be in it (even if you turn out to be really good at it) and will allow you to collect elemental or enhancement gear as well... heck, often there's not really another shaman along and you end up getting it anyway. Likewise, maybe your guild has all the healing they could ever possibly need and are interested in putting together a caster group with a mage or two, a moon kin druid, a warlock, and you in your elemental finery collected from various instances. Elemental shamans can help provide nice totem buffs (Wrath of Air and Totem of Wrath at once is a very nice combination, and manna spring doesn't ever hurt) as well as their own excellent DPS. Keeping current with the three talent trees means you can offer your guild the flexibility that playing a shaman is really all about.

    Some shamans like to keep their points spread out in order to emphasize the hybrid nature of their class. Frankly, this has always struck players as an awesome idea that the itemization doesn't do nearly enough to support. There's some nice synergy between the low level resto talents and an enhancement build, for instance... it's almost impossible to imagine an enhancement shaman who hasn't taken Nature's Guidance, for example. As a contrast, a starting elemental shaman might well begin raiding with 20 points in resto like so, and then throttle back Nature's Guidance as his or her gear caught up on +spell hit. But it's hard to see much in enhancement within those 20 points that's going to appeal to an elemental shaman, and as enhancement I always felt that Convection and Concussion, while attractive, ultimately just got in the way of getting up to Nature's Guidance as fast as possible.