The Game Dame

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If you keep up with the forums, you’ll see that Blizzard has posted some of the changes that will be implemented in patch 3.1 (release date unknown). For those of you who don’t, I’ve copied the Shaman changes here, with my comments.

Chain Lightning – now jumps to 4 targets but does less damage. We wanted to make the distinction between Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning more clear.

• I don’t really get what Eyonix means by saying that the distinction between LB and CL is not currently clear. I mean, what’s to get confused about? One hits multiple targets, the other one doesn’t. It’s not rocket science, people. Adding an extra target doesn’t make it more different. I don’t really like this change because the odds against facing multiple mobs increase along with the number of mobs. That means you’ll need to hit two targets more often than you’ll need to hit three, and so on. There’s no way, even with four jumps, that shamans can compete with other AOE damage classes — even at its fastest it takes too long to cast and it costs over 1/4 of your base mana (again, without buffs, etc.). I’d rather they keep it the way it is. 

Storm, Earth and Fire – this talent now increases all damage done by Flame Shock, not just periodic damage.

• Currently this talent improves the periodic damage from Flame Shock by 20/40/60% so, although Eyonix’s comment doesn’t say how much the base damage will be improved, I’m going to assume it’ll be by the same amount as the periodic damage. At level 80, Flame Shock’s initial burst damage is 500 (without buffs or other enhancements), which means that will change to at least 800! 

Spirit Weapons – now reduces all threat, not just melee threat.

Unleashed Rage – reduced to 2 ranks, now also increases your critical strike chance with melee attacks by 1/2%.

• These talents are too far into the Enhancement tree for me to have them specced, but I can’t see any shamans being upset with reduced casting threat or added crit and three extra talent points.

Totem streamlining: The Mana Spring and Healing Stream Totems have been combined. The Disease Cleansing and Poison Cleansing Totems have been combined.

• This change surprises the heck out of me but I gotta say I love it! Still, it leaves me with quandary. When there are two shamans in a group, one will drop Mana Spring and the other will drop Healing Stream as their standard water totems. If you have no need for disease/poison cleansing, the only other water totem is Fire Resistance and sometimes that’s just not necessary when fighting mobs that use physical, frost, arcane, etc. damage. So the big question is: Will the new mana/healing totem stack? I doubt it. Now if only they’d replace Sentry Totem with something more useful…

We are also working on giving Enhancement and Elemental more PvP utility.

• I’m not much into PvP, as most of you know, and Eyonix’s comment is quite vague, but it would be great to see some improvements here. I hope it means getting a way to avoid stuns. I might even play PvP if I felt I had at least half a decent shot at winning a one-on-one match.

Of course, there will be people wishing for changes that aren’t listed. For example, there’s nothing here except the totem streamlining that helps Resto shaman. But at least we’re not getting badly nerfed. All in all, I like these changes for shamans, so I say bring on the patch!

Shamans were given a free (forced?) respec today as part of the changes in Patch 3.0.8. My previous build was Elemental with some smatterings in the Resto tree so that I could be more efficient at off-healing. Turns out my guild is full of brilliant healers and other DPS hybrids who have more healy power than me, so I decided to ditch the pseudo-resto posing and just try to max out my DPS.

I liked what I saw in the first few levels of the Enhancement tree so I specced 14 points there instead of Resto. Respeccing plus the good things this patch brings for Elemental Shaman left me with some hefty improvement on my spellpower numbers, especially crits. Prior to the patch I’d been averaging 4500 on Lava Burst crits, but now I’m averaging close to 6000, with 6500 not that unusual. Wowser!

Sorry for not being able to link a live build. Seems that neither Blizzard’s nor Wowhead’s talent calculators have been updated yet so I had to take a screenshot.

My haste is now off the charts, too. I don’t even really need to wait for Lava Burst to cool down before using it (although I usually do to get some more damage out of Flame Shock).

When I used Elemental Mastery today, I noticed that it had changed. It stays up longer now, almost as if the buff is only timed now and doesn’t count how many spells you cast during the time (before you could only get the effect on 2 spells). I still see a counter on the buff but I don’t see the buff go away before the timer is up. I wonder if this is a bug or the new way the spell works now. Anyone see it in the patch notes? I missed it, apparently.