Originally Posted by Toastradamus
Ah, good point, I forgot about patch note lag. I guess I should also clarify that I don't think elemental won't see changes (it is early alpha, after all), just that I was thinking enhancement and restoration weren't even ready for alpha testing and there would be some dramatic changes in store for them in the next patch or two. But you are probably right and for the most part they'll just tweak what's there for a while before deciding if things look good or need serious revamping.
Regarding the dramatically increased mana cost of our abilities: from what I've seen it looks like something really funky is going on with all of the shaman spells. Our mana costs seem to be going up way more than other classes' for comparable spells, and our effects are going up less. Here are a couple of examples:
Lightning Bolt:
TBC: 300 mana, 603 avg dmg, 2.01 dpm
WOTLK: 685 mana, 863 avg dmg, 1.26 dpm
Frostbolt:
TBC: 345 mana, 655 avg dmg, 1.89 dpm
WOTLK: 505 mana, 830 avg dmg, 1.64 dpm
Lesser Healing Wave:
TBC: 440 mana, 1112 avg heal, 2.52 hpm
WOTLK: 965 mana, 1720 avg heal, 1.78 hpm
Flash Heal:
TBC: 470 mana, 1190 avg heal, 2.53 hpm
WOTLK: 775 mana, 2220 avg heal, 2.86 hpm
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One important thing to note about the heals: there is a known change going on with healing where the amount of available healing power gain from gear is going to drop considerably but the base healing of spells is being increased to compensate. Probably something to do with curbing downranking and/or preventing +healing scaling from getting out of hand, I dunno, ask a healer. Just don't read too much into the fact that Frostbolt damage is going up 26% while Flash Heal healing is going up 86%.
--- Some possible explanations: - My quick checks did not include talents (sorry, I just noticed the relative power loss compared to other classes while typing this post, up to now I thought everyone was losing efficiency pretty evenly), which might make the disparities less dramatic
- My idea of "comparable spells" sucks and I should have chosen other spells to compare?
- Blizzard is trying to encourage elemental shamans to weave in fire spells by making lightning spells inefficient, and trying to discourage LHW casting because with the new talents it will be too strong in arenas (or insert your own made up Blizzard motivations for here, I am just typing the first things that I pulled out of my ass that seemed like they might fit the meager data at hand)
- Shamans are being balanced around lacking longevity
- Something is going to make shamans stupidly good at regenning mana and our spells are being made inefficient to compensate
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I believe this is yet another way to make enhancement shamans go for mail gear with Intellect on it. And as nobody really knows WotlK gear, nobody can possibly know if this won't be good or bad at the moment.
In my personal oppinion, Blizzard have lanced very good ideas about enhancement shamans. However, now they have to finish what they started, so they still have PLENTY of room to mess up or to improve things. Most of the changes seem really nice, but removing Totem Twist(our beloved "exploit") - I don't see that as positive
. I hope that they balance this out by making the Weapon Speciality buff for all the raid, not just for self. I also think it's nice that they have the possibility of making different bosses prefer different weapons : to give ArP or Haste for the raid? Of course, that again depends on the question if those buffs will be raid-wide, party-wide or just self buffs.
Oh, and of course, I can't express the amount of extra heart beats caused by happiness when I saw the Improved SR, I can already imagine making a macro with it saying "Fear this, suckers!"- definately a needed thing.