Elemental Beta Thoughts & Impressions

I'm currently 73 at the moment, running around with a 51/0/12 build. This is mostly because Elemental Oath is "broken" (increases mana cost rather than decreasing) as well as the fact that stack buffs like that aren't that useful in a levelling sense.

Thunderstorm so far is very fun to use. There's the usual Frost Shock + Thunderstorm trick to get a mob far enough away to kill it before it gets back and running away with Earthbind down. I've also been using it in a "crowd control" sense in instances, either moving mobs along to avoid returning patrols or flinging those that are pulled off the tank (by other people, honest!).

With the change to Totem of Wrath, I tend to drop it more than I used to while soloing (heck, I never used to drop totems while soloing unless I could camp an area or had a difficult group/elite to handle).

All in all, levelling hasn't been that painful, but I am using T6/SP gear at the moment. With the spellpower change, I'd say that if you're resto at the moment and don't have an equally geared enhancement set, elemental may be a good way to level. At this stage in the beta it is definitely the best, but that's partially due to the fact that some Enhance talents aren't working yet/correctly, and weapon enchants are broken.

Anyway, the reason I decided to make this entry, and post the previous one, was to start "thinking out loud" in possible ways to fix areas that I think need to be corrected (and have stated so).

Firstly, with the demise of Nature's Guidance, there is less synergy in Restoration (in fact, if you ignore Tidal Mastery, there isn't any decent synergy at all). Making a change to Tidal Force that allows it to affect nature damage spells would be a nice change, as well as giving an extra level of crit control for maintaining Oath/Clearcasting uptime (especially if you decide to go with LB rather than LvB)

Secondly, rotations. In order to get some real variation in rotations, changing Flame Shock/Lava burst rotation to something like the Warlocks Immolate/Incinerate interaction (perhaps higher crit chance). Then there can be more talents in the higher end of the tree to accommodate these different rotations, similar to the Destruction tree for Warlocks (possibly including fire range increase and flame shock dot duration increase)

Lastly, stormstrike. As it is, the presence of an Enhancement Shaman is about a 4-5% dps gain. In WotLK it is will be roughly 15%. In order to avoid raid stacking this interaction should be looked at and/or removed unless the Moonkin nature/arcane debuff is intended to "replace" this.