Shaman news from WWI

So besides the big news of Diablo 3 we now know a few more things about Shaman in WotLK.

• Confirmed that we're getting hex, on some sort of moderate cooldown. Will function as a polymorph that allows the player to still move around but not attack/cast.
• Totems are going raid-wide. All of them apparently.
• Strength of Earth and Grace of Air are being combined into a single totem.
• Windfury Totem will no longer function as a temporary weapon enchant and will instead be a buff placed on the player and will function alongside poisons, etc and will be usable by "bear form"druids.

Thoughts:

Raid wide totems is obviously a response to the shaman stacking taking place in 25 mans. Chain heal alone might and probably will still be a good reason to bring more than 2 shaman in a raid, but at least now it only takes 2 shaman to buff the entire raid with totems. (1 melee range, 1 for casters)

The change to GoA/SoE and Windfury has 2 effects. First it removes the mechanic of totem twisting - this will have mixed responses, a lot of shaman just liked having a few more buttons to push every minute rather than just waiting for procs. Second, it makes playing a shaman in a group immensely easier for a new player. Now a shaman won't have to figure out if Windfury is better than Grace of Air or Wrath of Air for a group, he can just drop them both all the time, and it ensures that the shaman is always able to get the totems that benefit him the most.

Obviously the change to Windfury allowing Sharpening stones and Poisons to co-exist is going to mean "bigger numbers" for melee dps, and its about time that Druids were finally able to benefit from it as well. Hopefully that will mean that we'll see an increase in cat form viability as a raid dps slot.

Apparently there was some mention at the dev panel that other totems might be looked at for merging. Mention was made that Flametongue will now boost Spelldamage when used, a healing weapon imbue is being added, Rockbiter is being removed completely (thank you), and that Frostbite will snare "more reliably." From the enhancement shaman perspective adding spell damage to flametongue will definitely increase its viability as an OH enchant along with the spell hit/crit ratings merging with melee ratings.