Well, I've gotten around to actually playing the beta now.. I was wondering if anything ever came of the idea of an EJ-based community guild. My live characters are inactive so this is the first thing that came to mind. Hopefully this is an appropriate question for the thread, since I recall it being discussed a while ago.

I think its safe to assume that since wrath of air totem already increases spell damage, they wont be adding in another spell damage totem. I think flametoungue totem will be either unchanged or just plain axed.

Wrath of Air is Haste for casters, Flametongue and its associated weapon imbue will be for spell power.

The odd thing is, Flametongue is a Fire totem, same as Totem of Wrath (41 point Elemental Shaman talent). So elemental shamans have to choose from buffing their groups with either Totem of Wrath (hit and crit) and Flametongue (spell damage). Unless either ToW/Flametongue totems have gone raidwide?

I think they're both raidwide now, so the Resto shaman will handle Flametongue

Giving Flametongue Totem a spell damage component mainly affects Resto Shaman, who have no good fire totems to drop.

Stoneskin will be non-useless.

Edit, forgot grounding is air.

Given that there will be ten man raids, and twenty five man raids, the only time I think we'll end up running across issues with an earth totem, will probably be in the twenty five man raids. And given how much more AoE abilities they've added, (Gluth is an example of an early AoE fight anyway), I think Earthbind will be present in some encounters. Plus, depending upon positioning in certain encounters, it may just so happen that the hunters at range will end up needing the Strength of Earth from the ranged Shaman.

Does it stack with Devo?


Even if it doesn't it is worthwhile if you don't have a Pally around (like 5 and 10-mans).

I doubt one would ever choose Stoneskin of Strength of Earth.

With a prot pally tank, shaman and 3 mages/locks? the typical 5man cheese group

Edit: Actually I guess there would be a pally in the group in that case but he'd probably be using retribution aura for threat

I haven't seen the exact changes of Flametongue posted, but from what I have read it sounds like it will be placing a temporary weapon enchant that gives additional spellpower. Won't this effectively replace Mana/Wizard Oils? This seems a bit strange as casters will no longer get the benefit of temporary weapon enchants while melee (with the removal of windfury) will still have stones and poisons.

I doubt they'd do that since it would encourage twisting Flametongue Weapon Totem and Totem of Wrath, and I believe Blizzard doesn't want twisting.

Flametongue is basically working how Wrath of Air works in live, and now Wrath of Air gives haste. It's pretty straightforward. The amount of damage it's providing was bugged last time I ran an instance though.

Twisting wouldn't be worth it for an elemental shaman, though, due to the lost GCDs. It's only viable for enhance because they have so many free to start with.

Sounds quite intresting to me. What I would like to see instead of the "more loot" mechanic when doing things in different orders would be to change the fights slightly. For instance you could have some bosses start to hit harder, but also get lower hp, and wise versa, ofc depending on the niche of the fight you could change things around. So that if you one day are going naxx and you are low on healers, or dps, or tanks, or whichever might prove to be a issue for you that particular day/week you could do the place in a different order, instead of having to resort to bringing alts or over recruiting. For instance if you look at sunwell its required to have certain setups on certain encounters, if instead you could reach say all the 5 first bosses instead of having to do them in a certain order, it would be easier to always have something to raid. You could even add in that if you kill muru before twins they would loose some of their high aoe dmg and instead 1 min shorter enrage, so that you could run with a smaller roster. Or they could simply balance each fight around 7-8 healers and 2-3 tanks.

Only ratings were merged. Buffs remain explicitly tailored towards melee OR spells specifically.

Buffs and talents*

*unless otherwise mentioned as in the case of Improved Faerie Fire.

I know Rowyn and other have been doing some testing on downranking. Thought i'd post my findings on testing i've been doing on a paladin's. Holy Light and Flash of light.

The first thing that seemed to appear was that once you learned a new rank of a spell, the previous rank suffered a 5% downranking coefficient and then a further 5% for each additional level. Unfortunately there were a few anomolys that did not fit this perfectly.

The most obvious one was Holy Light Rank 9. Now, for Holy Light, new ranks of spells before wrath have been learned every 8 levels. This spell was one of the AQ learned spells which broke this pattern. Rank 8 was learned at 56 and rank 10 at 62, but due to this extra spell (level 60), it meant there was only a 2 level gap between it and the next rank up. According to the rule i've stated it should start downranking at 62, which it doesnt.

However this can be accounted for by the following formula:-

Downranking coefficient = 100% - 5%*(Current Level - (Spell Level + Common Levels Between Spells - 1)

When I say "Common Levels Between Spells" I mean the general rule of thumb of how often a new spell is learnt. For Holy Light and Flash of Light this value is 8 (and is variable depending on the spell used).

Using this formula, it fits all spells (see exception), including the AQ book learned rank of Holy Light. Holy Light rank 9 doesnt start downranking at level 62, but instead at level 68.

Exception:-

I'm only level 74 on beta, so have only managed to get a new Rank of FoL so far. I did notice however that the moment I got this new spell, my previous spell downranked by 10%, not the expected 5%. Now, my one possible explanation for this is that to avoid current max rank spells being more powerful than they would like in wrath, they are doubling the downranking of current max rank spells so that.

Downranking coefficient = 100% - 10%*(Current Level - (Spell Level + Common Levels Between Spells - 1)

As I gain more levels and get more ranks, will test it out.

Let me know if this fits any of your beta tests.

An interesting change, how low can this go with haste?

It does seem that fire spec mages will benefit more from WOTLK than frost when it comes to damage output. However the changes to Water Elementals means people will still want deep frost around.

Considering that WOTLK is in the frozen North what has been the frequency of frost immune or resistant mobs? How about Nature resistant? I do remember running into a wall as an Elemental Shaman when dealing with Nagrand's rock and air elementals.

I´m pretty sure Frostfire Bolt and Lava Burst are the answer for mages/shamans, so frost/nature immune mobs won´t be the same issue as they were in vanilla WoW/TBC. Actually "Brain Freeze" for mages acts as an additional damage source vs. frost immunes.

I've got the following data for Arcane Missiles with a 1% exactness, from a level 75 player:
(A new rank is learned at level 75, Arcane Missiles before 60 are learnt every 8 levels, at 8, 16, 24, etc.)

The testing suggests very strongly that penalty scales in 5% steps.
I added a "Level" number at the end, which would describe the last level where the spell would get full scaling.
After that, it would lose 5% per level. This part is speculation though, since I cannot do any kind of reliable testing.
I only know the scaling at 75, the "last level" concept is a guess which would fit the data.

Rank 11, learned at 70; 80% power => Level 71
Rank 10, learned at 69; 80% power => Level 71
Rank 9, learned at 63; 75% power => Level 70
Rank 8, learned at 60; 55% power => Level 66
Rank 7, learned at 56; 35% power => Level 60
Rank 6, learned at 48; 0% power => Level would be 55 or lower. Level 54 would fit.

I would need something like another set of Arcane Missile data from a mage who is not level 75 to confirm this concept.

The big question that remains however is how the listed "Level" is determined.
It might be the last level where the spell gets a base damage/healing bonus, but I know no mod/database that tracks this information, ot tracks the level-dependent base damage.

For Arcane Missile, it seems to be "level learned + 6", with A'Q/BC spells not exactly following that pattern and pre-Wrath not reaching far past 70 (even the the spell learned at 70 only seems to count for 1 level).

It may also be that the level 70 gets full benefit until 74 because it's the highest spell at this level, and at 75 suddenly drops by 20%.
Might the penalty based on actually learning the spell?
Warlocks have only 1 rank of Chaos Bolt taught at 60 (new ranks should be expected at 70/80), the others ranks are simply not there yet, and the spell also gets a penalty.


My question for your Flash of Light of test would be:
Did you check whether your old highest-rank FoL still got 100% at level 73?