I guess so then. I was not familiar with those talents. But seriously this is the last thing shamans need: Another talent to put points into that have to be taken from somewhere else. As someone said before the resto tree is the most bloated talent tree in the game. Adding a talent that most pvpers will want into a place that they never spent points before is pretty bad form.

Our Resto Shaman isn't very impressed, you only have one very expensive buff (ES) and even if it resists dispel three times, it was still more expensive to cast than to dispel. They should really add something else, maybe 10/20/30% chance to miss totems when struck in melee or something like that to make the talent useful.

I really dont understand the complain about bloated talent trees. So you actually got many talents worth putting points into? You have to choose? Oh noes?
What is the problem?

Sounds like a decent problem to have, that there are more good talents to take than points to spend, rather than the other way around.

Guessing people would just rather know that they have every good talent in the tree and have points left to put into things that don't matter too much. Then again, they would then complain about not having enough great talents to point their extra points into. I would rather have too many good talents then not enough good talents, any day of the week.

Change dispel so spells with charges lose 1 charge per dispel? Would help out quite abit. On the other hand, dispel a priest 20 times to remove inner fire might be quite stupid . Still think they can and should change how dispel works in 2.4. Casters got the same problem with their armors getting purged all the time and a warlock without felarmor on goes down really quick even with SL. Mages are kinda in the same boat too, w/o ice/molten armor they take quite alot more damage.

On the shaman, while I don't play one, I'm pretty aware of their problems, I hope they do some stuff to "fix" them for pvp. We had a few ideas going in a discussion with our main resto shaman the other day, was thinking of reducing totem gcd to 1secs(so you can actually drop them easier in pvp), and something like the AV marshal buff thingie they wanted to put in on totems, increasing their resist/miss chance as you drop more(so 1totem is like now, 2 would have 10resists and 1%miss chance, 3 would have 25resists 3%miss chance and 4 would have 60resists and 6%miss chance).

Anyway, they haven't posted all changes, but they sure could have chosen a better tidbit from the shaman changes. This is pretty minor at best, considering there's not so many dispellable shamans spells anyway. Hopefully get full patch notes next tuesday, and PTR ^^

I find this statement to be somewhat naive. Priests would kill to have 1 "healing" tree. Instead of being forced to go 23/38 for the first bitch, then 20/41 for the other healers. Let's not forget, priests have to spend 5 talent points to get 20% dispel resistance.

Just fair warning, I plan on reporting every single post that whines about their personal random distribution of loot and claims that something is wrong. I want people to look at this post before posting something like that, and ask themselves -- is this adding anything of substance? No, it's not. So don't post crap like this, thanks.

If i can bring my gcd down to 1.4 secs, I would gain a shadowbolt every 25 dot refreshes (well, less than that because my shadowbolt takes less time to cast as well, but i didn`t do the math). Considering I spend more than half the time spamming shadowbolt (2.5 secs cast) it`s not gonna be much of a boost.

Rolling class improvements in as new talents (or improvements to older talents that were previously rubbish) is bad form IMO. It's not choice if you need it.

Let's say for the sake of the argument that Ret Paladins are lagging behind in raid DPS. Many months later Blizzard responds by adding a new talent in tier 6 Retribution that adds 10% pve dps. Paladins rejoice. Great talent, but now you need to spend 5 more points in Ret to perform in a raid. More choice or less choice?

Still, it's arguable whether that dispel resistance is worth it so it's not that cut and dry.

Blizzard doesn't want to speed up progression for guilds that are working on MH and BT. They want to speed up access to Sunwell for guilds that have cleared MH and BT.

If they added an additional non-set drop to bosses, guilds just starting MH and BT would be pulling 1.5 times as much loot out. Instead, they're adding an additional set token, which doesn't impact those guilds at all. However, once those guilds reach the end of MH and BT, they suddenly get a rapid influx of T6 set pieces, allowing them to quickly gear up for the next instance.

So it's not about making it easier for people to complete their gearsets. It's about opening up access to Sunwell without trivializing MH and BT.

The haste change for dots needs a corresponding change to dot durations to really make a difference. Some possibly faulty theorycraft incoming, but maybe someone will see what I'm getting at and apply it in a more realistic way.

At 114 haste rating, my 1.5 second spells are 1.4 seconds and my Shadowbolt is 2.33. Assuming I respec Affliction and start off on a mob using UA and Corruption, and my GCD is now 1.4 seconds because of haste I will have 16.6 seconds to fill with casts. If I use Shadowbolt for my filler, I can fit in 15.2/2.33 (rounded down) = 6 Shadowbolts. Those 6 Shadowbolts take up 13.98 seconds of casting time, leaving me with 1.22 seconds to fill before UA runs out. I'd start casting my 1.4 second UA at that point and lose 0.18 seconds of uptime on UA and Corruption.

In the current game with that same spell haste, I'd have 15 seconds to fill instead of 15.2, so I'm losing 0.48 seconds of uptime on UA and Corruption unless I stop Shadowbolts early. For the sake of demonstration, let's say I'm a moron and I cast the same order of spells even though I'm clipping off several ticks of Siphon Life everytime, so my cast rotation looks the same and I'm losing the same uptime on every cycle of UA and Corruption. The haste change is giving me .3 seconds of extra up time every cycle. It would take me over 3 minutes to get an extra tick of UA and Corruption. My shadowbolts are still somewhat constrained by my dot durations (it's still 6 shadowbolts between dot applications no matter what) and my real gain from the haste change is uptime on my dots.

What happens though if we apply something like the channeled spell changes to dot durations? My 114 spell haste is roughly 7.23% haste (assuming 15.76 haste rating for 1%), so my UA duration would go down to ~16.78 seconds and it would tick every ~2.79 seconds. That would coincide with the 1.22 seconds of casting time I had leftover in my first paragraph. Perhaps with this change I would be able to adjust my spell casting to leave 0 gaps, much like one would see with no spell haste gear (ignoring latency issues).

Well, is anyone thinking the 30% no-dispell talent is going to revitalize shamans or something? As far as I can see it simply adds a tiny bit of incentive to chose the talent.

People seem to wish there are exactly 41 (or whatever number your class want to spend in a particular tree) great points to spend in a talent tree, anything more is a disaster since they now cant get it all. Anything less is a disaster since they now have to waste points.
But shouldnt the goal be to only have talents that are worth taking, so you have to lose something, if you pick something else?
Thus making your spec an actual choice, rather than any talent tree always having the perfect spec for any situation.

It's complicated for healing classes, because the talent points are typically oriented in such a way that you lose out on critical solo viability talents in the lowest tiers of other trees. The more points you feel compelled to spend on your core talents, the more severely you neuter your ability to do anything other than heal.

Having haste effect durations of dots is nice and also bad, think of the negative effects it gives Lifebloom for example.. it will destroy your ability to roll it well if the duration is reduced by much at all.

Thats because you want to take the extra points needed from another tree, rather than redistributing the points you already wanted to spend in the first tree. Sounds like a good choice to me if you want a little bit of solo-ability or a little bit better healing, or keep the bit of soloing but choose to spend your healing points in another way than before, while keeping the same theoretical healing power, just in another way.
Why not have the choice between all those options? Otherwise we might as well not have talents trees at all, and simply have the bonuses from talents incorporated into your class as standard (Like, switching between Resto shaman, enhancement shaman etc with the click of a button). The purpose of talents is having different choices, not having the perfect way to spend your 61 points (although thats mostly how it is now).

But that's exactly the point.

I don't believe either dot class right now can have a perfect rotation (mindblast's 5.5 second cooldown is what gets it for a spriest. affl lock is obvious), so fussing that haste means you can't have a perfect rotation is a bit silly.

It's still a dps increase because a dpcs increase for a dot *is* a dps increase for it because it means you can be doing other things. Lifetapping, nuking, moving, popping a pot, etc.

For dots there definitely will be a sweet spot where your rotations line up perfectly (our spriest RL raided with enough haste to drop his MB's by 0.25 seconds so his spells would line up better), but that problem existed before haste, exists after haste, and changing it to be interval between dots wouldn't have helped the problem since blizzard didn't allow any dot classes to actually have a perfect rotation.


These arguments sound like the arguments normally posted against haste for nukes, unless I'm missing something: people get set on "but if the fight is only 3 minutes and 15 seconds instead of 3 minutes and *17* seconds haste is worthless because I don't get in my extra nuke!"

Priests are the least hybrid-y of the healing-capable classes; without a melee DPS option (cloth class, after all) the trees just aren't going to line up with the other healing classes and making direct comparisons between trees is silly. Given that limitation, having both "PvE healing" and "PvP healing" trees with a ton of diverse options in both is a pretty good situation. The Disc tree in particular has gotten a ton of love recently. Also, while it might make sense on paper to bring the Shaman subtlety talent in line with the others, the Shaman class has FAR fewer dispellable buffs/debuffs than any other healing class and it's far more reliant on a single buff to survive--Earth Shield. Which, by the way, costs 900 mana. I'll go out on a limb and assert that no healing class is as reliant on a single dispellable buff for survival as Resto Shamans are on Earth Shield, particularly considering we have nothing to protect it.

This is why 30% dispel protection doesn't work for shamans: we have a total of 2 buffs that we cast, ever: Bloodlust and Earth Shield.

Priests have Spirit/Fort as filler buffs (and that +heal/-dmg thing for the priest itself), then rely on Renew/PW:S/PRoM/Pain Suppression to heal. I would say the ratio of dispellable "heals" (including shields) to actual direct heals for your average priest, especially in 2s/3s, is ridiculously high. Therefore a talent that protects those spells is quite useful, both because you rely on the spells to survive and also because the high number of dispellable things you cast means having resists is going to cost opponents valuable time.

Druids are very similar in that they rely on magical buffs, their HoTs, to heal. They also use abilities like Barksin and Nature's Grasp as necessary escapes. Not to mention their offensive abilities (roots) which benefit from a chance to resist dispel.

Paladins are different in that they don't rely on magic buffs to heal. However, their buffs are hugely powerful and a resist at a crucial moment can turn the tide of a game. Resisting a mass dispel on a bubble to land a clutch heal, or resisting several purges on a BoP that allows you to get a heal off with no MS can be game-changing moments.

Now take shaman. First, we have 2 actual casted buffs and 2 proc buffs. Neither of the buffs we have are nearly as "must-dispel" as a BoP or BoF. In 2v2 you might as well dispel bloodlust, since nobody has filler buffs and it's easy, but in larger brackets the fact that it throws up 3-5 buffs at once is already a sort of protection. Does anyone actually attempt to sit there and purge all the buffs off of everyone every 5v5 game? So in 2v2, on account of bloodlust, these 3 talent points will cost your opponent an average 1 gcd every couple of games.

Earth Shield is the other reason. Making earth shield undispellable or at least have some resistance has been suggested many times, mainly as a buff to resto shaman, partially as a reaction to the proposed ES changes last patch, and slightly because many people believe that a 900-mana 41-point talent should make a difference in an arena match rather than being dispelled in the majority of small-bracket games. The problem is this: the thing is mad expensive and takes a looong time to come to full effect. 30% chance to resist means very little when you can only really afford to use the spell 2-3 times a game or risk going OOM. Having 30% dispel resist does not in any way make the spell viable around a dispelling class. You can't reapply it once it's dispelled knowing that it's likely to last the full duration, because with 30% dispel resist, the chance that it will is very slight. It isn't a PW:S that only has to last till it takes 1.5k dmg, this thing has to last a minimum of 30sec to be of full value. It isn't lifebloom that you can spam all day just on your in-combat regen alone. 30% doesn't make it viable in any situation that it wasn't viable in before.

30% wouldn't really be enough if they had just added it, but that isn't even really the case. It has been assigned to a talent that no shaman picks up, which forces a choice between this slight dispel protection and the other talents in the resto tree. So in that regard it's not even a buff at all, it's a choice. I can give something up to pick up this (fairly worthless) new talent, or I can continue with the spec I have. The way this is looking now, there are several other talents I'd take before Healing Grace. It's hard to call that a "buff", isn't it?

I never stated the current plans aren't a good change. I'm proposing my change in addition to what's already being done since I still believe dots won't scale with haste as well as pure nuking.

I'm not aiming for a perfect rotation. What I'm proposing is dot durations be somewhat proportional to cast times, like 18 is a multiple of 1.5, to help a player minimize gaps in dot uptime.

Nukes don't have what are effectively cooldowns like dots. I'm very much pro-haste, but something like a Destruction Warlock or a Fire Mage is not dealing with GCD clipping and damage spells on a cooldown (counting dots since they effectively have a cooldown equal to duration on a single target). I guess another aim of my idea is to increase the scaling possibilities of an Affliction Warlock. An Affliction Warlock will certainly see benefit from the 2.4 spell haste change. I'd just like to see an Affliction Warlock get some scaling more comparable to other classes.

No, it's not a good situation. How is it a good thing to force a class to choose between PvE and PvP? Other healing classes aren't stuck with that crappy choice. This is a distinctly undesirable scenario.

Does it have to be a buff though? Maybe it simply is what you say, a new choice.
How exactly is that a problem.

Are you arguing about a few points varying between PvP and PvE healing specs? I find it hard to believe the same couldnt be said about other healing classes, not to mention non-heal classes where PvP and PvE specs might the total opposite of each other.