Hey hey folks, figured I'd make a fresh thread since we've chewed the previous thread to death. :)

Here it is cross posted from the live shammie boards.
UPDATE! UPDATED MY ENHANCEMENT GUIDE ON THE MAIN BOARDS. Added a dual wield guide now, please check it out and tell me what you think :D
The Dust has settled for now, What's Happened?


Dual Wield Spec From 10% --> 6%

Well there have been quite a few changes both documented and not-so documented in the shammy area, particularly in enhancement. I'm sure you're all aware of the DW spec nerf/change (depending on who you talk to), and I've now gotten a chance to put it through it's paces and see what it has done to us overall.

My findings? Overall it does have a noticeable effect on our dps. I do miss a bit more often especially when the mob starts to attain equal con or 1 to 2 levels higher than me. Certainly noticeable, but horrible? Not really. I can certainly see why they did it give how NO OTHER CLASS is given any kind of +hit talent like this as far as melee attacks are concerned. And it does indeed free up two points to spend elsewhere. Having to spend 47 points in enhancement to take advantage fully of dualwield's capability was really painful.

Dual wield still is still providing great sustained dps and bursting occasionally even in some crazy ways. I have no idea how this parsed out in my combat log but today I got quite possibly the most mindboggling chain of WF crits ever....

This is basically how it panned out:

Stormstrike: 894
WF Attack: 1008
WF Attack: 948
Crit: 398
WF Attack: 1012
WF Attack: 1226
Hit: 154
WF Attack: 409
WF Attack: 586
HIt: 302
Wf AttacK: 794
WF Attack: 947

That was all from a 3 second window in my combat log hehe :)


Taken from fighting a level 61 elite Fen Strider in Zangamarsh "Boglash" is his name and I'm currently level 64. Wielding Claw of the black Drake main hand and this in the offhand. :)

The Stalker's Fang
Binds when picked up
Unique
One-Hand Dagger
71 - 133 Damage Speed 1.80
(56.7 damage per second)
+16 Stamina
Durability 65 / 65
Requires Level 63
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 15.
Equip: Increases attack power by 20.
Sells for 7 Gold 51 Silver 31 Copper to vendors
Item Level 94


Yeah, quite a crazy chain of crits there. Now before this turns into a OMGWTFSHAMZORZOP'DWFNERFLOLZTHREDOVER (did I get everything?) I should admit that was the ONLY time now in all the testing done in the past couple of weeks that I've seen something like that. Like everyone always says, it's rare as hell to see something like that, but man it's pretty when it happens :D


Shamanistic Rage

This spell definitely got tweaked. It's not listed anywhere but another fellow shamana on beta seemed to report similar findings. They definitely tweaked down the proc rate on it just a tad. It was not much, in fact it's hardly noticeable, but those earlier statements of how I could easily fill two mana bars may be just a bit much now. It can still easily restore 4k mana in under 30 seconds no question, but beyond that it definitely would be a bit sketchy. Still seems to be stuck on a flat % proc rate. Faster weapons are overall producing more mana than slow/slow combos.

The threat generation on it also seems to have been reduced, but i'm not sure whether that's the spell itself or the effect of the new spirit weapons talent we get WHICH btw has a nifty new bug at the immediate moment of writing this report. Namely...it's reducing Parry to 0.00%...woops! hehe

Other than the 0% parry bug, the -15% threat is rather nice....sort of. I was partnering with a priest earlier to finish some quests in zangamarsh and honestly If I wasn't spamming earthshock or stormstrike and just meleeing....erm...well...his holy fires and smites could pull of me.....Granted he also had a flask of supreme power on him as well so that could be it, but i'm not sure either. :)

The New Stormstrike

Oh yes this was definitely a very very nice change. 10 sec cooldown for only 177 mana for me at this level. Hallelujah praise Thrall this puppy is very nice now. If you just stormstrike on cooldown while refreshing water shield and using flameshock to pull grinding mobs is a cake walk. About every 9-10 mobs I just popped shammervate and was back to more or less full mana again where I continued to grind. I only had to stop and eat and drink when I pulled more than 2-3 mobs at once and needed some spam healing to top me off.

Water Shield

Reports of this not scaling at all and generally not being worth the expenditure to train are for the most part true. This skil definitely is more suited to solo grinding and nothing more. However this changes around a bit when you get a totem drop from Underbog that increases your mana restored per each globe by 12. I know it's not much, but I found that having that totem equipped I was noticing a more steady increase in mana regeneration from water shield than I saw previously. I also feel the proc-rate on water shield got toned down just a smidgen as well. I'm guessing this was to address the issue of it proccing so often that it was screwing too much with our 5 second rule on in-combat mana regen with us constantly having to refresh it.


I get to party with Bachi

For those of you who don't know, Bachi is a level 67 blood elf paladin on beta right now. Yes he really leveled a Belf to 67 as a paladin and is now actively raiding around in Hellfire. In fact the devs are so impressed with him he got the trainer in Silvermoon city named after him. Pretty sweet. :) I managed to finally party with him about 3 days ago. We did the Auchindoun Crypts, a level 63-65 5 man instance. Pretty impressive stuff. Party consisted of me, another awesome DW 67 shammy named Oggun, a 62 Priest (who's name escapes me at the immediate moment sorry! :( ), a level 67 hunter named Teruco and Bachi. For those of you concerned how shammies and paladins stack in raids now, well you'll be very very happy. Here's the short and sweet version for those who want the goobie details

-He had no problems holding aggro with the the two enh shammys running around. We only pulled aggro if we were both (me and the other dual wield shaman and keep in mind that this was before the spirit weapon change went live) focus firing on a target he was tanking or spam healing too much.

-Shield Throw is bloody awsome. It causes a high amount of threat on all the targets (basically a holy version of chain lightning) and it was a great pulling mechanism.

-Even when tanking he could jump out and toss a few heals our way when I was stupid and pulling proximity aggro, also very impressive there.

-All blessings and totems stack :D Fully buffed with blessing of might I was breaking 1640ap running around. It was fun to say the least :D

-We tried one section with me with Blessing of Salvation. It did a very good job of making sure I didn't pull aggro when dps'ing. Now granted I was fairly low as compared to the other players there, but I can say that if I was not chain earthshocking I had no aggro issues whatsoever.


Overall after doing the instance I was very very impressed with how paladins and shamans work well together. Paladins I can say with assurance are very good tanks when played competantly which Bachi most certainly did. Plus having two shamans in a party meant we pretty much got to have every possible totem buff down at any given time which was certainly fun to say the least :D



Restoration and Earth Shield

Holy moses this spell is quite frankly....well absurdly powerful. I've been keeping close tabs on what my friend Sashkahn who as a level 67 fully geared prot warrior, has been doing in the high level instances now in beta. He's been leading the first groups in many instances on hard mode and has been providing great feedback on how the instances are going and how shammies are doing in the higher level instances.

This is pretty much a verbatim quotage of a conversation I had with him:


"Earthshield pretty much right is absurdly broken, but in a good way. Last night I did caverns of Time with a shaman who had full earthshatterer and his earth shield was healing me per charge for 505. Coupled with a renew and that's all I needed to tank. Honestly if i'm leading raids I'm going to basically tell all shamans to f-ing shove it and spec earth shield for the tougher encounters. Enhancement shaman will still have a place in dps groups but definitely not more than 1 or 2 at the very most, that's basically how I see things with the new 25 mans coming around"

So yeah that's kinda how it's working out so far. I tried it out with Full Earthfury and Jindo's Judgment 2h staff and I was getting procs of 328 per globe myself. Very solid indeed. :)



PVP, 2h and Suicide Spec

Well I did say I would go back to 2h and also give suicide spec a solid try and well...honestly given how little +damage gear I have and also given that none of the bgs are working my testing unfortunately has not been very successful. I think this post sums up my frustrations pretty well that I made on the beta forums:


My major problem with PVP is that I can't really get a good idea of whether I did good or not because in the world pvp objectives you never know if it's going to be a fair fight. :(

I can't count the number of times I was doing the objectives in hellfire and I'd come across a lone priest or mage and beat the stuffing out of him and I'd say, hey I'm doing pretty good. :)

Then he comes back I beat him again, still feeling good.

Then he comes back again with a friend or 3....usually a lock or pally. And then the fun begins. I sometimes get lucky, but once he starts bringing more friends I usually just get corpse camped and it's all over.

And that's what's constantly happening. DW is certainly at a downside in PVP unless your at the cap and wielding the Maghari fury brand and hungering bone cudgel offhand in order to compensate for dps....

And a level 67 lock? Jesus cristo.....yeah dead dead dead. :(


That about sums up the majority of my experiences in trying to "test" shaman mechanics in world pvp. It's just not a level playing field and you can think you're on top of the world until a roving trove of 67s comes by and just melts your face and blows it off at the same time while vaporizing your soul and not necessarily in that order.

From the limited testing I have managed to cobble together here's what seems to be my findings.

-DW provides great sustained dps if you can stay on target. Stormstrike gives some solid burst with dw but still not approaching 2h's burst given my current weapon set. I also still don't find DW sufficient to wear down the increased stamina i'm seeing in PVP. I could chalk this up to needing better weapons but overall DW works in PVP if no one is paying attention to you...

-2h Spec is still king of burst. Yeah i'm sure you know that, but just to make sure that people don't forget, if you still want to provide the biggest possible burst you need a big beefy 2h and thankfully I have a sulfuras to test this. :)


-The stamina that's being loaded onto things makes bursting a bit harder to say the least. Fight's now are about outlasting your oppoenent and delivering calculated salvos to wear him down in chunks and moving around as much as possible. Obviously this means bursting people down is much much harder. Since DW didn't seem to be doing much for me, I decided I'd finally try and get my suicide spec on and go 19/32/0, the spec I used is here.


http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/...00000000000000


I figured this fit the nice run and gun style of suicide spec by focusing on shocks and getting more crit from when I do crit with spells and the handy dandy eye of the storm for clutch healing :)

Overall I found that this spec is indeed viable in world PVP...if you have the mana to back it up. Now I'll be the first to admit that I've focused heavily on melee stats on my gear so my mana pool is only about 4.2k. If I fully unloaded on anything other than a paladin with my sulfuras and shocks and stormstrike and whatnot I could consistently take down 75% of most of target's life but I basically blew 50% of my mana bar in the process. Yeouch not good. Every time I tried to pvp, I felt like some glorified sniper rifle. I get one shot to do insane damage, but I use up so much resources in doing so that recovering from the initial strike puts me at a disadvantage while I'm basically running around trying to avoid being clusterbonked and praying for a wf crit to finish off my target. Plus it doesn't help that a sulfuras on a Tauren is OMG PLEASE 5 MAN ME PLZ! sign pasted on my back.

I definitely need to load up on some stam gear that's for sure. The amount of damage that's being dealt means that pre-bc gear at least for pvp will want to be replaced if only to get more stamina on it.

Unfortunately, my overall feel of world pvp as a shaman right now, to be perfectly frank, is not looking too good. There are just so much forms of CC out there and with the increased stamina it's damn hard to actually feel like I'm contributing anything. In a group I'm a glorified distraction now 80% of the time unless the happy tripple wf crit god smiles upon me. Which, tying into the stam changes with gear is what I need almost all the time to take down the higher level chaps. Now granted i'm only almost 65, will that change at 67? From what I'm hearing so far, not really. We're still relying on stormstrike for burst and white damage to smack enemies down, and smacking them down is becoming tougher and tougher.

I basically feel like i'm still stuck with a Honda Civic while people got upgraded to a nice Lexus. Bad anology I know, but that's really how it feels, my strategy overall has not changed much because I can't really do anything different, even with dual wield. I'm still wacking people around and if WF procs, GREAT! if not well....I get basically outlasted and CC'd to death plain and simple.

Itemization so Far

Oy vey this is proving to be really really annoying here. From what I'm seeing so far for dual wield pretty much every shaman at 67 worth his salt is using the following combo of weapons.


Mag'hari Fury Brand
Binds when picked up
One-Hand Fist Weapon
109 - 204 Damage Speed 2.50
(62.6 damage per second)
+13 Agility
+19 Stamina
Durability 65 / 65
Equip: Increases attack power by 26.

http://www.thottbot.com/beta?i=420

Hungering Bone Cudgel
Binds when picked up
One-Hand Mace
67 - 126 Damage Speed 1.60
(60.3 damage per second)
+12 Agility
+18 Stamina
Durability 90 / 90
Equip: Increases attack power by 26.

http://www.thottbot.com/beta?i=562

Granted these are some awsome weapons indeed, but I really would have liked to see a greater availability of weapons at this level or something closer to that at least.
Right now there is a very specific weapons path for dual wield to go through and that's quite annoying to say the least.

NOw, for you people who managed to stay with weaponsmithing (ie mace/axesmithing) you are in for a real treat :D Behold 1h that REQUIRE you to be that profession in order to wield them:




Black Planar Edge
Binds when picked up
Unique
Main Hand Axe
166 - 310 Damage Speed 2.70
(88.1 damage per second)
Durability 105 / 105
Requires Level 70
Requires Master Axesmith
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 20.
Equip: Increases attack power by 42.
Sells for 11 Gold 70 Silver 66 Copper to vendors
Item Level 115
Source: Recipe




Hand of Fate
Binds when picked up
Unique
Main Hand Mace
172 - 321 Damage Speed 2.80
(88.0 damage per second)
+8 Stamina
Durability 105 / 105
Requires Level 70
Requires Master Hammersmith
Chance on hit: Increases your haste rating by 200 for 10 sec.
Sells for 12 Gold 27 Silver 67 Copper to vendors
Item Level 115



How's those apples eh? :D


Here's some other very nice crafted weapons for DW i saw as well. Unfortunately not useable yet :(



Runic Hammer
Binds when equipped
One-Hand Mace
136 - 254 Damage Speed 2.40
(81.2 damage per second)
+14 Stamina
Durability 105 / 105
Requires Level 70
Equip: Increases attack power by 50.
Sells for 10 Gold 46 Silver 59 Copper to vendors
Item Level 100



Fel Edged Battleaxe
Binds when equipped
One-Hand Axe
125 - 232 Damage Speed 2.20
(81.1 damage per second)
Durability 105 / 105
Requires Level 70
Equip: Improves hit rating by 9.
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 25.
Sells for 10 Gold 39 Silver 4 Copper to vendors
Item Level 100


Some pretty nice items to be sure, but quite rare overall. Hopefully once the game goes live we'll see some other good melee
1 handers but for now this is all I can find so far. :(

Now I should not forget the 2h love either :D



Crow Wing Reaper
Binds when picked up
Two-Hand Axe
253 - 381 Damage Speed 3.40
(93.2 damage per second)
+28 Strength
+17 Agility
+33 Stamina
Red Socket
Red Socket
Red Socket
Durability 100 / 100
Requires Level 70
Sells for 11 Gold 50 Silver 94 Copper to vendors
Item Level 115

Mooncleaver
Binds when picked up
Unique
Two-Hand Axe
348 - 523 Damage Speed 3.80
(114.6 damage per second)
Durability 120 / 120
Requires Level 70
Requires Master Axesmith
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 48.
Equip: Increases attack power by 98.
Sells for 15 Gold 18 Silver 32 Copper to vendors
Item Level 115
Source: Recipe

Lunar Crescent
Binds when picked up
Unique
Two-Hand Axe
321 - 482 Damage Speed 3.80
(105.7 damage per second)
Durability 120 / 120
Requires Level 70
Requires Master Axesmith
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 45.
Equip: Increases attack power by 92.
Sells for 13 Gold 33 Silver 70 Copper to vendors
Item Level 100
Source: Recipe
Use: Recipe

Felsteel Reaper
Binds when equipped
Two-Hand Axe
287 - 431 Damage Speed 3.40
(105.6 damage per second)
Durability 120 / 120
Requires Level 70
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 30.
Equip: Increases attack power by 108.
Sells for 13 Gold 3 Silver 59 Copper to vendors
Item Level 100


Thunder
Binds when picked up
Unique
Two-Hand Mace
329 - 495 Damage Speed 3.90
(105.6 damage per second)
+36 Strength
+35 Agility
+54 Stamina
Durability 120 / 120
Requires Level 70
Requires Master Hammersmith
Sells for 12 Gold 32 Silver 76 Copper to vendors
Item Level 100
Source: Recipe
Use: Recipe



Deep Thunder
Binds when picked up
Unique
Two-Hand Mace
357 - 537 Damage Speed 3.90
(114.6 damage per second)
+36 Strength
+35 Agility
+54 Stamina
Durability 120 / 120
Requires Level 70
Requires Master Hammersmith
Chance on hit: Stuns target for 4 sec.
Sells for 14 Gold 3 Silver 95 Copper to vendors
Item Level 115


Hope this manages to get your whistles wet! And I will definitely have more screenshots for you all. I have secured some hosting for the pix so I should have pix up late tonight :D

Hope this was informative. I had a blast compiling this for you. :)

Alas I did not get to try that out but what I was hearing 2nd hand from shammies who did indeed use it in a ele/resto style reported that it was very very nice. Grinding is very easy given you have almost no downtime and you're a blessing as emergency support healer in PVP.

Real quick note is that as a (laughingly) anti kite mechanism, they increased stormstrike's range to 9', which lets you almost always get in a 'free' SS as they try to get the hell out of dodge. *wishes for a beastial wrath type effect tagged to SR*

Also, Sof was the priest and *glee* I got a mention in the post!

Good post as always.

Thanks for the update, great info as always.

You have pretty much confirmed my feelings on PvP and dual wield, however. Looks as if I will go with a deep resto spec in order to perform at both high end PvE and high end arena. It is unfortunate, since enh looks like a lot of fun in PvE; its utility in PvP is sadly lacking atm.

Creepjacker off of Pandemonius in Auch. Mana Tombs (64-66) is a good Main Hand to grab before the fury brand. Almost 60 dps, 2.6 speed I think.

They finally made respecs 1c on Blade's Edge, so I'd respecced full resto for kicks (0/5/51) and did some PVP (just for the 30 mark trinket - more on that later) and several Mana Tombs runs. I posted this stuff somewhere already, maybe just on my guild boards. I like to talk about it mainly because I'm a diehard Enhancement Shaman, and though I've tried a couple Elem/REsto variations, discovered that purely Resto spec is far better than I thought it would be.

Resto is hax. Pure hax. Mostly BC blues and greens on, I have almost +600 healing (maybe it was almost +500, I get it confused) and 12% spell crit in my healing gear, water shield relic, etc. It's insane. Earth Shield towards 400, critting over 500. Non-crit Healing Wave for 3k. Chain heal crits (first target) 2.5-3k. My only issue was mana regen, because most of my gear is simply dmg/heal and spell crit. But with a 6.5kish mana pool, it wasn't a problem except on the bosses and some of the really bad mana burn pulls in there. Mana Tide and Enamored Water Spirit helped a lot with that though.

Improved Healing Stream is god. Screw Mana Spring. I dropped it by mistake once and realized it was ticking for 55. Someone in my group noticed and was like "jesus, is that from healing stream?" After a full run of Mana Tombs, I'd healed over 600k, the main tank (with Earth Shield) healed over 110k, and my Healing Stream healed over 100k. It's ridiculous.

Grinding as resto is not as hard as you'd think. In my Elemental gear, I'm running maybe 330 damage and 400 healing. Earth Shield on, ticks for 359. Lightning bolts critting for 1.5k. Searing Totem critting for almost 200. Flametongue noncrits over 100. I was getting 300 dps, which I didn't think was too shabby considering my damage gear isn't that amazing. Melee mobs *rarely* took me below 100% with Earth Shield on.

PVPing was amusing too. I take a while to kill people since I can't just chuck bolts at them, but I take a long time to die. Uninterruptible heals with Earth Shield and the 70% reduc talent, regular damage gear, etc. I fought a non-MS warrior 1 level below me, and I swear he must have been crying at the end of it. He took me to about 25%, crit Healing Wave to full. Just whittled the guy down, kept Searing down, Earth Shield up, it was great. I ended it at almost full health and half mana.

Now, one thing I wanted to mention: the Vindication trinket, the one purchased with 30 Marks of Thrallmar. I had originally poo-poo'ed it when I heard about the proc being on spell hit, but I eat my words. Get it now if you're in the beta because it will almost certainly get nerfed. Proc rate on LB wasn't great, but it's got a 100% procrate on Shocks, including Rank 1 Shocks. Basically at the cost of 30 mp6 I can regen around 150 mp6 by spamming Rank 1 ES while meleeing with FT. As Enhancement I'm sure it would be an extremely good addition to your gearset if you don't have it already. Enjoy it while it lasts, there's no way it's working as intended now. But regardless, even if/when nerfed, I'm sure it will be a solid trinket for those that don't have crazy yummies like DFT.

Saw a 66 Shaman in my party use Earth Elemental totem a couple times in a run. No clue what it was doing in terms of damage or aggro, but I did notice after it was summoned and we started a new pull, it sat on top of its totem while we fought 10 feet away, doing nothing to join the fight. So uber.

Anyway, that's all I can think of now. I'm taking a long, long break from WoW and the beta (if not permanently), so won't have anything new, but keep on the good discussion and work.

Not an enhancement question, but how long does earth shield stay up assuming a frequently hitting mob? Do we have a value for "every few seconds" in the talent description? Basically, if I'm a full resto shaman in a 40 man raid, will that be the only spell I use on tank and spanks?

Through most of the pulls, a full 10 charges before the pull tended to last through trash. Sometimes I'd need to refresh, but usually a couple charges remained at the end of the fight. I highly recommend priming your MT with R1 Healing Wave before a fight to get max Healing Way up. Bonus if it procs AF before the pull. I used Chain Heal with great frequency when the other dps pulled aggro, but otherwise it's Earth Shield and Healing Wave.

Is it just me or do the BoP maces totally dominate axes for enh shamans?

I mean the 1h mace has a haste proc! Would be great for troll shamans... Troll beserk, bloodlust and shamanistic rage used after the maces haste proc for maximum mana regen.

But yeah, both the 1h and 2h mace seem better than the axe "equivalents". I hope those stats aren't final.

I saw a screen shot that had a new name/better stats for this cool Mace, but it did get 0.1 seconds faster.

I saw another interesting Mace MH that is craftable.

Dragonstrike MH Mace 2.7
179-334 95 dps
16 stamina
Requires Master Hammersmith, level 70
Chance on hit: Increases Haste rating by 200 for 10 seconds

Does blessing of kings stack with the tauren endurance racial?

Not original, but anyway: waiting for your test on new rockbitter weapon :)

Unfortunately, that is still not sufficient. I wielding those 2 weapons and yes, sometimes I get "omgwtf" crit streaks in PvP, but it's very rare. Unless that is happening, the ENH shaman is unfortunately dead meat currently in PvP. The situation is very-very bad for enh freaks out there, because of the very thing you mentioned: there is this abundance of CC and snare abilities.

Frankly, there are no class other than shaman, which cannot CC you to death, if you aren't lucky and don't get that crit streak off in time.

Locks - all of them, not just SL - are virtually invicible now in 1on1, but they usually take down 2 people without too much problems. As a shaman, you have ZERO chance against a lock: the scenario is you get feared, tremor doesn't pulse in time, you run around, gets dotted massively, you come out of fear, got a felguard intercept and daze you / 3k shadowbolts, fear again and you are pretty much dead and there is nothing you can do. You dead even if you manage to kill the lock, because you'll have no mana left to heal yourself up from the crazy dot damage.

This is very frustrating to say at least, but I guess it's the same with every class, which doesn't have fear counter and/or doesn't have some abilities to remove magic or curses. I have yet to see a lock die versus anyone in 1on1 or 1on2, because believe it or not, they just simply never die in these scenarios.


My feelings exactly. We really lack some kind of CC. If we don't get it and not specced heavy elemental, you can just forget PvP, forget 2vs2, 3vs3 arena, because you'll be no real powerup to the group.

I got those "highend" weapons, which you can acquire on lv67 / Nagrand, but you are still on spot: DW is a failure in PvP, it's a strictly PvE damage setup. Now, this can change with those uber 90 dps, slow, heavy hitting one handers you mentioned, but provided the stamina scaling and levels to go still, it's very unlikely.

Yeah :) I have a Sulfuras either, got around 1k base AP as of yet, and my best WF is (with SoE and BS) around 5.5k combined with a SS crit. This is power to be reckoned with, but still the luck factor makes ENH spec very frustrating in PvP 80% of the time, due to the CC flood, you experience from your fellow enemies.

Stamina is a must now for ENH shamans. The crappy armor and the slow, big weapon means we'll be primary targets (as if we weren't before :) and will take a lot of damage anyhow. I have now 7k HP unbuffed on 67, but this still needs to be improved.

Exactly. As if were said by me.

Sorry, but it won't.

All I have to say is to give us some powerful CC ability or some other counter to these mechanisms, becasue spending 80% of your in combat time in some sort of running around, doing nothing is VERY nerve breaking ... I'm lucky, that I have a good guild for PvP, so I can feel a bit relieved, because we usually never wander alone and/or coming to help guildies very fast .. otherwise, my hunter would be promoted as my primary PvP char.

Just my 2 cents.

So in theorycraft now, what we are truly missing to be any kind of PvP force as a stick-swinger is a CC / Stun ability? Ahhh crap. Shamans have always had that weakness built into the class to balance our ability to interrupt so often. What the heck is blizzard going to do this time? It can't be proc or luck based, we are already too highly reliant on that factor.... our skills are already out... Something like:

Warquake: 650 mana
20 yard range - Nature school -
30 second cooldown

Target enemy is stunned for 6 seconds and gains the "off-balance" debuff, reducing armor by 25% for 15 seconds.

Would fix us you think? Or would that break us in half? How finely balanced are we in DPS that the changes to fix us in PvP are based solely around CC from other classes? Maybe give us some kind of shield that grants an additional chance to resist CC effects?

Well, as you said, the lack of any form of proper CC is built into the class from the beginning and I can live with that. IF and only IF we have some counter for these effects, because they are getting abundant.

There is the Focused Mind talent in the resto tree which gives 15% to resist interrupt and silence effects at 3 points, fully talented. This is a very good start, however I would be more delighted if they would implement your solution, like a 10 sec CC immune shield which purges all current cc effect on you, with a reasonable cooldown, like 30 sec or 1 min. Hell, I could live with this passive CC resist stuff too (like Focused Mind, but for all CC effects).

Maybe it just sounds too imba at first, but as you will start to play after release, you'll see that Greatcow's description about shaman pvp was not exaggarated.

I just respecced to elemental / resto and well ... the difference is there, however, you'll hate Purge by the most .. getting your Ele Mastery and NS purged with an instant is rather ... hm, stupid ;) Altough the focused casting talent combined with the silence / interrupt resist is working out very very nice. Add in Elemental Warding and the Elemental Shields talent and you just became a tough beast to kill, while popping out 2.5k shocks and whatnot ..

Makes me sad that we have to (and we do) discuss elemental and resto as a solution in our enhance thread. And even then, the only real longevity solutions are deep tier resto or mid-tier elemental, the 15% in resto nonwithstanding. Something like this would probably keep you alive much much longer against all kinds of silliness, or you could even drop lightning mastery and get the last unrelenting storm point and full Nature's Guardian in resto to live even longer. (I wouldn't, since I could just heal myself hopefully). But still, this kind of survivability is next to impossible in enh right now unless you spec deep resto anyways, missing out on a ton of sustained dps. Distinctly troubling.

What sort of HP does the earth elemental have? If it's going to be some sort of advanced target dummy, I hope it can take the hits.

I'll get you an exact (current) number soon, but as of last 2 times I tested it it was well over 4k with ~40% DR. Giving it threat abilities is really all that's needed to make it a viable totem to drop.

So a while ago, in the old thread, I posted that I would be willing to hand over my combat logs and perform specific testing for Shamanistic Rage. Discofiend took me up on it, and a few megs of text files later here are his results:

There's 2-3 other sets of logs and tests he also based this on, and a few hours of me beating the crap out of the invuls in BL. With 950 AP, 23.5% to crit, 2.5 and 1.6 speed, that gives me almost 13 procs, for an unbuffed 1852 mana. This feels about right assuming no totems, buffs or trinkets or spirit regen.

Many thanks to Disco for doing all the work, I just hit things.

Edit:
If that number seems low, by adding in BS, SoE and GoA (still no trinkets or spirit regen) jumps that to almost 3k, and it scales very quickly with more AP/crit. 4K certainly isn't out of the question.

I was looking in the Curse beta database, and I noticed that earth shock does not give extra threat anymore, now Frost shock has that extra threat. If curse is right, this a good change for Stormstrike raiding shaman.

Rockbiter now give extra dps (62 dps added at 70, 49 dps added at 62) and the extra threat is removed.

Windfury is the same you get the two extra attacks.

Also, Offhand flametongue hits do full damage rather than being reduced in damage like other weapon buffs.

...
Wow.

Quick question, is there really a difference between windfury procing 2 attacks and one attack (It says its damage is equal to 2 attacks) when it can't proc UR/Flurry?

WF has always refreshed Flurry and as of the push before this most recent one refreshes UR as well.