I think I'm reading Earth Shield different from how a lot of people are. My interpretation is that you cast it on a target, and it works like Lightning Shield or Water Shield, except that instead of doing damage or returning mana, it heals when a charge goes off. So it's a pre-cast reactive heal. The key question is its magnitude and whether it benefits from +healing gear, but conceptually, how is that not very useful? I think that as described it specifically has no cooldown, but you can only put it on one person at a time.

It seems like an incredibly useful raid ability to put on a MT, no?

I was having trouble modeling the dual wield numbers on paper so I just wrote a program to do it.

There are 3 ways enhancement can play out.
A} weapon buff works on offhand and procs mainhand.
B} weapon buff works on offhand and procs on offhand.
C} weapon buff does nothing on offhand :(

The numbers used were
25% crit (probably low)
1300 AP (with bshout str totem and 10% and generic str potion and gear).
Mainhand 3.0 second 66 dps weapon.
Offhand 2.0 66 dps weapon.
Windfury applied to both weapons.

Option A yields.
47 main hand swings 35 offhand swings per minute.
Option B yields.
33 main hand swings 50 offhand swings per minute.
Option C yields.
33 main hand swings 35 offhand swings per minute.

Add 3 stormstrikes per minute is 10 bonus attacks for both.

So with no shocks just stormstrike spam
A = 50 mh attacks 38 offhand attacks. ~650 dps.
B = 36 mh attacks 53 offhand attacks. ~550 dps.
C = 36 mh attacks 38 offhand attacks. ~500 dps.

So the devil is in the details for dw shaman. Maybe we can squeeze the info out of a cm on the forums in the next month or so. Also I ran my simulator out to 6000 seconds and the longest the group ever went without the +10% ap buff roughly 3 seconds and it was quite rare for a shaman to go 10 seconds without landing a crit even at the meager 25% crit used in my sim.

If the shaman used earthshock they could easily get 150 dps over what is listed but they would also get aggro and die.


Also assuming the dw shaman leaves the ss charges up for the elemental shaman...
I think with generic raid buffs, mana spring, BoW, JoW, mageblood, +40mp5 elemental talent, +60 from gear
An elemental shaman should be able to get around 650-750 +damage at level 70 and pretty much spam lb rank 10 for a long time with very minor consumable usage. The end result with stormstrike almost always up would be in the neighborhood of 700 dps while also helping out the rolling ignites with their new toy totem.

So an enhancement shaman in all likelihood will justify their raid spot from a dps perspective. Especially if there is an elemental shaman to cash in on the stormstrikes.

Earthen Shield is definitely a healing lightning shield that is targetable I do not think that is up for debate. Like most things for us in the expansion we do not have enough information to act. If it returns a static amount and does not scale with gear it will probably be good for a few months and then be awful for years like manatide was. If it returns a % of damage taken that would be pretty cool and scale with the encounters.

I am underwhelmed with earthen shield in pvp though as it will have next to no use at all. Both sides will be quite aware what the guy with the greenball spinning around him is buffed and that buff will get purged/dispelled immediately and 600 mana down the toilet.

That said, I am happy that I am torn over my choices. That means we finally have some worth making. I think that if a raid can field a dw enhancement shaman and an elemental shaman that they will both contribute enough dps to justify their spots. A resto shaman will continue to be good like they are now.

As far as wishes go... I do wish that the chain heal talent was not so prohibitively low in the tree. Just because it is a new talent does not mean it justifies a position in row 8. Comparitively it is very week to other bottom tier talents. I wish that they would shuffle it around to make it more available.

I think Earth shield is just the Holy Word: Shield of shamans. If it scales, I think it will scale pretty poorly like HWS, but well it'll still scale a bit, and at least tanks won't have to click it off when a zealous shaman will cast it before engaging on a mob that doesn't hit hard enough ^^
It'll be interesting what the Earth elemental totem thing do too, the description is pretty vague.

The shamans in our raid last night were drooling more than my seven month old daughter. It was a sight to behold. I'm very much looking forward to going 41 enhance with the expansion and then switching to a 0/40/21 build at 70. It's really amusing to see all our rogues crying and wanting to switch to a shaman.

The big question for Earthen Shield is whether or not the "this effect can only happen once every few seconds part" applies to the spell interruption portion. If the 30% interrupt resist does indeed stack with the 70% earlier up in the tree and is a full time effect, it's going to take a while to chew through the 10 charges to actually be able to interrupt casting. If it only happens for a second or two when the shield is triggered it isn't so good but it's also not a load of suck either. It may or may not stack with Power Word: Shield also. However it'll make a great pre-pull buff for tanks in any case.

I like the caster +dmg totem for obvious reasons (not the least of which is you take the effect yourself, hi +100 healing). I also like Water Shield, it'll provide some nice mana regen on raids (works out to around 20-25 MP/5 I think?). Of course it probably won't stack with Earthen Shield, and it may be questionably useful on some raid encounters since, well, you have to get hit by something for it to trigger. The summoned Elementals seem like gimmicks. Bloodlust is a yawner.

I think the improvements to each of the talent trees, viewed individually, are great. Every tree got a boost in what it does. Nature's Blessing will be at least 100 dmg for most Shamans, and a talent to make Chain Heal better is long overdue. Dual Wield obviously has some big perks (Lok'amir + Claw of Chrom = pew pew) and the AP buff talent gives Shamans a viable excuse to melee. The Elemental talents aren't quite so great, Lightning Overlol^H^Had is a PVP gimmick but the mana regen talent is great.

The problem is when you try and combine all 3 trees. You are forced to choose between a mana regen talent (which is pretty important considering that Shaman mana regen historically blows goats compared to the other healing classes), or between a talent that gives you 100 or more +dmg or 20% improvement on Chain Heal, which is the numero uno healing spell in a raid situation, and you automatically default Earthen Shield which may prove to be the best talent that Shamans get in TBC. Going 40 enhancement will give a shaman some decent melee damage, but meleeing has its own perils and mail AC and low mitigation isn't up to eating cleave after cleave. Any fights where you can't wade in and bust some skulls you'll be severely limited in your effectiveness. Not to mention that with a few exceptions (high rank PVP gear, Stormcaller's) itemization does not lend itself to being able to both melee with any appreciable DPS or to heal well. This isn't a new issue, Druids have been dealing with it with their tanking gear for ages. It's the curse of the hybrid.

Gurgthock posted yesterday on my knee-jerk reaction that talents are about making choices, and I agree. However, ask any Shaman what they do most of the time on raids. No matter what their answer is, they use mana to do it. Shaman healing is not overly efficient outside of Chain Healing situations (especially without Healing Way), and Shaman DPS is heavily reliant on using mana hand over fist as well (Shocks + Lightning Bolt/Stormstrike). It's for this reason that I don't understand burying Unrelenting Storm so deep in Elemental. Reflection is a 3rd tier talent, as is Meditation. Why do Shamans have their regeneration talent 2 tiers lower?

Dualwielding for healing or elemental weapons is not viable considering that you will sacrifice either +100 dam/healing or +40 mp5. Not to mention losing 3k armor. A single weapon is not worth it. It would be nice though to get a second oil but still not worth it.

Using two big stat-heavy weapons helps to offset that loss in situations where you aren't meleeing for DPS reasons (like say cleave spam), or where you just don't care about your own damage and are just trying to boost the group's AP. I don't disagree that a deep Resto spec is superior from a healing perspective but it's far from the only answer.

Nature's Swiftness. :(

it will be like ls today. Today i think you can get 1 proc per 2-3 seconds and the interrupt thing should be active the whole time.

Sham. Rage is a good grinding talent but for raids it isnt that great. My problem is how do i spend the last points in Enhance?
max out weapon dmg or max out to hit?

That's how I read it as well, but at a cost of 600 mana whoever's responsible for keeping it up probably won't be responsible for too much else. If it's scaled to be really worth having on your MT, some poor sap gets to be the Earth Shield bitch who can't even get as far as elemental fury or improved windfury and thus has no role in any raid besides Earth Shield bitch and Mana Tide and whatever healing they can spare the mana for. And having to keep up with level 70s in pvp or soloing will be horrible for that person, a current mana tide shaman taking 10 more points in resto will have little more ability for anything besides healing than he did at level 60. It's not even an interactive ability to use, just fire and forget.

The ability looks pretty nice depending on how it works, it's more that the deeper you go into the resto tree, the more you're doing it for one or two gimmick abilities (mana tide, earth shield) and there's a huge opportunity cost involved. A deep resto shaman just has no flexibility, mostly because all the really good shaman stuff in every tree is past that 20 point line. That includes resto. A pally can stop at 20 points in holy and still have +10% int, +12% healing (for 3 points!), and Illumination. A pally who goes all the way gets even better and still gets some stuff to support dps and/or tanking, and there's a number of good things early in both their other trees to support non-healing duties. A shaman who stops at 20 points in resto has stopped just short of all the good stuff, same for all the other trees (the only talent point before 20 which makes a considerable difference in either elem or enh is 2h weapons, and I'd say 90% of the resto shamans I know ended up with 11 or 13 points in enh just for that and perhaps improved SoE/GoA, as I've done myself).

I enjoy healing, been mana tide for 12 months with no regrets, but I enjoy my flexibility too or I'd play a priest or druid. Doing the same thing as I've been doing for 12 months but now with earth shield casts every 10-15 seconds or whatever does not strike me as either fun or creative.

That lack of flexibility also means that the deep resto shaman is purely competing with a healing-spec priest or druid for a raid spot without any pretensions to switching between being DPS and healing. That, or it's going to be a deep resto's earth shield and bigger chain heals vs an elemental/resto's DPS and better mana regen (and perhaps crit totem) or an enhancement/resto's DPS and better melee buffs.

Depends on what you're going for I suppose. My shaman are looking at this from the viewpoint that healing will be priest/druid/paladin for the most part so the shamans will be DPSing and enhancing DPS in groups. When a healer dies we'll stop DPS and pick up the slack, or when a paly has to tank we'll swap gear for the encounter and heal. I'm willing to pass up NS for the incredible benefit we'll be bringing.