Totemic Restoration has some interesting uses when used creatively. For instance, place Spirit Link Totem on the tank just after he takes a Decimation Blade from Baleroc and then cancel the totem. One tick is usually enough to get him to 50-60% just from the health redistribution. Since Spirit Link has a 6.80 sec duration (we'll round to 6) and you only had it active for 1 sec that means 5 sec was wasted. Totemic Restoration would set the cooldown of SLT to 30 sec.

180 sec CD/6 sec duration = 30 sec off/1 sec wasted.
180-(30x5)=30 sec CD

I like the idea that Blizz is aiming at with the new talent system being redesigned for emphasis on play style preference utility talents. However, my concern is that none of these talents can replace the utility of the current talent choices. For example, all three of my shammy specs have come to rely heavily on the movement ease of Ancestral Swiftness and I see nothing included in the new “utility” talents that comes close to the benefit of movement that this does. Put quite simply, ghost wolf becomes blah during combat with a 1.5 sec cast time.

Losing other similar talents scares me a bit, but I have confidence that many of them will find themselves into the spec specific talent trees (unless Blizz is willing to create tremendous setbacks with class specs as opposed to advancements). An example of this is, Nature’s Swiftness. Will something that is really built into most resto druid and shaman specs find a place in the new spec specific healing trees of these two classes?

I recall GC saying that Ghost Wolf will be instant cast baseline, but the "effects can't slow you below normal run speed" effect will be something to talent into, as shown in the earlier talent choices.

Nature's Swiftness is, in the talent panel we saw, a passive 5% haste that stays always and an ability that functions as the Nature's Swiftness does today.

Was I the only one who saw the one minute cd on Nature's Swiftness? Because that's fragging awesome.
That (along with the new Healing Tide Totem) address what I see as one of the major deficiencies of a RSham : no raw HPS cooldowns.
(before someone says it SLT IS awesome, but too situational to be of help in more than half the encounters we see.)

Not to mention our spot heals are gone too (surge is useless) along with lava burst...seems like they want to limit our utility to just a single task (ie. toss a weak healing rain or healing tide to supplement proper healing cd's) instead of a number of things like we can now. Essentially we become a pure dps class with 1 occasional hybrid task...and it seems to be the same with other hybrids too. (ie. they lose all their heals and are left with the worst one)

It depends on how much surge heals for but my gut feel is that a rogues recuperate, as an example, heals for more than surge over the same time. I am sure they will balance them at the end of the day though.

Well Bashiok came out to calm the tides, as I'm sure we aren't the only ones to have issues with what spells got hand picked for what specs and which spells got nixed etc. I'm hoping it's as simple as shaman haven't been revisited since Blizzcon and that the laundry list of spells and talents that aren't yet in their calculator will show with an update. ( /crosses fingers for telluric currents)

Otherwise, now's the time to start sounding off that we want changes made pronto. Personally I intend on making numerous posts demanding we don't lose TC, I've come to love that filler/mana return too much.

I'm still not sure the calculator showed any of our new auras that replace the buff totems. I was curious to see which specs got which auras, if we don't get all of them, and whether certain auras didn't stack (like WF and WoA atm is a choice) seeing as they're limiting the crossovers between specs for all hybrids and pure dps alike.

The problem with TC is that it gives a mana return that is effected by Int. From what I understand, the new MoP model is to have int not effect mana size or regen at all.

This could be solved by making TC return mana based on a percentage of your spirit, although this would make it undoubtedly less powerful than it is now, simply because it would scale with your regen stats, as opposed to your throughput stats. Still, I'd miss the utility if it was taken away. The combination of it and Glyph of Unleashed Lightning fills a gap in resto's toolset quite nicely.

Some potential Stat changes were posted yesterday. For Enhancement, the most relevant one is this:

"Expertise will negate dodge and spell miss, then parry."

Assuming I'm reading that right, this is likely the answer to the question of "But, what about the 8 Expertise from Unleashed Rage", and similar talents in other specs, that existed to counterbalance the need to also Spell Hit cap and chewed up itemization points on gear. Using Cata numbers, this means we'd want Hit to just about 960 and then the normal 781 Expertise to be spell capped. That would likely result in reduced white damage from lower melee hit under DW, but hopefully be counterbalanced by the ability to pick up more of other useful stats as at least the 541 Expertise in the item budget we'd currently need to cap both will be freed up.

Hit rating already increases both Spell and Melee hit, just at different rates (changing to the same rate in MoP). Spirit is the only stat that increases only spell hit, and that is due to the way the talent works (which will again no longer apply for enhance in MoP since it's an Elemental-only ability). Spirit weapons are currently completely non-viable for enhance anyway, since 4.3's spellpower/int nerf.

That is exactly what it means, yes. 7.5% hit + 7.5% expertise gives us our 15% spell hit. As a weird side effect, it also means that casters can gem or enchant for expertise to reach their spell hit cap too, tho I'm guessing expertise on gear will only exist on Agility and Strength items.

Also, DKs still use spell hit for Howling Blast and Icy Touch (and some others), so they will be equally affected this.