The stormstrike change devalues FS/LvB further compared to ES/LS, which in turn devalues Elemental Devastation. Our uptime on that will be much lower, too bad there isn't much in terms of alternative talents now. I think a flat 10% Stormstrike value instead of 20% to nature only would have been a smarter change.

It's also unfortunate that Unleashed Rage was "brought in line" with the DK version, but still remains 5 pts and offers no additional benefit to the shaman. It should be 2-3 points with an additional self-only effect.

I assume Dual Wield Specialization now provides spell hit as well, otherwise it is very underpowered.

At this point we have to assume that the devs are aware that UR is an inferior alternative, have made the deliberate decision to keep it like that, and don't feel the need to explain why. Shamans have certainly been vocal enough about it.

The new dual wield spec is 1% dps per point. That's not underpowered, it's balanced. It's no longer a mandatory talent for enhancement shamans, although I'm not entirely sure where else we'll use those points.

It's a pity, though... the flameshock/MW/lavaburst rotation was fun.

This is pretty significant, I'm looking at the simulation from my character and guessing a 8 to 10% dps decrease. I'm just ball parking it by reducing fire damage by 20% and taking out 5% of my white damage. The change to MW should reduce damage even more then that though not to mention that MW wont scale anymore.

The MW thing stinks of a pvp buff.

I was actually having a lot of fun with the FS/LvB/MW rotation, this stinks. OTOH, we were doing way too much damage so it was to be expected; just wish they had taken a different route.

I napkin mathed a far greater than 10% damage decrease from these changes when starting from a spellpower gear perspective. Even when melee geared it's still much more than 10%. The change to flurry alone has huge repurcussions since most enhancement shaman abilities recursively trigger off autoattacks, creating a feedback mechanism. My best guess is that the developers wanted to get enhancement shamans off spellpower gear immediately and did so with massive sweeping nerfs. Hopefully they'll continue to look at our numbers in the aftermath.

I don't really see the MW change as a PvP buff, as melee attacks that would have crit but were avoided by resilience can be set to still activate.

If i remember correctly this only works for defensive mechanisms.

Some interesting changes to be sure, but the Flurry and DW spec nurfs are bigger nurfs to physical damage than spell damage, so I'm not sure if the shift back to physical damage will be as significant as blizzard has implied they want.

I'll probably regret this but I'll bet less useful now.

I'm guessing its a PvP buff because the duration is increased to 30 seconds and it procs off of everything.

Its a pvp nerf actually. The irony is that we already had a 25-27% crit rate in PvP gear. With a 10% reduction in crit from resilience, wed have a 15-17% chance to proc it every attack. A flat 15% proc rate = 15% flat crit rate that never scales. This means we will now prioritize faster weapons with TONS of haste on our gear over crit rating. Yes folks, crit rating just took a dump in favor of haste rating. We don't need crit rating anymore. We can easily get 30% raid buffed with all +hit and +haste gems, as crit only affects flurry now.

Hit and Haste are now king.

Can anyone check if they normalized FT coefficient?

Improved Stormstrike spell bonuses and Duel Wield Specialization nerfs make me sad. Thats gonna be 6 percent hit gone from TBC

The changes listed have nothing whatsoever to do with Improved Storm Strike.

kk. Stormstrike change

This is correct, but I'll add I don't think it's a pvp buff (unless as someone said the duration was double, that element would be a pvp buff) as without any outside buffs or totems in my pvp gear I have over 30% crit, consider most people's pvp sets reduce crit rate by about 10% and you're still looking at a more than 15% effective rate.

edit: Beaten.

So are the added Charges on Imp SS a waste now? How can we do 4 hits of Nature Damage in 12 seconds or really 8 seconds since that is the CD of a talented SS? I assumed that when the DeBuff worked for ALL spell damage we would eat the procs with one shock per CD and a couple of FT hits coupled with a MW proc.

Imp SS is still nice for the CD reduction. Maybe add the other Spell types to the Improved Talent?

Yeah, I'm not sold that we will end up with two fast weapons. I still think the intention is WF/FT with at least one slow weapon. We still are "suppose" to be melee and have windfury and stormstrike. I have to believe that those are still a big part of being and enhance shammy.

I'm thinking that increase in duration is the real PvP buff section, it looked like a lot of the complaining about MW and arena was that the charges fell off too soon to be useful. I am willing to wager that the % reduction in proc chance had to happen in order to justify the increased duration.

Does anyone have hard numbers on this "scaling" problem the only thing I can come up with at the moment is a post by pitbuller, and that one only seems to do 4.3k dps. I am just assuming its an lvl 80 build based on the numbers in the debuff positions. It would help to know what the base line is for all classes as well.

Personally I could care less. Damage is damage. The method is kind of pointless outside of do you do it at range or do you do it up close. To me the optimal situation is having all weapon combos be viable (not necessarily equal) so that we dont have to skip really nice weaons just because they are to fast or to slow..

The potential problem with the new method is that they cant raise MW as it sits right now if the DPS does turn out to be too low, because all that will do is push us towards fast/fast, as a straight on hit % scales with weapon speed.

The warriors were asking for their version so to be buffed up to our versions of +hit and Flurry for a reason. Their 51pt talent forces them to have to get a horrible amount of hit. Our 46-50 now does the same thing to us.

I'm not really seeing a point to a bunch of these changes. DW spec was weak. Rogues get 50% off-hand damage increase and 5% hit before level 20. We finally get to DW at level 40 and how is it improved? 3% +hit in a T6 talent. GC indicated that a huge round of nerfs to talents were done because they were over budget. Well someone needs to point out that the budget for a T6 talent should probably give more pt for pt than a T2 one. We still don't have a way to boost off-hand damage and now have a talent to do an extra attack with it.


I've been following this thread since page 3. I've been reading stuff on the beta board since the day it opened and I have been disappointed with pretty much the entire way shaman have been left behind. Most people are betting on this going to 3.0 next week. That doesn't bode well for these changes being fixed or reverted.

I don't really see leveling to be an enjoyable thing with these changes. MW will be pretty pointless for it.
I'd say be more vocal on the beta boards about getting us parity, but then someone would call you "nitpicky"...

I'd like to direct the community to this post: WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> Enhancement in Caster Gear still the best...

Once again, caster gear is winning out over melee gear. Their changes had the exact OPPOSITE effect that they planned. Caster gear with a caster MH going Fast FT / Slow FT is still the best setup, only now by leaps and bounds. Now what can be done about this?

Biggest change/nerf seems to be Improved Stormstrike. I really can't see any justification for taking this talent anymore. 4 charges are practically impossible to use up now, especially since it will be very rare to use MW with Lightning Bolts due to the much slower stack rate (even with 2 fast daggers it was very rare that MW5 came up before Lava Burst was back off cooldown).

As for the whole fast weapons vs slow weapons, I bow out of the argument until the Sim gets updated.