The great thing about PPM systems, for shamans anyway, is that they generally still proc off the extra hits from WF, SS and (one assumes) LL. That means that slower weapons (which have a higher per swing chance) will result in a modestly higher actual proc rate.

It is, however, not as dramatic a "game" as haste and fast was.

I couldn't be happier with these changes. They smooth out the rough edges, maintain most of what makes a shaman a shaman in BC, and keep something special for Elemental shamans. Moreover, they make our "rotation" a bit more sensible and restore a melee focus (love those 24 hour nerfs). Yes, there's no more synergy with ED. Yes, it may sometimes still be worthwhile to cast LvB (though I doubt that will be true for long).

Now -- somebody go hit cap, put on a single weapon & shield, and autoattack a dummy for a few hours so we can figure out the PPM.

The bad thing about PPM systems is that they scale inverse to haste. Which means that Windfury Totem, Flurry and any haste from gear or any other source reduces the amount of proccs after instants (WF, SS, LL).

Well, Toots, we may want to wait till they actually push the patch with those changes first before trying to test them out.

I'm happy about the PPM aspect of the proposed Maelstrom Weapon change and think it's great.

What I am not happy about, on any level, is the removal of Lava Burst from maelstrom weapon since that effectively means I will never be casting that spell and that is a real disappointment to me since I really like the spell and how it interacts with Enhancement through Elemental Devastation.

I've suggested a few ways they could fix it so that the Lava Burst could still be used with Maelstrom Weapon but without it being such a huge portion of our damage. I really like the idea of having spells on only do 50% damage when cast with Maelstrom Weapon for 50% less mana but that could scale so negatively that it could hit a point where it wouldn't be worth the GCD to cast a damaging spell.

Another option, that I actually like even more, is to reduce the base casting time of Lava Burst to 1.5 seconds instead of 2 seconds which would reduce the coefficient from 58% to 43%. Then they change Lightning Mastery so that instead of affecting Lava Burst by reducing the casting time from 2.0 to 1.5 it would increase the coefficient by 15% leaving it as a 1.5 second cast but with the coefficient of a 2 second spell for Elemental Shaman.

Basically no change at all for them but a significant decrease in how much spellpower will affect Lava Burst for Enhancement. We would still get to use the spell for it's interaction with Elemental Devastation but Lightning Bolt would scale better so if Ele D is already active it would end up being better to use the MW stack for a LB instead of a LvB. Would also preserve the use of Lava Burst in PvP even with the decreased coefficient since that would be made up for with the ability to force a crit in that resilience laden environment.

Seal of Command is a ppm that now scales with haste. It looks like Ghostcrawler is on top of that aspect of PPM mechanics.

Well, you do lose a few "extra" procs, but that's easily made up by increased damage from haste, and it is sort of the inverse of the situation with lightning knives.

It'll be interesting to see how the offhand works now...I still think the flexibility to pick the speed you want and not worry too much about lost DPS is a valiant goal. I had a guildmate buy the 1.5s badge fist the other day, and he was pretty bummed when I informed him the Blazing Comet that just dropped was better DPS.

Just a few notes about Hex, our new CC. The only disappointment is having to wait till 80 to get it. However its mechanics are different from Polymorph, which also has a cast time. The key advantage and most likely probable reason for the longer cool down is that it does not break automatically on damage. That is an important advantage over polymorph. In tracking down comments its effectiveness many have commented that it currently takes a lot of damage to break it, so it operates more along the line of a Fear in this regard. This opens up the window for casting it on a target which has decided to eat your healer for lunch, dotted or not. If anything it opens more doors for us at 80 than we had before, I cannot count the times I was excluded from five mans simply because I did not have CC.

Lava Burst to me needs to be exclusive to Elemental, best as a talent to give them their compliment to our Lava Lash. If done this way, as in as deep in their tree as ours, perhaps we can convince the developers to give us back the full range Stormstrike debuff. We have never been a spec about spell damage, we got a gimme with the SS debuff which made our Earth Shock hit better. Now Maelstorm weapon allows us to at least put Lightning Bolt into the rotation as well as give validity to extra ranks of StormStrike as we have another option for burning off the bonus damage charges.

Still my primary use of MW has been to get off heals in PvP. To that it excels. While I won't be as aggravating to my attacker as I would be on my Resto Druid it has increased my survivability immensely. No more interrupts, no more lock outs from counterspell or equivalent melee effects. Even at 60% reduction your opponent has a hard time stopping it, usually from reaction time combined with their GCD.

While their are three new abilities and I agree we get the least use of them overall we still have very good talent improvements, the ghost doggies are really good however most people will fail to exploit them enough to warrant consideration. Too many sit on CD effects to the point of losing out a lot of DPS/survivability.

If MW becomes a PPM that scales with haste, I'd give a kudos to Blizzard on that one. If they can achieve what they want to achieve with Enhancement: more damage through melee, portion of damage done through spell casting. I'll be incredibly happy in what they serve up.

It is sad to see Lava Burst removed from MW, but shouldn't this cause Crit to be a more "needy" stat? More crit should cause (both melee/spell crit) longer Flurry and Elemental Devastation uptimes. Even though we'll see Elemental Devastation up a lot less, 9% for 10 seconds from 3 talent points as a tier 2 talent is still incredibly awesome. It's a gift of a talent!

Considering Blizzard are now going down the road of making us benefit from a slow MH/OH (or what seems like it, we still don't have numbers to yay/nay this idea) perhaps Blizzard could remove the Flametongue advantage from Lava Lash and rework it too this: "You charge your off-hand weapon with lava, instantly dealing 75% off-hand Weapon damage. Guarenteed to critical strike if Flame Shock is currently active on the target. Consumes Flame Shock in the process." [this will proc ED, but count as a melee attack so it doesn't gain bonus from Elemental Fury]

This gives us 5 things:
- more benefit from ED
- more benefit from Flurry
- more benefit from twisting FS/ES
- damage will be significantly lower than Lava Burst's damage
- no longer have to worry about SS affecting Fire/Frost damage

It does also cause some less beneficial effects:
- Crit is less desireable
- MW is less desireable

There are probably other less beneficial effects that I'm forgetting. If anyone could enlighten me on possible problems?

So what? I could say about that ANY ability. And you are wrong, Hex DOES break on damage, it just doesn't break on the initial damage, it has a percentage of the target health that it's allowed to absorb.

Yah Polymorph and Fear don't have cast times, right?

The change to Maelstrom is laughable...this is a post I made on the beta forums:

It's the only CC with a cast time AND a cooldown. All other CCs only have one or the other.

This actually looks like a really good idea. One thing though (and I am not 100% sure about this) but isn't LL a melee ability that DEALS spell dmg and thus does not affect ED? Or am I misunderstanding the mechanics of LL?

And I know that we all want to use our SS charges just as much as the next person, but the only time that SS really benefits us is while we are soloing. In a raid situation don't ele shammies gain more from it than we do (e.g. why we used a FS/ES rotation as supposed to ES/FS or straight ES to nab charges) as well as eat the charges before we can even come off of our GCD? So what I'm saying is that with the extra charges, we'll prolly end up using MAYBE one of them, two if we are lucky, but i don't have numbers to back that up...just lots of experience with the GCD.

I've been running a lot of instances and heriocs, and Polymorph isn't even on my main action bar anymore.
Nobody wants you to crowd control anything, the time of "need 3 mages for heroic" are over.

My Mirror Images have cast polymorph more often than I have. I'm not joking.

Elemental has bigger problems than Lava Burst.

Yeah I've even tried to push for CC, but Blizz themselves have kinda stated that they're trying to push for AE tanking for everyone =\ JUST BLOW IT ALL UP MWUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Laughable? This fixes everything, reforges our spec while balancing it against other classes and without harming Elementals.

It's at worst a bit indelicate. Perhaps a more lore-defensible approach may be to make Lavaburst a deep Elemental talent, just far enough that your choice would be Shamanistic rage or Lavaburst, but considering that reduces OUR flexibility (LavaBurst will remain a great finisher against mobs that flee) I'm glad they haven't go that route yet.

As for CC...they're curently on their "nerf tanks" round of balance. AoE tanking is only good insofar as you can survive the impact of the mobs you're controlling. By the time we're at 80, we'll probably have been to control SOMETHING to keep our level 80 tanks alive, at least in heroics.

I didn't have a lot of trouble finding groups during my grind, but I also had a number of instances called due to too many wipes. That sucks. It also sucks that our class has more or less forgotten the fine art of kiting.

Polymorph and fear don't have cooldowns.

Any CC with a cast time has no cooldown, any CC with a cooldown has no cast time......
....Until HEX appeared.

But I couldn't care less about it.

The PPM change is nice, and will completely scale with haste, GC himself said so to the druids, when they asked about Omen of clarity (is PPM) and haste-scaling.

Indeed laughable.
Because even if we would do a lot more dps now it is a massive nerf on fun.

If anyone besides me remember this word in a game.
Beta Enhancer was a lot of fun, but with this changes ...

To help synergize the enhancement tree with Elemental Devastation more, perhaps they could change Stormstrike to simply increase the critical strike chance of spells by 20% instead of increasing Nature damage by 20%? It's an extremely elegant solution that while less interactive than the FlS -> LvB combo allows us to better use ED.

You think? I haven't had a chance to raid at 80 on Beta, but the problem with elemental always seemed to me to be that having to spend a GCD to Flame Shock for every LvB wasn't worth it, along with the range/timing issues involved, vs. just LB spam all day long. It always seemed odd that enhance got more use out of LvB than elemental, in practice. You'd have had to completely gut LvB and roll some massive buffs into deep elemental for it (to the tune of "LvB does half damage and deep ele has a talent that doubles LvB damage"), which would've been just as hamfisted as what ended up happening, I think, in order to get things balanced between the two specs.

Also enhance was probably just plain doing too much damage, looking at GC's posts on the beta forums. So they weren't necessarily looking to fine-tune, but rather to deliver a beating with the nerf bat.

I am a little sad the damage rotation appears to be a static rotation, hitting SS, ES and LL when they come off cooldown and possibly refreshing lightning shield. I was really looking forward to the interaction and choices we had to make on the fly based on MW, FS and LvB.

Exactly. It doesn't matter what other problems elemental has, the primary purpose of Lava Burst was to spruce up elemental spell rotations, not ours. The fact that it gave enhancement some added synergy was simply an added plus. Reverting Stormstrike to nature damage only and removing LvB from MW makes our lives a little simpler in terms of theorycrafting and actual execution. No more "after how many ticks of FS is it 'ok' to LvB?" or "at what point in the duration of ED is it worth casting LB instead of LvB when MW is up?", etc. We'll still have plenty to worry about keeping in our rotation without having to micromanage FS, LvB, and MW; this fix did a good job of both simplifying a complicated-to-perfect talent and scaling back our damage without hurting elemental in the process.

[e] @ goddi23a: My definition of 'fun' doesn't include having to look at 3 different cooldown/proc/dot timers (LvB CD, ED timer, FS dot time remaining) and consulting some memorized table of data in my head to decide what spell to cast every time MW hits 5 stacks, and knowing that if I don't make the decision quickly, I'm losing DPS. That's always been my main problem with MW, and I'm perfectly happy with just having to made decisions based on a static priority queue of abilities rather than one that's constantly in flux based on the status of various cooldowns/uptimes. I wouldn't worry so much--the sky isn't falling, we'll still have plenty of buttons to push.

Dude, we've got some PPM-based MW stack interfering with 5s rotating shocks, 6s LL and 8s SS, LS refreshes, searing totem drops, wind shocks...we will be busy as hell. It will be really fun. FS->LvB was a cool mechanic but it's yet another thing to keep track of in a busy raid.