Sprout

This is the 1st I have heard of these changes...

I also heard a rumor of them combining hit/spell hit and crit/spell crit. Anyone back that up?

 

Aylii

* Hit Rating, Critical Strike Rating, and Haste Rating now modify both melee attacks and spells.
via Patch notes - Wotlkwiki

There was a blue post that had announced this a while back. I have been unable to find it however.

 

Sprout

Wow, not sure how I missed that one

thanks.

What about the coefficient changes listed above?

 

Daidalos

Since they are getting rid of +heal and +dmg stats and merging them into one spell power stat the assumption is that the amount of spell power will be comparable to current amount of +dmg on gear (thus making it about 2/3 to 1/2 or so of the amount of +heal we currently have). So to ensure that healing doesn't suffer from this merger they obviously have to increase healing coefficients. What they will be hasn't been released and I'm not certain but I don't think they have even done this stat merger in the beta yet. Ultimately heals should be pretty much the same with slightly different math.

Restoration Shaman calculations:http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...IWv3sPmcYnEJUg

 

Sprout

Assumingthe early level LK greens put everyone at about 2000 healing and about 550 int...

Nature blessing= ~200 +heal
Tidal Mastery= 5%
Blessing of elements= 4% + some minor increase to +heal (20-30 at most)
Tidal waves give you 5% and 500 healing
elemental shields gives ~150 extra on ES and ~7-8 mp5
Imp ES give +100 per ES and 2 extra shield procs
Imp CH- 20% to chain heal

You cant have all of these @ 70. The question becomes one of gear. Frankly most of us dont have a crit set so leveraging crit is more difficult. I would imagine the LK greens will solve that however, but you will give up a bunch of healing to do so if you have T6 level gear (not to mention set bonuses). So you have 2 options

Assuming you want a crit hvy elemental focus build I would do the following:

Looking at the talents above, Imp ES and Natures Blessing can probably go right off the top. elemental shield is a pretty low return as well @ 70. Imp CH/SL is nice but not the point of this build. That almost gives you enough points to spec 11/0/51....1 short, so you drop 1 point from tidal mastry to start out. This is assuming that instance farming is your goal you will only have to heal 5 people at a time and HW/LHW become much more useful. Because you are doing only 5 mans at this point AA is almost as good as CH for non tank healing.

Lvl 70 clearcast/AA build
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft


If you want to stick with a CH/SL build for instances, I would drop tidal waves, healing way, AA, and pick up imp ES and SL, and then elemntal shield again. I can also pickup the improved SoE/GoA for your group buffing and imp GW because its fun and Im lazy.
Lvl 70 CH/SL build
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

 

Galirn

CC/AA Build:

Level 80 - I was looking at something along the lines of this build. The extra intellect is not necessary and can be put elsewhere and the cleanse, depending on feasibility, is also not necessary. But, basically I was building it to maximize ability to crit.

Level 70 - I would probably be looking at this build. Very similar to the one above and the improved reincarnation is very tempting. It would really depend on how much I plan on dying during instancing

CH/SL Build:

Basically would do the same as above.

The issue for me is, the tool tip for the Elemental Shields talent states that only the orbs of Water Shield get the buff. So does that mean that only if the Water Shield procs that you get the 15% additional mana or is the 15% also on top of the say 50 Mp5?

Personally I would like to go CC/AA for raiding depending on the vaibility (though I'll pretty much go any spec that the guild needs me to). I used to play a Healadin, Pre-BC and found it fun. Will be interesting to see how this goes.

And as a point of interest, how viable will we Resto Shaman be in the 70-80 instance content. the reason I ask is that I switched from Enh to Resto for end-game as it was what I wanted to do. But, I leveled as Enh because it was quicker and easier to find groups that way. Would rather stay heal-spec if possible.

 

Plummer

The new wording for Spirit Link on mmo-champion sounds a lot better:

You link the friendly target with up to two nearby friendly targets, causing 50% of any damage taken to be distributed to the linked targets. If any target takes a blow greater than 30% of their health, or shared damage would reduce a target's health below 20%, the link is broken. You can only have one link active at a time.

This sounds a lot better allowing a link to stay active for a lot longer with having to refresh it constantly. It also implies that it won't be very useful to break large spikes of damage. I personally like the change a lot better giving chain heal a new edge on single target healing which is all I was looking for from this talent.

Source: Shaman Talent Calculator

It also looks like some of the talents which were exclusively healing wave and lesser healing wave were changed to include chain heal as well and now I have to say that I'm a lot more excited about WotLK.

 

rava

The new Tidal Waves/Improved water shield are really nice. It's a shame that AA still isn't going towards chain heal, but you're still looking at ~1 sec LHW/1.67 sec HW with Tidal Waves/New Wrath of Air/300ish haste(not sure what that number will convert into at 80, but it's around 20% haste and I can't really imagine wotlk gear lacking it based on late TBC itemization). Kind of weird they took out the healing crit part of Elemental Focus, frees up a ton of points. I also can't wait to use haste pots for healing :\

Full price for gum!? That dog won't hunt, Monsignor.

 

Roywyn

Hm, can LHW/HW still proc Elemental Focus (Clearcasting)?

It affects the next two damage/healing spells, but doesn't state that LHW/HW crits can proc it.


Edit: Yeah, I read it in the current and in the old patch notes and it was in before, but it's not mentioned in the current talent calculators I've seen.
It's not in the datamined Elemental Focus - Spell - World of Warcraft either.

Hence my confusion

The Blue Bar and you - the complete Fire Mage 2.4 mana compendium: http://elitistjerks.com/658230-post3191.html

DPS spec and class comparison in Naxxramas gear: http://code.google.com/p/simulationc...i/SampleOutput

And [Timbal's Focusing Crystal] doesn't proc on AM.
Neither does [The Egg of Mortal Essence] since 3.1.

 

Nacht

From the notes listed on MMO Champion:

 

Razzberry

I assume that they decided to remove healing spells from Elemental Focus and implement a retroactive mana refund on HW/LHW crits through Improved Water Shield.

Between that and the changes to Tidal Waves, it does make it much easier to pick up everything useful at least:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

 

Sprout

Some thoughts- Resto and other


Imp GW/Spectral trans- If they are making it a % of mana it better not be dispellable.

SL- As it sits not this became much less useful for a CH/SL raid build. Its great for AOE or small dmg type setups, but for the most part the link will drop on any big hit form a raid boss. Almost looks like a PVP talent now instead of PVE

AA- What does 'lowest health friendly party member or raid target" mean? Will it heal your raid target 1st if needed then anyone in your party?

Tidal Waves- Sets up an interesting config where you cycle CH with HW in raid situations. Even tank healing would be more efficient using method. And faster obviously.

Imp WS- Nice but if they only give us 3 orbs it will mean ALOT of GCD's used to refresh WS.

Swapping Totemic and Tidal Focus- Actually really nice, esp if you are a non resto. Totemic fovus s more of a PVP talent anyways.

Removing windwall and Shield spec talents- About time

I am really confused on elemental focus. What is the status of this?


EDIT : COuple other things

If flametongue is going to give +spell dmg, why use earthliving weapon?

I still think 30/0/41 is going to be a valid hybrid spec for instances and maybe even raids.

 

Malakitoo

Do we know for sure which is correct, the patch notes we're seeing, or the talent calculators?

They're definitely inconsistent:

o Convection (Elemental) is now a 3-point talent, down from a 5-point talent. Now lowers the mana cost of Thunder and Lava Burst.
o Ancestral Knowledge (Enhancement): Now increases your Intellect by 2/4/6%, instead of increasing your total Mana by 2/4/6/8/10%.
o Improved Lightning Shield (Enhancement) is now Elemental Shields, and is in Tier-1.
o Shield Specialization (Enhancement) - Now a 2-point talent, and increases the chance to block with attacks by 10/20%, and increases the amount blocked by 5/10%.

vs.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

 

Plummer

Maybe you haven't actually thought about it so let's take a level 70 encounter as an example.

Let's say Illidan does 7218 damage to the MT on his main hand. 50% of this is 3609. Assuming damage is split between the 2 targets we half this again to 1804.5 damage distributed to both targets. For the spirit link to sever, melee would have to have about 6015 health. Obviously all t6 level raiders have more health than this so the link will not break. On top of that, instead of the tank taking 7218 damage, he simply takes 3609 damage which greatly decreases the amount of burst on the tank.

Edit: I missed the part that says "if any target takes a blow greater than 30% of their health". If this includes the tank then this talent is not as powerful as I thought.

I would rely more on the patch notes but I can't say for certain since I don't have access to the beta. Since everything is chaotic at the moment I would assume any discrepancies in the data will be ironed out over the next few days.

 

Sprout

No I understand, but the link break if the hit is more than 30% total health or takes the person below 20%.

Look at encounters like Brut and use level 70 numbers. tanks take 15+k hits on stomp. 1/2 of that is 5k, which will sever the link for almost every class in the game, excluding OT's. Depending on how thelink sets itself up you could minimize that issue with OT's but for raid bopsses its going to drop off alot.

Not saying its not still really useful, it is, but its use in End game raiding might be less than perfect. Instances would be nice though for leveling. 3's also for PVP.

 

Razzberry

Questions I have regarding Spirit Link:

When it says it will break if a target will take a blow greater than 30% of their health, is it what the incoming blow would hit for before reduction or the re-distributed damage total?

Example:
Tank 20k (30% is 6k)
Two melee 10k (30% is 3k)

If it breaks on the damage of what the initial swing would hit for, then anything over 6k would break it and make it essentially useless for raiding.

On the other hand, if it breaks based on the actual damage received, the tank could be hit with any swings up to 12k (6k to tank, 3k to each melee) before breaking the link. The second application seems far less useless in raiding environments. I'd assume the latter would make the most sense, but the wording is somewhat ambiguous.

 

Plummer

Now I'm a little confused where your numbers are coming from. Taking a pre-mitigation view-point on this, stomp does ~20k. A quarter of that is 5k. Let's say 2 shamans are linked beside the tank so they have 50% armor mitigation. This reduces the 5k to 2.5k which is well below 30% of any sunwell raiders HP.

I hardly see the damage doing 10k pre-mitigation since that would mean damage is coming out of thin air and would largely seem like a broken mechanic. On a side note, if this is the case I would love to see the damage possibilities of a raid full of shamans using spirit link.

The only problem I can see is if the link breaks if the tanks health is reduced further than 30% in which case it still has it's uses, but largely useless in high-end encounters.

 

Sprout

I am assuming there would be no further mitigation. The way I read it:

Say a tank is hit for 15k (after mitigation). That would be 3.75k for each addon. For the other two they would need 11.5k health to be under the 30% rule. 11.5k health is possible for some classes raid buffed, but its pretty tough. If Im remembering correctly I run Brut with like 11k buffed

Now that having been said 15k hits on tanks are VERY rare in BC, so its not like this is useless. But I was thinking of SL as a spike dmg mitagation device, not a general dmg spreading device.

As it reads now (to me any ways) I would see SL as a 5 man instance chain healing spec device. Or for raid trash, light hitting bosses you could rotate CH with SL and HW with tidal wave.


Can someone in the beta give a confirmation on how SL and AA work?

 

PSGarak

Discipline Priests recently got some nice buffs to Power Word: Shield, including a 20% empowerment and a mana-return function. If that saves against Spirit Link damage, the two classes could compliment each other very nicely. Check out Borrowed Time and the disc priest thread.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Spifli

This movie shows how spirit link works: YouTube - WotLK (beta) Shaman Spirit Link

 

kraj

Wow that's rather funny---the shaman in the video is me earlier today(guy asked me if I could show him how spirit link works).


Basically it works as you'd imagine though things to note are the spirit link damage taken does give you spell pushback and does NOT proc water shield.



Feel free to PM me questions or ask here if you have pressing concerns.

 

Æthien

Well, that's not very nice.
I guess it's purely for linking some melee together.

Although that does make sense with the logic of use link > chain heal.

 

Andr00

Holy bloated talent tree batman!

In an attempt to cut down on the bloat a little, I have but one question.
This is obviously dependant on the raiding and instance encounters that would pop up in Wrath, but is Cleanse spirit worth its talent point? In a raid environment i can't see the curse removing utility being worth it, and now that totems are raid wide, you've got disease- and poison-cleansing totems for those on a large scale (unless they get axed).

I think i've just answered my own question haven't I? Bah :p

 

Æthien

I think it is mostly meant for 10-man's, where you cant reliably count on many disspellers.
And the same for the +crit talents and the improvements to LHW and HW, as mentioned earlier in this thread.
It's a way to make Shaman's Viable all around healers for 10 mans.

 

Sprout

Personally I dont understand why people complain about talent tree 'bloat'. That just means we have alot of good talents...Would you rather the talents seucked and were worthless?

As for Cleanse spirit, I could see where you might avoid it MAYBE. But for me personally the utility of a decurse will always be worth it. If we had other decurse options maybe I could go without, but there have been too many times in PVE AND PVP where a devurse would have saved my ass.


Kraj, can you tell from your testing how the damage mitigation works. For instance if you take YOUR armor off do you take more damage? Or is it like BoS.

Also, have you seen the link drop off from hvy dmg? When the link drops does the last 'hit' go through?

Do war's get rage from the linked dmg?

Does ES proc if its on you?

how long does the link last?

Does it have a distance limit?


Sorry for all the questions, the video got me excited.