Hey guys,

There were definitely some interesting things said about talents at Blizzcon - they want to remove passive talents, and talents that buff buffs. Well, that describes a huge proportion of the Shaman talent trees. I started trying to figure out HOW hugs and this is what I came up with. The red ones I am pretty sure will be removed, and the yellow ones I'm 50/50 divided on. I left some unmarked that are still "passive" but are more interestingly passive.




I'd be curious to hear what you guys think of my analysis of what will be removed, as well as how many talents you think they'll need to add. For example, Storm, Earth, and Fire will likely have one aspect removed (the periodic damage bonus to Flame Shock) and have the other two aspects split into two separate talents.

you are probably defining passive talents a little to broadly. My guess is that many talents that boost a specific spell or small set of spells will probably stay. It is easy to trim a talent Like Purification and provide a passive bonus to all healing done. If you take out something like guardian totems it is much harder to replace. You either need to reduce the grounding totem cooldown for PVE shaman, or increase it for PVP shaman. Either way it tends to water down the unique perks of different specs.

Personally I feel that it's a bit too early to discuss changes such as this as nothing is set in stone.

I'd hope that instant Ghost Wolf would become borderline as it's a travesty that GW only seems to be used in PvP and very select boss encounters (S3D for instance).

Again, they would like to, it doesn't mean it's going to happen and i don't think this thread is really worth anything to the community at this point.

As I said on the other threads that popped up in the class mechanics forum, class-specific Cataclysm discussion threads won't be allowed until there's much more information available. Most likely when the beta version without NDA starts. Currently they might support one, very maybe two pages of good posts and then go into the deep end of wishlisting and be locked. I might as well save some poor saps the infractions.

Since the nature of information available is also more general rather than class specific, I recommend you discuss things in the BlizzCon thread if you really have to.