Cataclysm Shaman Changes
 

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World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Cataclysm Class Preview: Shaman

Some very exciting Elemental changes in here. Ranged AoE, a new cooldown to boost LvB, built in ToW on fire totems that's the same as Demonic Pact, and a cooldown that lets us cast while moving.

I have a feeling that a 20% boost to LvB every other cast is going to be somewhat OP in PvP, but it gives us something else to think about in our rotation, and with a rotation as static as ours that's always welcome. In any case increased stamina across the board might make that less of an issue.

I guess I'll start if off.


The two things that struck me (as an elemental shaman) as being the most important things in the shaman post are

1. A CD that lets you cast while moving (Spiritwalker's Grace (level 85): When this self-targeted buff is active, your spells are no longer interrupted by movement and possibly even by your own attacks. This will give shaman of all three specs another way to heal or do damage when it’s necessary to move in both PvE and PvP. Instant cast. 10-second duration. 2-minute cooldown.)

2. The Elemental Mastery Stat (Elemental Overload: Your direct-damage spells have a chance to proc a less powerful 'bonus" version of the spell. This will work much like the current Lightning Overload talent, but would also apply to Lava Burst.)


Spiritwalker's Grace sadly seems to be a tiny bit too long of a CD to be as effective as it could be (a 5 second buff in a 1 minute cooldown would be preferable for this effect, I think), but there are a number of fights where there are brief but intense moving periods where this would be a life saver. The pvp applications are also immense, especially for resto-pvp.


The Elemental Mastery Stat is also amazing, though how mastery stat points improve it are something I'd like to know (is the lesspowerful bonus version always a static % of the damage (i.e. always do 50% of the damage of the spell it procced from) and mastery stat points just up the likelihood it procs, or is the chance of it proccing static (always 33%, say) and mastery stat points up the damage the bonus spell do?)



Yay Earthquake, also! ToW being baseline with Ele being allowed to drop DPS totems and get a stronger effect is an elegant fix to the problem, as well as an up to the Searing totem range (Having to always be within 20 yards of a boss to effectively use searing can be frustrating on a lot of bosses where at least initially everyone has a 'spot' they are assigned to stand in).

All good changes for Elemental, that for sure gives us another useful stat to work with (Our mastery bonus is both useful and fun), gives us a more useful toolbox in an AE spell, guaranteed DPS totems, and 2 new cooldowns to use.



All in all, Elemental looks like it has a good start come cataclysm.

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My own thoughts:

The new weapon based strike is something that I'm not sure was needed, especially when they are considering increasing the cooldown of Lava Lash so we can do other 'more interesting' things with our rotation. Its addition seems to simply clutter up an already overly cluttered GCD smorgasbord.

Unleash Weapon: An interesting concept, but the flametongue component does not affect us very much (unless LvB is now instant cast via MW). The 5 hasted attacks + 50% weapon damage from WF is always nice, as is the ranged component of the spell.

Spiritwalkers grace looks like MW on crack, allowing us to cast LvB once every 2 minutes while in stationary combat and perhaps allowing us to toss out a LB on the move, but with a 2 minute cooldown this seems more like an elemental spell than enhancement.

And unfortunately, Enhancement STILL do not have viable cleave damage.

No need to repost the stuff, it was linked in the second post.

Spiritwalker's Grace is a godsent for both Elemental and Resto, it is a nifty work-around for these two heavily stationary specs. But it is also great for Enhancement as noted. Think fights where you have to leave the boss for a short time, pop it and run back in firing off a Lava Burst (assuming Flame Shock is up) on the go, or even better if it is a merry-go-round with the melee running all over the place or you have to kite flames or whatever. It is going to be hugely fun.

Unleash Weapon is cool for Windfury, rather meh for Flametongue and looks interesting for Earthliving (awesome for precticable tankdamage bursts). I understand that Elemental will like it for bigger Lava Bursts, but if the reason to keep Flamtongue on the offhand for Enhancement is this, then it isn't there yet. But thankfully it is only early ideas.

Primal Strike appears to become a leveling ability, not something that will be used at 85 much. At best adding one or two when there is a GCD free. But, given the comment about cleaning up the GCD clutter, perhaps Fire Nova and Magma totem won't be worth the single target damage, in which case a few GCDs are suddenly open to Primal Strike. It could also solve the "whatever you do, just do it" problem, with a lot of abilities being used but the difference between optimal and poor is ultimately not comparable to the difference in workload. We will see I guess.

A little surprised at the Enhancement Mastery bonus. Yes, Lightning Bolt/Chain Lightning, Lightning Shield and Earth Shock are all Nature, but their total damage isn't all that big. Seems a strange direction for a melee tree (not that spells and such aren't cool). Oh well.

Healing Rain... Awesome! Wonder how good it will be, hopefully not the equivalent of Rain of Fire. It's potential is absolutely huge, and I think I'm going to love it for my Shaman's offspec. But the description is not entirely clear. Is it two seconds cast then 10 seconds channeling? Or is it two seconds casting then 10 seconds duration while you go back to the normal stuff? One is a little meh, the other one is going to be downright cool. Imagine if it can proc Earthliving too... *gasp*

And Spirit Bond again... YES!

It looks alright for the time being overall.

I'm interested to see how they balance healing rain. Having it be balance for 10 and 25 man is going to be a difficult task as to make it useful for both. If it's good for a 25 man raid, then it can potentially be overpowered for a 10 man raid. Regardless, the toolbox for resto is much larger now as we have the much lacked intermediary heal as well as a potentially good cooldown for tank healing. One of the biggest deficiencies we face as a tank healer is not having a cooldown during burst periods on the tank.

On the Resto side of things: wow, very excited about these additions. Our current toolkit has only one instant heal (and Nature's Swiftness on a cooldown), so Spiritwalker's Grace will definitely boost one of our weaker areas. It should also be a monster in PvP.

Healing Rain is intriguing, sort of a hybrid of Tranquility and Wild Growth. A two second cast time is comparable to Chain Heal, but I suspect that it will be far less mana efficient. The challenge will be, I think, for it to be designed as something that is used intelligently, rather than spammed on every cooldown (Circle of Healing) or rarely used (Tranquility).

Adding a "Medium Healing Wave" is interesting. With 2pc T10 and Tidal Waves, Healing Wave has a comparable cast time to Lesser Healing Wave. Slotting an intermediate heal emphasizes Blizzard's movement towards greater player health. I'm curious as to whether they'll bump up GHW's cast time, or make MHW a 2.0 base cast.

Overall, I think these additions complement our current spells, and strengthen our versatility. We should adapt very well to raid and tank healing, burst damage and constant aoe. Looking forward to it.

That will be a big balancing factor how to integrate it into Tidal Waves as well as IWS. Having it benefit with a shorter cast benefits at the beginning of an expansion while having additional crit benefits it at the end of the expansion. The way they describe it is that it will be our primary base healing spell for single target healing with LHW and GHW fitting in as niche spells.

From an Enhancement's perspective, I'm not excited about any of these changes. Unleash Weapon is just another move in our rotation (although a good way to front load damage I suspect). The only other real change that will actively affect us is increasing LL's cooldown. The reason given is to free up GCDs to use more interesting abilities. I'm not sure how increasing the cooldown on our least used ability will really help with that.

I expect cast time will be much less important, and hpm will be the important differentiator. Chain heal is conspicuous in it's absence. I'm hoping that blizzard sees CH as being in a good place. It should have very good synergy with deep healing, a 4-bounce CH across targets all at 50% should get a lot of benefit from mastery.

Spirit Bond definitely has potential. I recall that before they were having it break after X amount of damage, so I'll continue to watch exactly what it does. The idea of linking two tanks for split damage between the two and having a paladin use Bacon on one sounds like it would be a terribly dramatic ability to deal with heavy incoming damage.

I hope that if they are bringing back the idea of a medium healing wave, that they would consider the option of returning something like Chain Heal Rank 1 or 2 that was used so heavily in Sunwell. I'm satisfied with the size of our toolbox of spells, but I'm not sure what their desired implementation for Chain Heal in the future is if we're being given a new AE heal and a new spell that is listed as our default healing spell. Chain Heal did both of those roles, though sometimes sub-optimally. What's the future for it?

Personally, the idea of Spiritwalker's Grace had me thinking about switching to Engineering so I could rocket around the room casting heals while doing so. Maybe that's just my sick sense of humor.

Enhancement:

While I agree that our main issue with this expansion was our overloaded global cooldown situaton, I'm not sure increasing Lava Lash's cooldown is the best way to go about it. I always figured they would have increased the duration of Magma Totem and/or increased Lightning Shield stacks so we'd refresh them less often. Oh well.

The addition of Primal Strike is interesting; I wonder how viable it will be at max level compared to Stormstrike. I would image this spell will be completely useless at later levels if their goal is to clean up our GCD situation, however. Looks like Unleash Weapon will be one of our top-tier abilities in our rotation now as it'll increase all our sources of damage; I wonder if the Flametongue Enchant effect will be used by Flametongue procs and/or Magma Totem explosions.

From an Enhancement perspective, the good thing about Unleash Weapon is that it's Ranged. This suddenly allows for a lot more damage while running between targets as well as creating a setup queue for approach as well. Being able to FS, UW, 2 second cast LvB on a target switch with Spiritwalker's Grace running or UW -> FS to consume the damage buff from Flame Tongue while gap closing is interesting and opens up options.

Spiritwalker's Grace doesn't really interest me much otherwise though. I can't think of many situations where 10 seconds of mobile casting time really does much for Enhance given that you still have to eat the cast time while it's active and the realities of MW on everything but LvB. So, it's not like we're going to be stepping on the instants to slip 2 second LvB's in on stationary fights with it and, on movement fights, UW just stepped on its necessity a little bit while 10 seconds of movement is almost always going to be overkill in PvE as well. I suspect that holds somewhat true for Ele and Resto as well because I can't think of fights that require massive shifts for them that don't also step on other Caster DPS or the other more stationary healer as well. Although, maybe Cat introduces the massive movement fight.

The prospect of UW WF essentially applying a Flurry effect (in style, if not value), combined with Haste being one of the mastery stats doesn't give me much hope they're going to do much to directly address the 65/35% melee+passive/actual damage buttons split though. Have to wait and see where those values of Haste accumulate to i suppose.

There's a Blue Post later down the thread that states Primal Strike is intended purely as the 1-40 Melee attack for Enhance, and then Stormstrike supplants it with them both being on the same cooldown.

Consolidated Elemental information, as it's still a bit too early for a new dedicated thread:


Overview
Additions and changes address the major issues of fire totem dps/buff issues, AoE, PvP movement and cast times, useful instant-casts and procs. The changes should result in improved PvE AoE, less reliance on being a "turret" in PvP, and more mobility in PvE as well.

Additions
- Unleash Weapon (level 81): Unleashes the power of your weapon enchants for additional effects. 15-second cooldown. Undispellable. (Flametongue Weapon – Deals instant Fire damage and buffs the shaman's next Fire attack by 20%.)
- Spiritwalker's Grace (level 85): Your spells are no longer interrupted by movement and possibly even by your own attacks. Instant cast. 10-second duration. 2-minute cooldown.
- Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses:
o Spell damage
o Spell Crit
o Elemental Overload: Your direct-damage spells have a chance to proc a less powerful 'bonus" version of the spell. This will work much like the current Lightning Overload talent, but would also apply to Lava Burst.

Critical Changes
- Flametongue Totem will be removed, and Totem of Wrath will be baseline trainable for all shamans, and dropping this totem will buff the group's spell power by 4%.
- Elemental shaman will have a talent that lets all Fire totems provide +10% spell power, allowing them to drop Searing, Magma, or Fire Elemental Totems without losing their spell-damage buff.
- They plan to add Earthquake as a deep Elemental talent for targeted and persistent AoE.
- They are also considering letting Elemental drop Searing Totem at range.
- Elemental Reach will be simplified so shamans have a more consistent spell range.
- A deep talent that allows Spirit to boost their Hit rating (gear will be shared with Restoration spec).
- DoT spells, including Flame Shock, will have their duration lengthened when cast on an enemy with the DoT already on it, rather than the remaining ticks being "clipped". Additionally, haste will add ticks in X time, rather than speeding/shortening X time.

Other Relevant Changes
- Healing Rain (level 83): An area-effect heal-over-time (HoT) spell. 2-second cast time. 30-yard range. 10-second duration. 10-second cooldown.
- Healing Wave will be renamed Greater Healing Wave, and a new spell called Healing Wave will be added with a cast time between the Lesser and Greater versions. This is planned to be the new "default" heal spell.
- Ancestral Knowledge will boost mana pool size, not Intellect.
- Cleansing Totem will be removed from the game.
- Cleanse Spirit will cure Curses, but not Poisons or Diseases (Resto will additionally be able to cure Magic). Devs are considering options to help vs. classes with strong Poisons and Diseases (i.e. rogues and DKs).
- With the Mastery system, they are considering removing a number of talents that grant passive bonuses (and adding more active and involved abilities).

Note: At this time you only get the mastery passives of your talent tree with the most points... in other words you'll not be getting Enh or Resto passives from going into those trees a bit.