Latest 2.4 patch notes.

Flametongue Weapon damage effects for rank 3 and above now also reduce healing done to the target by 50% and lasts 5 seconds.

Flametongue Totem damage effects now also reduce healing done to the target by 50% and lasts 5 seconds.

Ghost Wolf: Cast time reduced to 2 seconds, down from 3.

The Global Cooldown of all Totems has been reduced to 1 seconds, down from 1.5 seconds.

Healing Grace: This talent now reduces the chance your spells will be dispelled by 10/20/30%.The resistance to being dispelled modifier from this talent now applies correctly to Water Breathing.

Rockbiter Weapon: Tooltip and error messages have been adjusted slightly.

Shamanistic Rage is now a Physical ability instead of a Magic spell, and thus is no longer dispellable. It now reduces all damage taken by 30% and gives your successful melee attacks a chance to regenerate mana equal to 30% of your attack power. This lasts for 15 seconds with a 2 minute cooldown.

Toughness will now also reduce the duration of movement impairing effects on you by 10/20/30/40/50%.

(Removed from notes) Nature’s Swiftness and Elemental Mastery now share a 10 second cooldown.

My thoughts.

AWESOME. I know im going to be disapointed because I find it hard to believe these will all go live, but they rolled back the nerf to our elemental brothers and then buffed the hell out of enhancement. I will no longer be a liablity to my team in 2v2.
Not sure how to make a proper PvP build now. I need 48 in enhancement to get 5/5 toughness which leaves me a point short in resto so I'd lose 1% hit or 10 yards on totems.

This build was my first thought

Buffs!

Shaman

The global cooldown on casting totems has been reduced. It is now 1 second instead of 1.5

Flametongue Weapon now reduces the effectiveness of healing spells on your target by 50%. Lasts 5 seconds and refresh every hits.

Toughness now Increases your armor value from items by 2/4/6/8/10% and reduces the duration of movement impairing effects on you by -10/20/30/40/50%.

Shamanistic rage now let you regenerate mana equal to 30% of your attack power instead of 15. Duration reduced to 15 seconds. (Was 30 seconds)

Woot! The GCD reduction on Totems is awesome and something shamans hav been asking for forever.

Mortal Strike on FT? Yes please!

Lessening of CC duration? Sure, I'll take a helping of this too. Now the hard part will be where to find the points. Would be awesome if they could move toughness to shield specs place in the first tier, but that's asking a bit much I suppose.

SR change is a sort of like the earth shield change, both a buff and a nerf. Mana will regen faster, which is nice, but our damage reduction lasts half as long. Maybe they could increase the damage reduction from 30% to 50% to compensate?

All in all a lot of positive changes for Enhancement in PvP. I might have to try some of these out on Bannonn on the PTR. Aww who am I kidding, I am to busy leveling Baelor. I finished up Terokkar last night and dinged 66. Onwards to Nagrand. There are thousands of clefthoofs and talbuks to slaughter. Although not being a skinner this time around, it seems like an awful waste.

Terokkar

This is one of my least favorite outlands zones. So I'm happy to have made a good dent in the quests there. I dinged 65 and got a nice start on 66. Nagrand is my favorite zone to, so I can't wait to be finished here to move on. I picked Scryer, so I should probably take an evening soon to farm Firewing Signets.

Zangarmarsh Cleared

Hit level 64 on Baelor yesterday, and finished up all the Zangarmarsh quests. Now its on to Terokkar.

We also got a Slave Pens run in too and I got 2 nice drops. Tracker's Belt and Deft Handguards.

What I really need are a couple of weapon upgrades.

I also ended up leveling up fishing and cooking. Did the artisan questlines for both and I'm sitting at 231 fishing and 280 cooking. 10-20 minutes of fishing is usaually about all I can take in one go, but I really wanted to level up cooking for the outlands food buffs. I worked a bit on enchanting as well. Got that up to 295 but In addition to being insanely expensive at 4G each, Illusion dust was totally absent from the AH yesterday. I bought all the armour that wasn't severly overpriced, but had the bad luck to get more essences and even a shard than I did dusts. Why can't that happen with outlands gear? :)

Mining on the otherhand was incredibly easy to level in outlands. I hit 375 without even trying.

I'm hoping to say I hit 70 by this time next week, but that might be a tad optomistic, as I only got 4 levels this past week.

Gold Selling

Its harmless right? If I want to spend my real money to avoid the tedious process if crinding cash I should be able to right?

NO.

Ignoring the less persuasive arguments about gold buying's impact on the ingame economy. The key to me is how many of these gold selling companies get the gold. If they were simply out there grinding dailies or primals and selling that gold, I'd be a bit less outraged. And sure I get annoyed by the constant spamming outside the Orgrimmar Bank. But the real indictment of the gold-selling segment is that much of the gold comes from hacking accounts.

Blizzard released a statment on the WoW EU site I wanted to share

We would like to make a clear statement here about the negative impact of buying gold and using power-leveling services. Every day, we encounter players who have been negatively affected and targeted by companies offering these services. So, we hope to raise awareness about the practices they engage in and the detrimental effects they have on all players, including their own customers, as well as on the game environment as a whole.

What many people don't realize when buying gold is the large impact it has on the game economy, and also how the companies selling gold obtain it. Our developers, in-game support, and anti-hack teams work diligently to stop the exploits these companies use and help players who have become victims of their services. We regularly track the source of the gold these companies sell, and find that an alarmingly high amount comes from hacked accounts. These are the friends, relatives, and guildmates you may know who have gone through the experience of having characters, gold, and items stripped from them after visiting a website or opening a file containing a trojan virus. Our teams work to educate players and assist them in avoiding account compromise, but the fact remains that the players themselves are often these companies' largest target as a source for gold, which the companies then turn around and sell to other players.

Through our normal support processes and the assistance of players, we also find that many accounts that have been shared with power-leveling services are then hacked into months later, and all of the items on the account are stripped and sold off. Basically, players have paid money to these companies, sometimes large amounts, and they're then targeted by these same companies down the road. We come across stories every week of the aftereffects of players using these services, and some players now have to deal with long-term repercussions -- In addition to consequences such as possible account suspension or closure, in many cases the companies they paid then use their personal information to perpetrate identity theft and credit card fraud. These are long-lasting effects on players' personal lives that can take years to recover from.

We also want players to recognize that these companies often employ people to do their work through the use of disruptive hacks in the game, which can cause realm performance and stability issues. The companies essentially take time away from our development and in-game support efforts as we work to stop their exploits and assist players who have become their victims in recovering characters and items. They spam advertisements, use bots that make it hard for players to find the resources they need, and raise the cost of items through inflation.

The negative effects these companies create depend directly on people using their services. Without them, the companies have no way to continue their unethical actions. Furthermore, it’s important to keep in mind that players are responsible for what happens with the account they play on. Selling gold for real money and having characters power-leveled are violations of our Terms of Use and End User License Agreement, and we regularly take corrective action when we find that these services have been used. We hope the information presented here is helpful to anyone considering buying gold or using a power-leveling service; these are just a few reasons that those services can negatively impact World of Warcraft and other games, and we strongly encourage players not to support the companies that offer them.

Buffs please?

Kalgan worried about drowning in the sea of tears produced by all the shaman crying has posted that buffs are incoming too.

Shamans in general will be getting buffs to go along with their nerfs. Bear in mind that there's still quite a bit that hasn't been implemented yet.

I'd share some of these with you, but some of them might not be technically do-able for this patch, which in turn changes some of our decisions about exactly what changes we make, so we're hesitant to give specifics until the work has been done.

Philosophically though, we're planning to make a number of improvements related to the totem dropping mechanic, improving specific under-used totems, and a few other non-totem related improvements.

To provide a little bacground, our general outlook on the class is that they're actually in good shape for all 3 specs for raid PvE, on the weak side for heroic PvE, pretty solid in battlegrounds and 5v5, on the weak side in 3v3, and pretty well gimped in 2v2. We're hoping to get at least 1 spec viable in 2v2 for this patch (we're thinking Enhance), but hopefully all three specs will be viable for 3v3.

Check HERE for a compiliation thread on the subject.

GIEF Badges!

Well I went through Loot Rank and checked on what Badge loot I'll want/need, and its not so bad. :p I only need 776 badges for the enhancement items I want. Thats just 36 full Kara clears. Throw in a couple of Herioc Dailies per week thats an extra 10-12 badges cuts it down to 6 months.

Here is my list
Dory's Embrace 60
Scaled Drakeskin Chestguard 100
Master Assassin Wristwraps 35
Gauntlets of Rapidity 75
Belt of the Silent Path 75
Trousers of the Scryers' Retainer 100
Nyn'jah's Tabi Boots 60
Sunwell Badge Ring 60
Bloodlust Brooch 41
Stonebreaker's Totem 20
Vanir's Right Fist of Brutality 105
Vanir's Left Fist of Brutality 45

Shard of Contempt

Shard of Contempt

Best DPS trinket in the game drops in a 5 man herioc come 2.4 YAY!
Lets hope it doesn't get nerfed,

New Patch Notes

Shaman

Ghost Wolf: Cast time reduced to 2 seconds, down from 3.
Nature’s Swiftness and Elemental Mastery now share a 10 second cooldown.
Tremor Totem now pulses every 3 seconds, down from 4.


Thoughts.
GW: yay! Instant talented GW FTW.
NS EM cooldown: Another nerf for Elemental. That spec is taking a beating lately. I've played Elemental for like 2 weeks, so I'm no expert, but a NS,EM Chainlighting was one of the joys of the spec for me. One of the Dev's warlock must have gotten a double CL crit in Fives.
Tremor: Yeah a nice little bonus. Tremor is pretty useless the way it is now. Half the time you get feared out of the range before the pulse. 2 seconds would be better, but a buff is still a buff.


In game news. Hit 61 last night. Also helped to finish off a Ramparts run. Got Garrote-String Necklace

New Badge of Justice Weapons

Vanir's Right Fist of Brutality
Vanir's Left Fist of Brutality

Both look pretty awesome stat wise. EJ says they are about 10 dps less than the S3 weapons at T6 level gear and buffs. Not sure what the models look like yet. Well its always good to have options. Might be easier to get than the Arena weapons.

Outlands

We hit outlands last night. I'd dinged 60 mostly by finishing up a couple of questlines and from killing mobs while mining. But the rest of the group hit 58 this weekend, so we went through the portal together. I proceeded to replace half my gear in the next couple of hours. It was pretty sweet.

The Bornak Quote

"The stats don't show a lack of popularity for shaman, they just show a ridiculous popularity for other classes."

I love that quote.

Testing

Mounting Vengence
I want!

My Wow Timeline

I'm relatively new to the World of Warcraft. I played Everquest back in the day from the release of Kunark to the release of Planes of Power, iirc. That was my only other MMO, but I've always loved RPG's
I've played the hell out of all the Elder Scrolls from Arena, to Daggerfall, to Morrowind, to Oblivion. I also have loved all the stuff Blizzard has ever done, and spent many a full night playing Diablo 2 on Battlenet.

So WoW should have been a no brainer for me, but I knew how much I'd like it, so I resisted its siren's call for a long time. Finally enough of my friends talked me into it, and the rest as they say... is history

3/24/07 Download the EU version of WoW. Roll a Tauren Shaman
3/29 level 15
4/6 level 28
4/23 level 40
4/30 level 46
5/9 level 52
5/17 level 57
5/21 level 60
6/11 level 70
So about 2.5 months to hit 70

Living in the US and playing on EU time made raiding a bit dificult. I only could do the weekend 10 mans and the occasional weekday 25 when I had a day off from work. I cleared Kara many times as well as downed the Bear, Eagle, and Lynx in ZA. For 25's these are the bosses I helped down. Gruul, Mags, Void Reaver, Hydross, Karathress, and Leo.

Do to the leaving of many good friends from our raid on EU and the difficulties of dealing with a 5 hour time difference, most of the Americans playing over there decided to reroll on a US server for a chance to see more content.

On 1/22/08 I rerolled on Quel'dorei US PvE. I rolled an Orc Shaman. Its taken me 3 weeks to hit 58, so quite a bit faster than my first time through. Of course I actually understand my class theorycrafting now, so I'm not stacking spirit anymore :p

We have a guild that we are looking to grow and raid with. Fire and Blood.
Forums found here http://fireandblood.yuku.com/directory

WoW Blog

Rather than subjecting my LJ friends list to my WoW Escapades. I've decided to start a WoW based Blog. My blogging track record is a bit spotty, But I'll try and develop this as time allows.

-Steve