Upcoming Shaman Changes

Elemental Changes via GC

We are making some upcoming changes to the Elemental shaman tree. Our goal was to streamline a few of the utility-based talents while giving shamans a little more damage scaling in later tiers of gear.

1) Unrelenting Storm – reduced from 5 points to 3 points. Bonus is 4/8/12% of your Intellect returned as mana.
2) Elemental Warding – now reduces all damage (not just Nature, Fire and Frost) taken by 2/4/6%
3) Elemental Shields – this talent has been removed, since its effects were combined with Elemental Warding.
4) Storm, Earth and Fire – reduced from 5 points to 3 points, but keeps around the same net benefit. In addition to current effects, also increases Wind Shock range. The damage bonus to Flame Shock has increased to 60% at 3 ranks. Storm, Earth and Fire has been moved up the tree as well.
5) Shamanism – this is a new 5 point talent in the old Storm, Earth and Fire position. Your Lightning Bolt and Lava Burst gain an additional percentage of your bonus damage. We have not finalized the numbers, but it will probably be something like 10% for Lightning Bolt and 20% for Lava Burst at max ranks.

These changes will be available in the next minor content patch, and are in addition to the AE changes mentioned previously.


The Previous changes are

Upcoming AE DPS Changes and totems
I realize buffing totems sounds strange to players who are used to loltotems. One of the designers just made the comment that telling Elemental you are buffing damage totems would be like telling Holy priests we are nerfing CoH and you're expected to area heal with Holy Nova now.

But the change to Magma Totem in particular is substantial. The base points went from 170 to 370 and the coefficient from 0.67 to 1.0. In our tests, the pulses were doing something like 600 damage. You would be hard-pressed to get that kind of increase out of Totem of Wrath, even considering its benefit to the whole raid.

Yes you have to run up, but we don't think that is too much to ask considering you can still Chain Lightning or whatever while the totem does its thing.

Totems are a core piece of the shaman design. We want to make them work, not remove them from the game. (Source)