New Beta build

Shaman (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)


Elemental
•Magma Totem base damage increased by 33%.
•Fire Nova base damage increased by 33%.
•Rolling Thunder is now a Tier 3 talent, down from Tier 4. Mana regeneration increased from 1% to 2%.
•Improved Fire Nova moved to Enhancement.
•Elemental Reach no longer increases the range of Thunderstorm, now affects the range of all your Shock spells. (Old - Just Flame Shock)

Enhancement
•Unleash Elements now has a 40 yards range, up from 30 yards.
•Totemic Vigor is gone.
•Improved Fire Nova is now a Tier 4 Enhancement Talent - Increases the damage done by your Fire Nova by 10/20% and reduces the cooldown by 2/4 sec.

Restoration
•Improved Water Shield now also procs from Greater Healing Wave.

The increased range on UE will be nice for openers I guess. Otherwise its mainly for Elementals.
Losing Totemic Vigor means nothing for PvE as you would never take it.  The imp FN change is a bit odd. It seemed like they were stearing us away from using it in our rotation, and now not only is it in Enhance, its in Deep Enhance.

I just dont know where the points will come from to take it. Taking all the dps talents without Imp FN takes 41 points. Thats also skipping Ancestral Swiftness and Totemic Reach.  Ideally I'd like all of those, but where can I find 6 points?  Possibly take 3 out of imp shields. Maybe lose one from Acuity.  Thats 4.  I guess its going to take a lot of testing to see whats worth losing and what isn't.

Ghost Cralwer has been busy

Shaman (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)


Tier 1 Enhancement
Right. The problem with tier 1 Enhancement is you have Focused Strikes, which clearly is for Enhance and nobody else. Then you're left with Elemental Weapons, a good talent for all 3 specs, and Improved Shields, a good talent for Enhance and Resto. That leaves Elemental with only 3 points they want to spend in tier 1 and a strong desire to get to tier 2. But, as I said above, if Elemental did care about shields, then presumably they could care about Improved Shields. (Source)

Making Shaman fun
Fun is obviously very important to us, but it's also a really difficult thing to talk about. I read these forums constantly, and it's pretty typical to see the class who had exciting changes a few weeks ago now bored of those and eager for new changes. The grass is greener mindset is huge around here, perhaps understandably since it's hard to stay in touch with the changes going on for all classes at once. When you drill down sometimes on what players are looking for to make their class fun for them, you often get a list of ideas that would be terribly overpowered or just not work in our game, or both. That doesn't mean it's not a goal. It just means that delivering what is fun for one player means something very different than what is fun for another player. (Source)

Fire Nova
We'd like to downplay Fire Nova in lieu of Earthquake (in addition to Chain Lightning of course). We also agree that Fire Nova should be used for true AE situations and not against single targets. (Source)

Elemental Rotation
We didn't set out with the goal of change for the sake of change though. Most of the new rotational abilities we've added were to fix problems with the class. Prot warriors for example are going to be hitting the same buttons they hit in LK because we think that works. Elemental is getting Unleashed Weapon (and Earthquake), and beyond that we think you have the right number of buttons to hit, so we're hesitant to cram a new button in there. Nor are we excited about giving you "Super Duper Lightning Bolt" that lets you take Lightning Bolt off your bar just for the sake of having a new button. I'd characterize the Elemental playstyle as closer to a mage, who isn't managing a ton of different nukes, but does have to react to what is happening in terms of procs, short cooldowns and movement. Lava Surge, Elemental Mastery and Unleashed Weapon are examples of those respectively.

We'll definitely take the feedback under advisement though. (Source)

Feral Spirit Scaling
Feral Spirit should scale like all pets. (It doesn't yet). Losing Parry was a consequence of losing Spirit Weapons, but we'll give it back somewhere. (Source)

Thunderstorm
I agree that Enhancement's choice at level 10 is transformative. I disagree that Resto similarly plays very differently at level 10. I also think you're downplaying Thunderstorm. Now you can Lightning Bolt and when a target gets closer to you, Thunderstorm them back and then Lightning Bolt them again. (Source)

Unleash Weapon
Elemental's range talent needs to affect Unleash Weapon too. (Source)

The trouble Enhancement Tier one is that I cant afford to take all of the talents.
I can spend 33 points in enhancement and get all the current dps talents, That leaves 8. There are 10 dps talents in the first 2 tiers of elemental. So I have to skip 2 and it looks like that's reverb. Now that build also skips ancestral swiftness and totemic reach. Fights are so movement intensive, I find it hard to believe that AS isn't going to be a pretty big dps boost as well not to mention the simple utility and survivability it brings. So where do we get the 2 points for that? Imp shields is my guess. That still leaves us skipping Totemic reach.  Look I appreciate that totems are no longer 2 minutes and 20 yards. Really I do. I can drop 4 at once. That's awesomesauce! But with everyone else's auras being like a 100 yd radius would it kill you to give us a 40 yard baseline radius?

Not being on Beta I had no idea that Feral Spirits were not scaling.  I wonder at what level they will scale? I hope its at the Ferocity pet level.

Getting some free parry is nice I suppose. Since I don't PvP it shouldn't matter much.

Lots of new stuff.

Shaman (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)


Elemental
•Magma Totem now costs 18% of base mana, down from 27%.
•Lava Burst damage has been increased by 25%.

Restoration
•Totem of Tranquil Mind *New* - Summons a Totem of Tranquil Mind with 5 health at the feet of the caster for 5 min, causing party or raid members within 30 yards to lose 0% less casting or channeling time when damaged. (Value NYI, Concentration Aura)

Enhancement
•Maelstrom Weapon now also reduces the mana cost of the spell.

Some really great changes here. Cheaper Magma totem for AoE packs, Harder hitting Lava Burst. and Maelstrom reducing mana cost are great.  It doesnt say much much the cost is reduced, but It would make sence if it were equal to the cast time reduction, so free at 100% would be fine by me.

Relics class requirements gone in Cataclysm

You are looking at existing, Wrath of the Lich King, items. Those are currently only used by those classes, so there isn't a great motivation or need to change them.

Cataclysm-level relics can be used by any paladin, shaman, druid or DK, though there may still be some class-specific ones from time to time. (Source)

Relic changes.

Shaman (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)

Shaman Q&A (Source)

Lots of questions. I don't have time to answer them all, but I will hit a few.

When will ele not have to run into melee to do aoe?

When you're casting Earthquake?

1) Are resto shaman now the only healer being forced to spec into a hit talent to supplement their active mana recovery ability? Paladins now apparently get the hit that was in enlightened judgements for free?

Our goal was to not have all of the healer talent trees to be mirror images of each other. So a priest might get one thing for free and have to talent into something else. As long as the end result is pretty similar (e.g. the priest can't get everything for free and just be able to spend talent points on candy) then it should be fine.

Personally, I'd like to know the rationale behind the fact that the Elemental Shamans did not recieve any spells that alter their rotation on 'primary' targets. Their level 10 effect was something halfway between a mana restore, an AoE, and a pvp gimmick. Our capstone of the talent tree is an AoE. I can't think of any other dps spec that doesn't get something 'unique' that changes their rotation from the other specs.

That's just part of the shaman design though, namely that Enhancement still cares a lot about spells instead of being a 100% melee weapon class. I'd argue that Enhance and Elemental still play fairly differently (such that you do have to adjust when respeccing). I'm not sure the mage design, where there is virtually no overlap among talent trees, is a superior model. It's just a different model.

Mana - I've heard mana has recently begun to be an issue for Enhancement in the last few beta builds. Will the ultimate solution just be to tweak Primal Wisdom s'more? Oh, and what about all that discussion about moving Primal Wisdom to being part of Enhancement's lvl 10 skillset? It's going to be hellish on new Enhancers not having their primary mana restoration technique until much later. Also on the table here, and I'm sorry it touches on totems again - a full set of totems or an AoE rotation kills Enhancement's mana very very quickly. It'd be nice if the mana cost got reduced on some of these abilities.

It's not the intent that Enhancement has to worry about mana a lot. Generally you should have enough mana to do what you want to do. It's a model we're still adjusting. We haven't quite established a base regen for the casters and healers that we're happy with and every time we tweak that, it affects the Ret paladins and Enhancement shaman, who aren't really supposed to be mana-constrained.

This is the kind of thing I'm talking about. Tier 1 of Enhance is one of the bigger culprits. While tier 2 has one talent that's really attractive (nigh on required for Elemental and Enhance), tier 1 is pretty bland. People would prefer to skip over Imp Shields, and Elemental Weapons is a flat spell power buff that scales with level rather than gear.

The model we're trying to use for all the classes is that you can't just soak up no-brainer talents in the first few tiers. Often there is a dps talent, and then a survival talent and then maybe an efficiency talent. You definitely get the first one, but you often need to get one of the others to progress down. This is what we mean about not being able to cherry pick just throughput-oriented talents and skipping everything else that is utility, etc. It's an evolving process though. I'm not sure I could point to a class yet and say "There. We nailed it."

Also, Enhance has 9 "required" points in Elemental - would be 10 if it weren't for Ancestral Swiftness - on top of their own tree being filled up, which highly limits their utility options (well, to be more specific, limits them to 0). Even if an additional point or two were freed up, they may feel obligated to spend those to grab the third point in Acuity (which I don't like as 3 points to start with - it creates a 'floater' point in Elemental specs rather than getting us stuck around tier 4 needing to pick a full utility talent, which I think is a good thing. But I digress), or Improved Shields, even though all three are fairly marginal DPS gains.

Yup. This is a challenge. As I mentioned above, Enhancement likes spell damage so it's hard to put anything in Elemental that Elemental wants that Enhancement also doesn't want.

Lightning and Water shield do not seem that useful for Elemental in many ways.

Agreed. This is something we're discussing. A new shield doesn't have to be the answer though.

- Nature's Blessing doesn't feel like a bonus when healing earth shielded targets, it feels like a penalty when healing targets without it. If the intent is to make shamans better tank healers, perhaps make it work in some other way. Perhaps change it to Earthliving or Riptide instead of Earth Shield?

This is the kind of feedback we struggle with a lot on most classes. As soon as something grants a bonus, it feels like a penalty when it's not up because players are very efficiency-focused. If it was say Riptide, wouldn't it feel like a penalty whenever Riptide wasn't available? Or a penalty because every heal cost that extra GCD for Riptide in order to behave at maximum efficiency?

Honestly GC when our dps is competitive with the other hybrid specs you barely ever see us whine. We just really want to be as good as others. It's when it isn't that we come out in masses to whine about everything. Since our totems are our thing they are what is an easy target for our QQ. I guarantee you that if we do competitive DPS and never fall behind the endless Shaman crying will be puddles instead of rivers.

I agree with that. I think a lot of the complaints about "we're the only class" or "are buffs aren't awesome enough" only come to bear when dps is low. As I said recently, we think Enhancement dps was competitive when there wasn't a lot of movement involved and when you weren't competing with guys using orange weapons. We can fix the movement problem. We don't think we need to fix the legendary "problem" because those Shadowmournes will all be banked at level 85.

I honestly don't see how healing rains AND chain heal are needed. Both are AoE heals fill the same role (heal people grouped together).

They are different spells with different niches. Chain Heal excels when you have a small number of players injured and Healing Rain is more for those big bursts when everyone takes damage. There are enough occasions when you need to heal say more than just the tank that we think healers can stand to have several different strategies to deal with it.

(4) Any chance that the stoneclaw glyph can become baseline or something? I'm mostly fine with the totem utility vs. buff thing, but it seems fairly weird to have this non-scaling bubble as a secondary effect of a totem. If it can't be baseline, is it being compensated for? Hance isn't exactly a survivability powerhouse.

We are changing a lot of glyphs. It's too early to know which ones we are keeping. If this one dies then we might consider putting in the functionality elsewhere.

At this point tho, after getting the current tier hit/spirit cap, I'm pretty much forced to handpick items with no or little crit rating however. Mastery and haste just seem so overwhelmingly better.

That's not the intent. Hit / spirit can be capped, but if you start viewing haste, crit or mastery as junk compared to another stat, then we need to change something. It's fine if one stat is slightly better than another. Remember that crit values overall are going to be far lower than the 70%+ that some players can reach in current content. Lava Burst crits, sure, but you cast a lot of spells besides Lava Burst.

3. Whether it will continue to attack stuff we are not in combat with (especially if it's range is increased).

This is something we are trying to fix. We already have the totem choosing your target. Next we need to make sure it doesn't "helpfully" grab additional mobs.

I'm the first to admit, that I'm not the greatest player out there, but I'd occasionally top the meters back in Ulduar.  I cant even come close now. I was doing some WoL comparisions and looking at Saurfang fights. Kresh, the top Enhancer in the US on that fight is a bit over 2kdps ahead of me. I can deal with that. the discouraging thing though is that the best Shaman in the US is only 7th best dps in his guild.  GC says not to worry about our damage, as Shadowmourne is being reset. Well what happends when they get new Legendary Weapons? We fall behind again as im guess they aren't going to be giving out any Slow 1H melee weapons.

More changes.

Shaman (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Elemental

• Hex now lasts 1 min. Up from 30 sec.
• Searing Totem now prefer to target enemies that are afflicted by your Flame Shock or Stormstrike effects.
• Reverberation is now a Tier 2 talent. Down from Tier 3.
• Improved Fire Nova is now a Tier 3 talent. Up from Tier 2.
• Elemental Warding now reduces magical damage instead of all damage.
• Ancestral Knowledge is now named Acuity and Increases your critical strike chance with all spells and attacks by 1/2/3%.
• Convection now Reduces the mana cost of your damaging offensive spells.

Enhancement

• Heroism's "Exhausted" debuff now also affects Time Warp (Mage)
• Static Shock now procs from Primal Strike, Stormstrike, or Lava Lash (Old - All melee attacks and abilities). Chance to proc increased from 2/4/6% to 15/30/45%.
• Totemic Reach *New* - Increases the radius of your totems' effects by 15/30%.

Restoration

• Totemic Focus is now a 2-Ranks talent, down from 3-Ranks. Now also increases the duration of your totems by 20/40%.
• Cleansing Waters *New* - When your Cleanse Spirit successfully removes a harmful effect, you also heal the target for [ 1093 to 1164 ]/[ 2187 to 2330 ].

1 minute hex is awesome.
Smart searing is nice.
Looks like Fire Nova is definitely not in or rotation anymore.
Ancestral Knowledge isnt as painful to take.
Heroism?  ITS CALLED BLOODLUST FFS!
Two talent points to increase the totems radius? Just increase it already We dont have the points to spend. If we skip improved shields we can take it. Or at least combine it with Totemic vigor.

At least it isnt just me.

So I've really noticed a pretty huge difference on parses say between a Saurfang and a Professor Putricide, or Blood Princes.  My dps on those fights is pretty bad.  Now I've never claimed to be a great player. Quite frankly I consider myself barely adequate. I do my research and know how to gear and spec, and what type of a priority to use, but I'm old, I grew up playing pac-man, not halo. I don't have the fast twitch reflexes of a spider monkey hopped up on red-bull, like a lot of players.  So seeing this post from GC makes me feel a bit better.

Enhancement

Enhance does fine on stationary fights like Saurfang and Festergut, but drops behind on heavy movement fights, and unfortunately the fight that counts the most has a lot of movement.


But that's not a totem problem. That's because so much of Enhancement's dps is tied up in getting procs on quick attacks. If a warrior has to move, it may not hurt them as much because their abilities are on longer cooldowns anyway and they can even store up on the rage. For energy classes it's even better because they can just unload when they do get back in range. But Enhancement just lost out on those procs, and they aren't coming back.


We're okay with some specs doing better on some fights than others, but we think Enhancement suffers a little too much when they have to move (and they aren't the only ones - Balance druids and even Elementals are in a similar bucket). We're trying to address this in Cataclysm without removing what it is that players like about Enhance.


But again, this doesn't have a lot to do with totems. They might have to drop their totems again, but that dps loss is arguably neglibile compared to the loss of not being able to deal damage for short times.

He goes on to talk about buffs.

Why does a DK not have to choose between horn of winter and desecration?

Because that is pretty much all the DK gets.


The shaman on the other hand gets to choose among Strength of Earth Totem, Windfury Totem, Wrath of Air Totem, Flametongue Totem, Tremor Totem, Healing Stream Totem, resistance Totems and Earthbind Totem, which doesn't even count Bloodlust / Heroism, and things like Unleashed Rage or Elemental Oath. If your buff was as competitive as theirs and you had so much versatility, we fear we'd see raids with many, many shaman in them. As it is, there's still a good chance for 3 shaman in a 25-player raid, while the DKs might get 2 slots if they're lucky.


You should get a slot because you are a good player, not because your buff rules. (Source)


Shamans are Mandatory


Throughout the history of WoW, the problem has typically been that shaman (and paladin to be fair) bring too much utility and are therefore considered too mandatory. They started out in vanilla as buff classes -- the guys you bring who don't really do much themselves but bring buffs and debuffs that make every other class perform better. You couldn't for example just stack your raid with rogues and mages because their performance would be low without the shaman and paladins -- and before LK you had to bring enough to stick one in every group.


Now, we decided to change that design because we didn't think it felt very satisfying to be the buff bot spec who got brought along as if the player were some kind of scroll or flask to improve the "real players" performance. On the other hand, we knew it would be really brutal to the shaman and paladin to just rip away all of their utility and give them the typical 2 or so raid buffs that most other classes or spec get.


But we've definitely eroded it a little, and I'm not going to apologize much for that because we want to give players flexibility -- and flexibility means you can do a raid, especially a 10-player one, without a shaman or paladin. Nobody should be mandatory, except for a tank and a few healers. Nobody should be left out either, but the specs who got left out in LK did so because of low dps -- Arms, Frost mage and Subtlety rogue. Shaman did fine.


Believe me, I have thought long and hard about scrapping the entire buff / debuff system because players focus on it too much. But I know that if we did that, players would then focus too much on damage per second and healing per second of the best players out there. We also think it would be unfortunate to lose that sense of being so much more powerful in a group than you are solo.


For now, in Cataclysm, we are just sharing even more of the buffs and debuffs across a wide gamut, especially very powerful ones like Bloodlust and Battle Rez, and chilling out the impact of some of the more potent ones, say Sunder and Curse of Elements, while also cutting back on the sheer number of buffs brought by say the Ret paladin and Balance druid.


I am much more interested in discussions about say shaman dps totems and healing totems than I am about buff totems, because we believe the latter have much less to do with either your getting to raid or your raid being successful.

Still doesn't make me hate Time Warp any less.

They brought mastery back in the beta.
Shaman (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)

•Elemental - Grants a 20% chance for Elemental Overload to occur. Elemental Overload causes a Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, or Lava Burst spell you cast to trigger a second, similar spell on the same target at no additional cost that causes 60% of normal damage and no threat. Chance to trigger increased further by mastery rating.
•Enhancement - Increases all elemental damage done by 20%. Damage increased further by mastery rating.
•Restoration - Increases the potency of your direct healing spells by up to 20%, based on the current health level of your target (lower health targets are healed for more). Healing increased further by mastery rating.

The change from nature to elemental is pretty big. With Lava Burst now on Maelstrom Weapon, and the change to Lava Lash our Fire Damage is going to be close to equal to our nature damage I'm guessing.

GC talks totems

Shaman (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)

Totems
We're fine with totem health given how easy totems are to replace. We also think it's fine to have to (sometimes) choose between a buff totem and a non-buff totem given how many different things a shaman can do.


However, we are going to increase buff totem range (and possibly other totem range) and we have figured out a way to make Searing Totem attack your target, instead of a random and probably inappropriate target. (Source)

Yay! with the number of high movement fights in ICC I find myself out of range of my totems alot.  And since searing will be out normal fire totem, having it be 'smart' is pretty huge as well.