Undocumented Shaman Changes in Beta
September 18th, 2008 by Dinak

Grabbed these from MMO-Champion

 

Elemental
Skills

  • Lava Burst mana cost reduced, damage increased, and it will now only consume your own Flame Shock.

Talents

  • Thunderstorm (Tier 11) knockback increased to 20 yards. (Previously 6 yards)
  • Lightning Mastery (Tier 6) no longer affects Lava Burst.
  • Elemental Fury moved from Tier 5 to Tier 3. It is now 5 ranks and increases the critical strike damage bonus of your Searing, Magma, and Fire Nova Totems and your Fire, Frost, and Nature spells by 20/40/60/80/100%. (Previously did 100% with 1 talent point)
  • Call of Thunder moved from Tier 3 to Tier 5. It now only costs 1 talent point and increases the critical strike chance of your Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning and Thunderstorm spells by an additional 5%.

Enhancement
Talents

  • Maelstrom Weapon (Tier 10) changed to - When you critically hit with a melee weapon, you have a 20/40/60/80/100% chance to reduce the cast time of your next Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, Lava Burst, Lesser Healing Wave or Healing Wave spell by 20%. Stacks up to 5 times. Lasts 15 sec.
  • Spectral Transformation removed.
  • *New Talent* Earthen Power (Tier 9) - Your Earthbind Totem has a 50/100% chance to also remove all snare effects from you and nearby friendly targets when it pulses.
  • *New Talent* Lava Lash (Tier 8 ) - You charge your off-hand weapon with lava, instantly dealing 100% off-hand Weapon damage. Damage is increased by 25% if your off-hand weapon is enchanted with Flametongue. Instant Cast. 6 sec cooldown.
  • Unleashed Rage moved from Tier 8 to Tier 6.
  • Stormstrike (Tier 7) now affects Frost and Fire damage as well. Will now only affect your own spells.
  • Mental Quickness moved from Tier 6 to Tier 8.
  • Weapon Mastery (Tier 6) is now 3 ranks and increases damage you deal with all weapons by 4/7/10%. (Previously 2/4/6/8/10%)
  • Toughness (Tier 4) now reduces the duration of movement slowing effects on you by 6/12/18/24/30%. (Previously 10/20/30/40/50%)
  • Thundering Strikes (Tier 2) now affects spells as well as melee attacks.

Restoration
Talents

  • Spirit Link (Tier 11) now breaks when being the target of an effect which breaks on taking damage (Example: Polymorph). It also now has a 10 sec cooldown.
  • Ancestral Aweakening (Tier 9) now affects the lowest percentage health player and heals for 10/20/30% of the amount healed. (Previously affected the lowest health player and healed for 7/13/20%)
  • Nature’s Guardian (Tier 7) now has an 8 sec cooldown. (Previously 5 sec)

Glyphs

  • Glyph of Renewed Life - All stats increased by 5% for 1 min when you Reincarnate.
Posted in Patch Changes, Wrath Commentary | No Comments »
Some more blue goodness
September 16th, 2008 by Dinak

Windfury was not proccing off the main hand weapon the PTR

Source: Koraa
Fixed for next build.

Concerning the lack of visual notifications when Maelstrom Weapon is fully stacked

Source: Koraa
We’re going to be doing something similar to that soon (combat text alert), also changing it so that it has a chance to proc from crits each rank (so 20/40/60/80/100%). That way if you get 1-4 ranks of the talent you can still get an instant cast :)

Complaints about the 4-piece set bonus on Elemental PVP Gear

Source: Verimonde
Thank you for bringing this to my attention. The shaman elemental set bonus has been changed to cooldown reduction on Grounding Totem.
Posted in Wrath Commentary | No Comments »
Wrath coming out November 13th, 2008
September 15th, 2008 by Dinak

According to the new add on wowhead!

Update: This has been confirmed by Blizzard

Posted in Wrath Commentary | No Comments »
Some more blue posts from yesterday
September 12th, 2008 by Dinak

Concerning the change to Stormstrike:

Source: Koraa
Following will consume your Stormstrike charges: Lightning Bolt, Earth Shock, Flame Shock, Frost Shock, Flame Lash, Lava Burst, Chain Lightning. Might of missed one or two in there, but basically it’s your main spells (not totems).

I am still a little confused on the subject, as the wording used in Koraa’s changes post, and here - seem to suggest that only Shaman abilities will consume the Stormstrike charges. According to this chain - it sounds like only the Shaman who cast Stormstrike can consume the charges:

Source: Koraa
I’ll look into it… note that Stormstrike only buffs the Shaman’s damage who cast it, not other Shaman. Similar to how Haunt works.

In regards to some light critisism about Chain Heal in WotLK:

Source: Vaneras
Thanks as always for your continued posting of feedback. 
In regards to Chain Heal in particular; similar to the originally 8 second cooldown we had added on the Priest’s Circle of Healing, we could nerf Chain Heal to be something you could only use here and there. But as much as we do want to encourage our resto Shaman friends to use other healing spells, we’re not going to do that — and we did remove the cooldown from that priest group healing spell too. 

But everyone knows about the Shaman’s powerful Chain Heals, right? That’s a lot of what makes a resto Shaman unique. We like it like that, and we have no current intention to stop it being that way. We do however continue to want restos to use other spells regularly in their healing routine.

Concerning more resto stuff:

Source: Ghostcrawler
A lot of the changes you’re seeing was the result of us taking a very harsh look at the spells and talents. We nerfed any that gave too much for their mana or talent cost. We changed some that were confusing or tried to do too much. We scrapped some that were going to be too hard to polish or eternally buggy. 
What we did not do is sit down and decide that Resto or any other spec was doing too much healing or too much damage so they needed to be nerfed across the board. We don’t feel like the talent trees have been stable for long enough and that enough stuff was functioning and relatively bug free to even get good comparisons across classes yet. And that’s really only talking about PvE. The PvP balance is even farther away, just because of the nature of that testing. 

If your numbers are too low, we’ll adjust them. The sky is falling in a lot of forums tonight. Just remember the game isn’t finished. 

(And because of the nature of WoW, even when it’s finished, it isn’t finished.)

Posted in Wrath Commentary | No Comments »
Some upcoming Shaman changes
September 12th, 2008 by Dinak

This was posted yesterday by Koraa on the Beta forums:

Source: Koraa
Elemental 
- Elemental Fury and Call of Thunder are switching places. Call of Thunder will be a 1-point talent, and Elemental Fury will be a 5-point talent. For Elemental Shaman this won’t mean much, for Enhancement it means they can have easier access to 100% spell crit damage. 
- Lightning Mastery will now reduce that cast time of Lava Burst by 0.5 sec with 5 points. (Down to 1.5) 
- Lava Bursts base damage numbers have been significantly increased. 

Enhancement 

- Mental Quickness and Unleashed Rage have swapped places. 
- Spectral Transformation renamed “Earthen Power”. It causes your Earthbind Totem totem to have a 50/100% dispel all snare effects when it pulses. 
- Weapon Mastery: Now a 3-point talent (4/7/10%) 
- Stormstrike - New animation, also now increases all Fire, Frost and Nature damage done by the Shaman instead of just Nature. 
- New Talent (Tier-8) - Lava Lash: You charge your off-hand weapon with lava, instantly dealing 75% off-hand Weapon damage. Damage is increased by 25% if your off-hand weapon is enchanted with Flametongue. 3 second cooldown. 4% base mana cost. (Also note: Lava Lash does Fire damage, also procs Maelstrom Weapon) 
- Maelstrom Weapon: Can now be used for Healing Wave and Lesser Healing Wave. 
- Feral Spirit - Many bugs with Spirit Wolves fixed, also increased the damage done by the Spirit Wolves 

Restoration 

- Ancestral Awakening improved to 10/20/30%

Here are some followup posts made by Koraa in the same thread:

Source: Koraa

Q u o t e:
You realize in the first part of your Elemental section, you say Call of Thunder will be a 1-pt talent, and then underneath it, you say 5 pts in Call of Thunder will reduce Lava Burst cast time by 0.5 seconds. Might want to fix that typo before the crazies get in here. 

Also — why is there no mention about the Thunderstorm knockback change? The current build contradicts what you posted about Thunderstorm a couple of weeks ago, and among all the TS threads since yesterday’s push, not one mention of this being an oversight or a legitimate change has been made.

 

Oops, I meant Lightning Mastery reducing the cast time. 

Regarding Thunderstorm, I did note that the knock “up” effect was being toned down. Was causing too many issues in the game. It still does a knockback effect.

Source: Koraa

Q u o t e:
Koraa, previously Thunderstorm knocked players about 15 yards in the air and 20 yards back, sort of like this:

I are SEE. 

Changed to 20 yards. It was actually longer than 6, more like 12.

Source: Koraa

Q u o t e:
Koraa, something I was meaning to ask about is our threat reduction. With enhancement seeing significant improvements through non-physical damage, isn’t it about time Spirit Weapons applied to all damage?

 

We’ve done a lot of work to make tanks generate a ton more threat than you’re used to on live. We’re confident that there will be a big of enough threshold between the tank and the DPSers. If we find Shaman pulling aggro, we’ll definitely do something about that.

Source: Koraa
Oops, I was wrong. We changed Lava Burst down to 1.5 with talents, not to 2.5 -> 2.
Posted in Patch Changes, Wrath Commentary | No Comments »
New changes for Shaman
September 11th, 2008 by Dinak

Thanks to MMO Champion for compiling this list

Elemental
Talents

  • Thunderstorm (Tier 11) damage reduced and knockback increased to 6 yards.
  • Storm, Earth and Fire (Tier 10) changed to - Your Lightning Bolt gains an additional 2/4/6/8/10% of your spell power, your Earth Shock’s range is increased by 1 yards and the periodic damage done by your Flame Shock is increased by 10/20/30/40/50%.
  • Lava Flows (Tier 9) now increases the amount of bonus spell damage on your Flametongue Weapon by an additional 15/30/45%. (Previously 20/40/60%)

Enhancement
Talents

  • Maelstrom weapon (Tier 10) now reduces the cast time of Lesser Healing Wave, Healing Wave, and Chain Heal as well.
  • Shamanistic Focus (Tier 3) changed - Reduces the mana cost of your Shock spells by 45%.

Restoration

  • Tidal Waves (Tier 10) changed to - You have a 20/40/60/80/100% chance after you cast Chain Heal to lower the cast time of your next Lesser Healing Wave or Healing Wave spell by 30%. In addition, your Healing Wave gains an additional 4/8/12/16/20% of your bonus healing effects and your Lesser Healing Wave gains an additional 2/4/6/8/10% of your bonus healing effects.
  • Ancestral Awakening (Tier 9) changed so that the spirit heals for 7/13/20% of the amount you healed. (Previously was 20/40/60%)
  • Nature’s Guardian (Tier 7) now has a 5 sec cooldown. (Previously was 8 sec)

New Shaman patch notes for Beta

  • Anticipation (Enhancement): Now is a 3-point talent, down from a 5-point talent and now reduces the duration of disarm effects on you by 16/25/50%.
  • Healing Grace (Restoration): Healing Way and Ancestral Fortitude are now affected by the dispel resistance portion of this talent.
  • Tidal Focus (Restoration): Now works with Earth Shield.

New glyph has been added:

  • Glyph of Ghost Wolf — Your Ghost Wolf form regenerates an additional 1% of your maximum health every 5 sec.
Posted in Patch Changes, Wrath Commentary | No Comments »
Ability changes in Wrath and some other misc blue notes
September 10th, 2008 by Dinak

Changes to Spectral Transformation:

Source: Koraa
Just an FYI - We’re going to be dumping Spectral Transformation. We decided we weren’t cool with the Shaman’s Ghost Wolf being too close to a core Druid iconic ability. What will replace it is a deep Enhancement Talent that will cause your Earthbind totem to clear all snares each time it pulses on you and all nearby friendly targets.

Concerning Enhancement DPS in raids (you really should read the original post to which Koraa replied, as it had some good info on raiding in Naxx).

Source: Koraa
Thanks for the post. A lot of tuning still has to be done, but it’s safe to say your DPS is a lot lower than what should be expected. All DPS classes/specs after we are done tuning should yield a pretty similar DPS with similar gear/”min/max” speccing. It’s going to take a bit of time until we reach that goal, though.

Maelstrom Weapon not proccing on Windfuries:

Source: Koraa
We will have it proc from Windfury soon. Also we’re going to allow it to also allow you to cast heals with Maelstrom procs =)
Posted in Wrath Commentary | No Comments »
Racial ability changes
September 8th, 2008 by Dinak
Source: Kalgan
Changes that should be in the next beta push. Bear in mind that some of these may change somewhat or entirely, and there may also be other changes coming in subsequent pushes:

Orc
- Hardiness now reduces the duration of stun effects by 15%

Troll
- Racial Passive “The Voodoo Shuffle”: Reduces the duration of all movement impairing effects by 15%. Trolls be flippin’ out mon!

- Berserking: no longer has an activation cost of energy/rage/etc

Draenei
- Gift of the Naaru: The amount healed is increased based on the caster’s Spell Power or Attack Power, whichever is higher. This ability does not lose casting time from taking damage.

- Shadow Resistance: reduces the chance to be hit by Shadow spells by 2%

Dwarf 
- Frost Resistance: reduces the chance to be hit by Frost spells by 2%

- Racial Passive “Mace Specialization”: Expertise with Maces and Two-Handed Maces increased by 5. 

Undead 
- Shadow Resistance: reduces the chance to be hit by Shadow spells by 1% (yes, this is lower than the other resistance racials) 

- Will of the Forsaken: removes any fear, sleep, or charm effect (no longer has a lasting immunity). 

Night Elf 
- Quickness: reduces the chance to be hit by melee or ranged attacks by 2% 

- Nature Resistance: reduces the chance to be hit by Nature spells by 3% 

Tauren 
- Endurance: now scales based on base health, to be tuned to approximately a 5% heath increase if the player were wearing green quality gear 

- Nature Resistance: reduces the chance to be hit by Nature spells by 2% 

Gnome 
- Escape Artist: the freeing effect can no longer be resisted 

- Arcane Resistance: reduces the chance to be hit by Arcane spells by 2% 

Blood Elf 
- Mana Tap: ability removed (partially integrated into Arcane Torrent) 

- Arcane Torrent: restores 15 energy, 15 runic power, or 6% of mana to the Blood Elf (along with the current 2s silence effect) 

- Magic Resistance: reduces the chance to be hit by spells by 2% 

Human 
- Perception: changed to a passive, now grants one character level of passive stealth detection 

- Racial “The Fall of Humanity”: Feign death which may trick enemies into ignoring you. Any threat is restored versus enemies still in combat upon cancellation of this effect. 5min cooldown 

- Racial Passive “Human Supremacy”: The dominance of Humanity is evidenced by having one more racial bonus than normal. Actually, make that two counting this one. (just a tooltip, no actual functionality) 

- The Human Spirit: spirit bonus lowered to 5% 

Note: this is a list of changes/additions, not an exhaustive list of all abilities. Racial abilities not mentioned here haven’t changed (or are ones I forgot to put on this list).

Posted in Patch Changes, PvE Commentary, PvP Commentary, Wrath Commentary | No Comments »
A couple blue tidbits today
September 8th, 2008 by Dinak

Concerning the undocumented change to Thunderstorm (knock back changed from 15yards to 5yards):

Source: Koraa
Not exactly intended. It’s still supposed to have relatively the same knock back distance, just we toned down the knock “up” effect. Should be fixed in the next build.

Concerning Shamans having so many abilities to use in PVP and being limited by the Global Cooldown (GCD) - someone complained about the new Wind Shock skill being on the GCD, to which we have this reply:

Source: Koraa
It will be off the GCD.
Posted in Patch Changes, PvE Commentary, PvP Commentary | No Comments »