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.
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