So the PTR is upon us and Shamans have a few changes to contend with. For those of you who haven’t been following the changes I’ll post the notes here before I give my comments on them so far. I’ll only give a list of the ones that affect restoration shamans but the complete list can be found Here
Shaman
- Bloodlust/Heroism: Cooldown reduced to 5 minutes, but Sated and Exhausted now last 10 minutes.
- Poison Cleansing Totem and Disease Cleansing Totem have been merged into ” Cleansing Totem. ” Cleansing Totem pulses every 3 sec, down from 5.
- Talents
- Restoration
- Ancestral Awakening: This talent now accounts for your ineffective healing, rather than effective.
- Cleanse Spirit now has a new icon.
- Riptide: This spell has a new icon.
Bug Fixes
- Tremor Totem: Now correctly pulses every 3 sec, up from 1 sec.
I really like the combining of totems so far. I’ve been begging for totems to be less cumbersome for ages now, and it’s finally starting to happen! I think this is going to prove especially nice in encounters where you have poison and diseases flowing around. Just drop one totem and like our buddies at Ronco with their Showtime cooker, you can set it and forget it. Tremor totem is also being fixed. While I know some of you are going to be sad about it no longer pulsing every second on the second, let me tell you this is a good thing. First of all I don’t know if you’ve had this happen yet, but I’ve been having tremor totem completely fail me as a result of this bug. It will be down, there will be a dispellable fear, I’ll be on top of the totem and even after it “ticks” I’m still running around like a Shaman with my Totem cut off! Right now on the PTR everything is back to normal with this totem apparently.
One change I’m not looking forward to is the Change to Bloodlust / Herosim. I might be missing it but it almost doesn’t make sense to me. Personally I think how the spell works on live is preferable overall to the way it was changed for 3.1.
Ancestral Awakening change is very interesting, and a significant buff to the talent. Ineffective healing, if my understanding of it is correct, is more then just your overheal. Ineffective healing is any healing lost from the initial cast/roll of the spell. Example would be, your tank has a healing debuff that reduces the incoming heals by 50%. When you cast your spell lets say you roll a 9,000 crit heal. The debuff takes it to 4,500 healing, making 4.5k of it ineffective. This talent change would count the whole 9,000 heal if I’m understanding this correctly. This also means that if I roll a 20,000 crit heal (to borrow from my previous post =P ) That’s going to be a 6k heal on someone else in the raid. This is going to require some testing, I’ll let you know more after I’m done running this one through the ringer.
On the purely cosmetic aspect I’m pretty excited about Cleanse Spirit and Riptide getting new icons. Lets be honest, the ones we have now are pretty lame. I’ll post screenies of them later on.
Glyphs
With new new patch we see some new glyphs pop up for the Shaman of many persuasions. Here’s what you have to look forward too.
- Glyph of Thunderstorm *new* — Reduces the cooldown on Thunderstorm by 7 sec.
- Glyph of Feral Spirit *new* — Your spirit wolves gain an additional 30% of your attack power.
- Glyph of Riptide *new* — Increases the duration of Riptide by 3 sec.
- Glyph of Earth Shield *new* — Increases the amount healed by your Earth Shield by 20%.
- Glyph of Totem of Wrath *new* — When you cast Totem of Wrath, you gain 30% of the totem’s bonus spell power for .
- Glyph of Hex *new* — Increases the damage your Hex target can take before the Hex effect is removed by 20%.
- Glyph of Stoneclaw Totem *new* — Your Stoneclaw Totem also places a damage absorb shield on you, equal to 4 times the strength of the shield it places on your totems.
Nice additions, but the restoration ones are only ok. The Riptide one is pretty meh, 3 extra seconds on it are not as good as some of the other things we can glyph for (LHW, Watershield etc). The Earth shield one is really good. Too good to be true. I foresee that 20% dwindling to a much smaller number, especially considering how our talents currently affect the spell. Glyph of Hex is interesting. The spell is good for what it is, I use it quite a bit in 5 man heroic groups and I’ve found myself using it in 25 man raiding as well (Kel mind control targets make great frogs). Having my target take a bit extra damage before breaking could be quite handy. I don’t know how I feel about Stoneclaw totem. Right now at max level it has 1620 health, it’s effect protects your totems by absorbing any damage done to them back to the Stoneclaw. By all appearances it would seem that the Glyph includes you in that bubble, and if it is 4 times the current amount, that’s 6480. That’s not a whole heck of a lot, and it seems that if someone was enterprising enough they would just attack your totems instead of you. This Glyph will probably not be used if it stays as is.
Minus the Heroism / Bloodlust nerf (and yes it is a mighty nerf) the rest seems pretty good. The streamlining of totems is pretty awesome, the Earth Shield glyph is fantastic for as long as it lasts and the Ancestral Awakening change makes me downright giddy. I’ll have more detailed information after this weekend. Lodur is copied over and ready to roll, time to see what we can do with our new cookies. =D
Please feel free to share your input or any thoughts you have on these changes
Until next time, Happy Healing.
The way I see the heroism change, they want you to use heroism in every boss attempt, but they only want you to use it ONCE per boss attempt.
No bringing two shamans for fights longer than 5 minutes so you can pop it at the beginning of the fight, then again at the end of the fight. Instead, the cooldown will be up soon enough that if you wipe, the debuff is removed and you won’t have to wait long for heroism to be up for the next attempt.
Yes, in some ways it will be a nerf, but it also means they don’t need to balance future raid encounters with the assumption that you’ll be able to use heroism twice.
The bloodlust change will be a nerf for speed runs of farm content, and boss fights that last longer than 5 minutes (which is pretty darn rare). It will, however, be really nice for learning a new encounter, and the associated frequent wipes (since dying removes the sated debuff).
I have to agree with Jan, the only nerf to progression boss attempts is trying to sneak in more than one heroism/bloodlust in a single encounter. For farm content you’ll just see the runs slow down a bit. Overall, I don’t see this being much of an issue.
I love the continued theme of combining totems. Making it easier to manage totems is wonderful 🙂
The Bloodlust change was very, very needed. Basically, our raid sporting only a single shaman didn’t have the option of double BL, but more to the point, on fights that we were learning that we needed BL early… if we didn’t have a 2nd shaman… we wouldn’t have BL up for every attempt.
This basically led to the decision of either doing the first again basically knowing it was a wipe without BL and hoping we’d learn something or waiting like 5 extra minutes after every attempt for BL to come up. Either situation really, really sucks.
As it stands, BL is still the single greatest buff in the game and frankly, I think it needs to be given to another class even with this change. I don’t like having to Battle Rez my enhancement shaman on fights when he doesn’t deserve it b/c of 1 ability. I don’t like having to take a grossly undergeared toon b/c my 1 Shaman didn’t show up.
Veneretios last blog post..Some things are worth fighting for…
In some ways, I agree that the Heroism / Bloodlust nerf was one that was needed, for the exact reasons mentioned above. I don’t feel the need to rehash what was said already, but I do agree with Lodur that perhaps the execution of the change is a bit confusing.
On a purely solo basis (though I must admit the times are few and far between) that I would use heroism (or BL), the current system does make sense. However, to have a five minute cooldown with a 10 minute debuff that prevents me from using it just does not make sense.
Yes, I understand this is designed to prevent double Hero/BL fights, but the way in which is it being enacted is just odd.
I understand the mentality of the heroism change, I know what they are trying to do. Heroism should be a raid’s kill it now button and shouldn’t be a crutch. I think I’m just going to have some time with it as it is now to really get a feel for the change.
@Arrystar:
Blizzard isn’t going to balance around solo content, nor should they. But to make the implementation a little less confusing to solo content, compare its effects in 3.1 on its effects in 3.0: Before, you could use it once every 10 minutes because of a 10m CD. Now you can use it once every 10m (assuming you don’t die) because of a 10m debuff. In terms of how often you can use your bloodlust on solo content, it’s really the same thing.
The original poster was right on; this is a change to disincentivize stacking shaman in your raid, and even with the change two shaman come in really handy (different totems, two Ankhs, etc). I wouldn’t call it a nerf to Bloodlust, it’s a nerf to stacking shamans.
“The original poster was right on; this is a change to disincentivize stacking shaman in your raid”
As a leatherworking Resto Shaman that was one of 4-5 Shaman from our T6 era.. I have no problem with this. My job used to be chain Bloodlust and Drum clicks. Oh, and heal. I think these changes are perfect.
We really want to reach a point where we aren’t power stacking a particular class/spec in our raids for advantage. Anymore that we want to limit a particular class/spec to 1 in the raid (or none).
As much as I loved being one of the sure raid spots, it sucks for the other people who aren’t flavor of the month. And you know change is constant, next patch it could be you that no one wants in a raid.
It’s super rare that we get two Bloodlusts in a fight. It is very common (think 10 man 3D Sarth) that we don’t have a Bloodlust up now for the next attempt. This will fix all issues with current content.
Going forward, I think Blizzard has learned from Sunwell re: massive stacking of raid wide buffs and they will give you little bumps, but no way to chain them for an entire encounter.
Still no way to prevent you from over stacking Resto, Balance and Feral Druids for huge battle rezes. But thats another topic. =)
Thanks for clearing the sated/exhausted issue, I thought the debuff didn’t go away when you died. The new change is awesome imo, now Blizzard doesn’t have to plan around 2 heroisms/BLs in one encounter (not to mention my guild is lucky if we get 1 shaman in any raid).
The only real problem with the new change is that there are always a few people who avoid dying on an attempt (bubbles, feign death, vanish, running out the instance). Those people will still have the debuff and you’ll either have to:
A) Wait an extra 5 minutes for their debuff
B) Go ahead and do an attempt without them getting Bloodlust
C) Tell them to go and die so you can make a good attempt
But I guess it solves more problems than it causes.
@ Mekias: I thought about that as well. I have a set of hunters in the guild that normally manage to Feign out of harms way. This change does give me an opportunity to tell them to go die and have them actually do it though =D
Lodurs last blog post..World of matticus?
As a resto shaman and raid leader for my guild’s 10 man runs, I’m glad to see the change to BL. As we moved through the new content, I was often forced to tell my raid to take a five minute break so that we could have BL back up again since I was the only shaman. I like the change, and the chance to tell the rogues/hunters who try to avoid the repair bills that the rest of the raid have to suffer to go die :D. The one problem I forsee with this change is that BL won’t be off cooldown for every fight during farm content.