Upcoming Shaman Changes

More pretty big changes for the shaman class this morning. On the elemental front we’re looking at some pretty nice buffs to riptide, which had been looking sub par. Now that riptide can proc tidal waves there should be no question about the rotational significance of the new spell.

Tidal Waves: You have a 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 20% of your bonus healing effects and your Lesser Healing Wave gains an additional 10% of your bonus healing effects.

This change in addition to the increase on initial healing should make the spell an absolute must for restoration shamans.

Some interesting changes on the elemental / enhancement front as well. I like the theory on Blizzard’s reasoning for trying to buff fire for elemental, but it’s a delicate balancing act. Currently an elemental shaman really does nothing in PvE accept drop totems and cast lightning bolt. So adding some sort of situational spells and abilities would be a nice addition. If the devs can work the new lava burst ability into the rotation it would be a job well done.

A small victory for enhancement shamans, initially it was looking like Maelstrom weapon was going to be nerfed to the point it was worthless, but in a last minute change Blizzard have decided to set it aside for the moment. It will certainly make for some very interesting PvP and PvE moments if it makes it all the way through till expansion.

Tidal Waves — Riptide now also procs this effect.

Riptide — We’re going to increase the initial healing component.

Storm Reach — now called “Elemental Reach” and includes Lava Burst.

Improved Fire Nova Totem - Increases the damage done by your Fire Nova Totem by 10/20%, and your Fire Nova totem has a 50/100% chance to stun all targets damaged by your Fire Nova Totem for 2 sec.

Thunderstorm — We will probably boost the mana return to 8% of total mana. That seems more in line with similar effects. We talked a lot about buffing its damage, but decided that may not be a good idea. With its short range, it isn’t a great rotational spell for a raiding Elemental shamans, and making you run up to hit a boss and run back is giving up a lot of cast time. Instead we’re going to try to keep the damage and knockback more situational (in PvP it will get used a lot) and make the mana return the big PvE raiding focus.

Maelstrom Weapon — We have a concern that the proc per minute frequency is too often. According to our numbers, it’s balanced for a two-handed weapon and a bit generous for a dual-wielder. However, this would be a nerf to Enhancement dps overall that we’d have to make up elsewhere, and it seems to be a fun change shamans are enjoying. So we’re going to let this ride for now. It’s something to keep an eye on, but we aren’t going to change it yet.

Lava Burst and Lightning Bolt — And now for a few words on Elemental damage. One of the things we were trying to do to make Elemental dps more interesting was to have a Lava Burst + Flameshock variant. We also themed some new deep talents to support this play style. The problem is that lightning still seems to do more damage than fire, which in turn makes the new talents feel lame because they benefit fire and not lightning.


Now we think that Lava Burst is doing appropriate damage for its cost and if anything Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning are a little too good. (Remember they benefit from Curse of the Elements and similar spells now.) However, nerfing lightning would make it harder to level as well as making 3.0.2 kind of brutal for Elemental shamans, since Lava Burst is level 75. Hurting lightning would feel like a flat out nerf, and even though you’d partially make up for it at higher level, overall we think this would feel, um, yucky. So no big changes to lightning spells.

We talked a lot about just buffing Lava Burst and a deep fire-based talent or two. This will make Lava Burst too good on paper, but it might work out okay in the game itself. We’ll just have to see. We aren’t 100% sold on this course of action, so I’ll update when we decide for sure.

Once again, these decisions were the consensus of our design team, so please don’t give me the credit. In fact, if there are any changes you specifically don’t like — those I had nothing to do with