More Shaman beta changes on the horizon
Yet more news from the beta: while not as massive as the revamp to the Death Knight from the last patch, shamans have seen a fair amount of change in the most recent beta patch. The relevant changes are highlighted on Nethaera's post, (and our own Alex Ziebart covered the entire patch) and we shall discuss them after, as always, the jump.
No, that jump, down there. Sorry, my bad.
Shaman
Flametongue Weapon: Now has a passive spell damage.
Nature's Blessing no longer increases spell damage from Intellect, and the effect has been reduced to 5/10/15% from 10/20/30%. This is in result of the new spell power system. Players should notice little to no change in the power of the spell relevant to healing spells.
New Talent: Tidal Force- Increases the critical effect chance of your Healing Wave, Lesser Healing Wave and Chain Heal by 60%. Each critical heal reduces the chance by 20% and lasts 20 seconds.
Stoneclaw Totem: Health of the Stoneclaw totem is increased by 5% of the Shaman's total health.
The range of all "friendly totems" has been increased to 30 yards, up from 20.
Totemic Mastery talent removed and replaced with "Tidal Force".
Well, for starters, this change removes one fo the reasons almost every shaman had to spec into resto at least a little, especially if you were intending to raid. The removal of Totemic Mastery and moving its effect into the base range of every totem is a very good move for freedom in shaman talent specs: you're going to see more elemental points in enhancement shaman's specs and more enhancement in elemental spec. Tidal Force, meanwhile, will have interesting synergy with the new talent Ancestral Awakening, which procs off of a critical heal. So if you really want to ensure that ancestor spirits are going to pop out and heal people, Tidal Force will help you do this.
Stoneclaw Totem's change, frankly, is long overdue and should be applied to all totems.
The Nature's Blessing change seems reasonable enough and is based on the new spell power system, so we'll see how it plays out. The change to Flametongue Weapon puts it in line with the new Flametongue Totem, so it was to be expected: it'll give elemental shamans and resto shamans a solid imbue for soloing and grinding since they're probably not going to want to have to dump the mana for a spell damage totem when they'll have this instead.
I don't think they can be done with shamans... there's no mention of what they're doing in Elemental Combat yet to replace paralysis, so I'll be looking to future patches to find out what's in store for deep elemental. Hopefully we'll see changes further in totem health as well.
