Mana-Spring
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Totem Talk: Hex and Lava Burst
Okay, when we last left off with the talents and abilities shamans leveling from 70 to 80 will experience, we didn't cover the new spells shamans get: Lava Burst and Hex.These two spells helped build the new foundation for shamans going forward in Wrath. Lava Burst helped change the way Elemental works (by being able to change the way the class procs its clearcasting and other on critical abilities) and Hex was (and can be argued still is) the long-await Shaman CC ability. We discussed shamans in PvP last week in the upcoming patch 3.1, and I think it's safe to say that both of these abilities (especially Lava Burst) helped prod the class into its new directions, along with the enhancement specific Maelstrom Weapon.
GC: If you're OOM, tell your guildies to get out of the fire
Ghostcrawler did battle with the forumites this weekend, and the topic of discussion was the recent mana changes. Players are saying that the changes (including the BoW and Mana Spring change last week) are basically forcing them to bring more healers along to larger raids, and GC in return expounds on the raid balance that Blizzard is aiming for lately. Interestingly, it's not the 5 healers / 5 tanks / 15 DPS that you might think it would be -- Ghostcrawler says that if they aimed for that makeup, bringing more healers would often make the fights inconsequential.He goes on to say that the way the fights are designed, you aren't supposed to run out of mana, as long as you're dodging the AoE and are geared up correctly. Making mistakes in gameplay digs into your mana reserves, and so when Blizzard nerfs mana regen, they aren't just trying to make things harder, they're trying to take away that extra breathing room that you get around errors. They don't want healers just healing through damage -- they want people trying to avoid it in the first place.And, if guildies won't get out of the fire, and your healers keep running out of mana because of it, it's time to weed out the ranks a bit. Finally, GC adds what we've heard before: those looking for a tough battle in Ulduar likely won't find it right away -- the instance is designed to be only a little harder than Naxx. But the hard modes are where the difficulty will really ramp up. If short, says GC, if you don't have enough mana on the easy modes, it's not Blizzard's design: it's the way you and your guildies are geared and playing.
Blessing of Wisdom and Mana Stream totem go exclusive
Eyonix has posted some bad news for Pallies and/or Shamans on the forums: the Shaman's Mana Spring totem, while still providing a raid-wide buff, won't play nice with the Paladin's Blessing of Wisdom spell. The two mana regen buffs will essentially be equivalent, but won't stack in the upcoming content patch.The reasoning? Eyonix says that Blizzard feels that Pallies and Shamans brought too many unique buffs to a group, and that this change was designed to pull in an either/or choice: either Pallies can hit up Blessing of Wisdom, and Shaman can go with Healing Stream (which isn't, apparently, being combined with the Mana Spring totem as we first heard) or do some cleansing with their Water totem slot, or Shaman can use the raid-wide Mana Spring, leaving Paladins open to use Blessing of Kings.Which makes a strange kind of sense, even though lots of Pallies and Shammies will likely be disappointed to hear of one less unique buff they can bring to a raid. There is one hidden benefit here, however: since raids were previously recieving both benefits together (and now can only get one or the other), we can probably look forward to a buff for at least one (since the Totem suffers the weakness of not being portable, you'd expect it to have some extra ability) or both.
