Raiding and WoW News

Lightning Shield for Elemental in Next Beta Build and Cataclysm Collectors Edition Revealed.

August 18, 2010 2 comments

Elemental Changes in the Next Build.

In light of the shaman Q&A after the last beta build, a blue poster has confirmed that in the next push, elemental shaman will be using Lightning Shield in preference to Water Shield.

While the precise changes being made to the shield haven’t been confirmed, the blue poster is quoted as stating it will provide a damage increase in some capacity.

In addition to the shield changes, it’s also been stated that elemental shaman will be utilising Earthquake rather than Fire Nova in AoE situations. Once again, the specifics of this haven’t been detailed.

The full quote can be seen below:-

In the next beta build (or the one after that), you will see two important changes to Elemental shaman. First, you will use Lightning Shield (for damage!) instead of Water Shield. Second, you will want to use Earthquake for AE over Fire Nova. These changes, especially the former, will provide Elemental shaman with a bit of an upgrade in the rotation over what you’re used to in LK.

I don’t want to oversell it, because players have a tendency to imagine herds of glittering ponies when left to their own imaginations, but it should be a fun change

Firstly, it will be great to finally use a shield more specifically tailored to the elemental tree. The mana regeneration of Water Shield has been nice but wouldn’t we all prefer a damage increasing shield? On the other hand, this may mean we are pressed towards taking mana regeneration talents that have been mostly skipped over in possible Cataclysm talent builds. If Fire Nova is indeed made unattractive to us however (or sub-part to Earthquake at least), there is perhaps the potential to ignore the Improved Fire Nova talent. This is pure speculation however and it has yet to be seen how a talented Fire Nova will compare to Earthquake after these changes go live.

Cataclysm Collector’s Edition Revealed

Full details for the Collector’s Edition version of Cataclysm were released yesterday. The full press release reads as follows:-

IRVINE, Calif., Aug 17, 2010 — Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. today announced plans for a limited-release Collector’s Edition of World of Warcraft(R): Cataclysm(TM), the third expansion for the world’s most popular subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game,* World of Warcraft. The special Collector’s Edition package, which will only be available at retail stores, will include the following exclusive bonus items in addition to the game disc:

— Art of the Cataclysm art book, featuring 176 pages of never-before-seen images from the archives of the Blizzard Entertainment cinematics department and the World of Warcraft development team, as well as progressive visuals from multiple stages of development.

— Exclusive in-game pet: he may not be a breaker of worlds just yet, but Lil’ Deathwing will still proudly accompany heroes on their struggle to save Azeroth from his much, much larger counterpart.

— Behind-the-scenes DVD with over an hour of developer interviews and commentaries, as well as a special Warcraft(R) retrospective examining the rich gaming history of the Warcraft universe.

— Soundtrack featuring 10 epic new tracks from Cataclysm, including exclusive bonus tracks.

— Special-edition mouse pad depicting Deathwing menacing the ravaged continents of Azeroth.

— World of Warcraft Trading Card Game cards, including a 60-card starter deck from the Wrathgate series, two extended-art cards, and two Collector’s Edition-exclusive hero cards, marking the first appearance of goblin and worgen heroes in the TCG.

The first two World of Warcraft expansions, The Burning Crusade(R) and Wrath of the Lich King(R), each shattered PC game sales records upon their release. In Cataclysm, the face of Azeroth will be forever altered by the return of the corrupted Dragon Aspect Deathwing. Players will explore once-familiar areas of the world that have now been reshaped by the devastation and filled with new adventures. In an effort to survive the planet-shattering cataclysm, two new playable races — worgen and goblins — will join the struggle between the Alliance and the Horde. As players journey to the new level cap of 85, they’ll discover newly revealed locations, acquire new levels of power, and come face to face with Deathwing in a battle to determine the fate of the world.

The beta test for World of Warcraft: Cataclysm is currently underway. To set up a Battle.net account and sign up for a chance to participate, please visit the official Battle.net website at http://www.battle.net.

The World of Warcraft: Cataclysm Collector’s Edition will be available on DVD-ROM for Windows(R) XP/Windows Vista(R)/Windows(R) 7 and Macintosh(R) at a suggested retail price of $79.99. The release date and other details for the game will be announced in the months ahead. For more information on World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, please visit the official website at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/cataclysm

The mini Deathwing confirmed as the exclusive Collector’s Edition pet can be seen below:-

World of Warcraft TCG cards have been featured in the Collector’s Editions before and are a good marketing ploy given the relaunch of the game after the licensing changes seen in early 2010. The inclusion of a mouse mat is new however. An interesting point gleaned from the press release reads as follows:-

The special Collector’s Edition package, which will only be available at retail stores

This has caused speculation amongst the community that online retailers will not be distributing the Collector’s Edition this time. Conversely however, Amazon are already listing it for preorder.

There’s still no word, hint or rumours about possible release dates, though the press release states we’ll here more about that in “coming months”. It is still set for a 2010 release though.

Most of the remaining news has revolved around the guild levelling system being introduced with the expansion launch. I’m intending on dedicating an entire article to these changes over the course of the next week.

Categories: Cataclysm

Shaman Class Changes and Q&A with Ghostcrawler

August 16, 2010 Leave a comment

A new beta build was applied to the test servers over the weekend. In addition to changes for all three shaman specs, there has been a Q&A panel with Ghostcrawler.

The spec changes in the new build are as follows:-

Elemental Changes

Magma Totem now costs 18% of base mana, down from 27%
Lava Burst damage has been increased by 25%

Restoration Changes

Totem of Tranquil Mind *New* – Summons a Totem of Tranquil Mind with 5 health at the feet of the caster for 5 minutes, causing party or raid members within 30 yards to lose 0% less casting or channeling time when damaged. (Value not yet implemented.)

Enhancement Changes

Maelstrom Weapon now also reduces the mana cost of the spell.

Shaman Q&A

When will elemental not have to run into melee to do aoe?

When you’re casting Earthquake?

Are resto shaman now the only healer being forced to spec into a hit talent to supplement their active mana recovery ability? Paladins now apparently get the hit that was in enlightened judgements for free?

Our goal was to not have all of the healer talent trees to be mirror images of each other. So a priest might get one thing for free and have to talent into something else. As long as the end result is pretty similar (e.g. the priest can’t get everything for free and just be able to spend talent points on candy) then it should be fine.

Personally, I’d like to know the rationale behind the fact that the Elemental Shamans did not recieve any spells that alter their rotation on ‘primary’ targets. Their level 10 effect was something halfway between a mana restore, an AoE, and a pvp gimmick. Our capstone of the talent tree is an AoE. I can’t think of any other dps spec that doesn’t get something ‘unique’ that changes their rotation from the other specs.

That’s just part of the shaman design though, namely that Enhancement still cares a lot about spells instead of being a 100% melee weapon class. I’d argue that Enhance and Elemental still play fairly differently (such that you do have to adjust when respeccing). I’m not sure the mage design, where there is virtually no overlap among talent trees, is a superior model. It’s just a different model.

Mana – I’ve heard mana has recently begun to be an issue for Enhancement in the last few beta builds. Will the ultimate solution just be to tweak Primal Wisdom s’more? Oh, and what about all that discussion about moving Primal Wisdom to being part of Enhancement’s lvl 10 skillset? It’s going to be hellish on new Enhancers not having their primary mana restoration technique until much later. Also on the table here, and I’m sorry it touches on totems again – a full set of totems or an AoE rotation kills Enhancement’s mana very very quickly. It’d be nice if the mana cost got reduced on some of these abilities.

It’s not the intent that Enhancement has to worry about mana a lot. Generally you should have enough mana to do what you want to do. It’s a model we’re still adjusting. We haven’t quite established a base regen for the casters and healers that we’re happy with and every time we tweak that, it affects the Ret paladins and Enhancement shaman, who aren’t really supposed to be mana-constrained.

This is the kind of thing I’m talking about. Tier 1 of Enhance is one of the bigger culprits. While tier 2 has one talent that’s really attractive (nigh on required for Elemental and Enhance), tier 1 is pretty bland. People would prefer to skip over Imp Shields, and Elemental Weapons is a flat spell power buff that scales with level rather than gear.

The model we’re trying to use for all the classes is that you can’t just soak up no-brainer talents in the first few tiers. Often there is a dps talent, and then a survival talent and then maybe an efficiency talent. You definitely get the first one, but you often need to get one of the others to progress down. This is what we mean about not being able to cherry pick just throughput-oriented talents and skipping everything else that is utility, etc. It’s an evolving process though. I’m not sure I could point to a class yet and say “There. We nailed it.”

Also, Enhance has 9 “required” points in Elemental – would be 10 if it weren’t for Ancestral Swiftness – on top of their own tree being filled up, which highly limits their utility options (well, to be more specific, limits them to 0). Even if an additional point or two were freed up, they may feel obligated to spend those to grab the third point in Acuity (which I don’t like as 3 points to start with – it creates a ‘floater’ point in Elemental specs rather than getting us stuck around tier 4 needing to pick a full utility talent, which I think is a good thing. But I digress), or Improved Shields, even though all three are fairly marginal DPS gains.

Yup. This is a challenge. As I mentioned above, Enhancement likes spell damage so it’s hard to put anything in Elemental that Elemental wants that Enhancement also doesn’t want.

Lightning and Water shield do not seem that useful for Elemental in many ways.

Agreed. This is something we’re discussing. A new shield doesn’t have to be the answer though.

Nature’s Blessing doesn’t feel like a bonus when healing earth shielded targets, it feels like a penalty when healing targets without it. If the intent is to make shamans better tank healers, perhaps make it work in some other way. Perhaps change it to Earthliving or Riptide instead of Earth Shield?

This is the kind of feedback we struggle with a lot on most classes. As soon as something grants a bonus, it feels like a penalty when it’s not up because players are very efficiency-focused. If it was say Riptide, wouldn’t it feel like a penalty whenever Riptide wasn’t available? Or a penalty because every heal cost that extra GCD for Riptide in order to behave at maximum efficiency?

Honestly GC when our dps is competitive with the other hybrid specs you barely ever see us whine. We just really want to be as good as others. It’s when it isn’t that we come out in masses to whine about everything. Since our totems are our thing they are what is an easy target for our QQ. I guarantee you that if we do competitive DPS and never fall behind the endless Shaman crying will be puddles instead of rivers.

I agree with that. I think a lot of the complaints about “we’re the only class” or “are buffs aren’t awesome enough” only come to bear when dps is low. As I said recently, we think Enhancement dps was competitive when there wasn’t a lot of movement involved and when you weren’t competing with guys using orange weapons. We can fix the movement problem. We don’t think we need to fix the legendary “problem” because those Shadowmournes will all be banked at level 85.

I honestly don’t see how healing rains AND chain heal are needed. Both are AoE heals fill the same role (heal people grouped together).

They are different spells with different niches. Chain Heal excels when you have a small number of players injured and Healing Rain is more for those big bursts when everyone takes damage. There are enough occasions when you need to heal say more than just the tank that we think healers can stand to have several different strategies to deal with it.

Any chance that the stoneclaw glyph can become baseline or something? I’m mostly fine with the totem utility vs. buff thing, but it seems fairly weird to have this non-scaling bubble as a secondary effect of a totem. If it can’t be baseline, is it being compensated for? Hance isn’t exactly a survivability powerhouse.

We are changing a lot of glyphs. It’s too early to know which ones we are keeping. If this one dies then we might consider putting in the functionality elsewhere<

At this point tho, after getting the current tier hit/spirit cap, I’m pretty much forced to handpick items with no or little crit rating however. Mastery and haste just seem so overwhelmingly better.

That’s not the intent. Hit / spirit can be capped, but if you start viewing haste, crit or mastery as junk compared to another stat, then we need to change something. It’s fine if one stat is slightly better than another. Remember that crit values overall are going to be far lower than the 70%+ that some players can reach in current content. Lava Burst crits, sure, but you cast a lot of spells besides Lava Burst.

Whether it will continue to attack stuff we are not in combat with (especially if it’s range is increased).

This is something we are trying to fix. We already have the totem choosing your target. Next we need to make sure it doesn’t “helpfully” grab additional mobs.

Commentary

The increase on the damage of Lava Burst is, obviously, great news for elemental players and it’s nice to see a mana cost reduction on Magma Totem given that heavy AoE situations tend to be a severe drain on our mana pools.

The addition of the new restoration totem, Totem of the Tranquil Mind is interesting and adds more utility to the spec in keeping with Blizzard’s aim to spread buffs more widely (and you can think of this like Concentration Aura.)

From the Q&A section, Blizzard clearly believe that the implementation of Earthquake will help a great deal with the movement issues facing elemental players. There’s no mention there of their original idea to allow us to “throw” our totems into the thick of the action rather than having them drop at our feet. I’m hoping this idea will still be pursued before Cataclysm’s release as it would be a huge improvement to how elemental plays.

The issue of neither Water Shield nor Lightning Shield being specifically aimed at the elemental tree was mentioned. I’ve seen numerous suggestions on other forums calling for some kind of “fire shield” to be added, allowing us to benefit from an increase in fire damage for a short period of time. Evidently the developers are at least acknowledging the lack of elemental shield for our tree but whether they choose to tweak the mechanics of a current shield to benefit us more as opposed to designing a new buff entirely has yet to be seen.

The final question, though it isn’t apparent when quoted in such a fashion, refers to the changes to Searing Totem whereby it is more likely to choose a target that you have already applied Flame Shock to. It’s comforting to see that they haven’t finished working on the totem AI yet (and perhaps this also indicates that we will see changes to how we placed these totems.)

There has a been a lot of more generalised Cataclysm news over the past week ranging from clarification of the rewards earned from guild advancement to UI tweaks and crafted items from various professions (including details of the engineering only “cogwheels”.) I’m going to aim to do a couple of blog updates this week to catch up with these changes and I’ll also update the Cataclysm F.A.Q section as I go along. For now, enjoy the shaman changes!

Categories: Cataclysm

New Beta Build Brings Shaman Changes Across the Board (In Addition to Stealth Changes)

August 5, 2010 7 comments

A patch released to the beta yesterday delivered both a new launcher and more class changes all around. After the lack of shaman changes in the last build, all three specs have received some tweaking.

In addition to the detailed changes, there appear to have been some stealth changes that have been pushed out without mention. These didn’t occur yesterday (yes, I’m slow on the news, my apologies), but they are quite significant.

Elemental Changes

The official elemental changes are as follows:-

Hex now lasts 1 minute, up from 30 seconds.
Searing Totem now prefer to target enemies that are afflicted by your Flame Shock or Stormstrike effects.
Reverberation is now a Tier 2 talent. Down from Tier 3.
Improved Fire Nova is now a Tier 3 talent. Up from Tier 2.
Elemental Warding now reduces magical damage instead of all damage.
Ancestral Knowledge is now named Acuity and increases your critical strike chance with all spells and attacks by 1/2/3%.
Convection now reduces the mana cost of your damaging offensive spells.

In addition to the above official changes, it’s also worth mentioning that Lava Burst is no longer affected by the cast time reduction of Eye of the Storm. On live, Lightning Mastery reduces the cast time of all three of our offensive spells. It’s tooltip (for maximum rank) reads:-

~~Reduces the cast time of your Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning and Lava Burst spells by 0.5 seconds~~

Lightning Mastery was removed when the thirty one point talent trees were released. Eye of the Storm was made a primary skill as opposed to a talent and had the cast time reduction component from Lightning Mastery incorporated into it.

~~Without the cast time reduction, Lava Burst’s effective cast time has risen from 1.5 seconds to 2 seconds. In addition, it has seen a small increase in it’s base damage.~~

Update:- I’ve finally patched the new launcher and this change no longer seems to be on the beta build. Eye of the Storm lists Lava Burst in it’s tooltip and it’s cast time reduction appears to be applying.

Enhancement

The enhancement changes are as follows:-

Heroism’s “Exhausted” debuff now also affects Time Warp (Mage)
Static Shock now procs from Primal Strike, Stormstrike, or Lava Lash (as opposed to all melee attacks and abilities). Chance to proc increased from 2/4/6% to 15/30/45%.
Totemic Reach – New Talent – Increases the radius of your totems’ effects by 15/30%.

Restoration Changes

The restoration changes read as follows:-

Totemic Focus is now a two ranks talent, down from three ranks. Now also increases the duration of your totems by 20/40%.
Cleansing Waters – New Talent – When your Cleanse Spirit successfully removes a harmful effect, you also heal the target for [ 1093 to 1164 ]/[ 2187 to 2330 ].

Thoughts on the Changes

As always, you can see the current talent trees via the calculator at MMO Champion. For your convenience, here is the direct link to the shaman tree.

Ancestral Knowledge has been removed and replaced with Acuity. Ancestral Knowledge provided a 10% increase in intellect. In Cataclysm, intellect effects spell power, critical strike chance, mana pool size and potentially, mana regeneration depending on whether or not you choose to take Unrelenting Storm. Acuity increases our critical strike rating. It’s worth noting here that the patch notes state it provides a 1%, 2% and 3% increase while the talent calculator is showing a 5%, 10% and 15% increase. MMO Champion have stated that they’re aware of some tooltips in the talent calculator showing incorrectly and the values of the post are correct.

Critical strike chance awards us with a few possibilities. The most obvious is the chance that our spell hit deals more damage than normal. For an elemental shaman, a critical strike also triggers our Elemental Focus talent, allowing us to enter a Clearcasting state. The Clearcasting state alone reduces the mana cost of our next two spells by 40%. Finally, when Clearcasting is active, we deal 10% more spell damage due to the Elemental Oath talent.

In addition to the above, our critical strike rating influences the stats of our Searing Totem or Magma Totem at the time of placement. (Note though that this doesn’t apply to our Fire Elemental Totem.)

This all sounds great and indeed it is but there’s a downside to the stat. Critical strike rating always has an RNG factor. It doesn’t provide the static DPS increase that haste or spell power do. A higher critical strike rating increases the statistical chance to receive a crit from an offensive spell but it’s still a chance.

The second problem for an elemental shaman in regards to critical strike rating is Lava Burst. Assuming Lava Burst is cast when Flame Shock is ticking on a target, it’s a guaranteed critical strike anyway, regardless of our personal stats. Having our critical strike rating not influence one of our primary nukes detracts somewhat from it’s value to us.

On live, elemental shaman derive crit from a number of sources in a raid environment. One such source is the enhancement Thundering Strikes talent that is included in most cookie cutter elemental builds. This provides a 5% increase at max rank and is a talent we’re losing in Cataclysm. Call of Thunder, also removed for Cataclysm, increases the critical strike rating of our lightning spells by 5% (again at it’s maximum rank.) It’s possible therefore, that the introduction of Acuity is to make up for some of the talents being removed.

Searing Totem now prefer to target enemies that are afflicted by your Flame Shock or Stormstrike effects.

The AI of offensive totems has been criticized for a long time and it’s undoubtedly frustrating to drop a Searing Totem next to a boss and then watch it hit a completely different target. While this change is welcomed it doesn’t address the range issues of Searing Totem (and the movement problems this can cause elemental shaman) nor is there mention of a fix to the bugs encountered where the totem just sits and does nothing. Hopefully there will be more changes to the Searing Totem mechanic in the future.

Reverberation is now a Tier 2 talent. Down from Tier 3.

This change puts Reverberation in reach for enhancement shaman, particularly if they choose to take the newly added Acuity talent (and note that the increased critical strike from Acuity affects attacks as well as ranged spells.)

Improved Fire Nova is now a Tier 3 talent. Up from Tier 2.

This is purely a positioning switch to allow Reverberation to reside higher up the elemental tree.

Elemental Warding now reduces magical damage instead of all damage.

This is slight modification to Elemental Warding from it’s live incarnation where it simply reduces damage across the board by 6%. It’s slightly sad to see this change made (though in a raid situation if you’re taking melee damage, Elemental Warding probably isn’t going to save you.) I suspect that with the inclusion of Ancestral Resolve in the tier one restoration tree, there was the potential for elemental shaman to have too many damage reducing talents. Spark of Life’s place also on the first tier of restoration could give the further option of a increasing healing spells on us and while it wouldn’t be a talent you’d take in a “general” elemental build, you could stack all the damage reduction talents for specific encounters (for example, having an elemental “caster tank” a boss as Spark of Life is very reminiscent of a Warlock’s Demon Armour.)

Hex now lasts 1 minute. Up from 30 seconds

This is a hefty increase on Hex and while it’s use through PvE in Wrath has been quite none existent (Kel’Thuzad springs to mind as an exception) that may change in Cataclysm. Wrath saw the days of crowd controlling trash as a distant memory and AoEing became king. There has been a great deal of talk of this changing for Cataclysm and Hex may indeed become more vital. (Anyone who raided in Sunwell will remember the importance of using crowd control on that trash at least.)

Convection now Reduces the mana cost of your damaging offensive spells.

On live, Convection reads as follows:-

Reduces the mana cost of your shock, Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, Lava Burst and Wind Shear spells by 2%

This change basically removes the mana cost reduction of Wind Shear; our interrupting spell.

Heroism’s “Exhausted” debuff now also affects Time Warp (Mage)

This is a highly predictable amendment to address any players questioning whether these two buffs could be used back to back.

Totemic Reach *New* – Increases the radius of your totems’ effects by 15/30%.

Shaman have been asking for a talent to increase the radius of our totems and Blizzard have delivered. Does this talent also increase the range of Searing totem? The inclusion of this talent gives us more interesting choices to make regarding our build. It is possible to take both Totemic Reach and our beloved Ancestral Swiftness (see this build as an example.) However, that does mean sacrificing points elsewhere. I’ve mentioned before that I personally see little compelling reason to take Elemental Reach unless the range of our Searing Totem is increased to match it. (If I have to either stand closer to a boss to keep placing Searing Totem, I see little benefit from having my spells out range this.) If this talent allows a greater distance on Searing Totem however, Elemental Reach becomes more interesting yet the build shown above doesn’t allow for both it and Elemental Warding for example. Taking both Ancestral Swiftness and Totemic Reach would also prevent us dipping into the restoration tree for Ancestral Resolve.

I think with the more interesting talents available to us, we’re going to see more situational specing in Cataclysm. You can focus on the damage reducing talents for new fights or encounters where there is a huge amount of raid damage going around. We could, potentially, take a great many of these and step into the role of “caster tank” if we took all the survival talents (click here for an example.)

Categories: Cataclysm

Cataclysm: Masteries

August 3, 2010 Leave a comment

This is slightly “old” news but the last new beta build reintroduced masteries. Masteries are derived from the mastery rating on your gear (which starts appearing at around level 82 I believe.)

MMO Champion give the following example:-

A level 82 player will get 1 Mastery point for each 93 Mastery Rating he has. This mastery point will increase the mastery bonus differently depending on the class, +1 Mastery Point doesn’t necessarily means a +1% increase to the bonus. (e.g. A Beast Mastery hunter with +2 Mastery gets +4% increased pet damage)

The elemental mastery reads as follows:-

Grants a 20% chance for Elemental Overload to occur. Elemental Overload causes a Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, or Lava Burst spell you cast to trigger a second, similar spell on the same target at no additional cost that causes 60% of normal damage and no threat. Chance to trigger increased further by mastery rating.

The Cataclysm Compendium has been updated to incorporate the above information.

Finally, on the subject of editing old articles, the Elemental FAQ also received it’s overhaul yesterday. Feedback is welcome!

Categories: Cataclysm

New Cataclysm Build and Zing Does Beta

July 30, 2010 2 comments

There was another beta build pushed out late last night with a plethora of class changes. There were, however, only two Shaman class changes and neither relate to the elemental tree. These are as follows:-

Shamanistic Rage now causes your skills, totems, and offensive spells to consume no mana for 15 sec. (Enhance)
Nature’s Swiftness no longer shares a cooldown with Elemental Mastery(Restoration and Elemental)

Elemental Mastery and Nature’s Swiftness no longer sharing a cooldown doesn’t impact us as it’s impossible to take both talents.

The new changes have all been accounted for in the MMO Champion Talent Calculator which can, as always, be found here.

Goblin ground mount model images have been shown over at MMO Champion also and while I tend to avoid publishing beta images (purely because I can’t keep up with how fast they appear), these are too cute to ignore.

(Image courtesy of MMO Champion)

The Goblin ground mounts continue to make me more and more envious of the race in general. (Though on the subject of mounts, I did obtain the following a couple of days ago)

In closing, I’ve finally been fortunate enough to obtain Cataclysm beta and having a “hands on” feeling for the class changes is something I’m greatly looking forward to. Hopefully, I’ll be bringing you my thoughts next week on how the elemental spec is shaping up.

Categories: Cataclysm

SC II Launch and More Site Updates

July 27, 2010 2 comments

Starcraft II received it’s greatly anticipated launch last night (I’m sure I wasn’t the only person queuing outside) and while not directly related to World of Warcraft, the collector’s edition did boast an in game vanity pet.

He has an amazing in game animation (though his place in the genre is undoubtedly debatable). Learning this pet does grant a Feat of Strength for those interested in such achievements. He’s definitely one for the vanity pet collector’s out there. Sadly for those who aren’t interested in playing Starcraft, you do need to install and register the game’s keycode to receive this pet. He’s automatically mailed out to all characters on your battlenet account (assuming, of course, that you register your Starcraft key to the same account.) The pet isn’t any kind of code that you can grab from the box so reselling the game isn’t an option.

Finally, I spent this morning updating my article on major glyph choices for the elemental shaman. You can find it here should you be interested in checking that out. It’s now entirely up to date and contains a little more in depth data about each glyph.

Categories: Raiding and WoW News

Cataclysm Compendium

July 26, 2010 Leave a comment

Cataclysm beta is well and truly under way. The state of the talent trees changes at a rapid rate with the tweaking still very much in progress. Whilst I will aim to keep this compendium up to date, the latest changes will always be published on my front page before the edits are made to this article.

Cataclysm Stat Changes

Most of this information came from Blizzcon 2009 when the Cataclysm expansion was confirmed. In an attempt to simplify the high end game and the challenge of balancing various stats, many are being removed, merged or morphed in some fashion.

For DPS casters, Cataclysm is bringing the following broad changes:-

Spell power is being removed
We’ll receive a lot more stamina
Spirit is being removed for all DPS casters
MP5 is being removed entirely
Mastery is being introduced

Stamina

The difference in hit points between plate wearers and cloth wearers is being drastically reduced for Cataclysm. For casters, we can expect to see much larger health pools than in the previous expansions.

Spell Power is Being Removed

This drastic change was also announced at Blizzcon 2009 and is still a topic of contention. Never the less, spell power as a stat is mostly being removed from the game. Come Cataclysm’s launch, intellect will be the main source of spell power for DPS casters.

A slight exception was made to this when it was announced that caster DPS weapons will contain spell power as an actual stat. The justification for this is to make them comparable to melee weapons in how attractive they are for the casters.

No More Spirit for DPS Players

While this has never been a stat that has affected shaman (aside from the annoyance of it appearing on otherwise nicely itemised items), spirit has always influenced the in combat mana regeneration of other casters. When Cataclysm goes live, spirit will no longer appear on most caster DPS items and mana regeneration for these classes and specs will be dealt with via a different system.

Spirit will be the primary source of mana regeneration for healers however.

Elemental shaman and balance druids are the exception to the above rules however. Both these class spec combinations will be sharing their gear with their healing counter parts. As such, they will have talents that allow conversion of spirit to hit so as to ensure that the spirit component of their gear is not wasted. In the shaman class review of Cataclysm changes, it was announced that this conversion would be bundled into another, more attractive talent rather than expecting shaman’s to spend points purely on converting spirit to hit.

However, when the newly pruned (thirty one point) talent trees appeared, the spirit to hit conversion was a stand alone entity. Currently it takes the form of Elemental Precision and appears as a tier two elemental talent.

MP5 Removed

For our restoration friends (or our restoration offspecs), MP5 will now be a thing of the past as this stat is being removed from the game entirely. Spirit will now influence the mana regeneration of our restoration tree.

The Introduction of Mastery

Where most stats are being trimmed and pruned away, mastery is a new stat to grace our gear in the expansion. This stat is directly tied to our talent choices and to quote the blue poster simply allows us to “become better at whatever makes their chosen talent tree cool or unique”. We’ve been promised a more thorough explanation of this in the up and coming weeks.

Elemental Shaman and Balance Druid Gear Itemisation Specifics

This is how itemisation of elemental shaman or balance druid gear will work in Cataclysm

You will still share gear with restoration druids and restoration shaman
Your gear will have spirit on it. It won’t have hit on it.
Hit on rings and other such gear will still benefit you
You will have a talent that converts spirit to hit. We will adjust talents accordingly so that you will want about as much spirit as say, a warlock wants hit
~~To stop the spirit to hit conversion feeling like a dull but mandatory talent, these conversions will be bundled into another, more interesting talent~~.
Raid buffs will no longer buff spirit, so you shouldn’t find yourself unexpectedly over hit cap because of buffs

New Shaman Spells For Cataclysm

Primal Strike

Primal Strike reads as follows:-

An instant weapon strike that causes 10 additional damage.
Available at level 3

This is a new weapon based attack designed to make levelling as enhancement more appealing. This is to tackle the complaint that most of the core enhancement talents come very late in the tree and many lower level shaman levelling as such find themselves primarily casting lightning bolt and thus, feeling more like elemental players.

Healing Wave

Healing Wave reads as follows:-

Heals a friendly target for 34 to 44.
Three second cast time
Available at level 7

This is an entirely new healing spell being added to the shaman arsenal. The intention is for this spell to become our core, single target healing spell. Due to this change, our current healing wave will be renamed to greater healing wave. As such, we will have lesser healing wave, healing wave and greater healing wave. The lesser and greater varieties are deemed to be more situational.

Managing mana is going to become much more vital to all healers in Cataclysm. You can expect, therefore, that selecting the correct spell depending upon the situation will be quite critical.

Bind Elemental

Bind Elemental currently reads as follows:-

Binds the target hostile elemental for up to 50 sec. The bound unit is unable to move, attack or cast spells. Any damage caused will release the target. Only one target can be bound at a time.

1.5 second cast
30 yard range
Costs 9% of base mana

Unleash Elements

Unleash Elements currently reads as follows:-

Focuses the elemental force imbued in the Shaman’s weaponry, with the concentrated effects depending on the enchantment unleashed.
Available at level 81
Instant cast
30 yard range
15 second cooldown
Can not be dispelled

“Unleashes the power of your weapon enchants for additional effects.” A dual-wielding enhancement shaman will activate the effects of both their weapon enchants.

A few of the effects under consideration for this spell are as follows:-

Flametongue Weapon – Deals instant fire damage and buffs the shaman’s next fire attack by 20%
Windfury Weapon – Hurls a spectral version of your weapon at the target, dealing 50% weapon damage and increasing the shaman’s haste for the next 5 swings
Earthliving Weapon – Heals the target slightly and buffs the shaman’s next heal by 20%

Healing Rain

Healing Rain currently reads as follows:-

Calls forth healing rains to blanket the area targeted by the shaman, restoring 1827 to 2173 health to allies in the area every 2 sec for 10 sec.
Available at level 83
Two second cast time
30 yard range
10 second duration
10 second cool down
This spell is not channelled

An area of effect, heal over time spell that calls down rain, healing all players within the selected area. There is no limit to the number of players that can be effected by this heal but you can expect a diminishing returns mechanic like with many AoEs.

Spiritwalker’s Grace

Spiritwalker’s Grace currently reads as follows:-

Calls upon spiritual guidance, permitting movement while casting non-instant Shaman spells. This spell may be cast while casting other spells
Available at level 85
10 second duration
2 minute cooldown

When this self-targeted buff is active, your spells are no longer interrupted by movement and possibly even by your own attacks. This will give shaman of all three specs another way to heal or do damage when it’s necessary to move in both PvE and PvP.

Cleansing and Dispel Mechanic Changes

As part of wider changes to the way cleansing works (and which classes and specs can do so), some changes have been made to shamans.

Shaman’s will receive cleanse spirit as a baseline ability
Cleanse spirit will only remove curses
Restoration shamans can choose to take a talent that will improve cleanse spirit so it also removes magic effects
Shaman’s will no longer be able to remove poisons.
Cleansing totem will be removed
All cleanses and dispels will cost more mana than they previously have
Attempting to cleanse or dispel a target that isn’t inflicted with a debuff will still result in the mana being spent. At present, the spell will simply not cast and this encourages a spam fest approach to cleansing.

Mana Regeneration

Restoration shaman and other healing classes will need to pay attention to mana more than they’ve had to during Wrath of the Lich King. Spirit will be the restoration shaman’s primary mana-regeneration stat.

The Future of Totem of Wrath

Totem of wrath now will replace flametongue totem for all shaman
Totem of wrath will buff the group’s spell power by 4%
Elemental shaman will gain a talent that allows all fire totems to provide a +10% spell power buff
The above talent is Totemic Wrath
The above allows the elemental shaman to drop searing, magma or fire elemental totems without losing their spell power buff
The 10% spell power buff will be based upon the target’s spell power, not that of the shaman.
The above also applies to a warlock’s Demonic Pact
The 4% gained from totem of wrath and the 10% gained from an elemental shaman’s talented totems will not stack
The above will not stack with a warlock’s demonic pact either

Elemental Mastery

Elemental Mastery received a small but significant revamp. Firstly, Blizzard removed the cooldown it shares with Nature’s Swiftness. The removal of this shared cooldown is irrelevant. We can’t take both talents so we gain nothing from this. On live, Elemental Mastery reads as follows:-

When activated, your next Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning or Lava Burst spell becomes an instant cast spell. In addition, you gain 15% spell haste for 15 seconds. Elemental Mastery shares a cooldown with Nature’s Swiftness.

On beta, the tooltip reads as follows:-

When activated, your next Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning or Lava Burst spell becomes an instant cast spell. In addition, your fire, frost, and nature damage is increased by 15% and you gain 20% spell haste for 15 sec.

The instant cast portion of Elemental Mastery has not changed. The spell haste buff that we gain has been increased from 15% haste to 20% haste. In addition, the damage to our fire, frost or nature damage spells has been increased by 15%. The two factors combined should provide a sizeable DPS increase and the addition of Feedback ensures we’re still able to shave a small amount off the cooldown of Elemental Mastery.

Shaman Talent Trees

Early versions of all talent trees were scrapped in favour of drastically reduced, thirty one point trees. These trees visually resemble those of vanilla World of Warcraft.

Thanks to MMO Champion, current versions of all class trees can be found here.

As part of the talent tree revamps, all players will choose their specialization at level ten. Each spec within a class gains key skills (known as primary skills) when they choose this path. Two of these skills are talents previously located deep into their tree.

Elemental Talent Tree Specializations

The elemental tree primary skills are as follows:-

Eye of the Storm
Thunderstorm
Elemental Fury

Eye of the Storm

The tooltip currently reads:-

Reduces the cast time of your Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, and Lava Burst spells by 0.5 sec, and the pushback suffered from damaging attacks while casting those spells by 70%.

This is a morph between the current, live version of Eye of the Storm (providing push back protection) and Lightning Mastery (providing cast time reduction.) Lightning Mastery was removed from the beta version of our talent trees.

Thunderstorm