A) Your items suck. Honestly, I get it: You spent all of Wrath of the Lich King workin’ hard for your purplez. You have deep, lasting, emotional connections with everything from your Heroic Sindragosa necklace to those boots from ToC that you were never able to upgrade. The idea of getting rid of them makes you sad, like you’re ditching your aging dog for a new puppy.

Get over it. I know that heroic Black Bruise is nice and you worked hard for it, but the Necrotic Touch proc has sucked since 4.0.1, and it sucks even more as a leveling item. Add into that the fact that there are blue weapons that require level 80 that have the same dps as H Black Bruise (that looks ten times better). The end result: Your weapons should be replaced by level 81, if you get lucky with drops. Stonecore (which you can queue for at 81 if you’ve found the portal), has two excellent Enhancement weapons: Heavy Geode Mace and Fist of Pained Senses. HGM has some lackluster leveling stats, but either hit or expertise can be reforged into mastery. Both of these weapons blow every weapon from WoTLK (from Pride to Heroic Havoc’s Call) out of the water. You’re hurting yourself by hanging on to your relics.

Did I mention how cool they look?

Armor is slightly less important to replace asap, but they’ll still be replaced soon. Elam just hit 83 and got Troggbane Chestguard to replace his 264 Tier10 Chest. It comes out to four more agility (counting two 20 agi gems), 60 more haste, 137 less crit rating, and a wopping 137 mastery. I’d exchange 137 crit for 137 mastery any day of the week. The only downside is losing my 4pct10, which means I won’t be equipping the Green quest reward until I can find another green that outpaces my tier gear.

Trinkets should be replaced fairly soon. Hyjal has Bileberry Smelling Salts, early Deepholm has Gear Detector. The base agility on these trinkets is huge, kicking the crap out of Herkuml War Token‘s haste, Tiny Abomination in a Jar‘s…everything, and Deathbringer’s Will‘s crit base. The haste procs are meh enough that Sharpened Twilight Scale might be worth hanging onto, though.

B) Enchant. Enchanting is your friend, and WILL make your life easier. This is a rule for both leveling and early heroic grinding- if it’s on you, you should enchant it and gem it. WoTLK enchanting mats are dirt cheap (I was buying Dream Shards at 50silver a piece last night. In total, berserking cost me 30 gold), and those enchants are still relevant. If you get an item in a heroic or five that you know will be replaced in a week, spend the thirty gold to enchant it with WoTLK enchants and blue or low-priced epic gems. No one will shame you for putting lesser-quality gems in lesser-quality items, and it’s so cheap to do now that there’s no excuse to lessen your performance by not doing it.

Now, back to leveling. See you all at 85!

My parents are both Presbyterian Pastors, a profession I can honestly say I’ve had no intention of entering since I was 7 and my mom was pinning homework assignments I drew of my dad on the refrigerator. This philosophy on career choices bled into World of Warcraft, where until last week my highest level priest was 17. I’m not sure what it is that turned me off the class. Freud would have his theories, but I think it has something more to do with the fact that I hate Paladins. And, after leveling one of those to 80 (how I found the resolve, I do not know), I vowed to never again pick a class whose main descriptive word is “goldenrod.” I also despise Blood Elves with a passion, and my opinion on trolls is “cool, but not for me.” Undead? They’re just ugly. (If they ever let us skin our undead to be another race that looks undead, though, I’m totally there.)

However, patch 4.0.3. changed all of that. After literally a year of anticipation, the Shattering has come and Deathwing has unleashed herds of Tauren Priest unto this world, in all their Divine Bovine(y) goodness. Following my tradition of only caring for characters if they’re of the so-rare-it’s-still-living-steak variety, I launched straight into leveling my first real priest. Five minutes ago, Clergelam hit forty. And, so far, I love it.

Leveling received a huge buff in 4.0.1, when talent trees allow us to get signature talents at incredibly low level. When Deathwing broke the world (and the servers), leveling saw it’s second huge buff- a retooling of the old world. Quests now breadcrumb into other quests, they require significantly less movement, and they’re written as to be engaging. However, I have little experience past Mulgore and the first half of Northern Barrens when it comes to questing. My focus has primarily been on dungeons.

Dungeons are incredible now. Blizzard has done an excellent job of going back to all of their old content and retuning it to be appropriately difficult for the level you are. No more of these silly “immolate-conflag-soulburn-soulfire-dead” bosses of a week ago. Bosses today, from Ragefire Chasm to Scarlet Monastery: Cathedral, take a beating. Moreover, they can dish out the hurt. Some have even taken it upon themselves to teach new players a vital life lesson for all of World of Warcraft: Don’t Stand in The Bad.

Shadowfang Keep. Level 20ish. Lots of Bad.

Some dungeons have been retooled entirely- Shadowfang Keep and Deadmines being the most significant examples of this, though Stormwind Stockades as well. They feature new bosses, and unlike most low level bosses these ones come with actual weird mechanics. They hurt like heck (the first boss of SFK is going to be a pug killer, doubtlessly), and they don’t go down easy. For those dungeons who didn’t get a total redesign, some changes were made. Razorfen Kraul is now a 30-35 instance, while it’s counterpart Razorfen Downs is even higher. Maraudon was dropped into the 30s, and Scholomance was moved to 40.This made for some slight annoyance in the late 20s, where the hell-hole of Gnomeragan and Scarlet Monastery: Graveyard provided my only dungeon choices for 3-4 levels, but once past that hurdle I’ve had a cornucopia of dungeons to feast on.

My level 40 Dungeon List.

But wait, there’s more! An entire new quest system has been put in place for the newly remade instances. Most instance-related quests have received a makeover, and are now given by questgivers inside the instance proper. This means that when you do a random instance for the first time, you’re not only getting the instance experience and the random experience, but you’re also rocking thousands of experience in quest rewards. While straight up quest leveling might be the fastest way to level now, this gives questing a run for it’s money. There’s also more to instance questing than just having quest givers at the entrance, too. For quests that are part of a chain, they will give you the option to “complete” the quest and give you a new objective for your next quest, saving you a run back to the beginning of the instance. For those not part of a chain, you have the handy “teleport out of dungeon” and “teleport to dungeon” buttons to allow you to skip the run and focus on the quest rewards.

Look at those shiny Uldaman quests.

Finally, if all of those endorsements weren’t enough to get you salivating for dungeon leveling, here’s the kicker: You can represent your faction of choice while running instances, allowing you to garner reputation without having to quest or donate stacks of cloth. If you’re a Tauren who wants a Raptor mount, a Troll who wants a turbo-trike, or an Undead who wants a kodo, you just need to buy the tabard at your local city quartermaster (conveniently located next to the city flight masters). On another positive note, these tabards actually look cool, making you want to wear them.

As a final note- the changes to low level questing/instancing have made a lot of people play lowbie alts. DPS queues are around 5 minutes for me, and healing queues are almost always instant. There’s really no harm in trying the refurbished zones out. (Unless you wipe, which is a distinct possibility.)

In preparation for my Giant Slayer’s Compendium (everything you need to know about Enhance 4.0), I’ve been doing some research to try and come up with concrete data on what our priority system will be the day 4.0 hits servers. To that end, I’ve spent the better part of an hour and a half exporting stats by hand from a level 80 beta version of Elam and simming him with a variety of priority rotations to see which rotation would be maximum dps.

The problem, one I’d like some input on because it’s really confusing me as the sim was just updated this morning with Rouncer’s proper Lava Lash damage formula (http://elitistjerks.com/f79/t82621-enhsim_updated_thread/p20/#post1759278), is that the rotation we’ve all been assuming would be top dps isn’t. (MW5LB, SW, LL, ST, FS, ES, SR for those following along at home.) To give you a sense of what I’m looking at, here are my dps results for the course of the night, linked from lowest to highest:

1. MW5, SW, SR, LL, ST, SS, FS, ES- 10,533 DPS
2. MW5, SW, SR, SS, LL, ST, FS, ES- 10,553 DPS
3. SW, MW5, LL, SS, ST, FS, ES, SR- 10,573 DPS
4. MW5, SW, LL, ST, SS, FS, ES, SR-10,584 DPS
5. MW5, SW, SS, FS, LL, ST, ES, SR-10,615 DPS
6. SW, MW5, SS, LL, FS, ES, ST, SR- 10,616 DPS
7. MW5, SW, SS, LL, FS, ES, ST, SR-10,618 DPS
8. MW5, SW, SS, LL, ST, SR, FS, ES-10,626 DPS
9. SW, MW5, SS, LL, ST, FS, ES, SR-10,636.11 DPS
10. MW5, SW, SS, LL, ST, FS, ES, SR-10,636.78 DPS
11. MW5, SW, FS, SS, ST, ES, LL, SR-10,639 DPS
12. MW5, SW, FS, SS, LL, ST, SR, ES-10,644 DPS
13. MW5, SW, FS, SS, LL, ST, ES, SR-10,652 DPS
14. MW5, SW, FS, SS, ST, LS, ES, SR-10,654 DPS
15. SW, MW5, FS, ST, SS, LL, ES, SR-10,668 DPS
16. MW5, SW, FS, ST, SS, LL, ES, SR-10,670 DPS.

We can see some trends develop in this stream of numbers:
A). As we can see from examples like 9&10 and 15&16, firing off your five stack of MW yields about 2 more dps than holding it and using Feral Spirits.
B) Shamanistic Rage with 2pct10 belongs at the end of your priority. Any time I tried creeping it up sooner resulted in some of the lowest dps sims I had.
C) I started out my testing with Lava Lash being a high priority, but every one of those sims were near the bottom of the barrel. Out of the first 6 sims, the only time SS is ranked higher is the 2nd, which is so low a dps value due to how high I valued shamanistic rage as well.
D) You can see a logical progression emerge. LL is replaced by SS by the 7th sim, but was replaced by FS at the 11th sim, and SS is pushed back further again by Searing Totem at the 15th and 16th sims.

Glyphs used for all of these tests were Windfury, Feral Spirits, and Lava Lash. Glyph of Flame Shock, despite my overabundance of haste, simmed at a 117 dps loss in the max dps priority rotation.

Stats were from Elam, transferred to beta:
MH/OH DPS: 250.60
Str: 145
Agi: 1670
IntL 195
Spirit: 165
Mastery: 0
Melee Crit: 47.55%
Melee Hit: 21.44 w/ DW
Expertise: 136, 11 under beta cap.
AP: 4432
Melee Haste: 27.90%
SP: 2401
Spell Crit: 27.92
Spell Hit: 18.11

Talent Spec: http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#hohZfIG0s0hRGo (The point from acuity is counted in base stat configuration- that talent isn’t in the enhsim gui.)

Questions:

Am I overlooking something? According to my simmed results, our priority in 4.0 should be:
Maelstrom Weapon 5 Lightning Bolt, Feral Spirits, Flame Shock, Searing Totem, Stormstrike, Lava Lash, Earth Shock, Shamanistic Rage…but that’s not what our common sense was telling us in the past. It’s possible LL isn’t being calculated accurately, but Rouncer’s testing and formula were sound and Ziff implemented it as is as far as I know, which means it should be calculating correctly.

Additionally, the EnhSim offers a choice of waiting for a 5stack of Searing Flames before using Lava Lash. Any sim where I replaced Lava Lash with this option, I lost about 10 dps. If I followed Lava Lash 5SF with a regular Lava Lash in priority, I’d get the same number as the sim without LL5SF. This makes me think that Lava Lash in it’s basic form as just LL will be used no matter what the stacks of Searing Flame on the target are, which should almost always be 5. The 10dps loss is indicative of no Lava Lash going off during the first 10 seconds of stacking Searing Flames, since there was no non-5stack Lava Lash there to press. (Hope that makes sense.)

So yea, data. Make of it what you will, give me some feedback, and hopefully we can figure out something concrete.

After spending last night messing with a variety of free video recording programs, I stumbled upon Xfire when my friend Naithin told me he was live streaming our Halls of Origination run for his blog readers/twitter followers to watch. It took me well into the morning (who needs to sleep before 5AM? Seriously?) but I can now confidently say that I’ve got this live stream/video recording stuff in the bag.

As my first two videos, I decided to do an introduction to some of the mechanics behind playing the two different specs of DPS shaman in Cataclysm, mainly showing off new spells like Unleashed Elements and Spiritwalker’s Grace. They’re fun little videos, but there are a few important things to remember here:

1) My dps doesn’t matter. I wasn’t strictly following priority (anyone who has ever raid lead can tell you how dps can suffer when you’re trying to explain fight mechanics while hitting dps buttons.)
2) Searing Totem is broken to not attack target dummies on beta. Hnnnnnng.
3) These are really basic videos that don’t really catch the coolness of certain abilities. (For example, it shows me strafing while throwing off a lightning bolt. No where near as fun as raining death from the air in Arathi Basin after jumping from lm to bs with slow fall on, one of the ways to utilize Spiritwalker’s Grace.)
4) In my Enhance video, I attack from the front because attacking from behind would mean really bad graphics and be confusing/annoying to the watch. Don’t attack from the front. That’s bad. Bad bad bad bad bad.
5) In both videos, I don’t attack the level 85 boss training dummy. I am spell and melee hit capped and expertise capped for 85 heroics, not for 85 raids (remember, blue gear!) and I didn’t want to miss a fulmination or anything when trying to explain how cool it was.
6) Most of the power auras feature in my videos are Syronious’ Ultimate Shaman Auras, with some of my own interspered. (For example, my game plays HADOUKEN every time LvB comes off CD, and I had to tweak the Lightning Shield power aura to warn me at 9 stacks since it’s currently set up to warn for low stacks as it’s meant for live enhancement shaman to use. The majority of the auras in the video are Syronius’, though.
7) I’m running really addon light at the moment, using only OmniCC (I still can’t fathom why this isn’t a default ui functionality), Power Auras, and Recount. I want to give anyone matching the most pure beta experience possible, so I decided not to try and retool my ui like it is on live…which is drastically different than default.

I hope you enjoy watching them as much as I did making them!

I’ve also now branched out in the social networking scheme of things and got myself a twitter to tweet upon. Fo shiz. My main use of it will be for tweeting when I’ll be live streaming on xfire, but I’m more than cool with talking to people and such. Whatever normal people use twitter for, at least.

(Oh, and my xfire profile name is Elamqt. I love friends, btw.)

Now, I know I’m not alone in this, but leveling my shaman back in Burning Crusade was a chore-even moreso than it is now. For one, we had to talent into using a two-handed weapon (which meant level 1-20 was done with either sword and board or a staff), rockbiter was the weapon imbue of choice till level 30, and shocks and lightning bolts were so mana intense (shamanistic focus came in the place of the 2handed weapon talent) until you got to shamanistic rage-our top tier level 50 talent- that drinking became our best friend. Over the past few years, I’ve made a number of efforts to try and level another shaman. Generally, they fall short around level 13 where I get bored and play something else on wow.

Cataclysm changes that. It makes level 10 an achievement-not in the points sense, but in the “holy @#$% look at these spec-defining abilities I just got. For Enhancement, the three passives we get at 10 are Lava Lash, Mental Quickness (now 50% of our ap and 60% reduced shock cost!), and Dual Wield with 6% hit baked in. This means that straight out the bat, at level 10, an Enhancement shaman can dual wield (and dual wield two weapons with flametongue weapon, our level 10 ability) and has primal strike, lava lash, and Earth Shock all at his disposal. The days of autoattack-autoattack-autoattack-shock-dead are over. Enhancement has turned from a wooden spoon to a leveling meat grinder with the Cataclysm talent changes, and it’s -fun-.

Mechanically, Earth Shock should be your priority during these levels. At level 16, I was rocking 102 spell power with 106 Attack Power; 53Mental Quickness SP, something like 15 from flametongue (30 since I was dual-wielding), and the rest made up by the intellect-spell power conversion. Earth Shock hit hard. Earth shock crit harder. And on a six second cooldown and being a short-range ability, there was seriously no reason not to lead off with it and hit it every time it’s up. Love the Earth Shock-it’s there to be your friend. Primal strike seems to come next, if only because your first three points (levels 10, 11, and 13) will be spent in making it do 45% more damage. Now, Primal Strike is inferior to Stormstrike in every way-including being a non-scaling “adds x damage” attack- but for low levels, it gets the job done. It’s also good for starting your auto attack if you’ve not macro’d /startattack to your Earth Shock, and it’s only downside was that while I was leveling it had no icon. /tear.

Lava Lash is a strange beast. I didn’t see it hitting harder than Primal Strike on beta during this level range, but I’m not totally surprised, as it doesn’t have the talents and glyphs that prop it up later in the tree. (Imp Lava Lash and Glyph of Lava Lash, to be exact.) It’s good damage, but not quite good enough that I was prioritizing it over ES and Primal Strike. The weirdest thing about leveling in beta is the GCD gaps in between using these abilities. You’re often not hitting quite hard enough that the mobs are dying before PS is up again, and with everything on cooldown there’s this feeling of “BUT THIS IS NOT ENHANCE SHAMAN PLAYSTYLE RAAAWR.” It’s not true, my mind just has to get accustomed to GCD gaps happening. You also can use these gaps to refresh lightning shield.

I already went over glyphs in a previous post. You’ll get your first glyph when you hit level 15, as this nice ui element will be sure to let you know:

You can read the older post to see me wax poetic about how amazing glyph of lightning shield is, so I won’t go into it again, but I do think it’s amazing for leveling.

Being a hybrid and all, a definite fact of leveling is healing. From 10-20, you’ll have two heals: Healing Wave and Healing Surge. Healing wave is your go to for in-between fights healing. It’s a 3 second cast time, doesn’t hit for spectacular amounts, and it’s low mana cost makes it excellent for keeping you topped off without hurting your mana. Healing Surge is your “OH SNAP” button. It’s a 1.5 second cast, hits like a truck, and takes a Jaws-sized bited out of your mana pool. You want to use this muchmuchmuch less than your healing wave, but don’t let it’s mana cost deter you if you’re about to die. Beyond that, with ghost wolf at level 15, leveling 10-20 should be a cinch.

Talent breakdown:

• 10: Focused Strikes, 1/3
• 11: Focused Strikes, 2/3
• 13: Focused Strikes, 3/3
• 15: Elemental Weapons, 1/2
• 17: Elemental Weapons, 2/2
• 19: Ancestral Swiftness, 1/2

(Note: Elemental Weapons increases the damage of both your weapons FT imbues by 40%, which in turn increases shock damage, their own proc damage, lightning bolt damage (for pulling) and lightning shield damage. Improved shields provides an overall greater bonus to shields (which are a chunk of your damage), but the loss of sp to the rest of your abilities is to much to make the improved shields route that viable. (Also, percentage based bonuses-while ultimately better at higher levels- tend to stink at low levels. 10% of 50 damage is only 5 damage, not a huge benefit.)

Elemental

• Stoneclaw Totem deal and absorb effect reduced by 50%.

This is mainly a nerf to all three specs in regards to pvp. Less damage absorbed by the shield means quicker totem deaths, and that shield’s base absorption is what the glyph of stoneclaw totem multiplies to create it’s player-bubble. My personal hope is we’ll see this accompanied by a change in stoneclaw totem that allows the shield to scale with players’ stamina, as currently Stoneclaw shield absorbs about 4200 damage no matter your gear level. Nerf.

• Chain Lightning now has a 3 sec cooldown, down from 6 sec.

Buff to Enhance aoe as long as we have the mana to sustain a CL every 3 seconds. For Elemental, they already talented into a CL nearly this quick with Storm, Earth, and Fire. Now we all get it base. Buff.

• Earthquake base damage increased by 55%. Now has a 10% chance to knock down the targets (down from 20%). Lasts 8 sec, down from 10 sec. Mana cost changed to 60% of base mana, down from 86% of base mana. Cooldown removed.

Definitely seems to have moved from a pvp control ability to a pure damaging aoe with a slight possibility of control. Spammable, higher damage, lower mana cost all for less of a chance to knock down anyone without a range interrupt. Overall a buff- definitely for pve, and everyone on the forums had stubbornly made up their minds not to use it in pvp anyway, even if that was stupid of them.

Storm, Earth and Fire renamed to Earth’s Grasp – Grants your Earthbind Totem a 50/100% chance to root nearby targets for 5 sec when cast.

Storm, Earth, and Fire did three things: Lower CD on CL, increase FS dot damage, and gave your Earthbind Totem a chance to root nearby targets. CL is base 3 seconds now, FS gains dot damage through lava flows, and Earth’s Grasp has appeared in Storm, Earth, and Fire’s place. This is a buff to Ele PVE, allowing them to more talent points to spend elsewhere. To Ele pvp, it’s not a buff or a nerf.

• Lava Flows now also increases the the periodic damage of your Flame Shock by 20/40/60%

Explained above.

• Totemic Wrath is now a Tier 5 talent, up from Tier 4.

I’m annoyed, because Elame JUST got Totemic Wrath. >:( Other than that, I like this change: Lava Flows and Elemental Oath become shoe-ins for your 39, 41, 43, 45, and 47 talent points, and then you’re faced with the really hard choice of Fulmination vs. Totemic Wrath vs. Elemental Mastery at level 49. For anyone above level 60, this change doesn’t matter very much.

• Elemental Precision now increases damage instead of your chance to hit.

My initial feelings are that this is a buff. Since hit is not going to be static in Cataclysm, spirit found on gear is going to matter a lot. Losing this talent means that you need to work harder at getting hit capped from gear alone, but that always ends up with you eventually over the hit cap and wanting to drop points from hit giving talents in order to pick up dps increasing talents. This way, no one will want to ditch Elemental Precision.

• Item – Shaman T11 Elemental 2P Bonus – Increases the critical strike chance of your Flame Shock spell by 10%. / Instant

No reason it shouldn’t, but I hope this increases the critical strike chance of the dot portion too. Otherwise, solid bonus.
Item – Shaman T11 Elemental 4P Bonus – Reduces the cast time of your Lightning Bolt spell by 10%. / Instant

Seriously, that’s like a billion haste or something. Definitely a nice bonus.

Restoration

• Cleansing Waters base healing increased from [ 1916 to 2075 ] to [ 2634 to 2970 ]

With cleanse spirit talented to remove magic and curses, this seems useful. I cleanse you of your dot and heal you for what it’s last two or three ticks of damage did! It’s a free heal on top of something you already were going to do to help that person survive. It’s definitely a choice talent, but for those who choose to take it this buff is nice. (And remember, that’s base healing-unmodified by talents/sp/etc.)

• Tidal Waves no longer affects Lesser Healing Wave. Now affects Healing Surge.

http://db.mmo-champion.com/s/8004/<-Lesser Healing Wave is now Healing Surge. This is a good thing, as my LHW was hitting substantially harder than my healing wave on beta- definitely not my definition of lesser. It’s a high throughput, fast cast, high mana cost spell-the name fits it nicely. (Tidal Waves does the exact same thing it did last build, the only change is in the name of LHW.)

• Telluric Currents is now a Tier 5 talent, down from Tier 6./Improved Cleanse Spirit is now a Tier 4 talent, down from Tier 5./Nature’s Blessing is now a Tier 3 talent, down from Tier 5./Nature’s Guardian is now a Tier 2 talent, down from Tier 4.

Not much to say. Movers gonna move.

• Improved Chain Heal is gone.

Nerf to most pve resto shaman, methinks. Not that anyone is especially sad to see a bland %increase talent go, but chain heal healing 20% less won’t be fun.

• Restorative Totems renamed to Soothing Rains – Increases the amount healed by your Healing Stream Totem by 25%, and your Healing Rain spell by 15/30%.

With a 20% decrease to chain heal, we see a 30% increase to Healing Rain! Seems to me like this build is screaming “Be good and use all your aoe spells and break the green laser spam mindset.” I also like the name. I find it…soothing.

• Blessing of the Eternals is now a Tier 6 talent, up from Tier 4. No longer icnreases the critical chance of your spells.

Admittedly, I had no idea this talent increased the critical chance of my spells. It’s probably a nerf though, as no one likes critting less. Well, people who hate RNG do. But those people have no sense of fun and adventure!

• Ancestral Awakening is now a Tier 5 talent, up from Tier 3. This is now linked to Ancestral Healing.

One good talent linked to another good talent, both win ancestral in it’s name. For flavor, I approve. And since I would have spent all five of those talent points anyway, I see no problem linking them.

• Improved Water Shield no longer affects Lesser Healing Wave. Now affects Healing Surge.

See Tidal Waves.

• Item – Shaman T11 Restoration 2P Bonus – Increases the critical strike chance of your Healing Wave spell by 5%. / Instant

Healing Wave on beta is a really mana efficient, slow heal. It’s kind of the heal to use when someone is taking steady damage but not really in danger of dying. This bonus probably would be nicer on something like Healing Surge or Greater Healing Wave, where it’s less likely to overheal, but it’s not like your melee attacks are giving you a chance to cast an instant lesser healing wave or anything.

• Item – Shaman T11 Restoration 4P Bonus – Grants 540 Spirit for 6 sec after you cast Riptide / Instant

An increase in mana regen after using your mana-heavy instant cast spell. Not terrible- provided the pieces of the set are good, there’s no reason not to get this.

Enhancement

• Stormstrike now increases your chance to critical strike the enemy with Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, Lightning Shield and Earth Shock spells by 25% for 15 sec instead of increasing nature damage by 20% on the target.

I’ve not seen concrete math on this being a buff yet, but for all intents and purposes it seems to be. 25% more chance to crit means 25% more chance to proc Elemental Devastation. Seeing as we’re not critting every 8 seconds anymore, this is a good change. On another note, this also tells us Lightning Shield can crit now- something that hasn’t happened in the past, and is in itself a large buff. I believe this talent is a buff, but time and math will tell.

• Windfury Weapon – Unleash Weapon now lasts 6 swings or until 12 sec, instead of a flat 12 sec.

This is a bit of a nerf, but an increase in weapon speed by 50% for 12 seconds on a 15 second cooldown seemed a bit drastic anyway. Nerf, but I’m not mollified.

• Ghost Wolf speed reduced from 40% to 30%.

Ugh. Nerf. Can glyph back to 40%. Freedom Wolf is a pretty powerful ability though. Not happy about this one, but I’m not keen on rallying for it either.

• Maelstrom Weapon no longer affects Lava Burst.

Sucks. An instant crit that did lots of damage and procced Elemental Devastation was awesome, and I’m going to be sad to see it go, if just because it was a fun spell. Ultimately, though, we’re probably better off for it:

A) Lava Burst always felt like we were intruding on Elemental’s territory. It’s definitely the definitive spell of Elemental, and is kind of like them imbuing windfury. That said, with them getting both Lava Burst burst and Fulmination burst, I’m stupid jealous.

B) It really makes the rotation less clunky to cut out. my current haste rating, I seem to average 5-6 seconds for MW to stack to full, sometimes less. I’m sure we’ve all had it where we were in the middle of aoeing, shot an instant CL and got a full stack way before CL was off it’s six second cd.  That would mean our priority would be like “LvB on five, stack to five, Lightning Bolt and risk Elemental Dev falling off and not having a full stack as LvB came off CD” or “LvB on five, stack to five and wait for LvB cooldown to fall off, wasting potential MW procs.” The new scenario is more “LB on five with increased chance to proc Elemental Dev/ Chain Lightning for aoe.” Overall it’s smoother, but noticeably less fun.

These points don’t really outweigh the fact that I really freaking want LvB on Maelstrom Weapon, but they help me cope. :3

• Item – Shaman T11 Enhancement 2P Bonus – Increases damage done by your Lava Lash and Stormstrike abilities by 10%. / Instant

Lava Lash and Stormstrike already hit hard on beta. Now they hit harder. I can’t foresee us wanting to skip this set bonus.

• Item – Shaman T11 Enhancment 4P Bonus – Increases the critical strike chance of your Lightning Bolt spell by 10%. / Instant

10% more means that we’ll be sitting at a 35% crit rate on LB after Stormstrike without factoring in any gear or buffs. We’ll easily be seeing a 50% crit rate on Lightning Bolt within the first tier of raiding in Cataclysm with the SS change, epic gear, talents, and this set bonus, helping waylay the pain of losing Lava Burst a small amount.

That’s it for this build. Tomorrow, Elames adventures through Loch Modan, the tale of which was inconveniently interrupted by a new beta push.

First: Glyphs are permanent. You buy a glyph, and you learn it in what is essentially your glyph spellbook for life. Once a glyph is learned in said spellbook, you can pull it out and place it into glyph slots an indefinite number of times. This means that if one encounter you want to glyph flametongue weapon, the next lava, and then the third go back to flametongue (which we saw a lot of in LK), you can do this as many times as you want without having to buy the glyphs more than once. Bad for inscriptionists, amazing for the rest of us. (On a side note- does anyone actually call them scribes? I know that’s what we’re -supposed- to call them, but inscriptionists is so much easier to say. Err.)

Second: There are now three glyph types- Prime, Major, and Minor. Prime glyphs are your dps increase glyphs. On beta right now, this includes glyph of feral spirits (30% more ap to ghost puppies), glyph of lightning bolt (4% damage to lightning bolt), and glyph of earth shield (ES heals 20% more), to name a few. These are glyphs where their contribution to dps or hps are quantifiable and easy to math our.

Minor glyphs are your cosmetic/quality of life glyphs. Multiple glyphs to make your spells reagentless, glyphs to reduce your return-to-inn card every 7.5 minutes, and glyphs to make your ghost wolf go from off-white to arctic white all fall in this category. Nothing mind-blowing, but you’ll be thankful when you die at level 42 and use reincarnation for the first time because this glyph covered your butt when you forgot to buy ankhs. (Or, in my case, when you didn’t have the glyph or ankhs, died at 42 for the first time in 12 levels, and realized you had a reincarnation you couldn’t use.)

The last category are major glyphs. These are your “fun” glyphs. These glyphs have strange effects that are hard to math out as contributing to your dps/hps/tps or ability to stay alive as a tank, but are fun. These include some of your standard cd-reducing glyphs (10 less seconds on T-storm means that over a 5:15 second fight on the EoTS flag, you get two more chances to blast warriors into the nether! (#Fuckyealeastcommondenominators.) You also see the Power Word: Stoneclaw shield glyph in the minor category, as well as a glyph of chain heal that decreases healing on the primary target by 10% but increases in on subsequent targets by 15%.

The real point of this post, however, is to introduce you to the glyph that is going to be your best friend as a leveling shaman in Cataclysm. While in the past, Stoneclaw bubble was a vogue leveling glyph because of it’s ability to get you out of a tight spot, Stoneclaw Totem’s new spot as the level 58 shaman ability means that you need to find something new for the first 43 levels of having glyphs. With the lack of surviving that generally comes with pulls of 5+ mobs, glyphing chain lightning to hit that many people seems a bit silly. In fact, the majority of glyphs come in 3 categories: Too high level, too offspec, or too reliant on actually dropping totems (though, to be fair, glyph of totemic recall might be enough to make you drop totems on a frequent basis- it makes the mana you get back from totemic recall 75% rather than 25%, making dropping four totems less expensive than a chain lightning…if you remember to recall them.)

But no, emerging from the other glyphs (all solid options, but most not at level 15-40+), two glyphs shine. First is glyph of ghost wolf- very straightforward, it increases ghost wolf’s speed by 10%, which is almost the speed of a non-epic mount. This is especially useful for enhancement, since Elemental and Resto can’t talent into instant ghost wolf until level 1 billion. (or like, 85).

The glyph that really takes the cake for leveling, however, is glyph of lightning shield. On live, glyph of LS provides a nominal increase to lightning shield damage at the expense of a glyph slot.On beta, glyph of LS makes it so that you never drop below 3 lightning shield orbs via them doing damage. This means that although Lightning Shield will proc and shock the zombie attempting to nom on your face, the orb itself won’t be consumed. Essentially, Lightning Shield becomes a Thorns-like buff that stays on for 10minutes, hurts the bad guys, and provides you the peace of mind of not having to refresh Lightning Shield before every fight. If this glyph makes it to Cataclysm, I’d suggest to anyone planning on leveling a shaman to get this glyph and love it long time.

Leveling. It’s something we’ve all done. It’s something we’ve all hated. It’s something that prevents some of us from ever having more than one level 80; the thought of endless grinds, traversing the world on 10minute flight paths to get Linken’s crappy green boomerang, and the need to eat and drink more than the most gluttonous Hutt on Tattooine are all barriers in the way of our enjoying a nice streak of 10 level 80 characters. Well, those aren’t the only barriers. Add in those nuisances like “a real life,” “friends,” and “moral and societal obligations.” Uggggh.  However, I’m coming to you straight from the High Seat of Ironforge, where Elame just handed in the last quest of Dun Morogh in Cataclysm beta, to let you know that all of that annoying questing you’ll be sure to tell your grandchildren about someday (“Back in my day, we had to walk to Kharanos. Uphill, both ways, with no shoes!”) is a thing of the past. Deathwing, while being generally regarded as a public nuisance by the Stormwind deparment of Parks and Recreation, has done one thing right- leveling in the post-Postal Earth Aspect Azeroth has taken a turn for the awesome.

The first thing to note about Cataclysm leveling is that spells scale with level rather than needing to have new ranked skills trained at class trainers. This means that every time you level, your lightning bolt powers up a little more. When you first enter Azeroth, your level 1 Shaman will be doing about 1 damage per lightning bolt (enhanced by your SP from base intellect- for me at level one, this was 10SP. This damage scales up by one or two points every level through your first ten levels (and is coupled with you getting more sp from your intellect going up as you level,) so that you end up able to hold your own against the mobs that also scale in level. This is a noticeable increase over the live caster leveling experience, where training LB at level 8 meant that you were still using a LB that did a base 26-30 damage against level 13 mobs. For pure casters, this meant that the last levels before you trained a new rank for your primary nuke were incredibly painful.

Another fun notice about casting in Cataclysm- it doesn’t kill your mana pool. Everyone of us who has leveled a shaman from 1-10 can remember their time shooting four lightning bolts at plainstriders and then meleeing or drinking for 30 seconds before we could get back into the game. A 30second break every four mobs adds up, and it was very frustrating. Leveling 1-10 in Cataclysm blew my mind. Rather than mana regenerating within and outside of the five second rule, Cataclysm has mana regenerate in combat and out of combat, and Out of Combat mana regeneration is through the roof at lower levels. Chain casting lightning bolts becomes THE way to level from level 1-10, with primal strike costing significantly more mana (did I mention LB costs 2 mana at level 1? And you have a 75 mana mana pool.) and hitting for less, melee damage is no longer the way to go. This might be slightly depressing to any Enhancement purists who want nothing to do with Lightning Bolt ’til Maelstrom Weapon, but for those of us who want to level at a non-boring pace, the chain-casting high-damage playstyle of 1-10 is a welcome addition.

Beyond the changes to mechanics that make leveling easier, there’s some other quality of life changes that are definitely worth mentioning. The first is the leveling UI, shown here (click for larger):

Every time you level in Cataclysm, this notification pops up. It details everything you receive at that level: Abilities, Talent Points, at level 10 you get a notice that Battlegrounds become available for play, and more. For abilities, it shows you what you will receive as soon as you visit your trainer. You don’t get the abilities automatically, but you’re not flying all the way back to your trainer to find he has rank 6 rockbiter weapon or anything. (Though ranks don’t exist, as I mentioned above. )

The other main quality of life improvements to leveling 1-10 in Cataclysm is the actual 1-11 questing experience, which has been increased 10fold from live. One of the first big improvements is the fact that Anvilmar, the little fortress we all know in Coldridge Valley, has a mailbox outside of it. This is huge for easy 1-6 leveling, because on Live right now new characters either need to forego leveling with heirlooms until they get out of the starting area or they need to run to the first town with a mailbox, grab their heirlooms, and run back- both options time consuming. This attention to the small details is emphasized in the addition of two new flight paths within the zone of Dun Morogh, which are already connected to Ironforge.

The largest addition to the 1-11 Dwarf Shaman leveling experience in Cataclysm is the totally restructured flow of quests in Dun Morogh. I won’t give out any spoilers, but from the moment you spawn in a trogg-invaded valley to the blue-weapon rewarding end of the quest chain in Ironforge’s High Seat, your questing experience is one that flows. There’s no downtime between quests, and no confusion about what to do next. All of the quests contribute to the flow by giving quest rewards that form a matching item set on your character, so that you actually look like you’re advancing in gear as you do more for the Dwarves of Dun Morogh. (It helps that the quests near the end of the zone start giving you green items as well, promoting a real feeling of powerring up over the course of the game.)

Quest Gear in Dun Morogh! (As I'm sure you notice, there's a new character sheet too. )

And, the quests are engaging and ultimately epic. Everything you do in Dun Morogh culminates in the last quests of the zone (which saw me through to level 11), and when you ultimately travel to Ironforge to report in after their completion, there’s another quest giver in the same room offering you a quest in Loch Modan…and a way to get there that isn’t walking uphill in the snow with no shoes.

All-in-all, there was so much to do in Dun Morogh that I thought that it was so epic it deserved it’s own blog post, which I had originally planned to be about hitting level 10 and the usefulness of choosing a talent specialization. After actually doing it, I felt that talking about the talents as the focus would really detract from everything that was great about the zone, so that’s reserved for a later date. I hope this blog gets you psyched to level in Cataclysm, as it has me psyched right now.

Next issue: Elame goes to high school. Also, Loch Modan, Wailing Caverns, and levels 11-22.

1.Shamanistic Rage now causes your skills, totems, and offensive spells to consume no mana for 15 sec.

This is technically a buff from the old (as in, previous beta build) incarnation of Shamwall, where your skills, totems, and offensive spells cost 10% mana for 15 seconds. Now they cost 0%mana. This is all well and good and stuff, but I truly feel it runs counter to the design philosophy Blizzard has for SR- where they want it to be less something we use on Cooldown for mana and more a damage reduction CD. I’d much rather see skills and offensive spells removed from Shamanistic Rage and make it “Shamanistic Rage now causes your totems and defensive spells to consume no mana for 15 seconds.” We know that Cataclysm will see healers with mana issues and dps needing to take responsibility for their lives- having a button that reduces incoming damage but prompts you to keep attacking within that damage reduction in order to gain the benefit of no-cost spells and keep your mana pool high seems much less effective than an ability that reduces incoming damage and allows you to heal yourself afterward without worrying about killing your mana pool- which will be an issue for Enhancement in Cata.

This is not me saying that the new SR is useless, by any stretch of the imagination. Primal Wisdom is at it’s core an RNG talent, and having a button in place to give you 15 seconds of attacking and allowing your mana pool to refill will be helpful any time you run into a dry spell of PW procs. I just personally would rather see it fully made into a total defensive cooldown than the hybrid it is today and will be in Cataclysm.

2. Enhancement – Increases all elemental damage done by 20%. Damage increased further by mastery rating.

Earlier in the year when Masteries were revealed, there was a bit of an uproar by the Enhancement community when Survival Hunters’ mastery turned out to be Elemental damage while Enhancement got left with “Nature” damage- seeing as Searing Totem, Lava Burst, Flametongue, Unleash Flame and Flame Shock are all on the menu for Enhance in Cata-not to mention the frost spells for pvp- we were naturally a little worried that SV hunters got what we perceived as our mastery. (For the record, Elemental damage does make sense as a SV mastery!) The rationale that was posted was that Blizzard wanted all 30 masteries to be unique- unfortunately for Enhancement, the uniqueness of our mastery meant less damage than we wanted.

Thankfully (and seriously, thank you Blizzard!), our concerns were heard and addressed, and while we do lose out on having a unique mastery, this beta build announced that we will have our mastery bonus effect all our non melee/windfury attacks, and not just the nature one. This is a great change, and while I personally would have preferred a more interesting mastery a la Blood DK’s or Fury Warrior’s, beggars can’t be choosers and I will be happy as a claim with our mastery as is.

On a slight aside, I’d like to apologize for posting this late, but I happened to (we think, doctor will confirm tomorrow) tore a muscle in my knee at work on Wednesday, and I’ve spent the past 3 days being emo and lethargic. On the plus side Sashafears, my undead warlock, went from being level 1 Thursday afternoon to level 40 tonight…which just goes to show you exactly how much time I spend on this game when I don’t have the outside influences of work, gym, family, relationships, etc. keeping me from sitting in an armchair with my laptop on my lap.

To give you an idea of how awesome my knee is right now, here's a picture.

Why is that? Because I want ALL the information before I post about it, so I think I’m going to wait until the end of Blizzcon to update. I just want to be able to go through, nitpick on every single thing and go “omgz thats kewl and hears y!” Suffice to say, however, I don’t think I have -ever- been excited for a video game in my life as I am for World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. It seems amazing, and I give props to everyone at Blizzard for making it look so appealing. That said, here are the things I currently dislike!: (Btw spoilers for you bads who are blocked from WorldofWarcraft.com at work, so don’t go below this shiny linkbar if you’re afraid of finding out that Sirius Black is dead, Snape Killed Dumbledore, Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s Father, and Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen will make you ask for your money back.)

A) No Worgen Shaman: Hai guys, I’m a qt Enhance shaman who has badass claw-like fist weapons and occassionally turns into a wolf spirit/summons some wolf puppies because I’m that in touch with my canine brethren. What’s that? You’re a qt wolf-man who is constantly struggling with his wolfesque nature, who has badass claws, and a propensity to eat raw meat? We can like, totally be friends and windfury things together, and maybe later go to a Jonas Brothers concert, right?

…right?

B) Dear Blizzard:

I love you guys. I love the majority of your preview movies. That one in Dalaran where Jaina/Thrall eyed each other and Varian emo’d out like a 13 year old and Kologarn forgot to say OBLIVION? Classic. The WOTLK one where Icehowl lays the smackdown on a Jaina-wannabe, the s2 geared paladin goes to the dark side (because they have cookies!), and there’s a 2-minute build-up before you figure out it’s actually Arthas talking to you? Very, very well done. And Zul’aman? That trailer was fucking beast. Spot-on voice acting by a more-emo-than-Varian arm-chopping troll leader with an incredibly well-written dialogue,  and the way the four animal-god bosses are introduced is simply incredible. So why, oh why, did the Cataclysm preview video simply have a boringly written, overly-dramatic-at-the-wrong-times, voice speaking? The graphics looked amazing, but the monologue just bored me. I am being a tad nitpicky about this, but it’s because I look forward to every movie you guys release, and I was a tad bit dissappointed this time. Still, great work overall!

<3, Elam.

3) Cairne Bloodhoof, leader of the qtest race in the game and voted most-likely-to-not-get-falsely-implicated-in-a-horde-plot-and-executed-by-Garrosh-Hellscream in his high school yearbook gets falsely implicated in a horde plot, gets executed by Garrosh Hellscream, AND then Thrall goes off to be all like “I’m in ur Tirisfal, guarding your…stuff that needs guarding” and Emoscream takes over the Horde. Fuck that shit. If anything happens to Cairne, I’m rerolling Worgen. Happy Cows will no longer come from Mulgore.

4) Worgen are alliance. It makes sense. I hate it, but it makes sense.

5) And, lastly:

My least favorite part of Cataclysm is that I want it already and it’s not out yet.