“As someone who has written quite a few Shaman forum posts and a blog or two about the need to have Fire Elemental more available during raiding, I have to say that I was pretty stupid ecstatic to see the cooldowns cut in half.

(For those of you who don’t know: Enhance shaman drop magma totem, which an average ToC-geared shaman will have contribute about 800 dps. Every 20 minutes currently, we can drop Fire Elemental, who contributes about 1300dps- a difference of 500 more dps over 2 minutes. The problem with FE is that we have to be incredibly selective about the when/where/why we drop FE, and on Progression raid attempts with hard dps modes, such as I choose you Steelbreaker ({not calling the progression, just pointing it out because it was a dps race in p3}, we’re often left without one of our main dps cooldowns for the next attempt.)

As someone who has advocated this change for a long time, I can’t really say anything but thank you!

I am interested, however, in the fate of glyph of fire elemental. It currently reduces the fire elemental cooldown by 10 minutes, which would mean fire elemental would no longer have a CD. Personally, I think this is an awesome idea, as it’s a sustained dps boost. (I’d hesitate to say it’s needed, because I think it’s pretty hilarious how every class seems to disillusion itself that they’re the worst dps in the game.) However, the unholy AoTD talent for Death Knights was changed, so I am wondering- what is in store for Fire Elemental totem?”

It’s not a huge buff. BUT, Fire Elemental can now be up 1/5 of the time, and is going to be able to be used at least every other boss attempt, rather than every fourth or fifth. Considering FE is a good 500ish dps by itself, that’s exciting.

Thanks, Blizzard.

(Note- Fire Nova+Fire Elemental are somewhat clunky to use together. I suggest logging onto the PTR to make sure you get down the FE placement for maximum Fire Nova damage!)

• Item – Death Knight T10 DPS Relic (Obliterate, Scourge Strike, Death Strike) – Your Obliterate, Scourge Strike, and Death Strike abilities grants 73 Strength for 15 sec. Stacks up to 5 times.
• Item – Death Knight T10 Tank Relic (Runestrike) – Your Rune Strike ability grants 44 dodge rating for 15 sec. Stacks up to 5 times.

Druid

• Item – Druid T10 Feral Relic (Rake and Lacerate) – The periodic damage from your Lacerate and Rake abilities grants 44 Agility for 15 sec. Stacks up to 5 times.
• Item – Druid T10 Balance Relic (Moonfire and Insect Swarm) – The periodic damage from your Insect Swarm and Moonfire spells grants 44 critical strike rating for 15 sec. Stacks up to 5 times.
• Item – Druid T10 Restoration Relic (Rejuvenation) – The periodic healing from your Rejuvenation spell grants 32 spell power for 15 sec. Stacks up to 8 times.

Paladin

• Item – Paladin T10 Retribution Relic (Crusader Strike) -     Your Crusader Strike ability grants 44 Strength for 15 sec. Stacks up to 5 times.
• Item – Paladin T10 Holy Relic (Holy Shock) – Your Holy Shock spell grants 85 spell power for 15 sec. Stacks up to 3 times.
• Item – Paladin T10 Protection Relic (Shield of Righteousness) – Your Shield of Righteousness ability grants 73 dodge rating for 15 sec. Stacks up to 3 times.

Shaman

• Item – Shaman T10 Elemental Relic (Shocks) – Your Earth Shock, Flame Shock, and Frost Shock spells grant 73 critical strike rating for 15 sec. Stacks up to 3 times.
• Item – Shaman T10 Enhancement Relic (Stormstrike) – Your Stormstrike ability grant 146 attack power rating for 15 sec. Stacks up to 3 times.
• Item – Shaman T10 Restoration Relic (Riptide) – Your Riptide spell grants 85 spell power for 15 sec. Stacks up to 3 times.

The numbers here seem a little low, at least for the Enhancement one. While it won’t drop off in any fight where we can stormstrike every 8-10 seconds like normal, 438 AP is only 38 more AP than our current Relic. However, as ghostcrawler has said- it’s much more work for them to put an item/spell/ability in than to tweak the numbers. (Nearly every relic buff seems to be about 10% higher than t9 relics, which seems to be a bit low at this point.) These are early PTR numbers, so the only thing we should really be looking at is how we feel it works.

First, I do have to say- I’m starting to be a little let down by Relics. Historically, they’ve given pretty cool varied bonuses from spec to spec and class to class. Having every Melee DPS relic in 3.2 be 200 strength/attack power/agility, Caster Relics be 200 Crit/ 200 Haste, every Heal Relic be 234 Spellpower, and every tank relic be 200 Dodge Rating wasn’t terrible. It was A) New, and B) It was known the patch had it’s focus set on PVP and Isle of Conquest, and that ToC was a playground so that the kids didn’t get bored. Which was fine.

But 3.3 isn’t that. 3.3 is Icecrown Citadel, the culmination of all our efforts in Northrend. It is largely a PVE patch. And having evvery relic be virtually the same as every other classes’ is just a little annoying. Every melee class will hit and gain ap or strength in stacks. Every caster will throw up their dots and get crit rating. Every healer will use their instant heal for 255 spellpower. The only real difference is in tanks, where Paladins and Death Knights will get dodge and druids will get agility.

Beyond just being annoyed with the sameness, I don’t really like the stacking effect. I’ve got fury of the five flights on Grazeless, who also uses Rune of Razorice in her offhand. Both abilities stack on melee hit, and have short durations- FotFF has 10 seconds, the rune has 20. If there is any boss that might require us to be away from the target for extended periods of time (I’m looking at you, Northrend Beasts. Burning Bile sucks. Also, phase transitions like Mimirons) will cause us to have to restack our stack. Even if Stormstrike is hit the second it’s off CD (which isn’t always the case) it will take us 24 seconds to restack to it’s fullest. That said, I just find it annoying- not stupid/broken/anything.

I’m also wondering a bit about the elemental relic. Crit is sux for Elemental compared to haste- having an instant crit every 8 seconds (6.5 with 4pct10!) means that crit is not their friend compared to haste. Also, no Elemental shaman in their right mind will be wasting a GCD to cast flameshock before they need to…which is every 16ish seconds. After the buff has fallen off. My hope would be that they change this as a chance to give crit on Flameshock ticks. (Really, I’d prefer they did haste, but w/e.) Because, as of now, Electrifying Wind looks to be BiS in ICC.

Meanwhile, crit is very attractive for Enhancement, as it effects both spell crit and melee crit. Anyone who has really high crit ep values might want to consider getting this totem for Enhancement, as we do shock every 6ish seconds or so.

Srsly need to finish this paper. Peace out chillun.

Edit: “The Elemental totem is haste, not crit, and I believe it is a 30 sec duration.”

Go go, Ghostcrawler! This totem is so much better now.

• Item – Shaman T10 Restoration 2P Bonus – Your Riptide spell grants 20% spell haste for your next spellcast.
• Item – Shaman T10 Restoration 4P Bonus – Your Chain Heal critical strikes cause the target to heal for 25% of the healed amount over until cancelled.
• Item – Shaman T10 Elemental 2P Bonus – Your Lightning Bolt spell reduces the remaining cooldown on your Elemental Mastery talent by 1 sec.
• Item – Shaman T10 Elemental 4P Bonus – The cooldown on your Lava Burst ability is reduced by 15 sec.
• Item – Shaman T10 Enhancement 2P Bonus – When you activate your Shamanistic Rage ability you also deal 12% additional damage for 15 sec.
• Item – Shaman T10 Enhancement 4P Bonus – Each time the beneficial effect of your Maelstrom Weapon talent reaches 5 charges, you have a 15% chance to gain 20% attack power for 10 sec.

Shaman
Enhancement

• Earth’s Grasp now also reduces the cooldown of Stoneclow and Earthbind Totem by 15/30%.

That’s pretty much it for now. I’m pretty excited to talk about these bonuses, but it’ll have to wait a few.

Edit: Since it’s only been an hour or two, I’m not going to right a new post about these changes. I’m just going to edit this one.

First off, let’s talk about Shamanistic Rage 2pc. It’s, dare I say it…awesome. It gives us a damage cooldown, something we presently don’t have (excluding wolves, ofc!) Moreover, it’s on a minute long cooldown, and it’s a cooldown we’re already going to be using every single minute. With the new fire nova making our dps even more mana-hogish, we’ll be using SR as much as we can.

For some quick napkin math, this set bonus equates to about 3% base damage increase over the course of the fight, assuming you use SR the second it’s available.  (15/60=1/4 uptime. 1/4X12=3%) Timing SR with things suck as Deconstructors Heart Phase will yield an even higher result, and timing SR with things like Yogg Brain Phase will ensure higher DPS when it matters most. Excited? Yes, yes I am.

As for the second set bonus…the jury is still out on it, but I’m quite excited. I figure that in 4pc t9, I’ll be sitting at at least 7k raid buffed. 1400 AP for 10 seconds is nothing to snear at. Even if it is a 15% chance to proc, it’s a 15% chance to proc on something that stacks to five every fiveish seconds. This means you should be proccing 1400 AP every 30ish seconds. (Note: This is very simple speculation. We sometimes go 10seconds without stacking mw5. 15% chance might mean it doesn’t proc for a minute or so. This bonus is very RNG, and people hate that. I’m just talking in a very specific case that is somewhat normal to give an idea of what it -might- be like.)

So, assuming it does proc every 30ish seconds because you magically convinced MW5 to behave and stack every 5 seconds, we’re looking at 20 seconds per minute of 1400 Attack Power. That’s around 470 static attack power assuming 7k attack power. And, that’s not at all! (If you order now we’ll send you…) On bloodlust + potion of speed, you’re going to stack MW much more quickly. -Any- form of haste buff is going to have you stacking MW slightly more quickly. The quicker you stack MW, the more chances you have at this buff. Personally, I’d like to see the chance upped to between 25-30%, but overall I do lovelovelove the idea of this set bonus. It just seems fun.

(Note: Don’t believe all these numbers, again. I was using assumed static numbers to prove a point- if this thing procs when your trinkets have both fired and stuff, it means even more ap. 7k attack power was chosen because it seemed a reasonable number for t10 but mileage will vary. See store for details.)

(OH! I edited this and forgot to talk about Earth’s Grasp. It’s an awesome change for pvp- 9 seconds off stoneclaw shield, 4.5 seconds off earthbind totem. Being able to use a 3rd Stone claw shield per minute is just amazing, imho. )

However, on things like Onyxia whelp phase, we don’t just suck. We blow. We blow like cocaine. Iirc this week’s Onyxia, I was sitting at a merry 6300-6500 DPS during phase 1, somewhere within the top 5 spots. Phase 2 hit, and while I ran around dropping my magma totem and throwing out some chain lightnings, I watched our rogue FoK himself to 10kish, and our mages and locks unleashe their targeted aoe of doom to put up some pretty nice numbers. I kept myself at around 6kdps…but dropped from 4ish to last on recount.

And then, our of the darkness, mmo-champon and the worldofwarcraft.com official patch notes updated with this rainbows-and-happiness filled patch note: Fire Nova now Causes the shaman’s active Fire totem to emit a wave of flames, inflicting 893 to 997 Fire damage to enemies within 10 yards of the totem. And I saw it. And it was good.

So, here is the initial breakdown on Fire Nova:

It replaces Fire Nova as a spell. Your Fire Nova totem is extinct as of 3.3, and unlike the dinosaurs, this extinction is widely seen as a good idea. It deals similar damage to what Fire Nova Totem does now, and crits for double damage with Elemental Fury. At the moment, it does proc flame stacks for Reign of the Dead/Unliving, the BiS caster trinket. However it does not proc Elemental Devastation. It is emitted from your current fire totem, not from you.You can talent the totem to do 20% more damage and have a 6 second cooldown, and can glyph it down to 3. It costs 967 mana on the PTR right now.

As you can see, it comes out of the totem.

Now, to talk about this ability and how it impacts game play! I’m breaking this into three sections: AOE, Single Target, and PVP. First off:

A. WE CAN AOE. OMG.

This is demonstrated in these next two screenshots of an Onyxia 10 I did while writing this post:

DPS I did immediately following her first liftoff, during the two waves of whelps.

This is mislabeled as Postsarth. This is post-Ony- my first time ever seeing anything other than melee as my number one damaging ability.

My dps is pretty low, but that was mainly due to the tank turning Onyxia at the start of p3 and getting me cleaved. If I had been alive to use Fire Elemental, Ghost Wolves, and Bloodlust, I’d have ended the fight with 7k+ easily. For aoe, Fire nova was priority over everything. Magma totem was second, and moved up to first if the tank moved anywhere even close to out of range of the totem. After that, MW5Chain Lightning+regular priority system took over. I think it worked out fairly well.

One of the real pros of Fire nova for enhancement is that we’re already reliant on magma totem for single target/aoe damage, and we have to be in melee range of the mobs to do damage anyway. This means that we’re moving with the mobs anyway, and thus we don’t lose anymore dps than we already would. For Elemental, Fire Nova becomes more of an issue, as they do have to move and redrop totems to use Fire Nova and Thunderstorm. In my opinion, this is a good thing- Fire Nova Totem was an iconic shaman ability. TOTEMS are an iconic shaman ability. Fire Nova coming out of the totem is a good thing; mechanically, a targeted aoe of blandness would be better. However, not homogenizing our aoe into bland circle of doom and making it totem based was a good class design idea.

Beyond that, I like the fact that this totem makes shaman think. It’s not fire and forget. It makes the shaman go “Whelps AOE is pretty excellent- would it be better for my personal dps to move and throw down some aoe?” The answer is pretty definitely yes. (Besides, that lock using rain fire/mage with blizzard have 8 second channels anyway- your aoe takes 2 gcds to complete. You have 5 seconds of movement time to catch up. ) OR, it makes you think “I know rubble on Kolgaron is always tanked here, maybe I should drop my totems here as we run in, and then proceed to fire nova liberally whenever rubble is down for the rest of the fight.” All in all, a good change for both specs, imho.

This takes place on a more minor scale with Enhancement. Fire elemental totem is a huge dps increase for us, and should be used liberally. However, more than ever, we now will need to be cognizant of where we lay our Fire Elemental totem. I ran away from a fire wall and dropped him on the opposite side of Sartharion last night. While he moved and aoed adds+sarth, my fire nova ability was trapped to the totem on the wrong side of Sarth. It stayed consistent single target damage, but it didn’t help my aoe a bit.

B. Fire Nova-A boost to single target dps!?

Much like my good friend Magma Totem, Fire Nova (as far as I can tell) provides a boost to single target dps. To show this, here is a screenshot of a 10 minute long damage test done on a SWC Level 83 dummy, done during non-peak hours to make sure no debuffs were present on target. Failam is spellhit capped, 1892 spellpower, 24.33%spellcrit before totems/unleashed rage. I dropped magma rather than flametongue, because I’m really bad at ever remembering there was a time when I didn’t just drop magma totem. It’s also worth noting that I am/was specced into Improved Fire Nova, which makes Fire nova do 20% more damage and shortens the CD to six seconds.

As a comparison, here is my lava lash damage.

Fire Nova and Lava Lash are a good single target comparison, as they’re both abilities with a six second cooldown, and would both be prioritized after your MW5/ES_SS/SS/ES in your rotation for single target. As we can see from these screenshots, even though I actually did less Fire Novas (54) over the course of the fight, it actually did MORE damage than Lava Lash, which I cast more (56). Moreover, let’s look at the raw data:

Fire Nova hit for between 1800-2k. It crit for between 3800-4200, as it makes use of Elemental Fury. It uses my spellcrit chance, so it crit around 25% of the time. It added 4.6% to my damage- a hefty amount for an ability that is totally new and fits into GCD gaps nicely. And, it did 131,186 damage over 10 minutes. 131186/600seconds=219DPS. This is unbuffed, with no flametongue totem or anything. While it’s possible to model the changes in dps that adding another 10-15% crit, 13% spell damage, 280 Spellpower from tow, spellpower from might, etc, I’m not that good at math. However, I’m fairly comfortable saying that in a raid setting, we’ll see Fire Nova contributing 400-500 single target dps, provided full raid buffs/debuffs.

Lava Lash: Hits for between 900 and 1200. Crits for between 2200-2500. It crits much more than fire nova (37% according to my recount) because it takes from my melee crit rather than spell crit. Even though it is less damage, it can proc flametongue, a mw charge, and a static shock charge. It’s still a useful spell, but it does not frontload the damage that fire nova does. It contributed 3.6% of my damage over this fight, but I can’t guess at how it impacted my dps by proccing abilities. 88,367/600 is 147dps, which would also be ramped up by raid debuffs.

My own personal feelings are that we’ll be using a priority system of MW5LB, ES_SS, SS, ES, Fire Nova, Lava Lash, Refresh Totems/Shields. When Magma Totem drops off, the system would be MW5, ES_SS, SS, ES, Lava Lash, Refresh Totem, Fire Nova, Refresh Shield. At least, this is my personal opinion and conjecture. (I’m using one test as my example, but I have been using this rotation for the past 2 days and am finding it pretty awesome.) The sim will eventually tell the whole story, but these are how I feel for now.

C. The ugly: PVP nerf.

The new Improved Fire Nova is an excellent talent. 20% fire nova damage, 6 second cd, yes plz. (In fact, I think it’ll be mandatory and provide a greater dps increase than 3/3 imp. shields.) That said, the new talent takes the place of an old and beloved talent- a talent that allows your fire nova to stun anyone hit by it for 2 seconds. It is an elemental shaman’s only stun, and one of two for Enhancement: (The other is on a 3minute cooldown and requires you using your wolves to do, which is a drawback on it’s own.)

To be honest, I’m pretty baffled by this change. Fire Nova stun, to me, was perfectly balanced- due to the 4 second wait for it to go off, it require great execution and finesse to pull the stun off, and was rewarding when it happened. I’m fairly certain part of the removal of the stun has to do with the removal of the 4 second wait, but I do believe it is overkill. In my opinion, the best case scenario would be to lose the rather cruddy glyph of fire nova (which shortens the cooldown to 3seconds-your mana will be dead), and replace it with one that increases the cooldown by 14 seconds and allows fire nova to stun. 14 seconds is to make it 20  to compensate for the fact that it is now a clickable ability, rather than one we have to wait to go off and hope the opposing player is still there.

I’m never an advocate for insulting Blizzard. Personally, I feel I’m rather good at taking nerfs/buffs in stride, knowing that the main goal of the company is overall game balance, and I think sayings like “OMG BLIZZ HATES SHAMAN” or “Itz bcuz opclasses lyk rouges cant have counters” are stupid. All of this said, I am more baffled and a mite annoyed by this nerf than I have been at most nerfs in the past, mainly due to the fact that I don’t understand the rationale behind it at all. If that is ever posted, I might have to reconsider my opinion, but for the moment I’m pretty confused and let down.

However, despite ending on a downer, I have to say this: I love Fire Nova. Sososomuch. If Fire Nova were a guy, I’d elope to Vegas with it. Hopefully maybe get in the tabloids. That’d be rad.

And now, myself and Failam bid you ado. G’night!

To that end, I figured it’d be a pretty rad idea to put together an informal guild of Shaman on the PTR, so that we have a place to discuss new changes, flex our epeen aoe damage, and generally make fools of ourselves. It’s going to be named <Best Shaman on Server>, because I have a huge ego and I thought it’d be funny.

It is going to be informal, which means:

• -Posting Meters is cool, provided you have a reason for doing it. “Hey, look at this 7500 dps on Sarth is cool; I think it has something to do with Fire Nova” would be sort of what I’m looking for.
• -As far as I can tell, we have some pretty inane and pointless conversations on the shaman forums. I start a quarter of them. That’s fine too- we can’t talk Shaman 24/7…it’ll get boring.
• -Alts are cool. Because being able to play a destro lock at 80 with reign of the dead when you’ve not been able to convince yourself to level out of the Barrens is a fun time.
• -Bashing on Blizzard is not cool when taken in an extreme. “I don’t understand/hate that they removed Fire Nova Stun” is fine. “OMG FIRE NOVA STUN NERF IS PROOF THAT BLIZZARD HATES THIS CLASS” is stupid, and I will demote you to a rank of “not being able to talk in guild” for a length in time.
  -Open Door Policy. If your guild wants to make a concerted effort at Icecrown Citadel, definitely drop guild to do it with them. If your guild decides to stop due to lack of interest and you want to come back in, that’s perfectly fine too…provided you weren’t an annoying twat to begin with.
  -Any spec is fine. I focus on PVE Enhance myself, but PVP Enhance, PVE/PVP Elemental, PVE/PVP Restos are all cool.

If anyone is interested, I’ll be on my Premade Draenei (Yes, we’re doing it ally side) Shaman Failam, on Broxrigar- the PVE server. I’m working on getting charter signatures now, and hope to have it up and running within the next few days.

Hope to see/talk to you all in game form soon.