Witch Doctor

An unfortunate side-effect of being strapped down in bed with a very bad flu, besides of course an unhygienic amount of snot and sneezing, is that one tends to miss out on stuff. Well, I got one such Very Bad Flu last weekend, and, as I would find out - I missed quite a scoop.

I’m still going to write about it, but blogging about news that is a couple of days old is the internet equivalent of wishing your colleagues a Happy New Year in the middle of June; some people might appreciate the gesture but most will probably just look at you funny.

You may now proceed to look at me funny.

So. What is the news? The news is that the new shaman talents and abilities have leaked out from the WotLK Alpha. And yeah, that’s pretty big. It’s quite a list, too, so grab yourself something to drink.

Also - disclaimer alert! - remember that all of the information that has leaked out so far is still speculative and very much subject to change; Blizzard don’t call it Alpha for nothing.

Hex

What is it?
Transforms the enemy into a random critter, reducing the target’s movement speed by 75%. While moving, the hexed target cannot attack or cast spells. Only one target can be hexed at a time. Only works on Humanoids and Beasts.

How awesome is it?
Oh, wow. Imagine a scale from one to five. Then extrapolate that scale by about twenty billion. Well, now you’re pretty close.

This is, quite seriously, the one and only skill that I have really wanted to have for my shammy, for as long as I’ve been playing the game. I could already use Chain Heal and Searing Totem, just like my favourite WC3 hero class, the Shadow Hunter, but unlike him I was never able to turn my enemies into random critters.

Heck, I’ve wanted Hex so bad I called my guild after it. True story.

Welcome to my spellbook, Hex. Make yourself at home.

Okay, seriously now. Hex appers to be listed in the elemental tab of the shaman spellbook, however, it’s not an elemental talent. This probably means it will be available to all shamans, regardless of spec. The icon unfortunately does not look like the WC3 frog in headlights, but rather like a red totem icon.

At first glance, it appears to be better than polymorph because it doesn’t increase the target’s health and mana regeneration. On the other hand, it appears to be worse than polymorph because it comes with a one minute cooldown. Also, the duration of the spell is still unknown.

It’s a bit early to tell, but I would almost start thinking that Blizzard is no longer wary of giving CC abilities to the healers. Yes, priests have been able to Shackle Undead since the dawn of time, but they were the only healing class that could do that - the unreliable Hibernate and outdoors-only Entangling Roots abilities of the druid can’t compare to that, nor can the six-second paladin stun. And let’s not even talk about shamans.

In the new expansion, however, shamans are getting Hex, and druids will be able to use Entangling Roots indoors as well. Now let’s just wait and see what the new paladin abilities are (they’re still unknown at this moment).

Lava Burst

What is it?
You hurl molten lava at the target, dealing 888 to 1132 Fire damage. If Flame Shock is on the target, Lava Burst will consume the Flame Shock, causing Lava Burst to critically hit.

How awesome is it?
Hm, this is one ability that I didn’t know we needed. And hurling molten lava - well, it just sounds kind of silly to be honest. I suppose it will breathe some life into the spell rotations of the elemental shaman though; getting a perfect timing on a Lava Burst before the Flame Shock runs out sounds just a little bit more interesting than Lightning Bolt, Lightning Bolt, Lightning Bolt, oh yeah, Flame Shock, repeat.

Lava Flow

What is it?
Increases the amount of spell damage gained while having Flametongue Weapon equipped by 5/10/15%, and increases the damage done by your Flame Shock and Lava Burst by 4/8/12%.

How awesome is it?
Can we say - finally a good weapon imbue for the elemental shaman? I think we can.

Astral Shift

What is it?
When you are critically hit twice in a row, you have a 33/66/100% chance to shift into the Astral Plane, causing you to be immune to all physical damage for 3 sec. This effect has a 30 second cooldown.

How awesome is it?
In PvE? Not very awesome at all. In PvP? Pretty good I think, depending on how starved you are for resilience. It’s too bad it only makes you immune to physical damage, but again, this corresponds with the Spirit Walker ability Ethereal Form.

Storm, Earth, and Fire

What is it?
Your Frost Shock has a 5/10/15/20/25% chance to root the target in frozen ice for 2 sec., your Earth Shock’s range is increased by 1/2/3/4/5 yards and the periodic damage done by your Flame Shock is increased by 20/40/60/80/100%.

How awesome it is?
*booming voice* Storm! Earth! Fire! Heed my calls!

Ahem - yes, yet another WC3 reference, namely the exact quote from the shaman units upon creation. This is another distinct PvP talent, one that will probably leave other classes crying about how imba shamans and their shocks are.

Summon Air Elemental

What is it?
Summons an Air Elemental to accompany the caster until dismissed.

How awesome is it?
Hard to say! What is it? What does it do? I’m eagerly awaiting more information about this one.

Skin of Earth

What is it?
Thorns sprout from the friendly target causing $s1 Nature damage to attackers when hit. Lasts $d.

How awesome is it?
Huh? Thorns? Are we turning into semi-druids here?

Elemental Oath

What is it?
Increases your chance to hit with all spells by $s1% while Elemental Mastery or Elemental Focus is active.

How awesome is it?
Sounds pretty good. Let’s wait to see how much $s1% is.

Thunder

What is it?
You call down a bolt of lighting, energizing you and damaging nearby enemies within 10 yards. Restores 5% mana to you and deals 595 to 679 nature damage to all nearby enemies, knocking them back 200 yards.

How awesome is it?
If “200 yards” is not a typo I expect it to be nerfed very soon. And if it isn’t, then I know I’m going to spec Elemental and defend the Lumber Mill in Arathi Basin: “Here comes the Alliance!” “Thunder!” “Ooh, look at them fly!” Heehee.

As you probably expected, this is the 51-point elemental talent. If you have more than 10k mana this spell will actually return more mana than it costs. And all of that at a cooldown of only 45 seconds. Crazy.

Improved Shamanistic Rage

What is it?
While under the effect of Shamanistic Rage, you have a 50/100% chance also cause you to be immune to all stun, snare and movement impairing effects.

How awesome is it?
Awesome for arenas. A little less so for your everyday PvE purposes.

Static Shock

What is it?
You have a 2/4/6% chance to hit your target with a Lightning Shield Orb charge when you do damage, and increases your spell damage by $s2% when you have Lightning Shield active. (Lower 2 ranks ” and increases your the number of charges of your Lightning Shield by 1.”)

How awesome is it?
This talent will hopefully make Lightning Shield a viable option for enhancement shammies again - which up to now has been pretty useless in PvE. Will it be worth the three points in enhancement talents? We’ll just have to wait and see about that.

Mental Dexterity

What is it?
Increases attack power by 33%/66%/100% of Intellect.

How awesome is it?
Well - how much intellect does an enhancement shaman have? This doesn’t sound like a huge boost to me.

Improved Stormstrike

What is it?
Increases the amount of Stormstrike charges by 1, and reduces the cooldown by 1 seconds.

How awesome is it?
The increase in charges is probably really good if you like to raid with a boomkin, or perhaps a hunter with a windserpent. I don’t have either, and I usually don’t even get to use up the two charges I get from the unimproved Stormstrike, so that’s a change I don’t care much about. The reduced cooldown is a welcome change though.

Weapon Specialization

What is it?
Axe - Increases the critical strike damage bonus by $s1%.
Mace - Has a $s2% chance to increase your melee haste by 10% for 15 sec.
Fist - Attacks from your fist weapons have a $s3% chance to reduce the armor of your target by 20% for 6 sec.

How awesome is it?
About as awesome as being three rogues at once? Okay, that’s slightly exaggarated - at least until we know the exact values for $1, $2 and $3 - but it’s nice to have an enhancement shaman’s weapon choice go a bit beyond Orc = Axe. I think I will enjoy mixing and matching my weapons on my enhancement off-days.

Feral Spirit

What is it?
Summons 2 Spirit Wolves under the command of the Shaman, lasting 30 sec.

How awesome is it?
Pretty cool. This is the new top-tier enhancement ability, and another one that is inspired by WC3; the Far Seer (read: Thrall) could summon two wolves to scout an area or to help in battle.

Despite the wording “under the command of the Shaman”, it seems unlikely that you have direct control over the wolves, seeing as they disappear after only 30 seconds and that having two pet bars at once seems inconvenient at best. This leaves the question how they do work - will they run around at random, or will they target whatever you are targetting? How about (not) attacking CC’ed mobs?

Earthliving Weapon

What is it?
Imbue the Shaman’s weapon with earthen life. Increases healing done by $51940$s2 and each heal has a 20% chance to proc Earthliving on the target, healing an additional 180 over 6 seconds. Lasts 30 minutes. (Scales with spellpower)

How awesome is it?
Finally a good weapon imbue for the healing shaman! Earthliving still isn’t a proper Heal over Time, with it being a proc rather than a spell you have direct control over, but I’m not complaining. I wonder how much $51940$s2 will turn out to be.

Tidal Wave

What is it?
Increases the critical effect chance of your Lesser Healing Wave and Healing Wave spells by 1/2/3/4/5%, and your Healing Wave and Lesser Healing Wave spells gain an additional 5/10/15/20/25% of your bonus healing effects.

How awesome is it?
I had to doublecheck to make sure, but yes - Tidal Mastery still exists in the new talent tree, unchanged even. I think I’m going to see a lot of big numbers from my Healing Waves! This talent sounds like a must-have for any resto shaman, except maybe the most hardcore 25-man raiding types who do nothing but spam Chain Heal - but even then, this talent sounds too good to miss out on.

Improved Earth Shield

What is it?
Increases the amount of charges for your Earth Shield by 1/2, and increasing the healing done by your Earth Shield by 5/10%.

How awesome is it?
Well, that sounds pretty nice. The interesting part here is that the regular (unimproved) Earth Shield seems to have its ten charges back (?), so with Improved Earth Shield you’d have twice as many charges as you have now. And if every charge heals 10% as much, you will see a 120% Earth Shield healing increase - that’s nothing to sneeze at.

Ancestral Awakening

What is it?
When you critically heal with your Healing Wave or Lesser Healing Wave, you summon an Ancestral spirit to aid you, instantly healing the lowest health friendly target within 40 yards for 20%/40%/60% of the amount healed.

How awesome is it?
Imagine having a permanent Woeful Healer at your side, except much cooler, and appearing much more often. That’s pretty awesome I’d say.

Sidenote: does Blizzard think resto shamans are somewhat mentally challenged? First Brain Chain heal, and now this. (I’m not complaining, mind you, it just amuses me!)

Cleanse spirit

What is it?
Cleanse the spirit of a friendly target, removing 1 poison effect, 1 disease effect and 1 curse effect.

How awesome is it?
Mages rejoice! Shamans can now dispell curses. Now please give us a cleanse-everything totem.

Blessing of the Eternals

What is it?
Increases the critical effect chance of your spells by 2%/4%, and increases the bonus healing from your Earthliving weapon by 5%/10%.

How awesome is it?
Oh wow, even more crit. And the new weapon imbue gets even better. Unskippable.

Spirit Link

What is it?
You link the friendly target with two nearby targets, causing 50% of the damage taken to be distributed to the linked targets. After 2200 damage, the link will sever.

How awesome is it?
Oh ho ho ho rogues are going to hate this one. Whether that’s a good thing or not depends on how you value your local rogues!

Okay, seriously now. This is the 51-point restoration talent that also finds its roots in WC3.

While it certainly has potential in theory I wonder how it will work out in practice. You will probably want to chaincast this on your tank in a fight with a lot of spike damage, which will work out great if there’s multiple tanks involved that are all linked through the Spirit Link. On the other hand, it seems a lot less useful in a single-tank fight, and as I already pointed out, it might result in some unneccessary stress on the melee DPS. I’m personally a bit underwhelmed by this talent, but who knows, maybe I’m looking at it from a completely wrong angle.

I do think it will make for an awesome PvP talent though.

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Changed talents

Some talents have also been changed and/or moved around a bit. I’m going to keep this part short and sweet.

Changes to the elemental tree

Earth’s Grasp moved to the first tier.
Convection has had its points reduced from five to three, while increasing the maximum effect from 10% to 12%.
Elemental devestation moved to the second tier.
Elemental focus is now required for Elemental fury.
Lightning overload is no longer required for Totem of Wrath.

Changes to the enhancement tree

Enhancing Totems moved to the first tier.
Improved Lightning Shield renamed to Elemental Shields, moved to the first tier, and now also affects Water Shield and Earth Shield.
Ancestral knowledge has had its points reduced from five to three, and no longer increases your mana pool, but instead increases your intellect by 2%/4%/6%.
Shield specialization has had its points reduced from five to two, and the maximum block chance reduced from 5% to 4%, and the maximum amount of damage blocked reduced from 25% to 20%.

Changes to the restoration tree

Healing Focus has had its points reduces from five to three.
Nature’s Blessing is no longer required for Earth Shield.

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Some final words

Whew. It certainly is a lot of information to take in. It seems that Blizzard is reaching out to the shaman community by giving us CC and stun/snare/root resist, as well as improving the elemental shields and weapon imbues. But as excited as I am about all these changes, it’s still a bit early for me to see the bigger picture. One thing I do notice is that, the Air Elemental Totem aside, there are no changes whatsoever to the totem system. Not even an increase of the totem radius; something I was secretly hoping for. But well, who knows what is yet to come?

Anyway, what better way to conclude this overview than with my ideal PvE resto build in the expansion? It’s a bit premature of course, but I would say that this build looks pretty good to me. What do you think?