Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Extra Extra!




Yum....
Skills
  • Bloodlust and Heroism now puts a debuff on you preventing you from using gaining the benefits of them for 10 mins. They now have a 5 min cooldown. (Previously had a 5 min debuff with a 10 min cooldown)
Talents
  • Improved Stormstrike (Tier 8 ) now has a 50/100% chance to grant you 20% of your base mana when you Stormstrike.
  • Stormstrike (Tier 7) now affects the next 4 nature attacks but only lasts 10 secs now. (Previously only affected 2 attacks and lasted 12 secs)
  • Unleashed Rage (Tier 6) is now a 3 point talent. It now passively increases your agility by 1/2/3% in addition to causing your critical hits with melee attacks to increase all party and raid members' attack power by 4/7/10% if within 45 yards of the Shaman. Lasts 10 sec.
  • Spirit Weapons (Tier 5) now reduces all threat, just not melee threat.
  • Toughness (Tier 4) now increases stamina by 2/4/6/8/10% instead of increasing armor value.
  • *New Talent* Frozen Power, Tier 6, 2 point talent - Increases the damage done by your Frostbrand Weapon if it is enchanted on your main-hand weapon by 10/20%, and your Frost Shock has a 50/100% chance to root the target in Ice for 5 sec. when used on targets at or further than 15 yards from you.

Ok, the PTR is up.  I think I'm allowed to talk about it now.  I wanted to wait till it was live because I would hardly think that all of these changes would get through or even if this was the complete list.  But I can't contain myself anymore.  Let teh Pif out!  Rawr!

  • Bloodlust and Heroism now puts a debuff on you preventing you from using gaining the benefits of them for 10 mins. They now have a 5 min cooldown. (Previously had a 5 min debuff with a 10 min cooldown)

This is somewhat of a nerf, not to yourself but to the raid.  Sometimes, in encounters that last longer than 5 minutes and you had multiple shaman, you would be able to pop HEROISM! twice in a fight.  Now, with the debuff lasting 10 minutes that won't be the case anymore.  I'm not sure why they then just don't make the debuff and the cooldown exactly the same if they just want us to use it every 10 minutes.  Perhaps, the debuff goes away when you die?  I'm not really sure to be honest.

  • Improved Stormstrike (Tier 8 ) now has a 50/100% chance to grant you 20% of your base mana when you Stormstrike.
  • Stormstrike (Tier 7) now affects the next 4 nature attacks but only lasts 10 secs now. (Previously only affected 2 attacks and lasted 12 secs)

Stormstrike?  Why are they messing with Stormstrike?  Well, we can't complain because it's a pretty nice buff.

Currently, Stormstrike by itself gives a debuff for 12 seconds, gives you 2 charges of a debuff for increased nature damage on the target, and it's cooldown is 10 seconds.  

Currently, Improved Stormstrike with 2/2 points increases the charges of the nature debuff by 2 and also  reduces the cooldown of Stormstrike 2 seconds, down to 8 seconds.

Currently, with 4 charges and a refresh every 8 seconds, you could keep the debuff up on the boss 100% of the time even if you missed one GCD before refreshing your Stormstrike.

On the PTR, Stormstrike by itself gives a debuff only for 10 seconds, gives you 4 charges now, and it's cooldown is still 10 seconds.

On the PTR, Improved Stormstrike returns mana when you hit 50%/100% with 1 or 2 points in the talent, respectively. 

On the PTR, you will still be able to keep those 4 charges on the boss, but following the attack priority list is more important than ever as missing it every ten seconds could result in a significant loss of dps over a long period of time.  

This change moves away from many things I wrote about the importance of Intellect.  Yes, intellect is important for the same reasons I've stated before.  But it's less important.  If you are returning 20% of your base mana on every single stormstrike, you'll be getting a 879 mana return every 10 seconds (Shaman base mana at 80 is 4396.  Multiply by .2 to get 879).  That's a lot of mana.  

In my case though, I don't have mana problems.  Especially in 25 mans.  I know replenishment may be reworked in 3.0.1 and mana may present itself to be a problem later, but when I first read the talent, I was considering skipping it altogether.  When you're wearing higher levels of gear with lots of Intellect, you won't run into a lot of mana problems especially with proper use of Shamanistic Rage.  So I'm leaning towards skipping Improved Stormstrike altogether, keeping a closer eye on that Stormstrike cooldown, and grumbling about the stormstrike nerf I just got.

  • Unleashed Rage (Tier 6) is now a 3 point talent. It now passively increases your agility by 1/2/3% in addition to causing your critical hits with melee attacks to increase all party and raid members' attack power by 4/7/10% if within 45 yards of the Shaman. Lasts 10 sec.

Now this is the major buff.  I'm happy the shaman community got this through.  I remember writing a post on the damage forums about how 10 points that Enhancement shaman were using for PVE builds, were spent solely to buff up the raid and had no personal benefit for the Shaman him/herself.  It erupted into heated discussions of class balance, qq, shaman hate, and someone even talking about pink vs. blue cotton candy.

But anyway, we spend 2 less talent points in Unleashed Rage now, get the same exact raid buff, and we get a 3% agility buff too.  I might have to revisit what I said about stacking AP over Agi and Int.  Agi is definitely now preferred over Int, but I'll have to calculate AP vs. Agi gems/enchants.

  • Spirit Weapons (Tier 5) now reduces all threat, just not melee threat.
This is a major major buff.  I shouldn't even call it a buff.  To me, it's a bug fix.  There are fights, Patchwerk immediately comes to mind and the first part of Thaddius too, where you do not in any way want to be anywhere close to the top in threat.  The problem before was that spells were not affected by this spell.  So my earth shocks and lightning bolts would rocket me in the threat meters, so I would spend seconds at a time, windshocking and sitting on MW5 waiting for the tanks to pick up threat so I could resume my priority list, at which point I'd have to stop and just lay out white damage again.  It was a major pain.  We'll have to see on the PTR just how much this really helps, but, as long as it's not bugged, even a little bit will help a lot.

  • Toughness (Tier 4) now increases stamina by 2/4/6/8/10% instead of increasing armor value.
  • *New Talent* Frozen Power, Tier 6, 2 point talent - Increases the damage done by your Frostbrand Weapon if it is enchanted on your main-hand weapon by 10/20%, and your Frost Shock has a 50/100% chance to root the target in Ice for 5 sec. when used on targets at or further than 15 yards from you.

PVP buffs.  Plain and simple.  The change to toughness is a really hefty bonus in stamina which helps for any melee class in PVP.  You're being expected to run in and smash things and many PVPers understand that an unchecked enhancement shaman will wreak havoc with massive burst.  

The second talent is interesting but also somewhat odd.  Don't get me wrong I can't wait for it to come live and try it out in some BG's.  Frost shock can now root the person ahead of you that's either running away or coming right at you from a distance.  This may allow you to then open up with hex or just outright burst the bugger down while setting up a totem or two.  It will be infinitely useful in PVP.  The thing that confuses me is they're expecting Frost shock to be on the mainhand.  Well, that's where windfury is supposed to be.  Windfury is a huge source of our burst damage which is so important for PVP.  I expect people will complain about this and it will get changed.  If not, and it goes live, I expect people to run with Frostbrand weapon, root, then switch to windfury, and so on and so forth, like a hunter changing his aspects.  I know the talent also increases Frostbrand damage, but it's still not as bursty as a double windfury proc.  

In PVE, we'll have to see how useful it is.  I know that I'm definitely going to ask my raid leader if I can kite the adds on Grobbulus with this talent, and we'll have to see what uses it will have in Ulduar.

So a buff to Unleashed Rage and Spirit Weapons.  A change to Stormstrike that I don't think was necessary and would like for it to change back to what it was.  Some PVP buffs, and no major nerfs.  Can't say it's a bad patch at all.

We'll take a look at the Glyph changes next.

NOTE:  Thanks to Phoenixboy to pointing out some glaring issues I had missed with Stormstrike.  I ain't too proud to admit when I done wrong.

10 comments:

  1. The previous effect of Improved Stormstrike was rolled in the original Stormstrike. Just pointing it.

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  2. Love the blog, keep it up. I'm posting in regard to the Stormstrike change. Being a freshly minted 80, I'm not as geared up as your epic self, but I'm working on it. My primary gripe at the moment is basically running with Water Shield up to help maintain my mana and reduce downtime. I've been doing this since I got Water Shield (prior to the addition of the lower ranks in a previous patch), and find I don't use Shamanistic Rage hardly at all any more.

    The stormstrike change is significant to me because I think it will let me run with Lightning Shield up instead of Water Shield, as the mana return from Stormstrike (and really, it's more like 879.00 - 329 (cost of SS) = 550 Mana per 10 seconds, or 110 MP5). I've invested the talents into Improved Shields and Static Shock, so I'm kind of pumped that I'll be getting more mileage out of them now. Yeah, it'll be a pain to keep SS up 100% of the time in heroics/raids, but I'm a hopeless keymasher, and I'm often sitting there spamming my SS key anyway just to get that hit in as soon as the CD is up.

    Overall I'm excited about the change. I'm curious what you think of the new glyphs (Feral Spirit in particular - 30% more AP has to be good, right?). Keep up the good work.

    @phoenixboy:
    So does Stormstrike have a baseline CD of 8 seconds now?

    Shatterhoof

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  3. Wow my math is bad. I should have said 55 mana/sec, which is 257 mp5. I believe that beats the passive regen on Water Shield by a good margin?

    Shatterhoof

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  4. In 3.1 yes, and also have 2 more charges. I think that people will spec the new Improved Stormstrike until they dont have mana issues (i.e having epix) and then spec out of it.

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  5. So, at 8s CD, the math becomes:

    550 mana / 8 sec CD x 5 sec = 343.75 MP5 (!!!)

    That's pretty ridiculous. When I get a chance I'm going to try to do an output/input check on our best-case DPS cycle to see how long it's sustainable.

    Shatterhoof

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  6. I have not seen any notes or anything about the stormstrike CD being reduced to 8 seconds. Can ya let me know where you heard that? Then I can update the post.

    Thanks for the feedback.

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  7. http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/test-realm-patchnotes.html

    "Stormstrike charges have been increased by 2, and cooldown reduced by 2 sec."

    There.

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  8. Almost forgot, i like the blog, keep doing the goos job (And i recomend reading WoW Insider).

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  9. np always glad to help

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  10. Hi just want to let all of you know that debuff from Bloodlust and Heroism does go away if you die :) , it means if you have more then one shaman in the team , you the shaman may die and use another heroism which only benefit you and give you an impressive DPS, isn't that what the shaman's self resurrection is for ?

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