Reincarnation of an Enhancement Shaman

I must say, it feels good to be enhancement once again. Great in fact. I had forgotten just how much I was truly missing my ghost puppies keeping me company. It's been long enough that I had forgotten the CD timers on a lot of the cool spells like Spirit Wolves, Shamanistic Rage, and the like. I couldn't remember just how much was due to patches that had come out while I was elemental.

Speaking of patch notes, I'll go ahead and talk about some of the most recent changes and what that means for my newly revived enjoyment of my shaman.

Earth Elemental Totem: The cooldown for this totem has been reduced from 20 minutes to 10 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.

Fire Elemental Totem: The cooldown for this totem has been reduced from 20 minutes to 10 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.

Fire Nova Totem: This totem has been replaced with a new spell, Fire Nova, which is available at the same ranks as the old Fire Nova Totem. Existing characters will automatically learn this new spell in place of the totem. With a Fire Totem active, shamans will be able to use Fire Nova (fire magic) to emit the same area-of-effect damage as the old Fire Nova Totem from the active Fire Totem, not consuming the totem in the process. Fire Nova will activate a 1.5-second global cooldown when used and has a 10-second spell cooldown. The caster must be within 30 yards of the totem to use this ability, but does not need to be within line of sight of the totem.

Reincarnation: The cooldown on this spell has been lowered from 60 minutes down to 30 minutes.

Talents

Elemental Combat

• Elemental Mastery: This talent now increases spell haste by 15% instead of critical strike chance while active.
• Improved Fire Nova Totem: Renamed Improved Fire Nova. This talent now provides an additional 10/20% damage to the spell and reduces the cooldown by 2/4 seconds.

Enhancement

• Earth's Grasp: This talent now also reduces the cooldown of the Stoneclaw and Earthbind totems by 15/30%.

Restoration

• Improved Reincarnation: This talent now reduces the cooldown of Reincarnation by 7/15 minutes, down from 10/20 minutes. Reincarnation cannot be used in Arenas.

Plenty of good stuff to talk about here. The majority of the changes are CD reductions on a variety of spells, and lets face it: the shorter the wait on the Fire Elemental the better. Since we didn't even get a new rank on either of our elemental totem spells grinding from 70-80, the least that they can give us is the ability to use it more often.

But something that is a really nice change is Fire Nova Totem is now just a castable spell which will work as long as you have a fire totem down. What's that? You want some AOE damage? I got your AOE damage right here. Magma Totem + Fire Nova = dead pack of mobs. I am loving this change and for once I can play with the big dogs of dps on trash pulls. Sure the really good ones should still out dps me, but watching the damage number fly up my screen always make me a happy dpser. The lure of this new spell was part of what encouraged me to respec to Enhancement. That and a couple new axes that dropped when no one else needed them.

I'm almost tempted to re-talent just a bit to get the extra fire nova damage and CD and throw in the FN glyph to boot to get a nice every 3 sec damage boost. The only downside is how much mana it uses. But this would only be really helpful during most trash pulls, and considering that the bosses are where my dps needs to count the most, I'd rather jsut stick with what I've got. Not to mention on any boss where there is movement (i.e. everything except maybe Deconstructor) recasting a fire totem to be near the boss in order to hit it with fire nova is a waste of resources.

What makes me the happiest about it all is I can manage to break 5k and occasionally 6k on bosses which just seemed impossible to me before. I remember barely even touching 3k at times so long ago when I switched to Elemental.

I think it was my time away that helped me the most however. After coming back to a spec that I hadn't touched for so long I had to relearn a little about what was important, what spells to use in combination, etc. It kinda of gave me a clean slate or fresh reboot on my thinking. You get so used to doing something one way that is successful and forget that things are always changing with patches, new gear, new stats, atmospheric pressure, network lag, addons, and genetically modified mice, all of which could play a role in doing even better.

Overall it feels like I had to let a little part of my enhancemnt self die before I could bring it back to life with a little help from my reduced CD Reincarnation. Some of you may think "You just weren't working hard enough on your class to begin with" or "Any good dps knows that they have to run sims and theorycraft for hours to get good dps" or "Shaman deeps is stoopid nOOb!!!1!11 lol lawls". Well I'm here to tell you that you are wrong, and I'm back and ready for action.