Where to begin, where to begin. Well let me start by saying enhancement shamans still have their ghost puppies (yay!). But stuff is changing quite a bit with this patch; some good changes as well as some bad changes so lets get to Bloodlusting.
Talents (or lack thereof)
Probably one of the biggest changes that we will be seeing is the 51 point talent trees getting a much needed pruning and are now 31 point talent trees as the result of Blizzard not wanting to deal with 101 point talent trees in the later expansions. Whatever the true reasoning behind the change, most likely to simplify balancing issues, it helps boil it down to picking talents that seem more like choosing how we want to play vs. “I must have x talent or I’ll be called a noob” (still true with ancestral swiftness). Also talent trees are locked in to one tree until you put 31 points into it before branching out into the other trees. I understand they present it as a way to help us focus on our main spec, but it also helps them prevent really crazy builds that take advantage of combinations of talents which would make us slightly more in line with our OP brethren.
Now you may have noticed something shiny and new in the elemental tree *cough* earthquake *cough*. But I think it’s going to be even more awesome (in some ways) to continue being enhancement. Probably the one thing that sticks out at me as fresh is the new mechanic for searing totem when talented. We are now getting a debuff on the target which will stack to 5 and increases our fire damage from our lava lash by 20% per stack in addition to the extra fire damage dot it applies. This means bigger and harder hits from our fiery offhand attack which is never a bad thing. With the increased CD on lava lash it times out to be ready a little sooner than a 5 stack actually hits so it may be just as good to use LL whenever it’s ready. I’m sure myself and a million or so other enhancers will be testing this and many other things out to try and re-maximize our dps. But overall this mean that we can forget about magma totem unless we are dealing with trash aoe.
A couple other changes to note: Static shock is only triggered by Primal Strike, Stormstrike and Lava Lash now, but the proc chance has been increased to compensate, and Shamanistic rage no longer regens mana but instead allows us to consume no mana while active. And we lose 1 expertise from our unleashed rage talent but this shouldn’t affect us by too much. If you are absolutely concerned about it you can always reforge some armor to compensate.
Glyphs
Glyphs got a nice overhaul in both the functionality of the glyphs as well as how we will be using them. Glyphs now have 3 levels of functionality: Prime, Major, and Minor.
Prime glyphs are the ones that will make direct changes in our DPS, kind of like throwing gasoline on a fire makes it bigger. With the changes to Searing Totem and Lava Lash, Glyph of Lava Lash will be one of our top 2 prime glyphs. The other main one at this point is our Ghost Puppies glyph. As far as the 3rd one goes, right now I’m using windfury vs. the other contender stormstrike, but with the way mastery can play into modifying spell damage, I might try out stormstrike for a while and see how it plays.
As for Major glyphs, these are more of a functionality change to our spells, rather than a straight dps increase. Back to the fire example, it would be like not having to add fuel to the fire as often. I picked up the glyph of Hex for reduced CD, glyph of Lightning shield which allows me to only need to refresh after it expires since it doesn’t go below 3 charges anymore, and shamanistic rage which also gets rid of magic debuffs when used. There is a lot of flexibility with major glyphs so don’t be afraid to pick them all up and play around with them. I’ve been thinking about swapping out for the fire nova one for trash and stoneclaw for pvp.
As far as minor ones go I had to pick up the arctic wolf considering how much more time I would be spending in ghost wolf form. I also grabbed glyph of renewed life which has a bit of a history with me and water walking, because we all know Jesus was a shaman and fishing from sitting on top of a lake helps me get those prime fishing locations. I dropped my astral recall glyph but now that i think about it if I know I’ll be hearthing back with frequency and don’t need to walk on water I can always do a quick switch with some dust of disappearance and be ready to go. I do wonder though if I'm 8 min through my 15 min CD on astral recall and I switch it out if the remaining CD time will hit zero. /add to checklist of things to try.
Level 80 retune
This is going to be somewhat tedious, but kind of fun. With epic gems getting an overhaul, current gear dropping and reassigning stats, talent changes, we are going to have to check and make sure we are still hit and expertise capped, after all we can’t get those big hits if we aren’t hitting.
Off the top of my head I know we need 26 expertise and some amount of hit that puts us above 17% for spell hit. Oh yeah that 3% buff you were counting on from the boomkin or shadow priest went bye bye so 17% if you have been relying on that before. I was well over that, and at one point was sitting around 22.5% hit or about 1.5% from the hard cap due to the way upgrades were happening for me. See if we had the reforging at that point I could have dropped that hit into haste or even better mastery stat.
Basically from what I have been reading at this point is it is best to reforge into hit and expertise from haste and crit since we can only do so with secondary stats and not our new prime stat of Agility. Once we do this, then we can gem out for agility and be ready to rock. Agility at this point gives us about 2 AP which in turn gives us SP so agility is a better option than haste. Haste will most likely be more important come cataclysm raids, but for now I’ll have to *sigh* regem all those lovely haste gems. I’ll be doing this slowly I think just so I can run some testing and see if it really is better with my play style.
But what intrigues me the most is the mastery stat since we can go ahead and reforge into it even though the first gear with the mastery stat on it doesn’t come until level 81. Mastery for us enhancers translates to more spell damage. Basically you get 20% more fire, frost and nature damage at the baseline when you train it and then another 2.5% for every point in Mastery.
Live Impressions
So I’ve had some initial time to spend with things on live for reconfiguring my character and so far I’m liking the freshness, but still not sure if my dps is up, down, or about the same. I can tell you that I’ve been hitting 20k Lava Lashes. You heard right, 20K! Looking at my recount Lava lash has gone from someplace down the list at 6th or 7th to usually 2nd on damage done during a fight. Some of that might be because of some reforging I did, as well as searing totem and lava lash synergy. When I logged on and set up my talents I found myself still over the hit and expertise caps so I didn’t need to reforge into either of those. Although I might do some retuning to drop some of those expertise gems and replace them with agility.
But what I did end up doing was reforging a lot of crit rating into mastery rating. I dropped about 4% crit but increased my mastery to get an additional 15% bonus to spell damage bringing the total to 35%. That’s not a bad trade off considering I still crit about 60% of the time on melee attacks. I did also replace my Agi + Haste gems with straight agility. I ran a couple dungeons last night and it seems like I’m in the same ballpark on bosses, but until I get into the raiding scene and get all my buffs, I won’t have a solid idea on how I’m faring vs. before the patch.
That’s all I have for now, but I’m sure I’ll be getting more in depth about what all is going on once I have played around a bit more and get used to my new priorities.
Just remember, even after 4.0.1 dropped, they still want us shammies for our Bloodlust. Until Cataclysm, when some other class is getting it.
