3.1 on the Horizon

Annoying Riptide icon says goodbye. Resto shamans celebrate.

Yes indeed, patch notes are on mmo champion, 3.1 is ready for PTR download. Do read the patch notes, interesting stuff there, not so much for shamans though. And yes my first reaction to the official patchnotes was:

WTF I rolled a resto shaman and all I get are two new lousy icons?

But let’s calm down my fellow shamans and look at the changes we will or might see:

• Bloodlust: The Cooldown is reduced to 5 min but sated debuff will now last for 10 minutes. This means we won’t be able to pop two bloodlusts in one 5-10 minutes encounter, but every shaman who’s the only one of his class in a raid has bloodlust faster at his disposal again. Blizzard seems to design fights around 1 bloodlust and not more. For 25 man raiding this is a little nerf. Oh yes, and alliance still calls bloodlust heroism. That is so not Rawwwraabgrbbl!
• Poison and Disease totems merged: welcome change, frees up one slot in totemtimers, but I did have no problem with choosing the necessary totem. I guess the biggest impact will be on pvp when facing rogues and a disease spreading class.
• Ancestral awakening: Yes this seem like a little buff and might lift up AA in its usefulness. It will still heal imps and other pets but a little bit more. I guess I’ll revisit this talent when it is clearer how good at single target healing we are and how chainheal hungry ulduar encounters will be.
• Glyphs: Glyph of Riptide and Glyph of Earth shield added. Riptide seem rather weak (duration + 3 seconds), Earth shield glyph could be an option (+20% healed).
• Cleanse spirit: has a new icon!
• Riptide: new icon as well! Feeling the blizzard love yet?

Not feeling the love yet? Ok, me neither. So let’s look at the big picture:

This is a resto shaman blog. I’m always happy if I can point out things that blizzard does right or even handles fantastic. And as long as I’m playing the game it seems as if I still like it. But with every patch, every class and even every subspecc feels as if they’re really missing out compared to others and I’m no exception in that way. So excuse my not so optimistic post and let me assure you, that resto shamans won’t implode after 3.1.

Nonetheless: WotLK brought many changes for resto shamans, riptide is there, Tidal Waves is there, glyphed Lesser healing wave is there. Those were many changes and I like all of them, I would just have loved to bring more spells in line with chainheal, because lets be honest: there are still too many fights where chainheal is just too good to neglect, its great scaling with spellpower doesn’t help other spells either. Single target healing is ok but too happy I’m not with it. Both spells are rather mana hungry, one is dependent on earth shield to really shine (LHW) and the other is just so huge and doesn’t fit every situation (HW). Last time we went Naxx25 with our alts we had a really decent geared resto shaman and a holy priest on Sapphiron tank and the resto shaman really struggled on single target healing duty, compared to the priest. And there is still the mana regenaration situation I recently talked about: Yes we are fine in terms of “we can heal it without running oom all the time” but less fine in terms of “it is fun as well”. Stacking mp5 is not fun and mp5 has no synergy with any of our talents. Refreshing watershields is not fun and eats global cooldowns. And compared to mana regen mechanics of priests (both holy and priest), druids and paladins I’m a little bit sad with how few ideas blizzard has come up to make mana regen fun and interesting for resto shamans.

To sum it up: Chainheal still too good. LHW and HW still a little bit clumsy and talent/glyph dependent to be acceptable. Mana regen is still mainly a gear and watershield issue without fun regen mechanis in our talent tree.

Of course this is not the end of the world. Shamans are fun as they are, especially if you like the hybrid idea, so I will win with 3.1 anyways just due to the fact of dual specs being available. But every content patch not only means new raiding content, but many players expect some tweaking of their class. Blizzard has always communicated that not every content catch will include big patches for every class and I guess that especially counts for a X.1 patch. But everyone likes their talents changed a little bit or moved around a tiny bit. It just gives a feeling of having blizzard attentions and knowing that your specc is being worked on. And if I’m glancing over to priest changes I’m a bit disappointed, those guys really got a nice turn of adjusting, it is not all for the good, but those guys know that somethings going on and their class is a target of guys how think and might even have a plan for priests on a bigger scale.

I interpret blizzards thinking like that: “shamans are the first class to run out of mana, so they must be ok, lets tune down the other classes on their level”. I’m ok with that, that is a good plan, but that still doesn’t mean mana regen of shamans is fine, fun or couldn’t get a little tweaking. Healing output of shamans is fine as well, if you look at numbers. But the 25 man raiding reality is very chainheal heavy. All shiny tools like Tidal waves, Ancestral Awakening do really shine in 10 man content, in 25 man raiding not so much. And I think it is sad if 25 man raiding is easier and much more monotonous than 10 man raids, when 25 man raids should be heroic.

The last thing I feel worth mentioning is changes to Prayer of Healing and Holy Nova of our priestly friends. Both spells get buffs, especially Prayer of Healing, which is now targetable and heals the party of the target. Prayer of healing is a really good spell with excellent HPS. A little bit slow yes, but so is chainheal. My problem with Prayer of Healing and to a lesser extent Holy Nova is: Both are group based. So it makes sense again to put everyone who’s going to stand close to one another in the same group. Something blizzard said they didn’t want and something that did lead us to all the complaining and whining about CoH and the CoH cooldown.

But enough with those priests. Please blizzard, take a look at resto shamans (and every other class that didn’t get much attention in 3.1) and give us some tweaks, that’s what content patches are made for, if not now then comes 3.2. If shamans run out of mana as you like it and perform well in their healing output, that doesn’t mean we are absolutely fine. Gives us some attention, do a little bit of tuning, move some stuff around, reduce talent points needed (Restorative Totems!), add little extras to talents that are already there and show some shaman love.

And for gods sake stop changing our spell icons!