Ailis in Hunterland

I know, lame.

Anyway, time to address these here patch notes….after I get coffee…

Sigh, had to make more coffee.  While that’s percolating, let’s get swiming through the notes, shall we?

General Changes

• Bloodlust/Heroism: Cooldown reduced to 5 minutes, but Sated and Exhausted now last 10 minutes.  - Well that’s just to take away bringing two shamans to each pop heroism during a boss fight.  However, this may present an issue when doing timer runs – such as the Arachnaphobia achievement – as you’ll have to do without Bloodlust/Heroism for at least one of the bosses.
• Flametongue Weapon: Bonus damage from spell power now based on weapon speed. Slower weapons will benefit more from spell power. – Interesting.  Before this change, Enhancement shammies always used slow weapons and Ele/Resto shammies used a faster weapon for the SP proc.  Now everyone will be after the slow fists/maces/daggers.
• Frostbrand Weapon: Damage increased by approximately 20%. – PvP change to couple with the new talents they gave Enh & Ele shammies.
• Poison Cleansing Totem and Disease Cleansing Totem have been merged into Cleansing Totem. Cleansing Totem pulses every 3 sec, down from 5.  - Thank god.  Now can we please have a combined healing/mana totem too?

Hooray!  Coffee is ready!

*runs*

Sorry, I need my fix.  Back to the notes.

Enhancement-specific Changes

• Lava Lash now has a new icon.  - Woo…
• Flurry: Now provides 5/10/15/20/25% haste instead of 10/15/20/25/30%. –  Why they felt they had to reduce our haste by 5% is beyond me.  Most of the time I don’t feel like I’m attacking fast enough as it is.
• New Talent: Frozen Power: 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. – An interesting option for PvP, but useless for PvE given the needed procs for our WF/FT combo
• Spirit Weapons: Now reduces all threat generated by 30%, not just physical attacks.  - Speaking as someone who constantly rips aggro from the tank without meaning to, this is a welcomed change.
• Stormstrike charges have been increased by 2, and cooldown reduced by 2 sec.  - A nice little change, seems minor, but I could see this helping our overall damage output as we’ll be able to keep SS up on the target 100% of the time.
• Improved Stormstrike re-designed: When you Stormstrike, you have a 50/100% chance to immediately grant you 20% of your base mana.  - A very interesting change.  This is fantastic for PvP and leveling but brings an interesting question to PvE.  If you spec into this, you can use Static Shock as you won’t necessarily need to ever use Water Shield.  However, this coupled with Shamanistic Rage means Enhancement Shamans are now mana batteries.
• Toughness: No longer increases your armor. Instead, this talent now increases your total Stamina by 2/4/6/8/10%.  - Nice little PvP talent; although, I’m not sure it needs a full 5 points.  3 would be more than enough.
• Unleashed Rage: Reduced to 3 points, down from 5. Each point now also increases your total Expertise by 3/6/9%. – Best. Change. Ever.  Since we share our gear with Hunters, expertise is very hard to come by so we end up with all our agi/hit/crit from gear and having to gem for expertise to hit our 6.5% cap.  Now we can just spec into it and actually focus on gemming for important stats like hit/crit/agi/ap/etc.

Overall, Enhancement Shamans are getting a nice boost in damage output in PvE and a lot of options for PvP.  There are a few things on my wishlist still.

• Combined Mana/Healing Totem and make them raid-wide
• A glyph or talent to increase the time of Feral Spirit
• A way to move totems to your new location (instead of having to recall and then recast)
• Being able to, as with Earth Shield, cast Water Shield on another player
• Ghost Wolf usable indoors (it’s a shapeshifting effect and if Droods can do it, so should we)
• Removal of the global cooldown for all shock spells – just make them cooldown individually already

I’m still playing with my new build on the 3.1 calculators, but I’ll probably go with something like this at first and play around with it.  I may actually remove the points into Imp-SS and use them elsewhere if I find the mana regen is over the top.