Shaman

Shaman changes revolved around fleshing out the class’ melee damage and healing specializations, alongside tackling major issues within its ranged facet; through talent compression and overhaul, we sought to have their trees properly function as the framework on which the class’ diverse iterations could flourish. Rendering their capstones worthy of investment without stifling hybridization between the specializations.

Baseline Changes

Many of the changes you’ll read about further below aim to introduce quality of life changes to the class, both during levelling and in its gameplay at level 60. We aim to introduce these changes while preserving its mechanical and thematic flavor as well as rendering its progression in the endgame accessible to players without losing sight of Shaman’s ability to perform competitively with different pieces of gear and a talent choices spanning multiple trees. Mana cost reductions; increases to the duration of class enchantments, elemental shields and totems; allowing shaman’s enhancement-focused toolkit, namely their shocks and elemental shields, to also scale with a portion of their attack power.

Windfury Totem went through major changes which go as follows:

The totem's effect is now an Aura, not an imbue. This proc only works for main-hand attacks, meaning that the totem works the way it did before this change but does not compete with temporary weapon enchants.

The totem now only has one rank.

The totem no longer grants an Attack Power increase on the extra attacks.

This effect now has an internal cooldown of 1.5 seconds instead of 1 second.

Shaman's imbues takes priority over the totem, meaning the totem does not affect the Shaman while any of their imbues is active.

Flametongue Totem went through a few changes which go as follows:

The effect is now an aura.

Now stacks with Windfury Totem.

No longer scales with Spell Power.

Shaman's imbues takes priority over the totem, meaning the totem does not affect the Shaman while any of their imbues is active.

The extra damage granted by this totem can no longer trigger on-hit effects.

Developer Comment: We are more than aware of the value Windfury Totem brings to the table and how close it is to the hearts of players. However, its Vanilla implementation was too big of a percentage of Shaman’s overall output, pushing their personal performance down while it also made other temporary weapon enchants like sharpening stones or rogue poisons irrelevant. That’s why we decided to redesign these two totems to instead apply their effect in an area similar to other totems like Grace of Air, and lower their power since they will no longer be mutually exclusive with other temporary weapon enchants.

Totemic Slam (New Tauren Shaman Racial): Slam your target with your ancestral totem, causing damage equal to 10% of your attack power and concusses your target, reducing their attack and casting speed by 25% for 8 sec.

(1.5 Minute cooldown, 5% base mana cost.) Developer Comment: This new racial has been added as Spirit Link will now be the last capstone talent of the Restoration talent tree. This ability should retroactively replace your Spirit Link.

Weapon imbues such as Flametongue, Frostbrand and Rockbiter now last 1 hour instead of 5 minutes.

Spirit Wolves summoned by Feral Spirit no longer scale with your Attack Power.

New Ability: Earthshaker Slam: Slams your target with your shield, taunting it. Has no effect if the target is already attacking you.

(5 Yard Range, 10 Second Cooldown, 3% Base Mana cost, requires a Shield.)

Earth Shock now has a x1.5 increased threat modifier instead of a x2 modifier.

Earth Shield now has new ranks that can be acquired at lower levels. The current version is now the max rank. The spellcast pushback reduction is the same for all ranks, being 30%.

Rank 1 (Level 40): 200 Mana Cost, 85 Healing on Ht

Rank 2 (Level 48): 245 Mana Cost, 115 Healing on Hit

Rank 3 (Level 56): 300 Mana Cost, 150 Healing on Hit

Water Shield now has new ranks that can be acquired at lower levels. The current version is now the max rank.

Rank 1 (Level 26): 34 Mana Restoration

Rank 2 (Level 34): 55 Mana Restoration

Rank 3 (Level 42): 76 Mana Restoration

Rank 4 (Level 50): 102 Mana Restoration

Rank 5 (Level 58): 130 Mana Restoration

Chain Heal’s baseline cast time duration has been increased from 2.5 seconds to 3 seconds.

Developer Comment: This change aims to steer Restoration Shamans deeper into their respective talent tree, as the new Improved Chain Heal talent reduces the cast time of Chain Heal by 1 second when fully talented.

Totemic Recall will now be available at level 10 and will correctly refund the mana cost of every totem. Additionally, the refunded amount is now displayed in the combat log.

Windfury Weapon's cooldown between procs increased from 3 seconds to 6 seconds and it's proc chance has been reduced from 20% to 15%.

Developer Comment: Although this might seem like a harsh nerf to Windfury Weapon's effect, it proved to be a major outlier during testing sessions, where Enhancement performed as an overwhelmingly strong outlier in its individual performance by pulling ahead of every single dps spec in the game by several hundreds of damage per second.

Within the specialization's rotation it also completely outshined every other performance tool in Shaman's toolkit often making up for two thirds of the damage dealth by the spec, as if Enhancement now was solely the windfury specialization and every other spell existed alongside it. As a team we did not want to revert or diminish the scaling on shock and shields spells in order to keep Shaman in check, mostly because our aim with these changes is to bring the feel of progression to a specialization which has been desperately asking for it since its inception and it did not seem right to have these new and enjoyable tools pay for the imbue's overwhelming and polarizing performance.

Elemental

We’re generally satisfied with where Elemental Shaman was after first class changes so it is only receiving minor improvements. Adjustments to this specialization aim to smooth out their random burst spikes both for player and creature combat, taking care of their threat issues, bump up their mana sustain and encourage the use of Flame Shock and Searing Totem into the rotation. Elemental Devastation: Now increases your chance to hit with melee attacks and spells by 1/2/3% and your melee critical strikes increase your chance to hit with spells by additional 3/6/9% for 15 sec. Previous functionality removed. Developer Comment: This hybrid talent was moved up to 2nd row and repurposed to address both Elemental and Enhancement spell hit problems. Borne of Nature’s Guidance, this is a prime example of the aforementioned talent compression, while maintaining a focus on the talent’s utility for Enhancement, we felt that originally having to spend a substantial amount of talent points to earn spell and melee hit was detrimental to a class with so much variety across its playstyles, forcing it to thinly spread across the board; we are confident this change allows for more efficient and smoother gameplay performance for both elemental and enhancement.

Elemental Focus: Mana cost reduction Increased from 40% to 60%,

Developer Comment: Clearcasting is a big part of shaman’s resource management and we felt that as a talent it was incapable of properly addressing the class’ mana issues across the board, prompting us to increase its effectiveness. We see Clearcasting as a good example of the class indirectly increasing its mana pool as it acquires better gear, and wanted to push this concept further through this change.

Call of Flame: Now also increases your Fire damage by 5/10/15%.

New Talent: Flame Guidance (5th Row Capstone): Increases the range of your Searing Totem and Flame Shock spells by 10 yards and casting your Flame Shock spell will now cause your Searing Totem to focus that target.

Elemental Fury has been replaced by Electrify: Your Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning spells charge you with electricity, increasing your Nature damage dealt by 2% and the critical strike damage bonus of your offensive spells by 20%. Lasts 20 sec. Stacks up to 5 times.

Developer Comment: Replaces Elemental Fury with a stacking Nature damage and critical damage increase. While the upfront critical damage bonus is momentarily lost at the start of an encounter, revised Elemental Mastery will carve its place into any Elemental shaman’s rotation by quickly bringing them up to old Elemental Fury critical damage levels while making it worth it to do so through the stacking nature damage bonus.

Elemental Mastery: Now also gives you 2 stacks of Electrify buff.

Enhancement

This specialization suffered from over-reliance on their strong supporting capabilities, weak personal performance and a lack of enjoyable rotation resulting in Enhancement shamans were either taken solely for their strong Windfury Totem or that Restoration shamans were forced to specialize deep into Enhancement to provide their teammates with Bloodlust. That’s why both of these powerful support tools were changed to open up the possibility for Shamans to focus more on their personal performance instead of just being a support for others. The Enhancement tank builds also got some new tools to help them properly fulfil a tank role in levelling and early end-game content. Rank 7 of Earth Shock and Rank 4 of Frost Shock now scale with your Attack Power, increasing damage by an amount equal to 10% your Attack Power. The base damage values have been reduced by 25 due to the base Attack Power values, meaning these ranks should do the same damage as before if you do not have anything increasing your Attack Power. The spell description of these ranks now indicate that the spell benefits from Attack Power.

Rank 5 and 6 of Flame Shock now also scale with your Attack Power, increasing initial damage by an amount equal to 6% of your Attack Power and each tick of damage over time damage by an amount equal to 1.5% of your Attack Power, equaling to 6% with four ticks of damage.

The base initial damage has been reduced by 16 and the base damage of each damage over time tick has been reduced by 4, meaning these ranks should do the same damage as before if you do not have anything increasing your Attack Power. The spell description of these ranks now indicate that the spell benefits from Attack Power.

Fire Shock, Earth Shock and Frost Shock now enable your auto-attacks.

Rockbiter Weapon now increases all threat you generate by 30% instead of generating a flat amount of extra threat every attack.

Developer Comment: The two changes above allows both damage dealing Enhancement Shamans to include this spell in the rotation, while not diminishing their tanking potential when needed.

Ancestral Knowledge: Now increases all of your base stats by 2/4/6/8/10% instead of increasing your maximum mana.

Developer Comment: The stats granted by this talent do not scale with any of your gear as they’re only your base stats.

Shield Specialization: The amount of damage blocked is increased from 5/10/15/20/25% to 6/12/18/24/30% to be in line with similar talents.

Guardian Totems: Merged into Enhancing Totems.

New Talent: Totemic Alignment (2nd Row / 2 Points): 30/60% of the threat generated by your totems is transferred to you.

Developer Comment: This threat is further increased by all threat increasing factors such as the Rockbiter Weapon rework.

Improved Lightning Shield has been replaced by Stable Shields: Increases the number of charges of your shield spells by 2/4/6 but increases the cooldown between activations by 1 sec.

New Talent: Lightning Strike (3rd Row Capstone): Instantly strikes your target, causing 60% (Physical) weapon damage and 20% weapon damage as Nature damage. This strike also triggers an empowered version of your active shield, consuming 1 charge. (10 second cooldown, 8% of base mana cost.) Empowered means that shields expended by Lightning Strike benefit from your Attack Power, the amount of scaling go as follows:

Lightning Shield: 4 Attack Power for 1 extra damage.

Water Shield: 20 Attack Power for 1 extra Mana.

Earth Shield: 15 Attack Power for 1 extra Health.

Developer Comment: With these two talents we set out to tackle two of Enhancement’s issues, namely its inability to interact with its elemental shields in group content and the lack of another skill capable of taking advantage of the specialization’s melee-oriented stat growth. With both of these talents combined we are confident Shamans can now take full control of their elemental shields while being rewarded from their creative and effective utilization as both a damage tool and resource management tool; all the while having a second way of expressing their strength as a melee specialization.

New Talent: Calming Winds (3rd Row / 3 Points): Reduces threat generated by your physical attacks, weapon imbue effects and your Lightning Strike and Storm Strike abilities by 5/10/15%.

Ancestral Guardian: Now requires 3 points instead of 5 points, now grants 15% increased armor value from items instead of 10% and chance to dodge increased from 5% to 6%.

Spirit Armor: Now requires 2 points instead of 3 points.

Enhancing Totems: Moved from the 3rd row to the 5th row and now does the following: “Increases the effect of your Strength of Earth and Grace of Air Totems by 8/15% and reduces the cooldown of your Grounding Totem by 1/2 sec. Your Stoneskin Totem's damage reduction is increased by 15/30% and additionally it increases block amount by 15/30%.”.

Stormstrike: Now only has one rank, its cooldown is reduced from 12 to 8 seconds, mana cost is reduced from 12% to 7% base mana and now grants a buff that increases the damage of your next 2 sources of Nature damage you deal to be increased by 20% instead of applying a magic debuff that increases the damage of the next 2 sources of Nature damage the target takes by 20%. Additionally, you now need a weapon equipped to use this ability.

Developer Comment: This change to the Nature damage functionality allows Enhancement to not lose their damage potential to other classes’ abilities and Nature damage dealt by weaker effects such as item effects.

Elemental Weapons now does the following: “Imbuing your weapon gives you a special benefit based on the imbue.

Flametongue: Increases the damage done by your Fire Totems and spells by 5/10/15%.

Rockbiter: Reduces your damage taken by 4/7/10%.

Frostbrand: Increases the chance to proc the effect by 8/16/25% and becomes guaranteed to critically hit if the target is afflicted with Frost Shock.

Windfury: If one of the bonus attacks of your Windfury Weapon doesn't land, your attack speed is increased by 10/20/30% for your next strike.

Developer Comment: Through this talent we had the opportunity to work on the role of each of the Shaman’s imbues and make them focus on their niches more. Flametongue and Frostbrand Weapon imbues have been rendered capable of interacting with their corresponding shock, slotting respectively into a sustained or burst melee spellcaster capable of fighting from both afar and up-close.

Rockbiter Weapon allows the Enhancement Shaman builds that specialize into taking blows for their allies to perform this task easier by granting them increased survivability for all kinds of situations. Windfury Weapon is left untouched as it falls in line with our concept of it acting as the imbue of choice for a pure melee damage dealing Shaman; while turning up the dial on this imbue would’ve been coherent with the changes applied to the others, we decided to instead have Windfury become more internally consistent by rendering it an inescapable menace for anyone on the receiving end of its effect, reducing the lows of missing a Windfury proc while avoiding rendering its power level polarizing when confronted with the other class enchantments.

Weapon Mastery: Now affects melee skills too.

Developer Comment: This change allows this 6th row talent to feel much more worthwhile, buffing the damage of Stormstrike and Lightning Strike.

Bloodlust: Now only has one rank that grants 15% melee and casting speed, can only be cast on yourself, duration increased from 20 seconds to 30 seconds, and while under its effect, your melee critical hits increase melee, ranged, and spell casting speed of all party members within 30 yards by 5% for 5 sec.

Developer Comment: Following the focus on personal contribution of the Shaman, Bloodlust was reworked to be a buff for the shaman first and foremost, while the party support component was reworked to depend directly on the shaman’s aforementioned personal contribution as well as its gearing progression; magnifying Shaman’s individual performance while toning down their reliance on buffing others to indirectly contribute to group performance.

Restoration

We are satisfied with Restoration’s identity as an effective AOE healer and tank healer, with the power level of the spec being, to us, adequate; we’re of the opinion the tree in Class Changes 1 has nothing of value beyond nature’s swiftness and have found Mana Tide Totem was lacking the strength that is reserved to a tree’s capstone feature. Taking this opportunity for an update to restoration’s tree, we have decided to push for Chain Heal as restoration shaman’s identity and have tailored our changes around making the tree speak to it without leaving Healing Wave and Lesser Healing Wave behind; with this new tree we think we’ve struck the balance between the two souls of shaman’s healing kit, its slow-cast high value AOE healing and their slow-cast high output single target healing. Tidal Focus: Now also reduces the mana cost of your totems by 5/10/15/20/25%.

Totemic Focus: Merged into Tidal Focus.

Ancestral Healing: Moved from the 3rd row to the 2nd row.

Tidal Mastery: Moved from the 4th row to the 2nd row.

Nature's Guidance: Merged into the revamped Elemental Devastation.

Healing Focus: Now requires 2 points instead of 5 points.

Nature's Grace: Now reduces threat generated by all Nature spells instead of just healing spells.

Restorative Totems: No longer increases the effect of your Mana Spring Totem and instead reduces its mana cost by 10/20/30/40/50%.

Developer Comment: This mana cost reduction stacks with the Tidal Focus talent’s mana cost reduction.

New Talent: Improved Water Shield (4th Row / 3 Points): Allows 2/4/6% of your Mana regeneration to continue while casting. This is increased by 1/2/3% for each of your Water Shield charges.

New Talent: Undertow (5th Row / 2 Points): Your Healing Wave and Lesser Healing Wave spells have a 25/50% chance to restore a charge of your active Water Shield. When at maximum charges, this effect consumes a charge instead.

Developer Comment: Our aim with Undertow and Improved Water Shield is to encourage the use of Healing Wave and Lesser Healing Wave by bringing its efficiency up to speed with that of other healers, a department in which the class is severely lacking. These talents are to function as the framework on which Shaman’s single target healing is rendered sustainable when used properly instead of restraint.

Healing Way: Moved from the 5th row to the 3rd row, now has a 11/22/33% chance of triggering from Chain Heal and now also increases the effect of subsequent Chain Heals.

New Talent: Tidal Surge (5th Row / 2 Points): When you heal a target affected by your Healing Way effect gain a stack of Tidal Surge. Tidal Surge gives you a 15/30% chance for your next healing spell to refund 10% of the base mana cost. Stacks up to 3 times and stacks are consumed when the effect is triggered.

Developer Comment: One of our marks was to have this new Restoration tree embody both sides of shaman’s healing; with Healing Way’s newfound ability to interact with Chain Heal we want our shamans to take full advantage of the options offered by their toolkit, while expressing their expertise through an apt and proper use of both it and the Healing Waves. Tidal Surge is the the other pole behind Restoration’s new mana-efficient ecosystem, we felt the class was too heavily punished for precasting due to the risk of causing high heavy amounts of overhealing, these two talents want to ease players into the idea of pre-casting and using their healing spells much more freely, by rewarding them for keeping a steady supply of healing throughout a fight.

Purification: Removed.

New Talent: Improved Chain Heal (6th Row / 5 Points): Reduces the cast time of your Chain Heal spell by 0.2/0.4/0.6/.8/1 sec.

Developer Comment: This last talent is the cherry on top of Restoration’s identity as an multi-target healing and its foundation moving forward. Know that this talent, specifically, is introduced in parallel with the removal of Stormcaller’s 5 piece set bonus, with the philosophy that items should add on top of a class’ strengths and not be the entire foundation of them.

Mana Tide Totem: Removed.

New Talent: Spirit Link (7th Row Capstone): You link your target ally and their two closest allies within 15 yards together. When linked targets take damage, 30% is distributed among the other linked allies. Lasts 30 sec.

(6 minute cooldown. 15 yard range.) Developer Comment: This spell has been on our radar for a while and its popularity is felt through the community, when looking at its performance it had the power level akin to that of a capstone and given its popularity we opted to make it so. Restoration Shaman now has a seat at the forefront of damage prevention and a tool synergizing with its area healing gameplay which can be used both to reduce incoming damage in preparation of . In stark contrast with mana-tide totem we are fairly confident this will push enterprising Restoration Shamans to invest into the tree and take full advantage of how it expands upon the specialization's gameplay.UPDATES | Dated: October 21 2024Lightning Shield: Now guaranteed to land, this also affects the empowered version triggered by Lightning Strike.

UPDATES | Dated: November 1 2024Reduced Windfury Weapon's internal cooldown from 6 seconds to 0.5 seconds and its proc chance has been increased from 15% to 20%.

Increased Stormstrike mana cost from 7% to 12% base mana and Lightning Strike mana cost from 8% to 15% base mana.

Reduced Shaman's Flurry attack speed increase from 10/15/20/25/30% to 7/9/11/13/15%.

Stormstrike and Lightning Strike can no longer trigger chance on hit effects such as Windfury.

Flame Guidance now increases your Fire totems' critical strike modifier by 100% to make up for that being removed when Elemental Fury was replaced by Electrify.