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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsPTR Notes: Shaman buffs, Life Tap "change," and more
by Eliah Hecht 
Feb 27th 2008 at 10:50PM
The PTRs just came back up about an hour ago from a new build being applied; some people were able to get on earlier, but any information they found is liable to be buggy. Here's what's been found since the realms came back online for real:- Shaman:
- Flametongue weapon puts a 50% healing reduction on the target for 5 seconds, refreshing with every hit.
- Toughness: each point in the talent now reduces the duration of movement-impairing effects by 10%, in addition to the previous effect of increasing armor. This means 50% reduced duration at 5/5.
- Shamanistic Rage changed; now reduces all damage taken by 30% and gives a chance to regenerate mana equal to 30% [was 15%] of your AP. Lasts 15 s [was 30 s].
- Global cooldown on dropping totems reduced from 1.5 s to 1 s.
- [Warlock] Life Tap (rank 3) converts 20% of your maximum health to 20% of your maximum mana. Still terrible, and not very much of a change from the 15% it was at before.
- Alchemy:
- There are some new epic gems: spell haste and stam, spell haste and spell damage, resilience and stam, and plain spell haste.
- New alchemist stones. They all increase the effect that healing and mana potions have on the wearer by 40% (does not stack) in addition to the following effects:
- Assassin's: +54 crit rating
- Guardian's: +54 defense rating
- Sorcerer's: +54 spell hit rating
- Redeemer's: +119 healing, +40 damage
- New cloak enchant: Stoneweave (+12 def rating)
Reader Comments (Page 6 of 6)
Doma Feb 28th 2008 10:08AM
ft debuff refreshes w/ every hit? really?
jeez...
no more looking for >=2.6 speed offhands
though that looks like a prime candidate to get taken down a notch, it's nice to see enh get some tinkering
Doma Feb 28th 2008 10:09AM
ohhh! and the totem cooldown!
still not good enough but yay anyway!
Charlie Feb 28th 2008 10:12AM
Personally with all of Enh shammies problems in 2v2s and 3v3s, this makes them awsome.
I could see a Priest, War, Enh Sham 3v3 being pretty awsome right about now.
woeye Feb 28th 2008 10:58AM
Btw, does it only affect the Flametongue weapon buff or the totem as well? Just imagine dropping the totem and boom - everyone in the group that can wield a melee weapon would have a MS debuff? Nah, too overpowered =)
Mats Feb 28th 2008 11:35AM
Blizzard needs to learn that we want a lifetap that is dependent on 1 stat, not two differently scaling stats. You can't have a % of life for a % to mana since there is no real correlation between mana and health, it's not like we get 1 mana per 1 health point, they both scale up independently of each other.
They can have a % of mana gained and we lose points of health equal to the points of mana gained, or we can have % of life lost, and mana gains equal amount of points of health lost, but having a % of both makes for a poorly thought out mechanic.
I myself favor the % of mana gained for a point loss of health, since then LifeTap would scale with int, another factor to think about when gearing your lock, but it would not break the core mechanic of mostly favoring stamina.
Yossarian Feb 28th 2008 12:18PM
@ 84 (Jeff)
You, sir, are either a troll or a douche (although, you being a troll would also make you a douche, so nvm).
There are numerous Warlock talents geared towards buffing stamina. All of the Warlock gear sets have +stamina as their dominant stat componant. But of course, that means Warlocks should buff....intellect? IDIOTJEFF!
Adauchi Feb 28th 2008 12:15PM
Protest by not playing a lock. It would be interesting if an entire class were to disappear.
Nick S Feb 28th 2008 1:01PM
hear hear! nerf locks until they all quit.
/kidding, geez.
while we're giving everyone Mortal Strike, MS for mages too, plz. how about whenever the enemy is frozen? seems reasonable. ;-)
Ryuhou Feb 28th 2008 12:28PM
So lets see, warriors have mortal strike, rogues have wound poison, hunters have aim shot and shamans now have flametongue, does that mean Blizzard is finnaly gonna add an MS effect to Crusader Strike like they hinted at?!
Theserene Feb 28th 2008 1:02PM
Blizzard - please, just STOP with the lifetap thing. Put it back to how it was and find some other way to get your silly arena working.
eroch Feb 28th 2008 1:14PM
Let LT stam cost be reduced by 100% of +dmg. Or just put it back how it was. A lock lifetapping is a lock not doing any damage but to himself. Give locks 0 spirit period. Give them a curse on 2min CD that steals the next healing spell cast on that player. Give all locks instant cast corruption and a new talent in its place. Give Deathcoil an MS effect that lasts until they die. Make hellfire give mana back equiv to the amount of health lost and make it so nothing can negate the damage you would take from it.
Shaemus Feb 28th 2008 2:34PM
As an decently geared (mostly S3)enhancement shaman who mainly PvPs (both BG and arena), I have the following thoughts:
Flametongue - I use a 2h weapon in PvP for the burst damage. Stormstrike-Windfury-Earthshock can take a cloth wearer down 70-80% if the WF crits, which it often does in BGs. In the Arena, a windfury proc is less likely to crit given how people are geared, but can still provide the extra push necessary to overcome healing, and, since we don't have any real way to break CC, often I find myself with only a few opportunities to swing my weapon at all. I want to maximize those opportunities, which is another reason that I use a 2-hander. If a rogue has me stunned (fights that I usually lose), my only hope is to do a massive amount of damage to him in the few seconds that I can move. That's not going to happen with a DW set-up.
I can understand why a DW shaman would put this on their off-hand, and with the WF cooldown the way it is, you don't really want to have your offhand proc it anyway. Looking at it that way, it is a nice buff. Maybe it's utility will force me to re-gear a bit to make use of it.
But the point remains that this is a buff to DW shamans, who need some time to hit their targets (what good is the 10% AP buff, which DW shamans rely on, if you're stunned for its duration?). Without a way to break CC, it seems like a lame gesture.
Toughness - I'd like to know if anyone is going to spend 5 points on this. Frankly, I don't know what I will take them out of. It might be nice to have, but honestly, if they're trying to make us less vulnerable to kiting, give us a charge/intercept! Call it Windwalker or something. I'd much rather have that, and I'd spend points for it. We have to be able to melee our targets to be effective, so we need some active way to get into melee range. As it is currently, this won't help against frost mages and hunters, who currently run us around like puppeteers.
Shamanistic Rage - As far as PvP is concerned, this ability is all about the damage reduction. If that is being reduced, then this is a PvP nerf.
Totem CD - A nice touch, but again seems a bit lame. I don't see why reducing the cooldown further would make us materially more powerful. It would just make dropping totems less annoying for shamans. Either that or give us a way to pre-set a stack of them, so we can drop 4 at once, THEN have a CD to prevent totem-twisting.
Angus Feb 28th 2008 4:10PM
I can understand why a DW shaman would put this on their off-hand, and with the WF cooldown the way it is, you don't really want to have your offhand proc it anyway. Looking at it that way, it is a nice buff. Maybe it's utility will force me to re-gear a bit to make use of it.
WF works as follows. You get a proc. The coding gets messed up and here's how we think it works:
Weapon 1: WF is linked to Weapon 2. It checks to see if weapon 2 is on that 3 second cooldown. If not then it applies a 20% chance to proc. However, because they are linked it checks both weapons at once. 36% chance to proc on this swing.
IF both weapons match for speed and are matched for swing timer the following happens as well:
Weapon 2: WF is linked to Weapon 1. It checks to see if weapon 1 is on that 3 sec CD. If not it applies 20% for each weapon with the 4% overlap going to main weapon.
So, if you have your weapons linked up, you have a 74% chance to proc it pretty much right away. The funny part is that this ends up making the proc rate actually show up to around 20% of total attacks causing WF.
If you don't have both weapons with it:
20% chance if not on CD. 1 swing on CD means you end up with around 11-12% total WF procs.
You really think shaman are going to give up 9% damage at the least?
Getting annoyed at the PVP balance ruing the PVE game and giving us stupid gimmicks instead of useful stuff.
Shaemus Feb 28th 2008 5:04PM
That's a bit hard to follow... But even if you are correct, remember that FT does damage as well. Spell damage as well, so not mitigated by armor. I've got about 380 +spell damage in my enhancement gear due to that talent, so the additional damage isn't trivial.
Doesn't look like you've worked that into your figures.