Totem Talk takes another week to talk about PvP on a shaman in the wake of 2.4 going live. Matthew Rossi hasn't had as much of a chance to play with the changes to talents but what he has been able to do, he now presents to you in a post about post patch PvP. Pickled peppers.

Last week we talked PvP. This week I respecced to an elemental and enhancement set of builds with more PvP focused talents (basically the 40/0/21 elemental/resto build and a variant enhancement build) based on feedback from the comments. I filled out the gaps in my elemental set with the new Seer's Ringmail set, which at least made it easier to experiment with the builds. A decent (if not outstanding) elemental, restoration or enhancement PvP set is now within reach of the new 70, after a few Auchindoun or Caverns of Time instance runs to get honored with Lower City and Keepers of Time.

After each respec I went and ran Alterac Valley, Arathi Basin, and begged a guildmate to run a 2x2 Arena match with me. The battlegrounds were easy enough to do, everyone's excited about the new AV and wants marks for the honor turn in, but getting people to form an arena team with me for the purposes of me trying out new specs to write about in this article proved difficult and so I can only report about how I did as an elemental shaman in 2x2.

I died, but man, I surprised the heck out of that rogue first. (He then died when my teammate, a mage, hit him after I did.) Even with my non-epic gear, a trinket enhanced instant cast chain lightning crit did quite a nice amount of damage to the other team, and my partner managed to mop up pretty effectively with a counterspell on their druid followed by massive nuking on the rogue. I died, as I said (people don't like instant cast chain lightning crits, who knew?) and the druid ultimately outlasted our mage, but it was worth it. I'd die like that again. I have to admit, I think this build would have worked a lot better for a bigger team but I was pressed for time and had to go to war with the army I had.

My previous misgivings aside, PvPing on an elemental shaman in AV and AB was a lot better than I had expected. You still get silenced, ganked, instant-gibbed etc etc but the damage seemed good and when that cooldown is up you can throw crazy damage into a mass of players. Never before have four dudes standing at a flag been so surprised as when I hit that beautiful 'Instant Cast + Crit = Pain' macro. And again, yes, I got killed, and yes, it was worth it. You start to cackle maniacally every single time the cooldown's up, waiting for some poor sucker to cross your path. When you're not feared, or stunlocked, or eating DoT's like they were of the dipping variety.

The changes to enhancement? Well, a lot of folks in the comments last week or in this week's 2.4 round up post didn't think they'd make much difference. And you were right. Curse you, accurate pessimists! I enjoyed instant casting ghost wolf, but it didn't really seem to matter all that much except for one time at the lumber mill where I ran the heck away from some horde. So yay for running away faster! If the ability is supposed to remove snares or roots, I must have been doing it wrong because I saw no sign of that happening. The update to Toughness didn't seem to matter all that much because, if I was being slowed by something like a hunter's frost trap, I either didn't get hit by anything or I was dead in seconds. I did try out instant switching to ghost wolf and chasting down a hunter, which worked okay until his pet stunned me. It might work on mages too with some creative macroing and earth shocking their casts, but I didn't get much of a chance to work on that.

I'm not happy with the duration on Shamanistic Rage either. Before, it would get dispelled after ten seconds or so. Now, I pop it and I maybe get five seconds of it being up and hitting people before they move and it wears off. Even with the new toughness and ghost wolf, you're not going to get a lot of mana back anymore, but at least you take less damage while you're being kited around.

In general, enhancement didn't feel any different in PvP to me, but I didn't get a chance to run arena with him and so I must leave it in the hands of you experienced PvP shamans to report on how that went.

My resto shaman, meanwhile, is not happy about the new Earth Shield. It's not an enormous difference and I'm sure it is better for PvP now, but I tried to heal a late night Magisters' Terrace run and found the loss of those four trinket boosted ES charges to be a right pain in the tuckus. It's not massively hard to keep the spell on a tank, mind you, it's just moderately annoying to have to apply it more often but personally I don't think shamans needed any more annoyance. I didn't feel a massive shift in the time on totems but it was still welcome when I was trying to get a Mana Tide down and heal the tank at the same time on Kael.

As for PvP, I ran all four battlegrounds there but my horde toon had no one to arena with at 2 am. Pansies. I did like not losing Earth Shield to dispels quite so often, but it's hard to say that it made a major difference. We lost two AV's and won one, so the Alliance has definitely roared back to life (whether that's entirely due to the map changes or because they now believe they can win, I couldn't tell you) but I didn't feel like my performance was radically better or worse. Tremor Totem was noticeably improved when the Shadow Priest/Warlock pair came over the hill trying to take Iceblood, I was in range to break the fear and my Grounding ate at least one horrible looking spell.

Yes, i still died, because there's not much two warriors can do to get both of those guys to attack them instead of me, but I managed to last long enough to see both of them go to dirtnapland just before me and we held the gy for a glorious ten more seconds before a whole lot of Allies rode up the hill. Ah well.

In general, PvP didn't feel radically different to me. Maybe slightly improved on enhancement mobility, but in general not a very big change. Since I didn't PvP with an elemental spec before, I didn't really feel the nerf to Call of Thunder, but I can't imagine I would have really noticed 1% to crit all that much when I was mostly using Elemental Mastery/Nature's Swiftness to pump out damage before dying anyway.

So my shaman compatriots, I turn to you. Did you find PvP better, worse or the same? If you have extensive arena experience please share it, and even if you're just running a 3x3 on a weeknight for some points, your insights would still be welcome.

Next week: probably more about elemental DPS in groups and raids. If not that, then some in-depth discussion of restoration when soloing. And maybe some pie! Probably no pie.

Talk totems with Matt Rossi every Thursday on WoW Insider -- whether it's about talents or group strategy, he'll lay down exactly what you need to know about totem dropping. And when you're done with that, head on over to the WoW Insider Directory's Shaman page to learn more about the class that Frost Shocks the hardest.

Tags: Changes, patch-2.4, pve, pvp, Shaman

Filed under: Shaman, Patches, Analysis / Opinion, (Shaman) Totem Talk, Battlegrounds, Arena