Actually, you can still toss out shadow spells. It may not be much, but you can toss out SW:P, mana drain...

All our heals and totems and all but two DPS spells are locked out by imp CS/Spell Lock. And those two DPS spells share a 6 second cooldown (5 secs with talent).

I don't think this is a game breaking change, and I think it's way less useful than giving us more fire/frost DD spells or shifting our heals to a different school than our nukes would have been, but it's an attempt to address an issue.

You are completely right, but this does not explain the silence part if it, which was supposed to be the focus if my comment, but typing a post and trying to create servlets at the same time for class gets you a bit mixed up. :)

The spell lock thing I get, and I'm fine with that, but not with the silence not effecting totems.

Hunters use mana for all their physical abilities, and they can still shoot tiny pieces of wood at you when silenced, why cant shaman stick tiny pieces of wood in the ground when silenced?

think about it though... a shaman putting totems down is practically placing an item from his inventory into play. for those who have never played a shaman, yes you do actually have to carry around 4 separate totems (one for each school) in your bag. so being able to pull them out and plant them on the ground while silenced isn't too much of a stretch in my eyes.

Yeah, I thought about that as I posted, CS/SL and Silence are on different mechanics. I guess there's two ways of looking at it...

1) Crusader Strike is also a physical effect that requires mana and it works when Paladins are silenced.

2) They felt bad for us.