Cataclysm Talent Preview: Elemental shaman
by Matt Low 
Jun 10th 2010 at 8:00PM
The first four tiers did not receive any heavy changes. It isn't until the fifth tier of talents that we start seeing some rearranging and collapsing of talents.
Elemental Mastery got moved up. It looks like it'll be accessible around level 31 for shamans. Good change, as it'll give shaman additional time in earlier levels to work Elemental Mastery in their rotation. Even at level 80, I still forget to use it.Elemental Mastery
(1 rank available; Requires 1 point in Elemental Focus; 3 min cooldown)
When activated, your next Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning or Lava Burst spell becomes an instant cast spell. In addition, you gain 15% spell haste for 15 seconds. Elemental Mastery shares a cooldown with Nature's Swiftness.
Elemental Oath has been moved up one tier. It effectively replaces the slot where Elemental Mastery once was. Mechanically, it hasn't really changed, but I think this is one of those passive talents that will get some kind of revamp (or get the axe altogether).Elemental Oath
(2 ranks available; Requires 1 point in Elemental Mastery)
While Clearcasting from Elemental Focus is active, you deal 5/10% more spell damage. In addition, party and raid members within 100 yards receive a 3/5% bonus to their critical strike chance.
This is the Totem of Wrath talent in a completely new form. The new format of Wrathful Totems will increase spellpower of players in your party or raid by an additional 10%. Hooray for scaling! The old Totem of Wrath only provided a static 250 spellpower buff. It used to be awesome when raids were steadily progressing through Naxxramas, but it didn't scale.Wrathful Totems (1 rank available)
Causes your Fire totems to increase the spell power of your party and raid members within 100 yards by 10%.
What's up, Earthquake? It'll be nice to have another AoE-type spell. Thunderstorm, Chain Lightning, Magma Totem and Fire Nova just weren't good enough. I'm curious if "mob state" will be taken into account. Would a mob that's hovering or flying get affected by this spell? I can definitely see both offensive and defensive uses for this spell. Are your healers getting blasted by other players in a battleground? Unload Earthquake around them and pray for some knockdowns or stuns so that they can get clear of any pursuing enemies. Or use it offensively to try to snag and finish off any stragglers who are running away from you and your allies.Earthquake
(1 rank available; 20149 Mana, 35 yd range, 1.5 sec cast, 15 sec cooldown)
You cause the earth at the target location to tremble and break, dealing 267 Physical damage every 1 second to enemies within a 10-yard radius, with a 40% chance of knocking down affected targets. Lasts 10 seconds.
This replaces Lightning Overload. Instead of just Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning getting activated again, we could be seeing a free Lava Burst thrown in. There's been no sign of Elemental Overload that I've been able to see, so I'm not sure on the exact details yet.Acute Overload
(3 ranks available)
Increases the damage dealt by your Elemental Overload spells by 7/14/20%.
Lava SurgeHere is another fun talent that doesn't seem quite fun at first glance. A 30% chance to reset Lava Burst? Yes, please! I'm a terrible shaman when it comes to remembering to refresh Flame Shock. One would think that this would give me an added incentive to keep Flame Shock active. What I'm curious about is if there's any internal cooldown on the rate of refresh. I could throw multiple Flame Shocks out on trash pulls or bosses that have extra mobs to increase the chance of Lava Burst resetting, in theory. Would there be a limit at the rate of how often Lava Burst could reset? I honestly have no idea, but I expect there would be. Heck, just thinking about PvPing for a second, one could conceivably light up Lava Burst repeatedly.
(3 ranks available)
Gives your Flame Shock periodic damage ticks a 10/20/30% chance to reset the cooldown of your Lava Burst spell.
Yeah, it would be a little overpowered. One can dream, though!
Just a quick note and reminder that this information could change at any time. It's not final in any form. Some of these talents might be merged or abandoned altogether. But assuming some of these changes stick into the final version, what are your thoughts so far?
World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it. Nothing will be the same. In WoW.com's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion. From goblins and worgens to mastery and guild changes, it's all there for your cataclysmic enjoyment.Filed under: Shaman, Analysis / Opinion
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Brex Jun 10th 2010 10:18PM
Elemental Overload is the elemental shaman Mastery skill.
Elemental
Spell damage
Spell Crit
Elemental Overload
Elemental Overload: Your direct-damage spells have a chance to proc a less powerful 'bonus" version of the spell. This will work much like the current Lightning Overload talent, but would also apply to Lava Burst.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=24038611737&sid=1
Doma Jun 11th 2010 12:46AM
When I can tag other raid mobs with a flame shock, I usually do. Just depends on the length of the fight. The current top tier totem grants stacking haste based off of flame shock dots. I'm pretty sure it counts multiple targets.
As far as pvp is concerned, I hope that's not the case. Even with dispels, constantly resetting lava burst sounds broken without some sort of hidden cooldown. All the more reason to have an attentive dispeller in your party when you queue up for rated BGs.
Not that I don't want to be OP, but that would make the others OP too. Can't have that now, can we?
Zalvi24 Jun 10th 2010 10:33PM
if blizzard feels that shamans will be OP by the Lava Surge talent when they put flame shock on multiple targets, they could either put an internal CD on it (lava surge) or just make it so flame shock can only affect one target at a time
Xaklo Jun 10th 2010 10:56PM
Too bad the Lava Surge talent isn't available for us now with out T10 bonus: Lava Bursts refreshing Flame Shocks refreshing Lava Bursts!!!!
Xaklo Jun 10th 2010 10:57PM
with our* T10 [4 piece] bonus
Shadow Gaia Jun 10th 2010 10:59PM
Along with the nice buffs, we also getting some nerfs, how badly are they ?
Removed 13+% critical hit rating in the way of:
- Call of Thunder 5%
-Thundering Strinkes 5%
- Totem of Wrath 3%
- 10% Intellect Buff also gave more critical hit rating. (the plus + in the 13%)
Not that im really concerned for my critical hit rating but still a slight nerf.
A pvp nerf that really bothers me is the Removal of: Earth's Grasp. The reduced cooldown on earthbind totem allowed me to kite melee classes. Along with the removal of poison removal, ill better cast /kneel /pray /beg when ever i sense a rogue nearby.
I hope this "preview" changes a lot for the release of cataclysm.
Question : How much Critical hit rating we getting from the mastery skill ? will that compensate for the lost from talents ?
Also, lost of people are saying the Earthquake knockdown proc wont go live, because its too OP. what do u think ?
Cody Jun 10th 2010 11:10PM
Holy smokes, 20k mana for Earthquake?
Ikarus Jun 11th 2010 2:24PM
I was also surprised to see that it isn't a channeled spell like it was (iirc) in WC3. I won't be surprised if they change it to channeled.
Grokmar Jun 10th 2010 11:46PM
The issue I have is the amount of bloat that is still in the upper levels in the tree. It's impossible to go into Enhance to get Searing Flames without gimping yourself. From the other previews that have been put out, they don't have the same issue. Hopefully the tree will get some more love.
Ted Heet Jun 11th 2010 2:47AM
What I'm looking forward to is the extra points. From the talent calc that are out there...dual wield ele shaman is a reality. The question is, will blizz support the build with one-hand/off hand spell weapons?
Boobah Jun 11th 2010 9:38AM
If Blizzard allows off-hand caster weapons, then Dual-Wield won't be
an option, but a requirement. Which means nerfs to all the shaman
spell coefficients because of the huge spellpower jump over any other
caster. Which means you'll be fighting the mages, locks, priests,
druids, and pallies for not one, but two weapons, neither of which do
as much for you as they would for them. And staves won't be a viable
option at all for caster shamans.
Is that what you want?
Rokshox Jun 11th 2010 5:03AM
I vote that Matt writes our Totem Talk:Elemental
Bluhdmoon Jun 13th 2010 10:25PM
When I first reviewed, I was also perplexed by Lightning Overlaod missing from the Talent Tree. In a previous comment a reminder was made that it has changed to Elemental Overload, however it was my understanding that Elemental would add to "Overload".
I seemed to remember an article on WoW.com about Mastery Formula leak which specifically had the Elemental numbers. I found the article and it does state +percent to Overload proc. Now is this the case the Alpha leak was misread and thought it was "plus" and not straight chance, because if it is true, with the straight chance, Overload was nerfed by 8%.
Sharvis Jun 11th 2010 12:51PM
I still wish there was a unique shield for Elemental Shaman; it feels kind of lame using Water Shield as DPS. Also, it seems the playstyle isn't changing drastically for single target fights, just with the added sudden Lava Burst cool down being up. I'd like to see something else in there to be honest, not sure what though.
icepyro Jun 11th 2010 2:59PM
First of all, I love that 20k figure for EQ. Wowhead's cata talent preview shows 86% base, which makes me wonder. I doubt Blizzard would make a spell uncastable without gear, so if both statements are correct, then that means we will be sporting 23k base mana at 85? I kind of doubt it given base is currently 4k-ish.
Also if the leaked mastery formulas are correct, we will get 8% crit from mastery if it is indeed capped at 51 points. If it's not capped, since my version of a desired tree has 59 points in this iteration, that's 9.26%. Still short of 13+%, but honestly, I know I have more than enough crit without the talents.
That is a lot of points above 51, but I wouldn't call it bloat. Bloat is mages going into arcane for one talent and having to waste 10 other points for it. In our case, all that bloat is useful. We are in fact gimping ourselves by not wasting talent points. I wouldn't call useful, helpful extra points "bloat".
I also would like to point out that you are merely doubling the damage of up to 5 impacts of searing totem, provided the stacks all finish. The rest maintain this dot, but add nothing to it. Obviously the extra time adds to it, but not as much as you may think. All those extra points staying in elemental mean that even if you only cast LB while having ST down, you have well more than made up for the difference in the gains to LB due to the difference in ticks/cast time and the limitation of 5 stacks unless my math is off.
Admittedly, I haven't done any math on how the new haste will affect these things and that would be interesting, but I'm not sure on how it will work anyways to know. Seems to me it would wash out to the same result though I could be wrong.
jerseyjunior Jun 12th 2010 10:25PM
"Lava Surge
(3 ranks available)
Gives your Flame Shock periodic damage ticks a 10/20/30% chance to reset the cooldown of your Lava Burst spell."
Seems like Blizzard is taking this the same way of Living Bomb for fire mages.