I find 12% magic damage reduction a lot more exciting, than lying dead on the floor the last 4 minutes of a boss fight... Might just be me though *Shrug*

"The problem with survivability talents for dps'ers is that they are generally not fun. Utility talents can be fun, but something like magic reduction (as seen in the elemental shaman tree) is really, really boring."

agreed

which is one of the many reasons i LOVE cauterize
itstops you dying - but if your not paying atention your gonna kill yourself in 12 sec

Errr mark, you might want to pay a bit more attention. It kills you in 6 seconds.

Krish, if you're an elemental shaman, and you're taking a bit of extra magic damage, you have a much better way to help your healers out, it's called Healing Surge. It's basically 1 gcd to make up for way more than the damage you prevented. And ele shaman are not going to have mana problems themselves, so no worries there. IMO, it's more fun to add survivability with a self-healing spell (see the recuperate post just below this one) than a passive "yawn" magic reduction talent. Out of all the healing classes, IMO elemental shaman have the best healing for their non-resto/healing tree (better than pallies, better than enhance, better than shadow, and better than feral/moonkin).

In other words, if you are getting low on health, and you are an elemental shaman, and you die from simple aura damage without healing yourself, in my opinion you are a very very bad elemental shaman, and you deserve to lay on the floor for 4 minutes.

As they say, boring talents are boring. However, the top two tiers of most (all?) the trees are just that: boring. The really exciting ones start around level 29/tier 3, in the ele shammy case Elemental Focus.

I assume they put the "boring" talents in because everyone needs access to those from the other trees, plus when you actually pick up those talents you are low level and they are actually useful then. Not to mention what others have said, where more survivability provides for better group/raid experience.

Just my two cents. /shrug

I actually like the challenge that Cata will bring to dungeons/raids. The Wrath formula is just getting boring for me (as both a lock and enh shammy). The formula is click through your rotation, move out of the fire, back to the rotation , switch to an add, back to the rotation, execute phase and voila.....dead boss.

That's why I'm pretty happy with my Warlock's Drain Life Affliction spec. It really fits what Blizz wants to do in Cata. I have 2 points in Siphon life that give me 50% chance per tick at 2% health regen. Boring? Yes. Dps-buff? No, but helps keep me alive and lets the healer focus more on the tank. The filler spell in this set up is Drain Life. It is a harder spec to manage than the Shadow Bolt affliction set up, which means probably less damage during dynamic battles, but much better for survivability.

I will gladly sacrifice 2 unsexy points for survivability