Posts with tag patch 4.1

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement and restoration shaman. Get some Fulmination with your Lightning Bolts! Sort the shocks from the flames with Totem Talk: Elemental, brought to you by Sarah Nichol, otherwise known as Pewter from The 'mental Shaman and the Obscurecast podcast and founding member of TotemSpot.

Last time, I talked about how elemental shaman have gradually begun to evolve from turrets into athletes. All that talking about patch 4.2 and that running around has my dwarf shaman longing to put her feet up and have a beer. So while my grouchy dwarf peers into the depths of her (pewter) tankard and ponders on the delightful looks of tier 12, I've been exploring the world of troll shaman. That's right, I'm leveling a new elemental shaman from scratch in the post-patch 4.1 game.

Meet Zuulfi, a young troll shaman on her way to level 85. Right now, she still randomly hits things with her staff and throws out the occasional Earth Shock. Eventually, the plan is to for her to match strides with the gray-haired dwarf I normally put above my columns. Why a troll? I play a dwarf -- time for a taller Horde point of view.

Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.

Coming fast on the heals of the chaotic hunter changes from patch 4.0.6 and the hotfixes that followed, we now have more changes to look forward to in patch 4.1. Happily, we are not seeing another overhaul of the hunter class to disturb the precious state of hunter balance we're enjoying now.

Instead, we have some nice quality of life improvements -- no more pet happiness system to juggle, and when we tame a hunter pet, it will now automatically level up to our hunter level, instead of three levels below. I definitely think this last was a needed change; hunters were the only class that actually had to level up one of their key DPS abilities in this way. It's worth noting that for the moment, this only works for newly tamed pets. Your existing pets still have to be leveled the old-fashioned way.

But aside from making the collection of our 25 pets easier, the other thing (so far) that we know patch 4.1 is bringing us is some attention to our AoE abilities. Join me after the cut for a look at what we're seeing on the PTR and how that affects the balance of each spec's AoE.