Totem of wrath nerf inc

[Naysayer]

If only we got 25% additonal lb spell damage, a stacking buff from crits across our party, and some kind of instant knockback mana restorer.

OH NO WAIT!

Its not the end of the world lads, wait and see the final design before lighting them mob torches

They had to add the damage buff because they nerfed the crap out of the lightning bolt coefficient. It's like me taking your computer away and then giving it back to you all wrapped up for your birthday. Surprise!

79.4% to 71.4% isn't nerfing the crap out of anything (same coeff as Smite now).

Yah, and the 10% frostbolt/fireball coefficient nerf didn't hurt the mages "jaw dropping" damage either...

It was higher than most dps spells with the same casting time to compensate for the lack of a debuff like CoShadows and scorch/ect. They nerfed it and added the damage% buff to compensate for the loss of dps shaman would suffer through the coefficient nerf. 8% on your coefficient is a pretty big loss to your dps, especially to a class that depends so much on crits and has 200% crit damage rather than 150%. It's ok though, they gave it a 20% damage increase through talents. It's going to hurt enhancement and resto lightning damage, but not elemental.

[succulent]

A note on the spell hit aspect: from what I read, spell hit cap will be 9% in wrath, and every caster can get 3% from talents (instead of between 0% and 10% like in BC). Boomkin apparently get 4% hit from talents in wrath as well as 3% from improved faerie fire. A dranei ele shammy gets 7% between talents, ToW, and racial, so needs nearly no hit on gear. With a boomkin and shammy together in a raid, thats' 6% from raid buffs/debuffs, and with 3%+ from talents and racial raiders won't any spell hit at all from gear. I'm going off the latest talent trees, which do seem a bit stale.

What I wonder is if ToW no longer stack, what will a 5-boxing shammy team drop for the other 4 fire totems? Back to searing, a la deadmines?

[Drakkun]

ToW has already been changed in the beta and no longer has +hit. It has been changed to 3% crit and 6% spell damage.

[Suvega]

I can't believe anyone actually thought that this would stack in WOTLK.

lol, 10 shaman = 30% crit 60% dmg. Are you serious? lolol

Fix, not nerf. Never intended to stack raid wide.

[kayb]

As a shammyboxer this is disappointing to everyone of course, but I gotta say as a raider this is a great thing. I'm assuming the same thing will be true for moonkin aura (raid-wide, non stack). There really isnt room for more than 1 elemental shammy, and 1 moonkin druid in a 25-man raid. And those raid slots are gonna get more valuable with a new class as well. Moonkin druids especially have been difficult to justify in Sunwell raids, since they only boost their party marginally. They just don't have the dps to be more valuable than a shadowpriest for example. Shadowpriest has a similar dps (slightly lower) but they give so much more back to the party. Given the choice of 2 shadowpriests + 1 elemental shammy, or 1sp + 1mk + 1ele shammy, the moonkin has gotten the boot most often. Felmyst and Muru has to take some of the blame naturally, where Mass Dispel is the shit.

The raid-wide, non-stackable buffs are there to make sure that it's valuable to bring at least 1 of the MKs or Ele shammys, since their buffs are now 2-3 times as valuable. It's also a way to make raid composition interesting and to avoid too much single class stacking. Stacking warlocks hasn't been a bad idea in The Burning Crusade to put it bluntly.

[Otlecs]

I don't have anything to contribute here, but I just wanted to say that I'm really enjoying the discourse in this thread, especially as I have an up-and-coming shammy team and refuse to read anything about WotLK before October when things are likely to be closer to their final implementation.

The non-personal, fact-based discussion epitomises what I love about this community