Hi!

We are making some upcoming changes to the Elemental shaman tree. Our goal was to streamline a few of the utility-based talents while giving shamans a little more damage scaling in later tiers of gear.

* 1) Unrelenting Storm – reduced from 5 points to 3 points. Bonus is 4/8/12% of your Intellect returned as mana.
* 2) Elemental Warding – now reduces all damage (not just Nature, Fire and Frost) taken by 2/4/6%
* 3) Elemental Shields – this talent has been removed, since its effects were combined with Elemental Warding.
* 4) Storm, Earth and Fire – reduced from 5 points to 3 points, but keeps around the same net benefit. In addition to current effects, also increases Wind Shock range. The damage bonus to Flame Shock has increased to 60% at 3 ranks. Storm, Earth and Fire has been moved up the tree as well.
* 5) Shamanism – this is a new 5 point talent in the old Storm, Earth and Fire position. Your Lightning Bolt and Lava Burst gain an additional percentage of your bonus damage. We have not finalized the numbers, but it will probably be something like 10% for Lightning Bolt and 20% for Lava Burst at max ranks.

These changes will be available in the next minor content patch, and are in addition to the AE changes mentioned previously.

AE changes:

There is definitely a lot of AE (area effect damage) going on in World of Warcraft dungeon runs at the moment. We’re not too worried about it for now – on the contrary it’s nice to see so many people doing the level-up dungeons on the way to level 80. If we find that AE tank + AE damage strategy (with no sheeping, sapping or other crowd control) is the only way people are running heroics and raids, then we’ll probably make some changes, but for now we’re content to just see what happens.

Having said all that, we feel like a few groups are being left out of the AE fun which makes them of less utility in the 5-player dungeons. We aren’t able to provide a lot of details yet, but here are some upcoming changes we’re making.

Shaman – we are removing the threat component from Fire Nova Totem and Magma Totem and increasing the damage from Magma Totem. This should provide the Elemental shamans in particular with some formidable AE.

Rogue – we are removing the cooldown from Fan of Knives and adjusting the damage calculation slightly to make daggers more useful for this ability.

Druid – we are adding Swipe (Cat) as a baseline ability.

As is the case with most multi-target abilities, these three should be something you want to use when faced with groups, but never against single targets. Fan of Knives and Swipe, for example, don’t grant combo points so they should never be a core part of the rotation against single targets like most bosses.

These changes will be available in the next minor content update, so keep an eye out for the next PTR push.