Time: 22:54:31 CET 13:54:31 PST 16:54:31 EST 06:54:31 Seoul 05:54:31 Beijing
You are here: Home / News / World of Warcraft: Shaman burst damage and Priests nerfed in new patch notes
NEWS
Shaman burst damage and Priests nerfed in new patch notes
New public test realm patch notes reveal new changes to reduce RNG damage in arena.
By Brendan 'trance' C
Feb 20, 2008 05:23
New public test realm patch notes reveal new changes to reduce RNG damage in arena.
Blizzard recently announced they were nerfing Icy Veins and Bloodlust stacking, new notes show nerfs to Priests' Power Infusion(PI) ability, as well as dwarf priest's chastise, and focused will.
List of Priest patch notes:
Priests
Chastise no longer disorients the target, but now is instant cast and roots the target for 2 seconds.
Fear Ward is now usable while in Shadow form.
Focused Will now reduces damage by 2/3/4%, down from 1/3/5%.
Inner Focus: Chastise now benefits from Inner Focus. In addition, Starshards no longer consumes Inner Focus.
Power Infusion: Infuses the target with power, increasing their spell haste by 20% for 15 seconds.
Power Word: Shield: Using low ranks of this spell will now be penalized the same way healing spells are penalized.
Prayer of Mending: This spell will now fade from players who leave or enter an instance, change continents, or exit the game.
Reflective Shield: The reactive damage from this talent no longer breaks crowd control affects which break on taking damage.
Shadowguard: No longer consumes the charge of Inner Focus when triggered.
Silent Resolve:This talent now affects Surge of Light, Power Infusion, Inspiration, Spirit Tap, Blackout, Levitate, Shackle Undead, Touch of Weakness, Hex of Weakness, and Symbol of Hope.
Touch of Weakness: No longer consumes the charge of Inner Focus when triggered.It will also function properly even when the Priest with Touch of Weakness on is silenced or stunned.
Vampiric Touch: Casting lower ranks of this spell is now properly penalized like other healing and damage effects.
Shamans have a nerf to their burst damage, in that Elemental Mastery and Nature Swiftness now share a 10 second cooldown. This nerf coupled with the nerf to Priest's PI(Power Infusion) means a significant reduction in elemental shaman burst damage, which is one of the reasons that the 2345/2346 combos are extremely effective in 5v5 arena.
List of Shaman changes:
Shaman
Call of Thunder: (Rank 5) now gives 5% critical strike chance.
Earth Shield: Mana cost reduced roughly in half, and charges reduced from 10 to 6.
Elemental Focus: This buff will no longer be removed when Shamanistic Focus is triggered.
Ghost Wolf: Cast time reduced to 2 seconds, down from 3.
Healing Grace: This talent now reduces the chance your spells will be dispelled by 10/20/30%.The resistance to being dispelled modifier from this talent now applies correctly to Water Breathing.
Nature’s Swiftness and Elemental Mastery now share a 10 second cooldown.
Rockbiter Weapon: Tooltip and error messages have been adjusted slightly.
Stormstrike has a new icon.
Totem timer icons will now show up under your player portrait when you cast totem spells. Right-clicking a totem timer icon will destroy that totem.
Tremor Totem now pulses every 3 seconds, down from 4.
The Shaman spell Fire Nova Totem will no longer sometimes detonate without doing any damage.
Paladins receieved one interesting buff, their "Turn Undead" spell was changed to "Turn Evil", meaning they can fear undead and demons now. Undead players are still considered humanoids, but Warlock pets are considered demons meaning they can be feared for 10 seconds in PvP by Paladins.
Test Realm Patch notes are available here.
List of Priest patch notes:
Priests
Chastise no longer disorients the target, but now is instant cast and roots the target for 2 seconds.
Fear Ward is now usable while in Shadow form.
Focused Will now reduces damage by 2/3/4%, down from 1/3/5%.
Inner Focus: Chastise now benefits from Inner Focus. In addition, Starshards no longer consumes Inner Focus.
Power Infusion: Infuses the target with power, increasing their spell haste by 20% for 15 seconds.
Power Word: Shield: Using low ranks of this spell will now be penalized the same way healing spells are penalized.
Prayer of Mending: This spell will now fade from players who leave or enter an instance, change continents, or exit the game.
Reflective Shield: The reactive damage from this talent no longer breaks crowd control affects which break on taking damage.
Shadowguard: No longer consumes the charge of Inner Focus when triggered.
Silent Resolve:This talent now affects Surge of Light, Power Infusion, Inspiration, Spirit Tap, Blackout, Levitate, Shackle Undead, Touch of Weakness, Hex of Weakness, and Symbol of Hope.
Touch of Weakness: No longer consumes the charge of Inner Focus when triggered.It will also function properly even when the Priest with Touch of Weakness on is silenced or stunned.
Vampiric Touch: Casting lower ranks of this spell is now properly penalized like other healing and damage effects.
Shamans have a nerf to their burst damage, in that Elemental Mastery and Nature Swiftness now share a 10 second cooldown. This nerf coupled with the nerf to Priest's PI(Power Infusion) means a significant reduction in elemental shaman burst damage, which is one of the reasons that the 2345/2346 combos are extremely effective in 5v5 arena.
List of Shaman changes:
Shaman
Call of Thunder: (Rank 5) now gives 5% critical strike chance.
Earth Shield: Mana cost reduced roughly in half, and charges reduced from 10 to 6.
Elemental Focus: This buff will no longer be removed when Shamanistic Focus is triggered.
Ghost Wolf: Cast time reduced to 2 seconds, down from 3.
Healing Grace: This talent now reduces the chance your spells will be dispelled by 10/20/30%.The resistance to being dispelled modifier from this talent now applies correctly to Water Breathing.
Nature’s Swiftness and Elemental Mastery now share a 10 second cooldown.
Rockbiter Weapon: Tooltip and error messages have been adjusted slightly.
Stormstrike has a new icon.
Totem timer icons will now show up under your player portrait when you cast totem spells. Right-clicking a totem timer icon will destroy that totem.
Tremor Totem now pulses every 3 seconds, down from 4.
The Shaman spell Fire Nova Totem will no longer sometimes detonate without doing any damage.
Paladins receieved one interesting buff, their "Turn Undead" spell was changed to "Turn Evil", meaning they can fear undead and demons now. Undead players are still considered humanoids, but Warlock pets are considered demons meaning they can be feared for 10 seconds in PvP by Paladins.
Test Realm Patch notes are available here.
RELATED NEWS
40 comments
Loading comments...
Most read last month
Most discussed last month
They could take away the burst damage, fine. But at least give us something in trade. Elemental shamans are definitely one of the weakest specs for 2v2 and 3v3 and considering droodrog and the drainburn teams are so popular in 5v5 nowadays, it really makes me reconsider if it's an elemental shaman I want to play in the future.
It's for a reason ,that in almost all teams, one of the players have the enemy shaman as focus target, to see where the burst is coming. It's not THAT hard to prevent with communication. Keep CoT on him, intercept him, silencing shot, cyclone, counterspell, fear, there are so many ways to counter it. Heck even a shaman on the opposite team could shock him or grounding the incoming damage.
Burst Dmg IS the only thing we are good at - we are easily locked down and to make it short - we just suck at 2's and 3's
Speccing instant ghost wolf won't help us ele's at all, it screws up the spec and my guesses are enh shms prolly won't have much use of it either, since it doesn't purge off movement impairing effects.
Tremor Totem buff is ok, but you still can be feared out of it's range I guess.
So long for unneccessary nerfs and useless buffs.
Hopefully this all is part of some master plan to give us some survivability skill - but seeing that there was no shm love for a very long time, I guess it's not.
You will still be able to do the same amount of spells that you normally would, you just don't get a guaranteed crit on one of them.
70% pushback resistance is also way over the top seeing as you're the only caster who gets a benefit like that on your set. Everyone else has to spend a large amount of talent points to recieve a benefit similar to that of your set (12 points in fire for mages, 17 points in destro for locks). Nerfing it to 50% is a good compromise since it'll allow hunters and to some extent warriors to lock you down somewhat as efficiently as they can other casters.
The very reason why elemental shamans are so strong currently is that all it takes for them to get a kill is to be left alone to cast one lightningbolt followed by the NS nuke and earthshock.
Good shamans like you gets several opportunities like that and as such you will still be highly efficient after the patch, you just won't be able to RNG gib people by yourself so easily anymore which I really don't see as a bad thing :p
Also, the tremor buff is huge. 3 second pulse makes it virtually impossible to utilize fear against any team with a shaman.
One pummel or cs on any nature spell leaves us with fire totems, flame shock & frost shock.
Or going melee.
But you're right. 70 % pushback resist as set bonus is way too strong. It should be in the talent tree.
Not that it would change the fact that every half decent and/or sober melee will still lock you down in 5's.
I still believe that shamans will get some nice buff in 2.4, since all they have down until now is making our prime role (nuke) weaker, and "buffing" totem ticks & ghost wolf *cough cough* useless *cough*
Shamans are not even remotely as easy to lock down as a warlock, or to some extent as a mage.
The reason behind that is that if a shaman is being zerged he can play very support oriented, keeping tremor and WF up, purging everyone down and keeping poisons off whilst controlling the opponents through earthshocks.
Going on a well played elemental shaman is simply incredibly risky since not only are you feeding him mana but he's also an incredibly hard target to kill since he can stop spellcasts with es and grounding whilst healing himself whenever his healers are in trouble. Sure you can pummel/cs him then but for the most part cs will go on the paladin and the pummel only locks him out for a short amount of time after which he can spam heal again.
Shamans are just much better tanks in arena than everyone seems to think.
If you're thinking that a mage or a lock can't play support oriented if beeing tried to"lock down", then you're missing something. Fear is support oriented, so is CS, Frost nova, pet nova, spell lock, you name it.
Still, IMO, a warlock is harder to kill than a mage than a shaman. All those classes have means to divert dmg from them far better than shamans.
And for the burst dmg, its not great. Its easy to counter, and people say it only takes a few seconds, yes in theory, but you need to set yourself up for it. It's only with insane RNG, that you kill someone like people Inactive tries to convince everyone, hell Inactives own shaman jumped the band-wagon probaby just to stop hearing Inactive complain about shamans and how OP they are when they kill him (not even taking his own class balance issues into account).
In 3v3 when you play with an elemental shaman, against dru/rogue/lock/warrior. Anything with 3 of those you only get 1 shot at killing a target if you play with war/healer, and that gets pretty much reduced to 0 after this nerf.
I've never thought that PI on elemental shamans was particularly overpowered since it's very easy to handle as long as your team has a somewhat decent awareness.
The amount of instant burst however, is unparalleled by any other class in the game (pom pyro comes close) and nerfing it slightly (by removing 100% crit on one of the spells, which still leaves your 30 something crit chance) is a good way to go about it the way I see it.
Them nerfing PI along with it however is a rather weird move imo but then again changing PI to haste with the new gcd change does allow for more applications to the spell so maybe it won't be so bad after all.
As for Hellcore. If you really think that warlocks are harder to kill than a shaman I got no idea what game you're playing because that really is quite far from the reality since warlocks have virtually no mobility and no interrupt or grounding.
Really, the NS+EM+CL was our trademark and how we often killed people. It's like a shatter combo for a mage, although we only get 1 shot during a 5v5 match. And yes, I can still get the same amount of spells off, but making the 'finisher' no longer a 100% crit, doesn't that actually make RNG a bigger factor?
Not everyone plays with a class that can cure curses and you know how simple it is to prevent a shaman from doing damage with such a spamable ability like CoT. Giving us less anti spell-pushback only makes it even harder.
Just ignore the crap I said about wl survivability.
Shamans are an abandoned class
But on a serious note: Yes the should look at it because what they are doing with Shamans and Priests feels wrong... very wrong.
Yes, shamans in general aren't very well represented when looking at the big picture across all brackets but that is first and foremost due to elemental fitting very poorly into 2v2 and to some extent 3v3.
Restoration shamans actually work very well in 2v2 (better than priests for the most part) and are also very viable in 3v3 whilst generally being dropped for a priest or druid for 5v5.
The hard part about looking at shamans across all brackets is that they wish for 2 specs to be 100% viable in all brackets, which is a luxury practically no other class has (rogues have multiple viable specs though).
If you look at priests, shadow is only viable in 2v2, disc is viable in 3v3 and 5v5 and does ok in 2v2 but is far from the strength of most other healers.
For paladins holy is viable in 5v5 pretty much exclusively, allthough it does function in 3v3 whilst retribution has become very viable in 3v3.
For druids restoration is virtually the only choice, they do have the possibility for slight spec variations, such as the dreamstate/resto spec but at the end of the day they function as a resto druid.
I just don't see the point in elemental shamans complaining about smaller brackets to be honest since there's been multiple other classes that have been close to useless in particular brackets and they've adapted.
The way elemental shamans should adapt is to respec resto for 2v2 and 3v3, just like warlocks spec sl/sl or affliction for said brackets over felguard for 5v5.
As for the priest changes.
The change to chastise goes a long way to making it somewhat balanced compared to other racials allthough it's still incredibly strong.
The PI change is interresting and is very likely to provide a good boost to 2346 and drainburn teams since by using it on the paladin they will have an easier time dealing with the control and pressure of all the droodrog teams.
In 3v3, resto shamans are completely limited by class composition (mostly warrior, paladin.) If ghost wolf would remove snare effects, then I think that would change considerably... but we can't grab something away from the all powerful druid.
5v5 elemental was the true chance for shaman to be highly competitive, and provide something better then any other class. Now, why would you bring one, if their burst is nerfed, and you could bring good CC instead? Resto is still not viable, even after these changes.
Oh and Raphiron... I love how you left out the fact that respecing between brackets for shaman will also require two different sets of gear to be highly competitive. I cry for the warlocks that only need to respec.... really.....
3rd or 4th after who? Resto shamans are a better choice for pretty much anything but a rogue compared to a priest.
The reason behind that is how water shield was changed last patch. That coupled with some drink abuse and restoration shamans can last longer than pretty much any healer.
You're right that shamans don't provide cc in 5v5 but they provide more anti cc and anti damage than any other class.
Like it or not, caster damage is what kills for the majority of setups in 5v5 and no class comes close to countering that as well as a shaman can with earthshocks and grounding. Add tremor totem to diminish fear being a real factor and I still feel that shamans will have their place in 5v5 just like they do now. They just won't be able to consistently drop any class from 60% to 0.
I was, like most ppl i guess, expecting a buff for ele shammys, instead they are nerfing them even further... unbelieveble
fixing the rogues and the druids would be a more effective change in bringing back the balance to the arena matches. Especially in 2v2, good druids dont even need gear to get to 2k, all they need is a warrior or a hunter.
A huge buff(s) would be needed to make up for these nerfs. I don't think he will understand the gravity of the nerfs he has put in place until Shaman have a weak showing in the April 3v3.
Additionally, I think more and more that he is concerned about making changes from a marketing standpoint (as a way of offering a slightly different game) than about making a balanced game.
the shared cd on EM and NS isn realy a big thing, wont bother highrated pvp in anyway.
just jump of the whine train and start to learn the class.
Besides, this is one of many PTR (YES PTR, TEST REALM ANYONE?) builds before 2.4 goes live. I believe many changes is yet to come, maybe revert this one as they did with warlocks drain mana? Or maybe buff something else.