Hey everyone, I’m not dead and I’ve been coming and going, looking at my blog wondering what to write about. I’ve written about some of the beta changes already and they’re continuing to evolve and seemingly every iteration something that was changed is reworked or removed. It’s actually kind of funny, aside from Glyph changes Shaman, like always, have been mostly absent from the list of class changes. What have we got? More glyph changes! These are only from the latest patch.
Minor Glyphs
Glyph of Earth Shield has been renamed to Glyph of Deluge. Your Chain Heal now has a watery appearance.
Glyph of Lightning Shield has been renamed to Glyph of the Lakestrider. You automatically gain Water Walking whenever you enter Ghost Wolf form.
Glyph of the Arctic Wolf has been renamed to Glyph of the Spectral Wolf.
Glyph of Thunderstorm has been reworked: Removes the knockback effect from your Thunderstorm spell.
Major Glyphs
Glyph of Chain Heal has been renamed to Glyph of Unstable Earth. Causes your Earthquake spell to also reduce the movement speed of affected targets by 40% for 3 sec.
Glyph of Telluric Currents has been reworked: Causes your Lightning Bolt to restore 10% of your mana when it strikes an enemy.
Glyph of Totemic Recall now returns the full mana cost of any recalled totems, rather than 50%.
Minor glyphs continue to be vanity glyphs, except for Thunderstorm. I’m sure there’s some reason why anyone would use that Thunderstorm Glyph. I know some people used it for Heroic Cho’Gall when people were worshipping. I saw a Shaman running around last night on the beta with the new Spectral Wolf glyph – this is what you look like.
The Major Glyphs are some interesting changes: The “new” Glyph of Unstable Earth causes Earthquake to reduce movement speed of affected targets by 40%. To me, this should’ve been in there to begin with. I found it rather foolish that it wasn’t, especially worse considering that when Earthquake was implemented it was Elemental’s 31 point talent choice, it’s supposed to add a lot of umph but as we all know it’s completely lackluster and I don’t see that changing.
The Telluric Currents glyph removing the damage reduction on Lightning Bolt is good, but hopefully it doesn’t mean that Elemental Shaman are expected to take this. Aside from Arcane Mages(unless they’ve changed in MoP), a DPS class shouldn’t have to really worry about mana while using their proper spell rotation. If you’re doing something incredibly wrong, then yeah, your mana should suffer, but in terms of “this is how you’re supposed to be using your spells and in what order”, Mana shouldn’t be a huge concern.
Glyph of Totemic Recall change makes sense, but I don’t see anyone taking it considering that all of our totems (minus Searing) are cooldowns – meaning we’ll want them out their full duration, it’d be pointless to sac them for a mana return at any point.
All that being said, my Shaman has been rather derelict on the beta. Last night was the most amount of time I’ve spent on the beta and I was playing a pre-made Monk the entire time. I did a few dungeon runs with it as a Windwalker (DPS spec), it was rather enjoyable though I was still learning the class and probably wasn’t playing it to it’s full potential.
