Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Unconfirmed "fake" patch notes for 2.4

World of Raids has made a few posts lately regarding 2.4 patch notes that may or may not be fake. Here's the parts that pertain to Shaman specifically:

Shaman
- Lightning Shield mana cost reduced and now grants Nature spell damage for each remaining charge.
- Water Shield now has a small mana cost and now grants mana every 5 sec for each remaining charge.
- The spell damage coefficient of Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning spells has been slightly reduced.
- Ghost Wolf now frees the Shaman from movement impairing effects when cast, renders the Shaman immune to polymorph effects and can no longer be dispelled.
- Windfury Weapon now only grants 1 extra attack and the bonus attack power granted has been reduced by approximately 19%, but the chance to proc has been increased. Overall shamans should see more consistent dps.
- Windfury Totem: The attack power bonus has been reduced by approximately 46%, but the chance to proc has been slightly increased. Overall the totem should see a slight decrease in effectiveness.
- The bonus that Frostbrand Weapon and Flametongue Weapon receive from bonus spell damage effects has been slightly increased.
- Frostbrand Weapon: The movement slowing effect has been increased to 40%, from 25%.
- Bloodlust/Heroism: The duration has been reduced to 30 sec, from 40 sec and the cooldown reduced to 5 min, from 10 min.
- Elemental Weapons: This talent now increases the damage caused by Rockbiter Weapon by 10/20/30% and the attack power bonus of Windfury Weapon by 15/30/45%.
- Stormstrike now grants a 30% spell damage bonus for the next 2 Frost, Fire or Nature spells cast by the Shaman.
- Healing Grace: This talent now also reduces the chance your Restoration spells will be dispelled by 10/20/30%.
- Focused Mind: This talent now also gives your spell criticals a 33/66/100% chance of reducing the cast time of your next healing spell by 0.5 sec.
- Earthshield now has a 20 second cooldown, but the mana cost has been reduced by approximately 50%
(from here)

- 30% dispel resist on that threat redux nature talent
- Earth shield mana cost reduced by 50%?
- Tremor totem and poison cleanse totem reduced from 5s pulses to 3s pulses (!!!!)
(from here)

Now, I have to have my say on these changes. While at first glance things like a passive +nature bonus is nice, it in fact will turn out to be a nerf. Now bear with me. Take a look at the reduced coefficient on Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning. Obviously, a change to Lightning Shield would help to keep our DPS the same, but their presents another problem, and that's picking between either the same DPS we had before by using Lightning Shield, or longevity using Water Shield.

I will not comment about Windfury. Blizzard is very good at being vague with how they word stuff, and there's no point discussing it if these changes turn out to be true. The increase in frequency for cleansing totems to pulse is definitely a nice thought, as well as the changes to Ghost Wolf, Elemental Weapons, and Flametongue / Frostbrand (all but the changes to Elemental Weapons are things I have fought for in the past)

Now one will say "But Dane, why are you talking about fake patch notes? If it's white, it aint right!"

Well for one, the thing that adds credence to these notes is the fact that a lot of what is in them did end up popping up from Blues on the forums. (The combat log changes, the Earth Shield and Nature's Grace changes, etc...) so it makes it hard to discredit these "fake" notes, especially since they came out before the blues even began discussing what was coming in 2.4

Hopefully the reducing to Lightning spell coefficients and the changes to Windfury don't go in. Everything else seems rather good, and helpful, but to change these to things, (especially after the uphill battle we faced the first time the Lightning Bolt coefficient was reduced) would be purely silly, in my opinion.

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