Shaman

Blizzard previously stated they weren’t happy with Totemic Restoration and were looking to change or replace it.  That changes come with the announced Totemic Persistance talent.

New talent: Totemic Persistence. Summoning a second totem of the same
element no longer causes the first totem to be destroyed. Only one totem
can benefit from this effect at a time.

This talent will be particularly useful for resto shamans who either want to double stack healing stream with healing tide totems, or just don’t want to lose out on mana tide, if they happen to drop it right before an unexpected damage spike the requires healing tide.  And there is also the case where resto shamans are so used to placing healing stream on cool down that they accidentally clip a healing tide or mana tide totem.

From a DPS perspective, the initial reaction was about how great it would be to drop both searing totem and fire elemental totems together,  especially for a burn phase with heroism/bloodlust, however Blizzard is already clarified that this talent will not work for fire totems.

Nonetheless, I suspect this talent will get the most use by resto shamans so they don’t lose out on the benefits of their mana tide or healing tide  full durations.

An interesting new resto Shaman glyph has hit the PTR – Glyph of Eternal Earth.  This major glyph has the change to add a charge to Earth Shield when the Shaman casts Lightning Bolt.

Since a Lightning Bolt costs 4260 mana and refreshing Earth Shield costs 11,400 mana, I could see some situations where a Shaman could use this, especially on fights where there is time to DPS.  The unfortunate thing is the true value of this would only be when used in conjunction with the Telluric Currents glyph, but that would cost the Resto Shaman 2 of the 3 major glyph slots.

Also, Lightning Bolts cannot cause the Earth Shield to have more than 9 charges – if it did, I could easily see Shaman’s LBing for the first 30 seconds of a fight – a time when raid damage is usually low on a fight, to build up a huge Earth Shield that would last an entire fight.

This glyph will be one to watch, particularly if it gets reworked to allow more charges or to work with Telluric Currents better.

Now that Healing Tide will be a baseline spell for all Shamans in 5.4, Blizzard needed to replace the tale previously occupied by Healing Tide.  They have announced a brand new talent called Rushing Streams.

This talent will increase the healing done by healing stream totem by 100% and cause the totem to heal to targets at once.  It will share the same talent tier as Ancestral Guidance and the newly redesigned Conductivity.

Because of this change, I expect that many resto shamans will be considering keeping their T15 tier bonus and take advantage of this talent.  However, because of this, I expect we could very likely see the T15 bonus nurfed by Blizzard shortly after T16 comes out and the new tier is available to resto shamans.

A few days ago Blizzard got Shamans all excited over the proposed change that Healing Tide was going to be baseline for all Shamans, instead of being a talent that Shamans needed to spec into. This is now official in the new patch notes.

Not only is Healing Tide being made into a baseline spell, it is also getting significantly buffed for 25M raiding, similar to how we saw Revival, Tranq etc buffed previously.  It will now heal up to 12 raid members in 25M, up from the previous five.

Healing Tide Totem is no longer a talent and is a baseline ability for all Shamans. Additionally, this totem will now heal 12 raid members (up from 5) when used in a 25-player instance.

This is a great change, because shamans will no longer have to automatically select Healing Tide as the talent for that tier for most fights.