Give Me Patch Notes and I’ll Give You Totems!

thehammer

As I’m sure many of you know by now, the PTR is live bringing with it a wonderous amount of changes to pretty much everyone. I’m going to focus today on a few things, Shaman changes and tier 10 set bonus for Restoration Shaman. First let’s take a look at the set bonuses for tier 10 Restoration shall we?

Shaman T10 Restoration 2P Bonus – Your Riptide spell grants 20% spell haste for your next spellcast.

Shaman T10 Restoration 4P Bonus – Your Chain Heal critical strikes cause the target to heal for 25% of the healed amount over until cancelled.

Hmmm, interesting set bonus. Two piece gives you more haste very much like how Tidal Waves reduces the cast time of your Healing Wave by 30%. Personally I love haste, and rolling Riptide should be a part of any Shaman’s normal healing arsenal so this set bonus really appeals to me. The four piece bonus is also very intriguing. The wording is a little weird and so it will have room for interpretation. Is it placing a HoT on a target for 25% of the amount healed similar to how Earthliving Weapon places a HoT on the target? Will it give an instant heal for 25% of the total? My moneys on a HoT. Personally I like these set bonuses. I think they are solid additions to our repertoire. Looking at them though we can take a guess at what type of damage we’re going to be seeing… I’m guessing lots of raid damage. Giving us haste, adding an additional heal component to our chain heal this just screams to me tons of raid wide damage (thoughts of Sun Well suddenly jump to mind). Now I’m looking forward to the aesthetics of the set. Hopefully we wont look like a mix between bugs and sand people.

So our set bonuses are shaping up nicely (which is pretty par for the course for us at this point). Lets swing our attention over to the patch notes shall we?

Not much is changing as of yet, of course as you know that may or may not change. For now though here are the bits though.

Orc and troll shamans now have their own unique totem art.

Shamans

* Fire Nova Totem: This totem has been replaced with a new spell, Fire Nova, which is available at the same ranks as the old Fire Nova Totem. Existing characters will automatically learn this new spell in place of the totem. With a Fire Totem active, shamans will be able to use Fire Nova (fire magic) to emit the same area-of-effect damage as the old Fire Nova Totem from the active Fire Totem, not consuming the totem in the process. Fire Nova will activate a 1.5-second global cooldown when used and has a 10-second spell cooldown. The caster must be within 30 yards of the totem to use this ability, but does not need to be within line of sight of the totem.

I’ll leave the totem art aside for a second, first lets talk about Fire Nova.

This one is… interesting. Basically getting rid of a totem that some of us were using to help with AE damage in fights like Thorim’s arena. It lets us not have to cast a different totem, but instead we can center an AE spell off our current fire totem. This still requires you to run into melee and drop said totem, but it’s a nice touch. I can run in set my totems and then when needed blast out some AE damage to help thing the gaggle of bad guys we’re killing. I’ll have to play with it more, but so far so good.

Now, onto totem art. Orcs and Trolls it has been long overdue that you guys get your own. Lets take a look at them real fast

3.3-orc-totems

The Orc one is pretty gnarly. Not only is it a totem but it can double as an axe! It seems to fit to me.

3.3-troll-earth-totem

Trolls are pretty cool too. Troll fetish hung from the totems looks like the shadow hunter’s totems in WC3.

All in all pretty good job. Now if I may I’d like to take a second to rage about another set of totems. The Dwarf Shaman Totems. Now I know that Cataclysm (or at least 4.0) is a while away, they… bother me.

3.3-dwarf-totem

I understand the concept behind it. It’s a hammer with Gryphon feathers. I’ll be honest though, as someone who is going to race change into a Dwarf Shaman I’m a little disappointed. I mean I can see the correlation between axes and Orcs, fetish masks and Trolls and I can understand the correlation of hammers and Dwarves… kinda. When I was at blizzcon and they were talking about bringing Dwarves into the fold of Shamanism, they mentioned making sure they had unique totems. They said they wouldn’t be kegs (which made us all sad) but that they were looking at maybe rune stones. I look at the above totems and that doesn’t scream Dwarf to me. Had they been chunks of stone with glowing colored runes in them I’d have been content. I mean look at the Draenei’s totems

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They pretty well scream Draenei. They have holographic rings around oddly shaped stone with the element present above it. Even the *Now* Tauren Totems fit their race

totems

So… why can’t Dwarves get something stone related? I mean think about it. They live in the mountains, they have a racial ability called Stoneform, they are known for their Gryphons, but only one clan (Wildhammer) and they aren’t playable, but we hear about is how they are awesome miners. Sure we hear about their forges and smithy’s but I think the totems could be a bit better suited to the race (read more metal/stone and less wood please).

Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy I can finally be a Dwarf Shaman. I’ve wanted to be a Dwarf Shaman for a long long time. I thank Blizzard for that, but that doesn’t mean I won’t weep a little bit every time I drop a set of hammers on the ground. Trolls and Orcs won out with some pretty good totem design and Tauren get to be unique snowflakes again with theirs. Overall I’m happy with it. Giving each race’s Shaman’s a unique totem is a good step. But if Goblin Shaman get cool looking gear totems, I don’t know what I’m going to do. Maybe throw my hammer at them. Maybe cast Wrath of Carpentry.

Although maybe I can rename myself Captain Hammer and invite people back to my Hammer Cave to show them my Hammer….

So what do you guys think so far? Like the new totems, dislike the new totems? Like the set bonuses?

Until next time, Happy Healing

Sig

Images courtesy of Dr. Horrible sing along blog, WoW.com, and WoW guru

11 thoughts on “Give Me Patch Notes and I’ll Give You Totems!”

  1. I don’t want to rain on the Dwarf Totem parade, but there’s only one clan of Dwarves according to lore who can be shamans. Funnily enough, you mentioned them… the Wildhammer Clan, closely tied to gryphons. That’s why they have the gryphon feathers, because its that clan that is ‘reentering’ the Alliance fully and giving us access to the Shamans of the dwarvish ilk.

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  2. I feel exactly the same way, Lodur. I am planning on race changing into a Dwarf on my Shaman (finally!) and the totems were lackluster. They “fit” in the loosest sense of the word, but I expected more out of the art department. I didn’t like the Draenei totems at first, but they grew on me, so maybe the Dwarf ones will, too. But for right now, I’m hoping we get a revamp, or at the very least, a pallette-swap.
    .-= Professor Beej´s last blog ..Say No to the Burrito, College Kids! =-.

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  3. @ perrin I understand that things are going to be shifting around, but I did look for confirmation that the Wildhammer Clan will be rejoining the alliance (blue posts or announcements) and couldn’t find any, but I hope so. Because it would be a huge lore event undoing what was done in The War of Three Hammers.

    There is a lot of possibilities for how the Dwarves got back into Shamanism. Wildhammer’s rejoining (since they still practice a form of shamanism) Brann unlocking the history of his people through knowledge of the titans and rekindling the shamanistic ways through historical discovery, or maybe taught by their Earthen cousins (Iron Dwarves and Earthen cast shaman spells in northrend). We’ll see how the story ties into it. As far as the totems I know it’s my own opinion on them but I feel like I was promised a pony and then the pony was taken away from me is all. =D

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  4. I am still battling with myself on whether to switch to dwarf or not. I do like the idea of it but then again the draenei model has kinda grown on me, now if only I could get rid of the tail.

    As to the totems I kinda like the hammer thing, it is different and while the rune stone idea would be nice it would seem reminiscent of the summoning stones that are placed by instances. Almost makes me think of a high elf thing rather than a dwarf thing.
    .-= skarrde´s last blog ..We can Haz Pengu? =-.

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  5. I can see where the frustrations would come from the dwarf totems. Personally, I was always hoping for a cool animation of the totems being pulled up from the ground, so they would almost look like shaped ore deposits from the ground. THAT would make me consider race changing.

    What I’m curious, and hesitant about, is the Fire Nova change. I PvP as enhancement on my shaman a lot, and Imp. FNT is an oft-used talent. Nice to throw down while a rogue is on me and hopefully interrupt his stun rotation. I like the idea (a lot, actually) of it being an instant cast spell based around a fire totem, but I worry about that PvP utility being taken out.

    Re: Set bonuses, the 4pc “until cancelled” is elusive. Still working my own gears about that one. I like the riptide/haste bonus, but I don’t have enough haste on my gear yet to really see a big jump from that yet.

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  6. The only thing I am having issues with is thati was told that goblins can be shaman in cataclysm. I have not heard a single glimmer of talk about goblin totems 🙁

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  7. There’s a video floating around of the Dwarven totems, and they do have particle effects. In fact, they look MUCH better in action than the pictures would suggest.

    Imagine how the Tauren and Draenei totems would look without their effects… ugh!

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  8. Didn’t the Wildhammer clan join the Alliance in BC? Their WoWWiki page says that they’ve joined the Alliance after being neutral (http://www.wowwiki.com/Wildhammer_clan)

    Anyway, I like the totems because of their Wildhammer influence. I suspect Ironforge dwarves will learn Shamanism from the Wildhammers.

    Also, the totem is very similar to the Ironforge racial shield, seen in a wallpaper made back in 2005 (http://www.freakygaming.com/gallery/game_wallpapers/world_of_warcraft/dwarf_racial_shield)

    So taking those things together I think the totems are a good mesh of Ironforge and Wildhammer… perhaps not strikingly obvious, but reasonable after you research a bit.

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