Upcoming Elemental Shaman changes

We are making some upcoming changes to the Elemental shaman tree. Our goal was to streamline a few of the utility-based talents while giving shamans a little more damage scaling in later tiers of gear.

1) Unrelenting Storm – reduced from 5 points to 3 points. Bonus is 4/8/12% of your Intellect returned as mana.
2) Elemental Warding – now reduces all damage (not just Nature, Fire and Frost) taken by 2/4/6%
3) Elemental Shields – this talent has been removed, since its effects were combined with Elemental Warding.
4) Storm, Earth and Fire – reduced from 5 points to 3 points, but keeps around the same net benefit. In addition to current effects, also increases Wind Shock range. The damage bonus to Flame Shock has increased to 60% at 3 ranks. Storm, Earth and Fire has been moved up the tree as well.
5) Shamanism – this is a new 5 point talent in the old Storm, Earth and Fire position. Your Lightning Bolt and Lava Burst gain an additional percentage of your bonus damage. We have not finalized the numbers, but it will probably be something like 10% for Lightning Bolt and 20% for Lava Burst at max ranks.

These changes will be available in the next minor content patch, and are in addition to the AE changes mentioned previously.

Q u o t e:
*gin*

Just what the doctor ordered.

Fixed it for ya.

The Unrelenting Storms change was less about trying to fix (non-existent) mana issues and more because that talent was pretty severely underbudget. You can't always compare talents between classes, but in this case you could find similar talents that gave a lot more for only 3 points.

We still have some plans to do more with totems, but those will be a little longer coming.

We'll have to monitor the LB vs. CL choices. It's not a bad situation if you favor CL more on group pulls and LB more on single targets. This will be a good thing to evaluate on the PTR.

As always, I'm just reporting changes that the class designers came up with as a group. Feel free to give them the credit for anything you like and me the blame for anything you don't.

We don't want to announce when this patch will go live for the reasons we usually don't announce such things. But you will see the changes in the next minor content patch, which is not the same as a hotfix or weekly maintenance, but isn't the same as a major content patch with a new raid either.