Patch 4.3 Changes

Disclaimer: This is all tentative right now, and things good change a lot before the actual patch hits.

So we got the first glimpses at what 4.3 might bring us. First and foremost, a buff to melee. Maybe now those mages won't be the top of recount every night. ...Right.

The Shaman changes seem standard for right now...

Shaman 

1) Flametongue Weapon no longer increases spell damage. It now increases all non-physical damage done by the wielder by 5%.  

2) Lightning Bolt has a new spell effect.  

3) Wind Shear now has a 25-second base cooldown, up from 6 seconds.

...except. OH SWEET BABY THRALL. My wind shear!!! 19 extra seconds?! Kill me now. Looking at this rationally (which I'd rather not), I can see why they did it, as elemental shaman currently had a big one-up on all the other ranged interrupts. BUT we don't play elemental shaman now do we? Thus as of this moment enhancement are the only melee without a reliable, 10second interrupt. And at this moment I will swear to you 80% of my raid utility is because of that interrupt. Buffing melee should help some of that, but still all melee classes get a buff, but only one (read: US) loose their interrupt. Harsh..."

Edit, based on 4.3 Changes Explained: "We made changes to Wind Shear to restrict the short cooldown version to the DPS shaman (who have the Reverberation talent) and make Restoration less potent at interrupting. We think Restoration is currently too useful in PvP relative to other healers because of a potent, ranged interrupt. We don’t think this nerf will have major PvE ramifications." So, is Ghost Crawler telling me that Reverberation will talent it back down to 6? Otherwise his "major PvE ramifications" prediction is about to be WAAAY off. Also, apparently elemental shammy can have interrupts, just not resto. Who knew. 

I thought I'd tackle each Enhance change one-by-one.

Enhancement

 1) Improved Lava Lash now causes Lava Lash to spread a Flame Shock debuff from the target to up to 4 nearby targets. This excludes crowd-controlled targets and those who already have a Flame Shock debuff from the shaman.
Hello AOE! Am I ever glad to see you. This brings the fire nova button mashing party down to just three. Instead of six or so. Sure it still takes more thought than "durr-cleave-durr," but it's an improvement to be sure.  

2) Improved Lava Lash no longer increases base Lava Lash damage by 15/30%. This increase has been rolled into the base Lava Lash skill.So did we loose that talent completely? If the talent buff goes into the skill, what replaces it? 

3) Mental Quickness has been redesigned. Instead of granting the shaman spell power, Mental Quickness now causes Enhancement shaman spells to behave as though the shaman has spell power equal to 55% of attack power. Enhancement shaman spells no longer benefit from spell power from other sources.Take that Eye of Purification, and take that all you spellpower-enhance theory crafters. I cling to my beautiful, beautiful attack power and agility-based weapons, and, you know what, so does Blizzard. Mwahaha.  (Remember what I said about being rational...) Edit: Straight from the man himself: "We changed Mental Quickness and Flametongue Weapon to hopefully put a nail in the coffin of Enhancement shaman using spellpower weapons. We want Enhancement using melee weapons."

That's it for now. I'm sure there will be much tweaking in the weeks to come.  Now if you excuse me, I have to go sob uncontrollably about the wind shear nerf.

Tier 13 Set Bonus

Tier 13 set bonuses were announced yesterday. I admit I'm optimistic but slightly puzzled by ours. 2-piece looks good at first glance. Lightning bolt is one of our staple attacks, so increasing it's damage is nice. However, is the 20% increase uniform if it's 2 stacks of maelstrom or 5 stacks? Or do the number of stacks matter? The blue post reads like maelstrom stack numbers don't matter, in which case will we be changing when we shoot off lightning bolt?

Right now we shoot lightning bolt at maelstrom weapon x 5, it's the most damage efficent. However, with the 20% increase it might be more efficent to have a slight cast time and shoot at 3 or 4 stacks of maelstrom. Probably not, but the possibility exists.

4-piece seems kind of lame aesthetically but good damage-wise. We can only have our wolves up every two minutes, but they're out for 30 seconds at a time. More maelstrom stacks means more lightning bolts, and they'll be super-charged because of 2-piece.

I'm not really a get out the sim and go crunch numbers type of gal. If I get super bored at work, maybe. Until then I'll leave it to others to calculate exactly what effect these bonuses will have on our DPS. These are just my non-math-backed thoughts.

I don't know why but I have this expectation that 4-piece sets should have some sort of cool aesthetic bonus. Like my wolves come out on fire or something. Fwoosh.