Addicted to Heals

The Under Development section of the World of Warcraft official site has had some exciting changes — I’m sure all the druid players have seen the new bear and cat skins. They’re gorgeous, though I really wish they’d ditch the mane on the tauren cats. Onashne’s a girlcow!

Now give me a tree form that looks like a tree, maybe with painted markings on it like the new bear forms, and I’ll be thrilled.

There are some pretty cool changes being worked on for shamans, too — primarily changes to totems.

1. The Global Cooldown. Right now, it takes several precious seconds to drop totems because of the GCD. Ghostcrawler (a.k.a. the coolest Blizz employee on earth) has said that they want to change the totem cooldown so that shamans can drop all four totems at once, without waiting. This means macros — many, many macros. One button, all the totems down, move, one button, etc.? I might actually start using them on something other than boss fights or when bored in Arathi Basin.

This is really handy because we’re the only class with a stationary buff — everyone else’s attach either to the targeted player (priest and druid buffs, for example) or follow the player or their pet (paladin auras, warlock’s Blood Pact). Hunters are different, like shamans, but their buffs are nearly all passive, so there’s no putting stuff down, picking it back up, etc.

So in raids, or in PVP, totems will be super easy to drop, even on trash/in the midst of battle.

2. Survivability. Right now, with the exception of Stoneclaw Totem, pretty much all of our totems can be taken out in one hit — by a squirrel. Which makes totems in PVP pretty much a waste of mana except in certain situations (dropping Earthbind on top of a flag carrier, elemental totems because people still don’t get how they work, etc.).

They’ll still be killable — but they want to make them a bit tougher so that we’re not wasting all our mana on totems when we could be wasting all our mana on Riptide, Cleansing and Purging.

3. Freeing up button space. So you have all these new macros to drop all your totems at once, but nowhere to put them? No worries, Sentry Totem is probably getting the axe (like the old Grace of Air Totem) — and has anyone ever used it? I know I haven’t. Fire Nova and Magma Totems may be combined. Maybe they’ll finally combine Mana Spring and Health Stream totems, too, like they were supposed to in 3.1?

They’re also talking about adding the elementals to any totem — this idea I do not like at all. These can be situational totems in PVP — I don’t want Rocky (YES THEY HAVE NAMES) popping out of Earthbind Totem and pulling Varian Wrynn when we’re still fighting off Alliance defenders, for example. And I certainly don’t want to waste Flamey’s 20-minute cooldown using Magma Totem on a couple of Alterac Rams when I’d rather save it for that huge pack of Alliance down the road.

4. Pesky pets. As a macro-less hunter, this makes me very happy to say: Your macros aren’t gonna work on our totems anymore! [insert raspberry here]

Ghostcrawler and the community team don’t seem to know quite how this will work, but they want to fix things so that pets must be directed by their players to kill totems, manually. No more auto-kill stuff to destroy our precious babies … um, I mean, totems. Which will be very nice, especially on the distraction front.

Now, given that promised combination of totems never happened last time (aside from the cleansing totems), I’m not holding my breath, but this will make using totems a LOT easier both in PVE, smallscale PVP and in the battlegrounds … like the new Isle of Conquest.