Update: Upon Patch 4.2 the 2 BIS Trinkets are

• Matrix Restabilizer
• Ancient Petrified Seed

While Fluid Death is still a very good trinket, Darkmoon Car Hurricane does no longer scale with Mastery and does only 7000 damage per charge (before resist).

Fluid Death

This seems like a nobrainer. Passive 380 Agility and hit rating – a very useful stat – make this trinket very good. Even with excess hit from Items you can reforge it to another stat. Even compared to heroic Trinkets, like Essence of the Cyclone (-17 Agility, and crit rating proc, instead of passive hit)

Fluid Death
Binds when picked up
Unique-Equipped
Trinket
Requires Level 85
Item Level 359
Equip: Increases your hit rating by 321 (2.67% @ L85).
Equip: Your melee and ranged attacks grant 38 Agility.  Lasts 15 sec, stacking up to 10 times.

Darkmoon Card: Hurricane

This trinket scales as you get better gear since the damage proc is affected by mastery. My concern compared to heroic Essence of Cyclone was that the loss of 44 Agility, but it seems to be a nonissue.

Darkmoon Card: Hurricane
Binds when equipped
Unique-Equipped
Trinket
+321 Agility
Requires Level 85
Item Level 359
Equip: Chance to strike your enemies for 3750 to 6250 Nature damage when dealing damage with melee or ranged attacks.

Here is are 2 Screenshots, the left one from my Feral Druid and the right one from my Enhancement Shaman.

As you can see, mastery beefs up the damage quite a bit. Let us look at an example fight and see what it means in numbers. You can find the original log here.

The fight took 160 seconds, 23 Lightning Strikes went off. this sums up at 1 proc each 7 seconds with roughly 13k average damage. As you can see this is quite a lot (actually a bit higher than previous tests), 7.6% of my total damage or 1880 damage per second.

As melee attack Lightning Strike uses our melee crit rating and it does not proc elemental devastation.you can see, the trinket does not use our spell critical strike rating, but the melee crit rating (treated as melee attack elemental devastation will not proc from it). On my previous tests the proc alone averaged between 4-6% of my total damage. Last week I started using this trinket and my damage went up a lot, as you can see in the log above more than 28k dps on argaloth for example.

In my opinion these 2 trinkets are the 2 best in slot (BiS).

Related Posts

• Does Feral Spirit benefit from Heroism?
• Patch 4.0.6: Enhancement Shaman Windfury Changes
• The Enhancement Shaman 4.0 Guide
• Patch 4.3 General and Enhancement Shaman changes
• A look at the first PTR 4.3 Changes

At first we have to enable the Pet Tab, so we can actually see their stats and then we will see how they are affected by heroism.

Feral Spirit

To enable the Pet Tab for Shamans use the following macro:

#showtooltip Feral Spirit
/run if not oldHasPetUI then oldHasPetUI = HasPetUI; HasPetUI = function() return true, false; end end PetTab_Update() ToggleCharacter(“PetPaperDollFrame”)

You can safely ignore the error message, once you cast feral spirit the tab becomes visible in the character pane.

Attack Speed

• no totems, no heroism: 1.5 Speed
• totems, no heroism: 1.36 Speed
• totems, heroism (on caster and wolves): 1.05 Speed
• totems, heroism (exhaustion on caster, heroism on wolves): 1.05 Speed

Here are the screenshots:

As you can see, Feral Spirit benefit from Heroism (they also get the Exhaustion debuff) and they gain a good 600 dps (per wolf?) self buffed.

Related Posts

• Patch 4.0.6: Enhancement Shaman Windfury Changes
• The Enhancement Shaman 4.0 Guide
• Patch 4.3 General and Enhancement Shaman changes
• A look at the first PTR 4.3 Changes
• Patch 4.1 Fire Nova Preview

Patch notes

Lets have a quick look at the Patch notes:

Shaman

• Chain Heal’s effectiveness has been increased by approximately 10%.
• Flametongue Weapon procs now deal roughly 20% less damage.
• Healing Rain now has a 40-yard range, up from 30, to be consistent with other shaman heals.
• Hex now has a PvP duration of 8 seconds.
• Purge now dispels a single effect instead of two.
• Spiritwalker’s Grace duration has been increased to 15 seconds, up from 10.
• Tremor Totem has been redesigned. The totem is now usable under Fear, Charm, or Sleep effects, and pulses much more rapidly, but lasts 6 seconds and has a 1-minute cooldown.
• The Windfury Weapon proc can now trigger 3 additional attacks, up from 2.

Elemental Combat

• Earthquake damage has been increased by approximately 10%.
• Elemental Overload (Mastery) procs of Lightning Bolt or Chain Lightning can now generate Rolling Thunder charges.
• Lava Burst’s damage has been increased by roughly 10%.

Enhancement

• Flametongue Weapon damage now scales from attack power instead of spell power (for Enhancement shaman only).
• Purge no longer has its mana cost reduced by Mental Quickness.

Restoration

• Cleansing Waters no longer fires its heal effect twice when a shaman removes a Magic and a Curse debuff with a single cast.
• Deep Healing (Mastery) has been increased to 3% per point, up from 2.5%.
• Earth Shield can no longer be dispelled.
• Greater Healing Wave mana cost has been increased by 10%; healing done has been increased by 20%.
• Mana Tide Totem has been redesigned. The totem no longer multiplies the Spirit of those affected by it. It instead gives a flat amount of Spirit equal to 400% of the casting shaman’s Spirit, exclusive of short-term Spirit buffs affecting the shaman when the totem is dropped. In addition, its effects are now raid-wide.

Glyphs

• Glyph of Hex now reduces the cooldown by 10 seconds, down from 15.

Sample Math

A Blue Post said that the Flametongue Weapon damage change will result in a bout 20% drop of its damage, while the Windfury Weapon Buff will increase from 2 to 3 swings (= +50%).

Argaloth

Lets do some math looking at example fights. The first one being a pure single target fight versus Argaloth in Baradin Hold.

If we apply this simple math the Flametongue damage will drop 20% from 389572 to 311658, we’d lose 77914 damage. At the same time our Windfury Damage rises from 313125 to 469688, gaining 156563 damage. Adding both together I would still have gained 78649 damage overall.
With Pets I did 3605980 damage, meaning the overall gain would be around 2,2%

FT: 389572 * 0.8 = 311658 = -77914 damage
WF: 313125 * 1.5 = 469688 = +156563 damage
Total: 156563 -77914 = +78694 damage = (78694/3130009) * 100 = +2.51% damage

Conclave of Wind heroic

FT: 610924 * 0.8 = 488740 = -122184 damage
WF: 471276 *1.5 = 706914 = +235638 damage
Total: 235638-122184 = +113454 damage = (113454/4792878)*100 = +2.37% damage

Maloriak heroic

This fight is particular bad as Enhancement Shaman with our total lack of AoE capabilities and the constant moving around.

FT: 994507 * 0.8 = 795606 = -198901 damage
WF: 779725 *1.5 = 1169588 = +389863 damage
Total: 235638 -198901 = +190962 damage = (190962/8731674)*100 = +2.19% damage

Summary

Looking at these numbers we do not need to fear the coming Enhancement changes. They will even turn out to be a slight buff for us. The examples above do not include pet damage, but even with that included we still gain 1.9%-2.2% damage. I still wish the Devs would do something about the absolute horrible Enhancement AoE Situation.

Related Posts

• The Enhancement Shaman 4.0 Guide
• Patch 4.3 General and Enhancement Shaman changes
• A look at the first PTR 4.3 Changes
• Patch 4.1 Fire Nova Preview
• Does Feral Spirit benefit from Heroism?

I recall Blizzard promises when they first announced the changes for 4.0 – “Your DPS will NOT GO DOWN”, but in fact all Melee classes took a big hit the first 1-2 days.
We had our Warriors, who did 18-20k DPS prepatch, doing less 10k dps and then 1 day later after a massive uproar in the Forum were back to their prepatch dps, maybe even a bit higher. This Fix also gave Retribution Paladins and Feral Cats, who are at 22-23k DPS in their BIS gear now btw, some buffs. Leaving us pretty alone at the lower end of the DPS Meter.

Not enough Feedback

Unfortunately they pretty much kiled the European Shaman Forums a while back and there was little to no complaints about the matter. Even on other Forums it is rather quiet and you need to be actively looking for more information on the subject. This makes it highly unlike that we will see any kind of buff soon and Blizzard si probably very content that they finally got the whiny shaman crowd quiet

I have once more cancled my Account, like I always do when I am not content with Shaman Buffs. I am pretty sure the European Team sends a cancled account summary each week. Unfortunately $$$ is the only thing Blizzard understands since Bobby K. took this project into his greedy claws. It is no problem to reactivate your account if you see fit, like I’ll do in 1 month It nevertheless sends out a sign to Blizzard.

Other than that I really like the 4.0 Patch, the class is more fluent to play – don’t forget we will get unleash weapon to fill gaps. Unleash Wind on Beta stacks up MSW pretty fast for us, then adding the damage the ability does it does indeed look better at 85.

Patch 4.0.3, Level 85

We raided Twilight Bastion on Beta last night, the first 2 Bosses. On the first boss I did relatively low damage, mostly due to the massive whirlwind and the “AoE” Phase though. Also offhealing and a healing rain here or there (each heal costs about 15-20k damage, that I can’t cast) paid its tribute. Lets see if I can find a recount Screenshot.

As you can see, I did lowest dps, but more due to the nature of the fight. Searing Totem did a nice 2600 dps

Bear in mind, the wonderful Blizzard Guy who decided to give Enhancement Shamans Strength Weapons (no joke!!!!) did his part to bork the meter aswell.  It is a typical sign on how much Blizazrd people are even aware of Shaman needs Also I just used standard available enchants (haste instead of ap for weapons e.g.) and other quick and dirty fixes to get the raid going asap.

The second fight is a Single Target fight – only 1 of 2 Dragons is up at the same time and I performed much better there. Ghost Wolf is really nice to escape “Void Zone”-like effects and searing totem stacks up charges when you are kiting so you can lava lash the dragon as you get back to it. Also being able to unleash weapon and shock while running from stuff is definitely a nice advantage.

Don’t have a recount from the encounter, but I did pretty well. Too bad that we killed the dragon while he was flying over the Lava. The doors did not open and we could not go on :-/

Related Posts

• The Enhancement Shaman 4.0 Guide
• Interview with Dave Kosak about WoW in 2012
• Myrddin vs Yor’sahj the Unsleeping 25m heroic
• Enhancement Shaman solos Gruul’s Lair
• Myrddin solos Plague Quarter

In a nutshell we get to choose more utility, get some glyph and ui enhancements which make the class more fun to play. Many changes are also coming statwise, many buffs get spread to more classes and we will get many changes to our Totems.

Keep in mind that patch 4.0 is tuned at level 85 characters and not 80. Enhancement Shaman felt a bit awkward to play at the start and Unleash Weapon (Level 81) will strongly effect the class.

4.0 First Steps

When 4.0 comes life you should visit your trainer as soon as possible. We will lose some abilities, for example to cleanse poison and disease, while we also learn some new skills. For example Primal Strike (for leveling up, shares cooldown with Stormstrike), Cleanse Spirit (remove curses), Healing Surge (a new heal), Bind Elemental (cc for elementals), Totem of Tranquil Mind (30% less casting time loss on damage), Mail Specialization (+5% primary stats, while wearing mail), Ghost Wolf can be used indoors and last but not least mastery.

Here is a link with all Shaman Abilities on Wowhead.

Talent Changes

The next best thing to do is to fix your talents. Beginning at level 10 you will be able to choose a talent tree (is there any other choice than enhancement?). You will receive a set of basic abilities right away and the other talent trees will not unlock before you place at least 31 points in your primary tree. Here are the Talents you get right away.

Enhancement

A totemic warrior who strikes foes with weapons imbued with elemental power.

• Lava Lash
• Mental Quickness
• Dual Wield
• Primal Wisdom
• Mastery: Enhanced Elements

We have 35 talent points to spend at Level 80 (actually 79) and these are talents every enhancement should take.

Basic Enhancement Shaman build (0/31/0)

(Talent Calculator)

• Please note: this build has 2/3 improved Lightning Shields as I have to spend 1 point somewhere
  you can change that point to wherever you like
• also you have 5 more talent points to spend
• but each enhancement shaman should have at least these talents

Single Target Enhancement Shaman build (5/31/0)

(Talent Calculator)

• I have chosen Concussion over Acuity, since we already have absurd high crit rating and because we lost the 50% extra crit bonus damge
• best single target dps

AoE Enhancement Shaman build (4/32/0)

(Talent Calculator)

• if you find yourself doing heroics or for fights like Halion, where AoE Damage matters you might like to check out this build
• I moved 1 point from Acuity and 1 from Improved Shields to improved Fire Nova
• also added the Fire Nova and Chain Lightning Glyph

Utility Enhancement Shaman build (0/36/0)

(Talent Calculator)

• if you prefer utility and are willing to sacrifice some dps
• I see this more as daily life spec for pvp realms, when you do dailies or other stuff and have to deal with occasional ganking

Glyphs

Glyphs leave you with similar choices.

For now the best dps glyphs seem to be:

Prime Glyphs

• Stormstrike
• Lava Lash
• Feral Spirit

Major Glyphs

• Fire Nova
• (Lightning Shield)
• your choice

My personal favorite Major Glyph is the new Lightning Shield one (“Your Lightning Shield can no longer drop below 3 charges from dealing damage to attackers”). Using this Glyph your Lightning Shield can only expire or be dispelled, but it never runs out of charges for dealing damage and will remain at 3 orbs for Enhancement Shamans.

This and the new power aura like spell alert for Maelstrom Weapon make the class much more fluent and fun to play.

What happened to my Mana?

Our Mail Armor has no longer Attack Power, Armor Penetration or Intelligence stats. We do now get 2 Attack Power per Agility and a 5% bonus Agility if all our gear is Mail Armor. the following new abilities will help to manage our mana anyhow.

• Primal Wisdom
  Your melee attacks have a 40% chance to immediately restore 5% of your base mana.
• Maelstrom Weapon
  When you deal damage with a melee weapon, you have a chance (higher than rank 2) to reduce the cast time and mana cost of your next Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, Hex, or any healing spell by 20%. Stacks up to 5 times. Lasts 30 sec.
• Mental Quickness
  Increases your spell power by an amount equal to 50% of your attack power, and reduces the mana cost of your instant spells by 75%.

There is also an undocumented change. On Beta Enhancement Shamans have a lot of passive MP5, think it was around 600 mp5 in combat at level 80.

Gems & Reforging

There is a lot of discussion about proper gemming for 4.0 and reforging. Lets look at the stats.

Haste

• Shamans lost the melee haste bonus they got during Ulduar
• Static Shock no longer procs from auto attacks
• Windfury nerfed, *cough* adjusted to 10% melee/ranged haste.
• Unleash Wind (Level 81) will bring 20% additional melee haste for 6 swings.

Critical Strike

• Stormstrike
  Chance to be critically struck by the Shaman’s Nature spells increased by 25%.
• Elemental Devastation
  When you deal critical damage with a non-periodic spell, increases your chance to get a critical strike with melee attacks by 9% for 10 sec.
• Lightning Shield can now critical hit! This will make it easy to keep up Elemental Devastation.
• Armor Penetration will be converted to Critical Strike Rating and provide us with even more crit on our gear.

Hit Rating

• the new spell hit cap for Enhancement Shaman is 446 hit rating (420 for Draenei)

Expertise

• Unleashed Rage
  Increases your expertise by 8, and increases all party and raid members’ attack power by 10% while within 100 yards of the Shaman.
• 139 expertise rating cap, 116 Orcs (using Axes), 116 Dwarves (using Maces)

Agility

• Each 83.19 agility = 1 % melee crit (324.88 @ Level 85)
• 1 point of agility = 2 attack power
• 1 point of agility = 1,28  spell power (raidbuffed, mail spec, unleashed rage,kings,flame totem)
• Mail Armor Specialization, +5% Agility if you are in full mail gear

Mastery

• Enhanced Elements
  Increases all Fire, Frost, and Nature damage done by 20%.  Each point of Mastery increases damage by an additional 2.5%

Gem conversion

Attack Power gems will be turned into Agility, Spell Power gems into Intellect, Armor Penetration to Critical Strike Rating. Hit rating will become a blue gem.

Conclusion

Haste will no longer become our most important stat, since less abilities benefit from it. Haste will be in line with critical strike rating which also seems to be less important than pre 4.0. Our new abilities (especially Stormstrike) provide a good base crit and we are already struggling with the crit cap.
However Agility seems to become a very good stat for us, since all our damage abilities increase by it.
It is not really known how effective Elemental Mastery will turn out. Guessing from the tests I have done on Beta it looks quite promising, basically replacing the spell crit damage bonus, that we can no longer get.

This is how I will reforge, gem

• Agility is a primary stat, also our best and you cannot reforge to. This means, it is probably best to reforge gear for expertise cap first, so we can use red sockets for Agility.
• Reforge the rest of the gear for Mastery (there are no Mastery gems at level 80), remember the (+hit cap).
• Use the 21 Agility Meta, (Relentless Earthsiege Diamond) and one Blue Gem Socket for +Hit Rating.
• For good Socket Boni, you can use Agi/Haste (Yellow Socket) or even Agi/Hit (Blue Socket).

Priority System

The loss of 100% spellcrit bonus damage reduced the importance of our spells until we reach high level of mastery rating. I am not sure if Lava Lash or Stormstrike win the priority queue. They both proc Lightning Shield while Stormstrike also places the +25% spell crit debuff on our target.
This debuff will help to get spell crits and thus Elemental Devastation, which again keeps our melee crit up. Fortunately due to the long cooldown on both abilities it doesn’t really make a big difference.
Delaying Lava Lash 1-2 seconds can also help making sure that we will have enough Searing Totem stacks on our target to make it our biggest nuke.

The Stormstrike debuff reads: “granting you an additional 25% chance to critically strike that enemy with your Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, Lightning Shield, and Earth Shock spells for 15 sec.”

Lightning Shield will keep itself up so we only have Shocks and Lightning Bolt to assign a priority to. The outcome should be quite obvious

Prio Queue

• Feral Spirit
• Lava Lash
• Storm Strike
• MSW 5
• Flame Shock x1, Earth Shock x2 Rotation

This will make the class much less tedious to play than it feels at time on live.

Totems

• Earth
  • Strength of Earth Totem
  • Stone Skin Totem
• Wind
  • Windfury
• Water
  • Healing Stream (will also provide resistance to fire, nature and frost spells glyphed)
  • Totem of Tranquil Mind
• Fire
  • Searing Totem (single target), Fire Nova can not be used
  • Magma Totem (multi target)

Spell Alert

The changes to the UI in 4.0 include a Power Aura like Icon that pops up for a few seconds once you got 5 Stacks of Maelstrom Weapon and looks like this. Pew Pew Lazerbeams!!

Other things to note

Totem/Relic Slot

Bizuri’s Totem of Shattered Ice, like all other totems, has been changed to provide primary stat/stamina/haste/crit and should be replaced with Totem of the Avalanche.

Totem of the Avalanche
Binds when picked up
Relic    Relic
+51 Agility
+77 Stamina
Red Socket
Classes: Shaman
Requires Level 80
Item Level 264
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 34 (0.74% @ L80).
Equip: Improves haste rating by 34 (1.04% @ L80).

Feral Spirit

Feral Spirit’s cooldown has been reduced to 2 minutes, instead of 3 and its duration has been reduced to 30 seconds. While this hampers our solo abilities quite a bit, it might even improve our raid dps on short fights.

Feral Spirit
12% of base mana    30 yd range
Instant cast    2 min cooldown
Summons two Spirit Wolves under the command of the Shaman, lasting 30 sec.

Sample Video

I have put sample video together, showing some of the talent ui, glyph ui, new spells (up to 85), and power aura in action. If you are curious take a look at it. The video is in 1080p, so you can choose fullscreen and higher quality and read the tooltips.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In case I forgot something, you have questions or want to express your gratitude, leave a comment below. Thanks for reading.

On a sidenote, something that keeps me baffled on Beta is that one one side we can unleash wind and fire, even get a fire damage debuff on the target, but have no ability that will actually consume it. It would be awesome if Lava Lash would make use of this, which it doesn’t at the moment.

Related Posts

• Patch 4.3 General and Enhancement Shaman changes
• A look at the first PTR 4.3 Changes
• Patch 4.0.6: Enhancement Shaman Windfury Changes
• Many Shaman improvements in build 12857
• Hidden Build (12857 Codename Ninja) – Thoughts

Here is Eyonix Post:

As many of you know from panels at last year’s BlizzCon and posts here on the forums since then, Cataclysm will bring about major changes to familiar character stats such as Intellect, Armor Penetration, Defense, and others, ultimately designed to make the effects of stats more easily understandable and make gear choices more interesting. As these changes will have a significant impact on how stats work and relate to one another, today we wanted to offer you a closer look at exactly what’s in store and explain some of the rationale before Cataclysm arrives.

The most obvious question these changes raise is “Why are stats being changed, and why now?” As the game has matured, we’ve run into increasingly complex issues with the current stat system. Many stats are inherently confusing, and the way they interrelate can feel convoluted. Attack Power, for example, currently translates to damage, but so does Armor Penetration. Defense provides five different statistical benefits of varying utility. Mana regeneration involves understanding multiple stats and rules and often ends up being irrelevant anyway. In addition, the difference between a “good stat” for a class and a “bad stat” can be extreme. Some casters want Haste but not Crit; hunters want Armor Penetration but not Haste. There are other overarching issues, as well, such as Intellect not being very exciting for casters despite it being a core stat — and these are just a few examples.

Our ultimate goal is make gear a more interesting (and less confusing) choice by making each stat valuable to more players. While the reasoning behind some of the following changes may be clear, we understand that you may have questions about some of the less obvious alterations, and we’ll do our best to answer any questions you may have here on the forums.

What You’ll See on Gear

Stamina

Stamina – Because of the way we will be assigning Strength, Agility, and Intellect, non-plate wearers will end up with more Stamina than before. Health pools will be much closer between plate-wearers and other classes.

Spirit

Spirit – Come Cataclysm, this stat should only be found on healing gear. Non-healing casters will have other systems in place to regenerate mana, and we are designing special solutions for Elemental shaman and Balance druids who often share gear with healers (more on this below). Raid buffs that currently boost Spirit (such as Blessing of Kings) will only boost the primary stats of Stamina, Strength, Agility, and Intellect. We are also likely changing the five-second rule and other quirks of the current regen system.

Intellect

Intellect – Intellect will now grant Spell Power (more on this below). Intellect will also provide less mana than it currently does.

Haste

Haste – Haste will become more attractive for melee classes by allowing them to recover resources such as energy and runes more quickly. Our intention is for Haste to let you “do stuff” more often.

Block Rating

Block Rating – Block is being redesigned to scale better. Blocked attacks will simply hit for 30% less damage. Block rating will improve your chance to block, though overall block chances will be lower than they are today.

Parry

Parry – Parry no longer provides 100% avoidance and no longer speeds up attacks. Instead, when you parry an attack, it and the next attack will each hit for 50% damage (assuming they hit at all). In other words, Dodge is a chance to avoid 100% of the damage from one attack, Parry is a chance to avoid 50% of the damage from two attacks, and Block is a chance to avoid 30% of the damage from one attack.

Mastery

Mastery – This is a new stat that will allow players to become better at whatever makes their chosen talent tree cool or unique. It’s directly tied to talents, so what you gain from improving this stat is entirely dependent upon your class and the talent specialization you choose. We’ll talk more about specific Mastery benefits in the future.

Armor

Armor – The way Armor mitigates damage is not changing, but the Armor stat has been rebalanced to mirror changes to the armor curve in Cataclysm. As a result, bonus Armor will go down slightly overall. We are also changing the mitigation difference among armor types so that plate doesn’t offer so much more protection than mail, leather, and cloth.

Resilience

Resilience – This will only affect damage done by players and critical damage done by players. It will not impact crit chance, mana drains, or other such effects.

Strength, Agility, Hit Rating, Expertise, and Critical Strike Rating

Strength, Agility, Hit Rating, Expertise, and Critical Strike Rating – These will all still appear on gear as well. Aside from situations mentioned elsewhere in this list, in general these will function similarly to how they do now, though the details — such as how much Hit Rating you might need to effectively combat high-level creatures (more on this below) — are likely to change.

Being Removed from Items

Attack Power

Attack Power – This stat will no longer be present on most items as a flat value, though it will still show up on some process. Strength and Agility, which will be present on items, will grant the appropriate amount of Attack Power (generally 2 Attack Power per point of Strength or Agility) depending upon which stat a particular class favors. Agility may provide less Crit than it currently does.

Spell Power

Spell Power – Spell Power is another stat that you’ll no longer see present on most items. Instead, as mentioned above, Intellect will grant Spell Power. One exception is that caster weapons will still have Spell Power. This allows us to make weapons proportionately more powerful for casters in the same way they are for melee classes.

Armor Penetration

Armor Penetration – This stat will no longer be present on items. Armor Penetration will still exist in talents and abilities.

Shield Block Value

Shield Block Value – This stat will no longer be present on items, since the amount blocked is always proportional to the amount of damage done. Talents and other effects might still modify the damage-reduction percentage from 30%, however.

Going Away Completely

MP5

MP5 – This stat will be removed from the game completely. Holy paladins and Restoration shaman will be redesigned to benefit from Spirit.

Defense

Defense – Defense is being removed from the game entirely. Tanking classes should expect to become uncrittable versus creatures just by shifting into Defensive Stance, Frost Presence, Bear Form, or by using Righteous Fury.

Spell Ranks

Spell Ranks – Spell ranks will cease to exist. All spells will have one rank and will scale appropriately with level. The levels at which you can learn certain spells are being changed in order to fill in some of the gaps, and we will be introducing some new spells to learn along the way as well.

Weapon Skill

Weapon Skill – This stat will be removed from the game completely. Classes will start with all the weapon skills they need to know and will not need to improve them.

What Else You Should Know

Combat ratings

Combat ratings – All ratings will be much harder to “cap out” at maximum gear levels. Ratings will be steeper in Cataclysm, and creatures in later tiers of content will be harder to hit or crit, similar to how level-83 mobs are harder to hit or crit than level-80 mobs.

Reforging

Reforging – While these changes will go a long way to making a wider variety of stats more attractive, we understand that sometimes you simply don’t want more Hit Rating on your gear or you’d rather have more Haste than more Crit. In Cataclysm, we are going to give players a way to replace stats on gear as part of the existing profession system. As a general rule of thumb, you’ll be able to convert one stat to 50% of another stat. While some conversions (like converting Stamina to Strength) won’t be permitted, the goal is to let you customize your gear more.

Gems

Gems – We are changing the gem colors of a few stats as a result of these adjustments. For example, Hit is likely to be blue instead of yellow. We’ll have more details on this in the future.

Changes to Existing Gear

As with previous expansions, we plan to roll out these changes and modify all existing gear shortly before Cataclysm launches, though it’s still too early to say exactly when. For the most part, the gear you have will still be good for you, though there will be exceptions, such as warriors using leather and mail armor.

If you are a tank (druids excepted), expect to see:

• No more Defense on gear. Existing Defense becomes Dodge, Parry, or Block Rating.
• No more Block Value on gear. Existing Block Value becomes Block Rating.
• You’ll have as much Stamina as you’re used to, though you may notice your tanking plate has a bit less Stamina than a comparable piece of DPS plate, since we tend to take the gem budget out of your most attractive stat.
• Bonus Armor on gear will go down slightly.

If you are a melee DPS class, druid tank, or hunter, expect to see:

• A lot more Stamina. Bear-form Stamina scaling will be lowered as a result.
  Strength if you wear plate. Agility if you wear mail or leather.
• Existing Attack Power becomes Agility and Stamina.Armor Penetration becomes Haste or Crit.
• No Intellect on melee gear. Hunters won’t need Intellect since they will no longer use mana. Shaman and Retribution paladins will get mana and spell damage in other ways.

If you are a DPS caster, expect to see:

• A lot more Stamina.
• All of your Spell Power converted to Intellect and Stamina.
• No Spirit. You won’t miss Spirit, though, because you won’t need it for DPS or mana regen.

If you are a healer, expect to see:

• A lot more Stamina.
• All of your Spell Power converted to Intellect and Stamina.
• Spirit instead of MP5. You’ll probably be happy with Spirit, though, because mana regen is going to matter more than it does currently. Healing paladins and shaman will benefit more from Spirit than they do currently.

If you are a Balance druid or Elemental shaman:

• You will still share gear with Restoration druids and shaman.
• Your gear will have Spirit on it. It won’t have Hit on it.
• You will have a talent that converts Spirit to Hit. We will adjust talents accordingly so that you want about as much Spirit as, say, a warlock wants Hit.
• Hit on rings and other such gear will still benefit you.
• Raid buffs will no longer boost Spirit, so you shouldn’t find yourself unexpectedly over the Hit cap because of buffs.

Many lower-level items with nonsensical combinations of stats, such as Agility and Spirit, will be changed. We’re also updating quest rewards, trade skills, and loot drops to support better itemization for class builds that weren’t widely available or used prior to The Burning Crusade (such as Balance druids).

We’re aware this is a lot of information to take in, but this is still only a piece of the larger picture, and many of these changes rely on integration with other systems we haven’t yet discussed in detail. In the weeks and months ahead, we’ll continue to tell you more about these changes, along with all of the new and exciting features we have planned for Cataclysm.

After this post there were a couple of followups int he same thread:

Q: So does this mean that there will be no more pure DPS caster leather/mail gear (aside from tier pieces)? Will Balance druids and Elemental shaman have any reason to roll on cloth gear?
A: The goal is that classes will want to wear the gear intended for them.

Q: Yes, but what about warlocks, who get a bonus to SP based on Spirit when they have the armor buff up? Will that spell and buff be reworked as well?
A: It seems so. I would remind players who are focusing on individual talents and abilities to remember that we’re going to be doing a major redesign on all talent trees. So fear not, these changes are meant to work in conjunction with the design of each class come Cataclysm.

Q: Will reforging become available when the stat changes come into effect? Or will my gear with spirit on it become trash until it does?
A: Your gear won’t have spirit on it as a mage when Cataclysm hits.

Q: I’m assuming they’re not removing it from caster gear since Eyonix stated in the beginning about how some casters prefer crit over haste and how you could change crit to haste with reforging. I don’t think it was quite mentioned though because they’re more focused on trying to get other classes to want the stats. For instance it’s utter garbage on my warrior. It’s only useful for faster swings to generate a bit more threat, but otherwise it’s trash. I think they want to get it to the point of being more viable to people besides casters and mutilate rogues to a lesser extent.
A: Haste will basically remain the same for casters. It is changing for melee classes, however. Haste will also allow melee classes to recover their resources more quickly, effectively letting them hit their buttons more often.
A: The change to haste for melee dps is “in addition to its current affect”.

Q: So, how’s this going to work for Ret Paladins?
A: Retribution paladins are already working this way on live realms, given that they rely on mana. You’re just cooldown limited.

Q: Now I understand that SP will be removed on these items but the initial thread of my idea should remain true. Are elemental shamans and balance druids going to be essential forsaken an extra dps stat on each peice of mail/leather gear we choose (or are being directed towards wanting to use) in relation to cloth casters?
A: Elemental Shaman and Balance Druids will have access to gear with the same item budgets as every other class.

Q: Quick question on this–will this spell power count against the item budget?
A: Spellpower will still count on the weapon item budget.

Q: Very nice changes overall. Only question I have is what is the point of calling plate armor plate armor if it has the same or nearly the same mitigation as cloth? Seems rather silly.
A: Plate will still possess much more armor than cloth, the difference just wont be as significant as it is now.

Q: So what’s the point of being a tank anymore?
A: Tanks will have much more health and armor with gear, enchants, gems, and talents. From gear they’ll also be getting mitigation stats such as parry and dodge (when applicable). Don’t worry tanks will still be tanks, and dps/healers wont be able to fulfill that role anymore than they are able to now.

Q: Will spell penetration still exist?
A: Spell Penetration will still exist on PvP gear.

Q: Wait, so melee DPS will have more health than the tank? Or am I misunderstanding this?
A: We take gem budgets out of the most attractive stat on a piece of gear, in order to avoid anything with sockets always trumping similar gear without sockets. As such, socketed tanking plate has less base stamina but with gems, you’ll almost certainly end up with more health than dps classes.

Q: Will have to see how it plays out but I have to say I am not a fan of the block chance being a flat 30%. Yes on a raid boss this means more mitigated damage but it also means mobs in RFC will still damage me when I block. (just an example)
A: Yeah, that is sort of the intent. We don’t like that block allows certain tanks to trivialize older content. Older content is always going to be easy, but it was a little strange that warriors and paladins could literally take no damage with enough block while DKs still took some damage. Stats need to scale and this one wasn’t.

Q: That all sounds fine as far as I can tell but where do Holy Paladins fit in there? Druid and Shaman resto classes will shar with DPS counterparts but it still seems Holy Pallies are not sharing gear with anyone.
A: Holy paladins are still a special snowflake with regard to gear. We have explored alternative solutions, ranging from them not wearing plate to somehow getting spell power from Strength, but we don’t like any of those designs better than just having Holy paladins wear plate.

A: Think about it like this:

DPS cloth: Int, Sta, Hit, Haste, Crit, Mastery (mage, warlock, Shadow priest)
Healing cloth: Int, Sta, Spirit, Haste, Crit, Mastery (Holy and Disc priest)

Melee leather: Agi, Sta, Hit, Haste, Crit, Mastery, Expertise (rogue, Feral druid)
Spellpower leather: Int, Sta, Spirit, Haste, Crit, Mastery (Resto, Balance druid)

Physical mail: Agi, Sta, Hit, Haste, Crit, Mastery, Expertise (hunter, Enhancement shaman)
Spellpower mail: Int, Sta, Spirit, Haste, Crit, Mastery (Resto, Elemental shaman)

DPS Plate: Str, Sta, Hit, Haste, Crit, Mastery, Expertise (Fury, Arms, Retribution, dps DKs)
Tanking plate: Str, Sta, Hit, Armor, Dodge, Block, Parry, Mastery, Expertise (Prot, Prot and tanking DKs)
Healing plate: Int, Sta, Spirit, Haste, Crit, Mastery (Holy paladins)

There will be exceptions. There might be some spellpower cloth with no hit or Spirit that healers and nukers may want. There will likely be Elemental tier sets with no Spirit. Jewelry and cloaks will be more class agnostic than actual armor pieces.

I wrote that quickly, so hopefully I didn’t mangle anything.

EDIT: You get a small mastery bonus for wearing the highest-armor gear capable for your class. Hunters in mail get a bonus. Hunters in leather do not.

Q: If I’m reading this correctly are you saying that with each tier, each boss level increases by 1? As an example: Naxx 25 – Boss level = 83; Ulduar 25 – Boss Level = 84; ToC 25 – Boss Level = 85; ICC 25 – Boss Level = 86 – Meaning are we trying to gain my hit and expertise with each tier?
A: We’re not sure yet how bosses will “level up” in subsequent tiers. The general idea is that currently you need a specific amount of hit and after that hit becomes worthless even though more hit goes onto higher level gear. Furthermore it creates odd balance problems when you are critting and avoiding the most powerful bosses by more than you did the earliest bosses (because your gear keeps getting better while they just get more health and damage).

Q: If DPS are going to be able to tank almost as effectively as tanks, I don’t see it as a problem if we expect to dps almost as well as a dps.
A: DPS won’t be able to tank almost as effectively as tanks.

Q: There will always be a superior stat, or a stat that is more desired to get the job done. Even if everything is as balanced as it can possibly be, the theorycrafters will come out and say something like ‘Crit does .001 more dps for Frost Mages than Haste’, then you can bet that all the Frost Mages will want and stack Crit. That’s just the way it goes.
A: I actually disagree with that. The problem we have with current stats is that some are good and some are terrible. To use the Resto druid for example, crit isn’t useful because so many hots can’t crit and haste isn’t useful because so many hots can’t be hasted (and talents provide generous cast-time reduction already). To use another example, some mages are very near the crit cap to the point where a trinket that proc’d crit (or even a free crit) would be less attractive that one that proc’d haste. It’s not that crit is bad for them. It’s just that they have too much. The problem is that some stats are twice as good as other stats. If crit was slightly better than haste, you’d take crit given the choice, but still wear haste.

Q: Is there any way that we poor poor clothy dps casters can get some kind of assurance that we won’t have to compete with boomkins/ele shamans for our cloth gear once they hit their spirit/hit gear cap?
A: There is a small Mastery bonus for wearing “your” gear. So a Balance druid who takes cloth will be essentially giving up free stats. Sometimes that may be worth it to them (just as sometimes it’s worth it for a Resto druid to take that piece of +hit gear), but often times it won’t be worth it especially if it’s an upgrade for you.

Q: How will this work with summon food and water? These items have level limits. How will a mage be able to create the lower level items with ranks gone?
A: There won’t be a way or need to cast the lower level spells. If you’re just worried about losing the flavor of croissants vs. strudel, we’re keeping that. At some point you’ll just start making the better breads.

Q: So what is going to prevent tanks from picking up the dps gear which already has higher stam and then reforging the stats to get tank stats? That way they still turn it into more of a tank chest and get the higher stam.
A: Think of reforging like enchants. It’s not that you take a piece of gear and turn it into whatever you want. You pick up specific scrolls with specific conversions. We haven’t decided on them all yet, but I imagine crit -> parry is not something you’re likely to see. Maybe we’d do hit -> dodge for the tank who is full on or doesn’t want hit. Maybe we’d do block -> parry to help DKs benefit from more plate. Rest assured that we’re not going to promote a system where Prot paladins want dps plate for tanking more than tanking plate. Part of all of these changes are to discourage behavior like that. We don’t want to recreate it immediately in a different form.

Q: I’m not liking these changes to stam and armor. A clothie being as durable as a plate wearer? Dumb.
A: Someone (Angua?) had a post awhile back that explained this using numbers. Cloth won’t have as much armor as plate. But maybe it will have half as much armor as plate instead of one fifth as much armor as plate (or whatever the ratios end up being at higher levels). Really, cloth isn’t the issue, since cloth wearers have spells to buff their mitigation. Leather wearers are the ones who end up the most fragile. Mail would be bad too except that shaman can use shields when needed and hunters typically don’t get hit by melee much. We just want to bring things a little closer to each other. It’s easier to establish a baseline for how hard a particular attack should hit for when one dps spec isn’t literally four times as survivable as another.

Q: Unless it’s drastically changed, that wont matter to much. Stam is king and has been. It might change, we shall see, but if not, people will take less dodge for more stam.
A: Once upon a time, being a “mana sponge” was a scary thing. Nobody (esp. druids) wanted to be the meat shield that had huge health pools but drained the healers dry. When mana matters, avoidance matters more too. I’m not saying parry will ever trump Stamina, but perhaps Stamina won’t trump parry by quite as much as it does today.

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World of Logs has a similar feature, the Ranking Page here. It is a very nice list, but it does not include any kind of filters, yet. As Enhancement Shaman it is often tedious to find the proper page and thus I created and easy way to access the pages. Just select class, fight, difficulty and get directed to the proper Ranking Page.

http://www.myrddin.de/world-of-warcraft/world-of-logs-ranking-links/

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Here is a Screenshot from a typical fight:

As You can see the proc from Drakefist Hammer and Blackout Truncheon in combination with Slice and Dice and Bladefurry reduces the speed of Both weapons significantly.

1.32 Speed on Mainhand and Offhand at 0.73 Speed. I will report back as soon as I can provide more data including Assassination Bonus.

Slanty is not well geared, yet. Here is his Profile. 

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