Each week Matthew Rossi lovingly hand-crafts Totem Talk from a single switch of aged Barrens scrub pine. This week, we try and calm some fears and discuss what changes we're still hoping might make it into patch 3.2. This week's image comes from Protein, a restoration shaman on Bladefist (he didn't specify US or EU realm).

Before we get rolling on the changes that shamans haven't seen yet in the various notes to patch 3.2, let us take a look at what notes we have seen, especially the most recent ones.

• Shaman
• Earth Shock: Redesigned. This spell no longer interrupts spell casting, but rather reduces melee attack speed by 10% for 8 seconds (exclusive with similar effects such as Thunder Clap).
• Wind Shock: Has been renamed Wind Shear and no longer shares a cooldown with Flame, Frost or Earth Shock.
• Maelstrom Weapon: Now also has a chance to reduce the cast time of Hex.

Hardly massive changes, but at the same time pretty welcome. The fact that ES gives a form of Thunder Clap is weird since pretty much every tank has or will have that debuff in patch 3.2 (Thunder Clap, Icy Touch, Infected Wounds and the incoming paladin ability) so it seems odd from a PvE standpoint to give it to a non tanking class. If this is intended as a PvP ability... well, it's not terribly impressive. If your choice is between ES or Frost Shock against melee, you're probably going to try and snare them instead of debuffing their attack speed.

Still, not having to use ES as an interrupt will be a positive boon for elemental shamans who saw their DPS nosedive every time they had to keep that cooldown open for Earth Shock instead of Flame Shock, and it's not going to terribly impact enhancement in PvE at all. So I'd definitely call this one, on the whole, a positive change. And having Maelstrom affect Hex is just hilarious. Hex is kind of the poor man's poly in PvP, a combination snare and disarm that can be trinketed out or dispelled.

So, we've now established that the changes, while minor, should at least be positive for elemental shaman DPS without being painful for enhancement. But we're still left with restoration getting the lion's share of the changes this patch and I know from experience that shamans are not finding a lot of DPS mail for casters in Ulduar, that elemental shamans found the recent Q&A somewhat underwhelming, and that there have been reports of DPS not in line with that of other classes or even this class before patch 3.1.

I think it's safe to say that enhancement is in fairly good shape in 3.2 with increased health to help them deal with the only real issue afflicting enhancement in high end raiding, that is, that they die a lot. Restoration is getting quite a few tweaks to increase its flexibility as a healing spec, and so we're left to consider what, if anything, we might see for elemental shamans in the upcoming patch. Sure, we're just blue skying here, but let's consider.

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