Elemental
Our goals with Elemental for Midnight are to reduce the number of rotational abilities and auras tracked, make it simpler to engage with Stormbringer talents, and add new gameplay for using fire spells in AoE. Flame Shock can now be replaced with an upgraded ability, Voltaic Blaze, that applies 6 Flame Shocks and causes your next Lava Burst to hit all Flame Shocked targets, similar to previous designs for Primordial Wave. With this version, we’re looking to allow a quick transition from Flame Shock application to the AoE Lava Burst for simplicity and keeping up with the demands of AoE against short-lived creatures. This is an optional talent path, so for players who want to focus on lightning and maelstrom spenders that’s still intended to be a viable playstyle.
Enhancement
Going into Midnight, we are aiming to reduce the amount of information to track for playing Enhancement Shaman optimally. To achieve this goal, we are looking into reducing the number of buttons, auras, and spell highlights to track, while heavily keeping in mind how it feels to play Enhancement Shaman. In addition to the core Enhancement changes, we are aiming to reduce the overhead of understanding two different Hero Talent rotations. The hero talents have affected the rotation a bit more than we’d like. We’re making adjustments that will allow these Hero Talents to fit into Enhancement’s core rotation more naturally while preserving what is unique about them.
Restoration
Shamans have a bunch of strong utility and many rotational spells, so an important goal for us in Midnight was to balance the number of possible active abilities. We’re also looking to remove talents that add auras that are constantly active or ones that temporarily modify other spells which can often make normal spell casts feel weak.
A significant change here is the removal of Healing Surge and Tidal Waves. We are reducing the base cast time of Healing Wave and Chain Heal to simplify gameplay and adding options for mana management through talents for situations where mana management feels valuable. We recognize there is a loss of a decision point when doing single target healing and will be monitoring feedback closely when it comes to Healing Surge being removed, but our goal is to keep the spell decision-making simple because healing already has dynamic gameplay with target choice.
We’re also updating Healing Rain to last 18 seconds when not playing Totemic. While we want the instant, long duration Healing Rain to be a hallmark of Totemic, it makes the alternative feel less awesome when it has to be cast every 10 seconds.
Another goal for us was to reduce the number of available group cooldowns healers have access to, so Ascendance and Healing Tide Totem are now a choice against each other. We want healers to feel powerful, but having too many powerful cooldowns often leads to needing to deal spiky damage to challenge them.