Shaman Talents Released!

[Kevin]

Tell you what does make me absolutely boiling furious about this review is that Shaman get to keep the 20 minute reduction to Reincarnation where the Paladin talent that gave the same reduction to Divine Intervention was removed in 1.9.

In other words, Horde wipe recovery = 40 minutes with talent, Alliance wipe recovery = 1 hour, no choice of talent. In 5 mans, this is just downright unfair. Ok, so it's a minor point in a specific situation, but that kind of inattention to detail during these reviews really makes me wonder if the left hand is aware of the right hand's activities.
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My biggest beef is that many paladins were nerfed. It wasn't just them crying because they didn't changes they wanted, a similar 1.9 build to what they had in 1.8 was worse than the old build. My paladin lost DPS, survivability, and healing power. The 1.9 spec I choose settled on kept 1.8 survivability, gave a very very small buff to healing (about a 2-3% increase in healing ability), and I lost about 35% of my DPS. I could not get a spec that had the same DPS as my old 1.8 spec. The best I could do was 5% less DPS, but I lost healing power and staying power with that build.

There were very few paladins I know or talked to that felt the changes buffed the paladin. They got some buffs to making dealing with raid situations easier. The playstyle of the class got a bit more interactive. Certain healing builds got a little better at healing. I think a few of the heal centric builds got a little bit of a damage boost at the cost of staying power (have to burn a lot more mana for that damage boost). Some DPS builds might have gotten a little more DPS at the cost of staying power (again pretty much every build had to spend more mana to just keep the same DPS as an old build). Some PvP builds got buffed a little bit.

I've yet to talk to a shaman player that feels the changes will nerf the class.

Many of the paladin changes also felt very very arbitrary. This was reinforced when they redid some of the review after initial feedback and just moved talents willy nilly as best as I could tell. The shaman changes at least seem to make sense in the context of the class, at least if you can wrap your head around what it looks like the developers envision the class as being. They streamlined and gave some minor, or in some case significant (from what I've read) buffs to several different builds. Sure we'll have to see how it actually plays, but I still don't see anyone saying that shamans have been nerfed in the patch, they just weren't changed to peoples expectations.