Fire Nova?Follow

At first I misunderstood the way it would work...I thought you still had a specific totem that would allow you to use the spell, but it was clarified for me that any fire totem would give you access to it. In that sense, it's not bad. Shaman needed a bit of a nudge in the AoE department, particularly enhancement shaman. Looking at the spell, however, the mana cost is too great and the cooldown is too long for it to fit seamlessly into what we're already doing. I know for enhancement shaman it may require a spec tweak (relative to the current "best" build on EJ) to prevent OOM issues, and if it scales with SP the way Magma Totem does, it will represent a decent but not mind-blowing dps increase. With a 10 second cooldown, I'd be looking at maybe a 2-300dps boost over what I'm currently doing on single targets and a fairly substantial boost on large trash packs. I still highly doubt it would put me anywhere near on par with what most other dps classes are doing for AoE, but something is better than nothing.

It'll be great for elemental shaman...not so much for enhancement. As enhance, I simply don't have the mana pool to be spitting out 1k mana nova bombs every 3/7/10 seconds. As it currently stands, mana in 25-mans is a non-issue with a full rotation including a fresh Magma Totem every 20 seconds. If I start to get a little low, Shamanistic Rage usually tops me up in a matter of seconds. The current trend with top-end enhancement shaman is to spec out of Imp. Stormstrike (and take 2 points out of Imp. Shields) and put those 4 extra points into Reverberation (? cooldown reduction on shocks/wind shear). That build is intended to maximize the 4pc T9 set bonus, and makes heavy use of Shamanistic Rage to keep from going OOM. Add in an extra 6k mana/minute for a no-glyph, untalented Fire Nova and you're looking at a mana dry enhancement shaman in no time.

I can see reasonable benefit for trash, but in terms of practical applications in PvE boss encounters, it's not really all that exciting to me as enhancement. My personal belief is that enhancement shaman could use some help in the AoE damage department, and this is sort of questionable. I could almost see myself dual speccing two different enhancement builds...one for trash and one for bosses...with glyphs and slight talent tweaks to support it. My personal preference would be to have a moderate AoE damage option (as opposed to simply poor) that fist with a current raid spec for an enhancement shaman, but I won't pooh-pooh the buffs until I've had a chance to test them (and also because that wouldn't be very nice of me considering elemental shaman are shaman, too ;D)

I think I sort of follow you Jakerp, but does that mean you are pro or against the new spell?

I like it because you can drop a single totem and get multiple effects off of it. If you want to AoE you can, and if you do not, you don't have to.