Arenas and 2.4

A note to self and others: Stay away from arena games in prime time, until the 2.4 patch anyway. I was doing some arenas yesterday and I was totally outgeared by rating boosting teams. I fired off 5 x Trinketed NS+Elemental Mastery Chain Lightning on a mage in one game, and barely got him below 50% hit points. I have pretty much dead on 500 spelldamage on my toons, so I reckon he had a ton of hp and resilience. I gave up after a 7 game losing streak, gotta play myself back up to around 1500 rating at some odd hours of the morning probably. Looking forward to 2.4 patch, when the person with the highest personal rating will decide which bracket the team will play in. Shouldn't meet that kind of geared opposition in the 1400 rating bracket.

While on the topic of the 2.4 patch, I want to touch on the changes to the Shaman class. A lot of people are crying nerf to the addition of a shared cooldown on Nature's Swiftness and Elemental Mastery, and to be honest it's a nerf. Blizzard have a dilemma here. On one hand the elemental shaman isn't a very strong pvp player in solo play, but when you box 4-5 of them the instant, guaranteed critical Lightning Bolt, Shock, or Chain Lightning especially, can be utterly devastating. I'm glad they did this. Lets be honest, boxing 4-5 shamans is riddiculously effective and overpowered in certain scenarios. This nerf isn't even going to change much, but I suspect Blizzard are using it as a statement of "But look, we ARE doing something about it".

They've changed Tremor Totem from a 4 second pulse to a 3 second pulse. This is a pretty decent boost for the soloing pvp shaman, for a boxer it's pretty huge. I like to use 3 global cooldowns for totems both in offense and defense, 4 if I need some aoe fire damage. This isn't very good when you need to press on hard and offensively. With the 3 second pulse, you can probably rely on just one totem (or multiple cast at the same time, if you're plagued by totem snipers), and fear will be removed before you have a chance to run out of range. For a fortified tactic I will only need to use 2 global cooldowns to be in "safe mode" with for example 2-3 staggered tremor totems, 4 grounding, 1 wrath of air, 1 stoneskin etc etc.