One thing that troubles me about being a shaman in wow, we still have the LONGEST cool down ability in the game. While the new 30 minute cool down is awesome, and I am more likely to use it when ever it is up (That is if I am actually dead). It still confuses and angers me that that in order to make the ability usable with some degree of certainty requires the additional penalty of wasting two talent points, and then we STILL have the longest cool down in the game out side of professions.
As it stands now in a raid situation, especially on progression raiding it is an incredibly difficult decision on weather or not to pop. You need to look at how long into the fight you are, what other members of the raid are still up, boss health left and the likely hood of a wipe, because with a 30 minute CD you do not want to pop it, only to still wipe. Especially if having that CD available on the next attempt could have made the difference between a 1% wipe and a successful boss kill.
Luckily for my my current guilds 25 man team has a GINORMOUS stack of druids, we have something like 6 battle resurrections available, so blowing the CD isn't always that big a deal. But on our 10's it is a huge difference, considering we are usually running with 2-3 healers and 1 druid 50% of the time.
One thing that still confuses me is when the CD was lowered from 60 minutes down to 30 minutes with the ability to talent into it to drop it to 15 minutes, the devs claimed it was so powerful that they didn't want Shaman to be able to use it on every fight. They wanted us to have to choose when to use it. Now don't get me wrong, but I LOVE! being able to pop when I make a dumb mistake, I think it is one of the signature abilities of the class. But I think the Druids battle rez, or even the Warloc's Soulstone provide quite a bit more utility seeing as how they can cast it on others.
What concerns me now is the fact that in all the Cataclysm preview data that has come out I have not seen the current CD on Reincarnate. Nor is the talent in the talent tree anymore. So I see it going one of two ways.
1.) They finally see it my way and dropped the CD to 15 minutes, still the longest CD in the game.
or
2.) They see that nobody uses the Improved Reincarnation talent in live, and think therefore nobody likes it and thinks 30 minutes is just fine. Without taking into account that spending those two talent points somewhere else provides much more bang for the buck. Talent points are expensive after all, and it really hurts to have to give up on mana regen, spell power or something else to make your ability ALMOST on par with other class abilities.
Well Finally got off my lazy bum and booked the hotel for the trip. I will be driving from the San Francisco area to Anaheim Thursday October 21st. I plan to work a 1/2 day, and be on the road by 12:30. Pick up "The Boy" from school about 1ish and make the 6 hour drive. I should make it to Anaheim in time for whatever Thursday night party is going on. If you want to meet up drop me a line, would love to share a beer with my tens of ones of readers. I'll probably be dropping by the WoW.com soiree as Matt "Matticus" Low owes me a beer for sending him a SC2 beta key. If anybody from the SF Bay Area are heading down and needs a ride and wants to share expenses, and can stomach hours of Kevin Smith podcasts on the trip I have room for 1 or 2 more people in the car.
