What's Changed
Stats - Hit and expertise caps are no longer what they were. You need 7.5% hit and 7.5% expertise, respectively. 7.5% = 2550, or 2210 for those of you who have racial bonuses that grant hit or expertise.
- Haste is no longer completely garbage. Currently at level 90 mastery, haste, and crit are all roughly equal, with mastery and haste been a smidge above crit. Depending on your level of gear, haste or mastery may pull ahead as the prime stat. As it's looking right now, it seems that mastery will still scale and perform slightly better than haste with the standard Echo of Elements and Unleashed Fury build, with haste possibly being more preferred for the burst builds containing Elemental Mastery and/or Primal Elementalist. To be sure which stat build is best for you, it is advised that you run your current set up through a Sim to insure optimal performance.
Mechanics
- Searing Flames (x5) no longer build up on a target; instead they stack on us, making target switching less of a pain.
- Buff totems have become auras, thus our clunky totem bar is gone. What totems you have left are now cooldown-type deals, save for the Searing and Magma totems.
- Our Fire Elemental has had his CD reduced to 5 minutes and should reset once an encounter is either completed or a wipe has occured. He now gives us Searing Flames, which makes him not only a viable totem to use, but a rather powerful CD.
- Our Earth Elemental can now be considered to be a minor DPS CD. He WILL taunt the bosses found in 5 man heroic dungeons. He will not however taunt actual raid bosses, thus is safe to use in a raiding situation.
- Feral Spirits have lost their control bar. Because of this change, we no longer have their stun ability. However, Spirit Walk is now a separate ability that has a relatively short CD, especially when glyphed.
- Pets such as our Feral Spirits and our Fire/Earth Elemental totems will no longer "snap shot" stats and will adjust to your current procs and stats as they roll out. No more double-dipping on Heroism for your puppies, but no more sitting around for the proc-gods to line up either.
Rotation
- Stormstrike and Lightning Bolt have moved up on the priority order some. Otherwise, our rotation is nearly the same as it has been.
Spec
For the most part, you'll be adjusting your spec on a per-fight basis. I'm going to suggest talents that you'd generally use on say a Patchwerk-type encounter. Please note that specs are no longer of a "set it and forget it" mindset; adjust to your needs accordingly!
Tier 1: Stone Bulwark Totem or Astral Shift - SBT = for those times that you need a bit longer duration of protection. AS = for those moments when you need 40% damage reduction, but only for a short moment of time (think soaking on H-Ultraxion).
Tier 2: Earthgrab Totem or Windwalk Totem - Both of these have minor utility uses, but will probably be rarely needed in a PvE environment.
Tier 3: Call of Elements or Totemic Restoration. CoE will allow you to use your Healing Stream Totem more often (which your healers will love you for). Totemic Restoration has some niche uses, such as possibly being able to use your Fire Elemental totem for a quick burst phase (think Spine tendons), and then pulling him back early so that he's up sooner. Needs some toying with to see if it'll work for you on an given encounter. Totemic Projection *might* have some incredibly niche uses, but it's fairly rare that an enhancer needs to toss a totem anywhere but at their feet.
Tier 4: All three talents at level 90 are nearly on par with each other. However, Echo of Elements is probably one of our stronger general use talents, while Elemental Mastery is great for more bursty situations (again, think Spine tendons).
Tier 5: From the numbers I've seen over at TotemSpot, it's looking like Ancestral Guidance is beating out Healing Tide Totem as far as potential healing output is concerned for enhancement.
Tier 6: All three talents are fairly close to each other, even with the various combinations from tier 4. As it stands currently though, Unleash Fury is the top performing talent on a most fights. The other talent option would more than likely be Primal Elementalist, with Elemental Blast kind of being a complete 'meh' choice due to both output and its casting requirement.
Glyphs
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- There is only one minor glyph that has a non-cosmetic function: Lava Lash. This glyph is necessary in those situations where you don't want to break CC via spreading your Flame Shocks around, or if a boss fight requires you to control your cleaving (think achivement runs; those of you who have run with me on things like ToGC through TLR and remember me saying "don't use FS!", yeah this fixes that). It's just a "per basis" sort of glyph, like many of the majors.
Utility Totems
- Stormlash Totem is a wicked little thing that buffs the raid for 10 seconds, causing them to pump out some extra nature damage. Naturally (har har) this gets slightly buffed through our own mastery. Sadly it's on a five minute cooldown and isn't reset through Call of Elements. Also, does not stack with other Stormlash Totems.
- Healing Steam Totem no longer works like the old, static HST. This one is a single target SMART heal, which will always try to choose the target with the lowest health. Can have its timer reset by the talent Call of Elements.
If you wish to read more in detail about each of the spells, glyphs, and various other enhancement-related MoPish things, please take a look at the Enhancement Guide for Mists of Pandaria, which can be found over on TotemSpot.
5.2 edit: I wrote another Need To Know post regarding the changes for talents. A video guide containing all of the information found in this post, the 5.2 post, and other adjustments that have not yet been discussed is currently in the works.
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