New Totem for 3.3; Reincarnation Changes

Back on tuesday MMO-Champion released the new totem slot items that will be available in 3.3, along with the Death Knight, Paladin and Druid equivalents. It has become commonplace to release a new totem for each spec every major patch for Blizzard since Wrath's release.

The new totem, which as I write this appears to still be unnamed, was initially announced to have the following attribute:

Your Earth Shock, Flame Shock, and Frost Shock spells grant 73 critical strike rating for 15 sec. Stacks up to 3 times.

This was jumped on quickly by the online community, due to the fact that as it stood it was going to be near useless for us and overshadowed by the previously released totems of WotLK. A thread was soon put up on the Damage Dealing forums and, to my surprise, got a very quick response from Ghostcrawler who stated it would be haste rather than crit and the time would be extended to 30 seconds.

This changes things quite a bit. It took it from being awful to being slightly better than our current best in slot, the Totem of Electrifying Wind. We will have an almost constant 219 haste, although the stacking time will factor in slightly. It may become habitual (depending if there is an internal cooldown) to spam a couple of extra shocks on cooldown at the start of bossfights to build up your stack. The 30 second timer is a nice addition as well in that it gives us a little more lenience in movement intensive fights that is currently given by Electrifying Wind. Overall it looks to be the new BiS, but not by much. Like a deluxe version of what we are already using; few more bells and whistles but essentially the same thing.

The other change that has sprung up was the reduction in cooldown on our Reincarnate spell. It currently stands at 60 minutes, although it can be talented to reduce by 20 minutes via the Resto tree which we don't spec into. The PTR patch notes showed it being reduced to 50 minutes, and GC came out saying they are considering dropping this to 30 instead. This is to keep it fair with the buffs to other 'back from the dead' abilities like Druid's Rebirth and Warlock's Soul Stones, which had their cooldowns halved also. I will update on this once it is confirmed but I expect this to be the case.

Due to a hectic week I didn't get the ToC 10 Gear Guide out but I will be working on it every chance I get. The 25 man version should follow shortly thereafter.

-Puut