Alpha Begins! (with Patch Notes)

[Kirby]

Seems combat is going pure damage than dots, seems interesting, hopefully it still is competitive in a raid

[Soraya]

Restoration Shaman had the most passive and smart healing of any healer, and so received some reductions in that area, along with buffs elsewhere to keep them competitive.

Deep sense of foreboding.....

One particular change is to Mana Tide Totem, which we made less effective for other players, but still just as effective for the Shaman. We like that Shaman could help other healers out on mana, but it was just too strong, significantly impacting how those other healers gear themselves.

Actually, I think Blizz are out of touch here. Not since WotLK have we had to time MT and poke droods to innervate. In fact I rarely use MT these days except on progression bosses, even though I have stacked silly amounts of haste and have a only a modest amount of spirit.

Chain Heal now heals each chain target for 15% less than the previous target.

I can live with that.

Unleash Life no longer increases the healing from Healing Rain.

I quite like this idea tbh, it is currently too important and quite clumsy, I would like to macro UL to a single target spell to save double tapping, you can't macro HR.

Earthliving Weapon now increases healing done by 5% (instead of increasing healing Spell Power by a flat amount).

this could be good as it will - ofc - scale with gear.

Healing Stream Totem mana cost has been reduced to 10% of base mana (down from 23.5%), and its healing has been reduced by 50%.

NOOOOOOOOOO I hope they remove the cd then as it is this totem that makes us comparable to other healers atm.

Glyph of Totemic Recall now only increases the mana returned from recalling your totems by 25% (down from 75%).

Happy to lose this, I don't use it anyway!

Mana Tide Totem now increases the Spirit of allies by 50% (down from 200% of the Shaman's Spirit). It remains unchanged (200%) for the Shaman activating the totem, and it still ignores temporary Spirit buffs.

Like I said, it has been a long time since I lost my mana battery identity.

Conductivity is no longer triggered by damaging spells for Restoration Shaman, or by healing spells for non-Restoration Shaman.

We will have little use for Rushing Streams given the nerf to healing stream so could make it up here.

All in all I get a pretty good feel that healing will become more interesting, and we will start to see who are the skilled healers and who are being carried by class mechanics (those that cry "nerf" methinks! )

[Amazone]

I made another thread about releasedate discussion!!
With info from this video, well all is rather what Blizz is normally doing.

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/blog/13813407#comments

for pvp you can only go as far as lvl 92 in alpha, it just launched...