Blizzard have said the recent improvement to the Shaman’s Flametongue spells is an attempt to make the Shaman more attractive to other players as a group member, despite their spec.
The change to Flametongue spells consists of a healing debuff, similar to [spell]Mortal Strike[/spell].The following has been added to the tooltip of all Flametongue spells on the PTR:
...reduces all healing done to the target by 25% for 5 sec. The healing reduction effect stacks up to 2 times.
Tharfor on the EU realms commented on the change earlier:
The ‘mortal strike’ effect that has been applied to the flametongue spells on the Public Test Realm was added as a way of making shaman more interchangeable for grouping and specc’ing.As has been said the flametongue spells can be used regardless of your talent point allocation so this should be an extra tick in the list of reasons to take a shaman in your group regardless of what build they have.
this will be nice for my world championship arena team, we will be having a MS warrior a enhance shammy(myself) and a holy pally. I will probally use this on my off hand (the dps isnt bad at all not comparable to windfury but good anyways). now we will own fosho!