Shaman getting “dunked”?
In many ways, “yes and no”.
WoW: Forever changes (thanks talentsforever.com for comparisons):
- Elemental Mastery - Next spell has 100% crit chance and costs no mana (gone)
- Shield Specialization - Increase block chance and block amount with shields (gone)
- Enhancing Totems - Strength of Earth and Grace of Air totems better (now baseline)
- Two-Handed Axes and Maces - Granted ability to use (now just baseline with training)
- Improved Weapon Totems - Windfury and Flametongue totems better (now baseline)
- Weapon Mastery - Deal more damage with all weapons (gone)
- Nature’s Guidance - Increase hit chance (folded into Tidal Focus)
- Totemic Mastery - Totems radius from 20 → 30 yards (now baseline)
- Totemic Calls + Recall + Projection - Added better totem management abilities
- Spell damage reduced across the board, spells more reliant on gear for damage
- Totems last longer and affect the entire raid, where applicable
- Weapon enhancements last considerably longer
- Various existing talents made better, across the board
- Lightning Overload - New. Talent similar to Elemental’s Mastery in Retail.
- Earthbound - New. Adds snare on earthbind totem cast.
- Lava Burst - New. Similar to retail ability, but plus damage rather than auto-crit.
- Mental Dexterity - New. Int contributes to attack power.
- Shamanistic Focus - New. Dramatically reduced cost of shock spells.
- Mental Quickness - New. Int partially contributes to spell power.
- Improved Stormstrike - New. Adds mana regen and reset mechanics to Stormstrike.
- Maelstrom Weapon - New. Similar to retail, but only affects Lightning Bolt.
- Rage of the Farseer - New. Personal “melee lust”.
- Mindfulness - New. Passive mana regen while casting.
- Water Shield - New. Similar to retail, but no passive mana regen component.
- Riptide - New. Similar to retail, chain heal healing bonus baked in.
Several notable issues:
- Shaman clearly has intention to be capable of tanking, but it’s not “fully supported”. Shaman can’t even set their own role to “tank” while in a group.
- Several lackluster talents still exist (most egregious examples noted in opening post).
- Shamans kind of care about “every stat, all at once”, making itemization difficult. Even “attack-power-centric” melee DPS builds suffer a DPS loss by not having the spell power available to make Lightning Bolts and/or Earth Shocks hit harder. None of the “I want to specialize in this” routes are well supported outside of perhaps casters (healer or DPS) that abandon auto-attacking (and thus, all weapon enhancement abilities) in the process… hoping their mana efficiency allows them to fight this way indefinitely (though doing so might require spamming rank 1 lightning bolt waiting for Clearcasting procs).