I play my shamans on Elemental as I quite like the spec but they have two abilities which puzzle me.
Primal Strike - does 8,000 physical damage.
and
Flametongue Weapon - causes my attacks to deal an extra 959 damage.
My question is, umm, what possible use are these tiny little abilities? Am I missing something?
EDIT: thanks everyone for the input. How quick am I, I didnt even realise that Warriors could still equip a bow. Now, if that could be used somehow still, even if just as some extra pulling ability, that could be handy…
Elemental does get a talent where Flametongue gives 6.5% extra Fire damage. I think that’s useful for the AoE build with Magma Totem? Don’t quote me on that, though.
Primal Strike, though? Yeah, that’s just a relic of a bygone age. Maybe at some point they intended to have spell casts be delayed if you took damage so you could use it when a spell cast flat out wasn’t possible? That’s just not a problem that exists anymore, though.
You can take them off your bars, they’re not worth pressing at 80
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I take them off my bars, as Resto lol.
Those are useless abilities, pretty much.
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If you don’t use these or see any benefit to them, take them off your bar and don’t use them.
I personally don’t find any value in primal strike but I do use flametongue in cheesy dungeons or while questing… I’m not burning valuable oils on that kind of activities.
In the Elemental talent tree there is a talent called “Improved Flametongue Weapon” which gives fire spells 5% more damage. Most shamans don’t take it but that would really be the only time you would put Flametongue on.
Primal Strike you just don’t keep on your bars, it’s useless and just one of those default spells shamans get but don’t use.
If you have a certain talent it gives you an extra 6.5% damage. Other then that. Only useful if trying to minmax. The other one is just completely and utterly useless. Better off just attacking with frost or literally anything else. If you want to do melee attacks then just play ench shaman.
I would play a Resto Shammy if you could go up to someone standing in bad and bop them on the head to encourage them not to do that.
That’s the best use of Primal Strike I can think of.
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Flametongue is stupid, it should be a better weapon oil akin to dk’s better weapon enchants
Primal strike was a reaction to people complaining about pruning, it was already cut and now it’s back and serves no purpose
I play resto shaman mostly because its a nightmare to get into groups as dps. But I do find it fun. I find it a lot more challenging to play then dps due to needing to pay attention to what the enemy is doing and the teams health, but it is fun.
It’s a legacy thing.
In Legion we lost Class abilities that didn’t fit our spec but some nerds wanted them back so here we are.
As others have said, it’s a relic from Classic. Same reason that Enhance can technically equip 2h weapons but has zero way to use them with their abilities. Or why Rogue/Warrior can equip ranged weapons despite having no use for them. Shaman just has more examples of them because they were pretty diverse for the longest time, and I assume it was easier to just leave them in the spell book for the specs rather than cull them, as anything tied to Classic inevitably is wound up in some amount of spaghetti code that was smashed together and takes a decent amount of re-coding to replace properly now.
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