Up front, I will give the praise that the shaman class tree remains one of the better cases of sticking to the original promise for the class trees to be built around utility rather than throughput, and generally presents a good variety of options that I rarely feel like I have points not worth spending or no talents worth picking up at any point in the tree.
That said, there are 3 major pain points I want to bring up before Beta: Spec Dissonance, Capstones, and Survivabilty.
Spec Dissonance
Spec Dissonance is the term I’m using for talents whose value carry particularly extreme swings in value depending on spec, to the degree of being basically useless to one or more specs.
Spiritwalker’s Grace: This and its followup node in Graceful Spirit/Spiritwalker’s Aegis are the most egregious case of spec dissonance in the class tree. This set of talents is very high value for Resto and Elemental, but nigh useless for Enhancement, as their cast time spells are too weak to be worth casting without Maelstrom Weapon stacks making them instant, anyway.
The bottom left corner of the tree frequently feels useless to Enhancement in general, and this pair of nodes are a big part of why. Spiritwalker’s Grace is a prime candidate to become a spec contextual node as Lava Burst → Lava Lash has in this Alpha, most likely with Spirit Walk, which is usually eschewed by Resto and Ele in favor of Gust of Wind. Alternatively, Spiritwalker’s Grace could have an Enhancement alternative version that grants long range to their auto- and melee attacks for its duration, echoing SG’s effect allowing Resto and Ele to maintain throughput during movement phases by allowing Enhancement to maintain throughput while forced out of melee range.
Primordial Bond: While less dissonant to the specs with less benefit from it than Spiritwalker’s Grace being almost worthless to Enhancement, Primordial Bond has drastically higher value to Elemental than to either Enhancement or Restoration due to Enhance and Resto solely having access to Earth Elemental to proc it, while Elemental has both an additional Elemental minion, and talents to dramatically increase the uptime of their Elementals.
Either this talent, or Earth Elemental itself, may be worth considering conversion to a choice node (with this talent having an alternate effect for the other choice, in the latter case).
Earth Shield & Healing Stream Totem: While the Alpha trees cutting us down from getting 2 starting points in the Class tree to only 1 has all shaman forced to spend a tax point on buying back a fundamental throughput spell, Restoration now has to buy 2 in the forms of these two talents. Resto has always gotten the short end of the class tree stick with needing to buy back fundamental healing power that Enhancement and Elemental both need their own access to for their personal survivability, and while it’s gotten better over time, it’s still a problem. Consider making one or the other of these spells baseline to the class as a whole.
Spec Dissonant Capstones
Soooo those 3 clearly delineated categories aren’t so clear cut, it turns out, as two talents fall into both of these boxes simultaneously. So, carrying on the spec dissonance problem:
Nature’s Swiftness: This talent is all but entirely useless to Enhancement due to the lack of punch behind their spells unless already rendered instant cast by Maelstrom Weapon. Something like an Enhancement-specific bonus to increase the power of the affected spell is desperately needed for this talent to even appear on Enhancement’s radar, especially with its current capstone placement.
Setting Enhancement aside, this talent also sports substantial dissonance for Resto and Ele in the form of their Hero specs. While better than nigh-useless as it is for Enhancement, Nature’s Swiftness is still not amazing for either Resto or Elemental… unless playing their shared Farseer Hero spec, in which case it becomes mandatory.
What’s more, it’s not even mandatory on its own merit, but because when taken as a Farseer it doesn’t even enter your spellbook, but merely modifies your Ancestral Swiftness spell. This turns Nature’s Swiftness into a blatant talent tax on Farseer, seemingly more to justify its place as a capstone talent when its own effects are so unimpressive in the modern game that Resto druids sport a strictly better version of it in the first tier of their spec tree.
Nature’s Swiftness is an utterly uninspiring capstone unless playing the Hero spec for which it is a mandatory point tax, and does not justify its placement in the tree. It should be moved to an earlier talent gate, if not struck from the class tree entirely and Ancestral Swiftness changed to receive its cooldown reduction internally from its own Hero tree.
Totemic Surge: In the very same vein, Totemic Surge seems to have moved to a capstone position solely on the basis of being a mandatory tax point on Totemic and Restoration shaman to bring their core totem cooldowns into their intended length. A 5 second cooldown reduction on totems with cooldowns of 1, 2, or even 3 minutes is just not that valuable unless they are either core rotational abilities that are designed specifically to require that 5 second reduction to fit into their intended uptimes (Healing Stream) or cooldown alignments (Surging), or an encounter has been designed with something like an AoE fear on a specifically 56 second cooldown with this talent in mind.
While not as limited outside of its mandatory status for Totemic as Nature’s Swiftness is outside of Farseer, this talent is still underwhelming for a capstone. This talent is valuable enough to keep around even independently of Totemic, but should move to an earlier talent gate where it’s not forcing expenditure from the shaman’s final 11 points.
Capstones
That leaves us with:
Instinctive Imbuements: Our brand new capstone is the worst kind of talent there is, and exactly the kind of talent we were assured we wouldn’t see when the Dragonflight talent overhaul was announced: a boring, mandatory stat increase.
Even the secondary effect of consolidating all of our imbues and shields into a single button press is a nothingburger, as the only one of those spells we need to cast more than once an hour out of combat is Earth Shield, which isn’t the triggering spell, and thanks to Therazane’s Resilience, we might not even need to cast that more frequently.
This talent isn’t even worth salvaging. Scrap it.
Survivability
Strap in, because this is going to be the long one. If nothing else, this is the section I really want Blizzard to take something away from, because while everything else I’ve talked about are things that would make the class feel better, Survivability concerns are a frequent and major roadblock to us being viable in higher echelons of content, period.
We’ll break this down into another 4 subsections: Passive Defense, Snap Defense, Defensive Cooldowns, and Self-Healing.
Passive Defense
Passive defenses are exactly what it says on the tin. These are things like permanent Stamina boosts and damage shield procs off of non-defensive abilities. The key difference between passive and active defenses is that active defenses are meant to prevent you from dying to specific damage spikes, while passives are meant to keep you alive against sustained damage.
Brimming with Life: The Alpha tree has boosted the Reincarnation cooldown speed increase from this talent from 75% to 100%, to resounding cries of, “Meh.” While this is unambiguously better than before in the literal sense, it’s still an absolute nothingburger because the core problem with the effect remains: we are never at full health for more than a few seconds at a time in content where we actually need faster Reincarnations.
What’s more, even if the full health requirement were loosened enough for us to have nigh 100% uptime on the effect, Reincarnation’s base cooldown is so long that we’d still only be getting a maximum of 1 extra use within most key timers/take 3 full raid boss encounters for it to come back up, even after this buff.
While this talent is still going to be universally taken solely for the bonus Stamina portion, this secondary effect just goes to speak to an ongoing disconnect between the devs and shaman players. Just let Reincarnation reset on raid boss pulls and keystone starts like its battle rez cousins, please.
Elemental Resistance: This effect just has too many limits on it to feel like I’m actually accomplishing anything by talenting into it, especially outside of Restoration. It’s limited to Nature, Fire, or Frost damage while we’re in the middle of a multi-expansion storyline centering cosmic forces that rarely deal in these damage types. It’s applied to only 1 target at a time every 2 seconds, but lasts only 3 seconds, maxing it out at covering only 2 people at a time. We have no control over who it applies to, and it only applies after damage has already been taken, so it’s only reliable for group-wide rot damage.
And for all that, it’s only a 6% reduction.
This would feel much better to talent into if it applied to 5 allies at a time per tick of the totem, even if the effect has to be cut to a lower reduction value.
Snap Defensives
Snap defensives are a midpoint between passive and major defensives. These are abilities that are either frequently available on short CDs, or always available at some performance cost, and are meant to keep the user alive in the face of frequent damage events. For this category, I’m counting anything with less than a 1 minute cooldown
Spirit Wolf: Spirit Wolf is a great defensive in the very specific situation of damage occurring simultaneously with a boss immunity phase, doubly so if it is also combined or taking the form of a movement phase, like the intermissions on Plexus Sentinel. In any other situation, the 4 second ramp up to full defensive value in the quasi self-silence of Ghost Wolf form is a much steeper price to pay compared to similar always-available DRs like warriors’ Defensive Stance or priests’ Protective Light, especially for Resto, for whom this personal defense comes at the expense of letting other people bleed out while the shaman can’t heal them.
That said, again, in situations where this effect is good, it is very good. I bring it up here only to consider how it fits into Blizzard’s estimation of our defensive profile. If Blizzard is not counting this effect as a major tool in our defensive kit, then no problem. But if they are reluctant to give us other, more versatile defenses because of Spirit Wolf’s damage reduction component, then I’d sadly rather cut Spirit Wolf down to only the speed increase in exchange for picking that more versatile defense up elsewhere.
Windveil: The simplification of making this effect cover all magical schools at the cost of losing the stacking effect is a slight downgrade. This change is only better in situations with multiple magical damage schools in the same encounter/pull, which is not especially common. That said, I understand if being able to stack up to 30% reduction on all the magical damage in a pull with 100% uptime was too strong. My bigger issues are twofold:
First, the nerf from an 18 second duration to a 12 second duration is really, really bad. This can easily allow for slips in the effect’s uptime, but more importantly, highly encourages casting Wind Shear on cooldown, when that’s not always the right play for the group. Many casters in M+ have at least two different spells in their arsenal, with one being substantially more dangerous than the other, and the best play for the group may be to hold Wind Shear past its cooldown coming up if we’re anticipating that deadlier cast coming soon.
This also exacerbates the core problem with Windveil, being that its effect is wholly reliant on 1) there being an interruptible ability in the pull/on the boss in the first place, which is not always true even of caster bosses; and 2) us being the one to get the kick instead of another party member. The latter is especially a concern on boss encounters, where there being only one target to interrupt makes it much more likely for multiple people to kick the same spell, doubly so with the ability to track party members’ interrupt cooldowns going away with the addon purge.
This ability design is thus highly dependent on group coordination to be able to reliably proc even when it’s even possible to proc at all, something that the devs’ design philosophy is supposedly moving away from in Midnight.
Please consider reverting the effect duration to 18 seconds to provide that flexibility to hold Wind Shear for more important casts, and further, allowing the effect to trigger even if we weren’t the one to get the kick as long as we were within something like half a second of someone else getting it.
Even with those changes, though, the nature of this effect’s triggering limitations puts this talent in the same category of Spirit Wolf where it is very good when we are able to trigger it, but our ability to do so is even more highly dependent on encounter design. If our survivability profile is being constructed with the assumption that we can reliably give ourselves a 15% magical defense, but then bosses don’t have any interruptible casts, our survivability is actually going to be 15% behind where we’re supposed to be.
Defensive Cooldowns
The big defensives meant to be the difference between living and dying to major unavoidable damage events, living in the >1 minute range and boasting substantial power.
Earth Elemental: Earth Elemental has been trying to fill a group PvE defensive CD role ever since Shadowlands gave us the Soulbind Conduit for making it increase our personal max health, and has always done so awkwardly. Being a 5 minute cooldown with a 1 minute duration was part of this, as 5 minutes is quite long for a personal defensive CD in most raid damage designs to the extent of often only being usable once in a fight unless dropped very early. Its comparably outlandish 1 minute duration didn’t make up for this, as major damage events are usually spaced more than 1 minute apart, preventing it from catching more than one even with its huge duration.
Cutting the duration to 30 seconds in exchange for bringing the elemental into line as a 3 minute cooldown makes sense for converting it into a raid defensive in this case, as the cooldown is now in line with other class defensives, and the longer duration already wasn’t substantially valuable anyway.
The problem is, this change only helps Earth Elemental in raid, while dramatically weakening it for solo play and completely failing to address its shortcomings in M+. Any enemy dangerous enough in solo play like leveling, delving, or tackling a powerful world rare spawn are fights where the shaman wants maximum uptime on their tank pet, and even a full minute may not outlast the enemy. And in M+, the eternal problem with having a tank pet double as a defensive cooldown as ever remains that the dumb rock taunts trash and instantly dies in any key level high enough for defensives to be crucial. And even in raid, 15% max health and 5% DR from a follow up talent aren’t that impressive for a 3 minute CD.
I understand that major defensive CDs are being cut back across the board and 3 different ones in our kit may have been too many now, but cutting Stone Bulwark Totem while keeping Earth Elemental is, for an M+ shaman at least, more like cutting us from 3 to 1.5 than 2. Please, please consider reverting Earth Elemental to its current form, and making it a choice node with Stone Bulwark Totem, with Primordial Bond receiving an alternate effect if specced into Stone Bulwark.
Self-Healing
Blizzard has long held that DPS shaman are meant to lean harder into their healer-hybrid nature for survival rather than rely on straightforward defense. The viability of this approach has often been suspect given the eternal problem of high end content is that you can’t heal yourself back from being one-shot, but if what defensive options we do have are up to the task of giving us the opportunity to self-heal, let’s see what we’ve got the work with.
Healing Stream Totem: I can’t speak to Elemental, but at least as Enhancement, this thing feels so weak that I’ve never even noticed it’s doing anything even when I do talent into it. With Maelstrom Weapon changing for Enhancement to no longer affect healing spells, and healing power instead being transferred over to an alternate proc off Raging Maelstrom, consider letting Healing Stream Totem benefit from Raging Maelstrom, too.
Therazane’s Resilience/Reactive Warding: Therazane’s Resilience is obviously the big one here for group content, and it is substantial for both Enhancement and Elemental. Being able to reliably maintain full Earth Shield uptime in high end PvE means that between it and Refreshing Waters, we can now guarantee ourselves +45% effectiveness on our self-cast Healing Surges. Combined with the aforementioned change in Enhancement’s relationship with Maelstrom Weapon and healing, and our self-healing is looking to be in a much more viable place as a defensive substitute, though I don’t have the experience with Elemental to gauge where theirs is at.
Survivability Wrap Up
Going over all of the above, the addition of Therazane’s Resilience in particular to the class tree seems to be moving our self-healing (along with the Maelstrom changes for Enhancement) into one of the strongest, most reliable positions it’s ever been in. However, the eternal issue of being one-shot at the high end still looms heavy over us. Our passive defenses are nothing special, our snap defensives are on one hand highly conditional and on the other highly punishing to use, and our proper defensive cooldowns leave major gaps.
Astral Shift remains our sole consistent saving grace, but one very good defensive on a 1.5 minute cooldown has never been enough to keep us from feeling like paper before, and I don’t trust that it will in Midnight, either.
If Blizzard is really determined for self-healing to be our substitute for defensive abilities to the extent that they won’t give us enough defensives to stay live, then they need to give us some other avenue by which to use self-healing to live through what would otherwise kill us before we have the chance. A few options:
- Self-healing grants a small damage reduction buff, ala priests’ Protective Light.
- Self-overhealing grants a proportional damage absorption shield.
- Damage that would kill us is converted into a healing absorption effect for the overkill amount. This shield can only be self-healed, must be healed within X seconds or we die, and we cannot benefit from this again for Y seconds after being triggered.
Bonus Round: Nitpicks
Alright, that last one got pretty long-winded, so let’s finish out with a palette cleanser of stuff that isn’t all that important, but still kinda weird.
Purge/Greater Purge: Why are these so late in the tree now? Enemies with Purgable buffs definitely exist before level 30, especially if you’re still forcing first time players level through recent expansions originally developed for endgame players with full class kits.
But speaking of this node…
Greater Purge: Why in the world does this still exist? Has anyone ever actually specced into it seriously? The circumstances for this ability to be better than just casting normal Purge twice are so specific and niche as to be nonexistent, leaving this nothing but a trap talent for people who don’t know better.
Therazane’s Resilience/Reactive Warding: As said, this is an extremely welcome pair of talents… but why are they where they are in the tree? Talents whose benefits solely apply to another talent are usually positioned so that they can’t be accessed at all without pathing through the relevant talent they modify, but this node is nowhere near Earth Shield.
Thunderstorm: I understand that CC is being trimmed down across the board, and that we shaman are arguably one of the most overloaded classes with such abilities, but why is Elemental allowed to keep this spell while Restoration and Enhancement are losing it? Disparity in CC profiles are usually rare between specs of the same class, and usually between specs of different roles like tanks vs dps when they do exist. So why does only Elemental get to keep this one? It would certainly make a better capstone than Instinctive Imbuements.