shamans have been my favorite class in almost all regards except one thing. Every time I play one I feel like I’m slapping with a wet noodle. I always switch off to another class because of how underwhelming the class feels as a whole.
Is this still the case? Does the future look good for shamans?
Survivability rather than damage is my primary issue w/BFA shaman. At least as enhance, we are pretty squishy for a melee class.
Burst healing looks like it may be getting worse in Shadowlands with the return of maelstrom weapon removing our ability to string together a bunch of instant cast heals and there’s no improvements to astral shift and no new defensives…just healing stream totem and a better earth shield talent for a little more HOT.
Hopefully there will be leveling perks on the way to 60 that help like improved maelstrom weapon increasing damage/healing by 10% per stack.
The shaman
the looks cool ,flashy, feels powerful
but its not in terms of recount/numbers its underwhelming
you put a lot of effort in your rotation just to be in the middle of the pack.
while other classes just fart out damage or roll face on keyboard blow up charts .
This is the life of the shaman
I was going to say something… but Huurdek already said it and said it well. He’s spot on.
That really is a shame. I played a lot of my warlock just because I found out warlocks used to be shaman but dipped into fel magic. At least thats what I was told.
Guess I’ll just use him as a profession alt till they do something with the class that makes them feel good.
Say what? Legit Shammy and burst healing don’t go hand to hand
My point was that our survivability toolkit on alpha doesn’t look much better and may be worse than on live (particularly if stamina starts to pull away from spell power as the xpac progresses like it has the last couple so that our our healing as a % of stamina drops).
I’m fine with removing the instant healing surge spam but then it seems like we might need something else in terms of defensives (sham rage, healing/maelstrom stack generating wolves, etc.).
Once upon a time back when we had maelstrom weapon we had sham rage + healing wolves + healing tide totem + spirit walker’s grace baseline + astral shift/stone bulwark totem/ancestral swiftness/ancestral guidance/primal elementalist as defensive talent options).
And that’s back when we had ascendance and fire elemental as baseline offensive abilities too - AND ascendance did nature damage.
Looking at you MOP.
I’d encourage Blizzard to look at the MOP toolkit and consider whether anything else should come back for enhancement shaman as we revert to maelstrom weapon play.
www.mop-veins.tk/enhancement-shaman-pve-dps-rotation-cooldowns-abilities
if you main a shaman at the start of a expansion you are honestly just asking for punishment.
Yeah I was genuinely excited about the design direction with the announced changes, but the more I hear, the more it sounds like it’ll be another underwhelming experience that ends up doing well enough at the end of the expac to be considered “fine”.
I hope I’m wrong, but I’m prepping my DK just in case.
welcome to WoW. shamans get shafted every expansion, and every patch, with the exceptionally rare “super op” that lasts a month or two before being patched
Don’t kinkshame me
Yep. Like always. I don’t know which shaman player did something to somebody’s wife in Blizzard HQ, but we’re constantly getting shafted now because of it I guess.
No shamanistic rage for enhance? Nah it’s ok bro I just LOVE being focused even harder than I already was in PvP. Oh, our healing surge barely heals even with the PvP perk to add 50%? It’s ok, I can just play a demon hunter and leech HP while DPSing. Oh wait, while we’re at it, what happened to use having Ancestral Guidance let alone Feral Spirits actually healing?
God hates shamans and so does Blizzard. Especially enhancement. The changes in SL are not enough and its just basically making a Diet Coke version of WoD enhance. Except we’re going to be even crappier in PvP.
Numbers are irrelevant right now, the shaman in alpha feels good maybe a lil spammy but feels good… in terms of survivability it feels the same even a lil better with healing totem being baseline…
dnt know what this burst healing on live yall talking about in this thread but at most you can get 2 instant surges off before yur hard casting it unless you just standing there get wacked in the face letting yur maelstrom cap in which case healing is the least of yur prob.
That said shaman is not a gimp class I usually jump on forums pre expansion to stay up on the news and its the same thing in every class forum “my favorite class sucks”… I do all content i want to do on enhance shaman, I lvl every expansion on enhance, never have any problems. Does the class need work? Of course! but just because the 1% isn’t taking it into world first clears or mythic+ 20’s dnt mean imma Shun my favorite class.
No other class feels as satisfying to play as shaman, so regardless of what happens I’ll keep playing this dude.
Honestly people constantly over-meme DPS Shaman and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
They are very rarely as bad as the community makes them out to be. Often times it starts off with higher level players complaining about clunky mechanics or survivability and as the complaints circulate it becomes a game of telephone where the criticism inevitably turns into memes about damage output.
The last time a dps Shaman was genuinely complete trash was the first 1-2 months of WoD.
Now if you want to complain about clunky mechanics (Enhance Maelstrom, invisible Earthquakes, etc) or survivability issues (hurrdurr Ankh = Defensive) then you’ve got some decent ground to stand on. But every time I read a post about someone saying they really like the idea of Shaman but can’t stand the “low numbers” I just facepalm.
I just want Gust of Wind and Spell Reflecting grounding totem back 
The shaman: is the Worst hybrid class in the game
off heals are a joke /meme
ele/ ench heal for 25-30 k and you can only cast it 4-5 time
depends on management.
(that’s with my 452 itemlv )
Dps : we put a lot of effort in our rotation just to be in the middle of the pack. awhile other class blow charts up doing half the effort/work.
ele :every thing we can do other caster does it better,
other caster have multi escapes/ roots better mobile and have more defense /offence cd on top of that
enhance: .every thing we can do other melee does it better and can take a bleeping hit .
we have paper armor with a no disengage crappy heals /off heals .and 1 defiance cd with a long cool down
Jack of all trades Master at only one thing being disappointed.
we are a meme class threw and threw
shadowland will extend it for another expansion
blizzard has NEVER fixed these core issues.
what I have seen in alpa videos shaman are looking bad for pvp .we are this squishy in a pve questing. how will we stand in pvp
I struggle to take anything you say seriously when you’re typing like that.
Yeah, that’s how hybrid classes work these days.
You just sound whiny and bad here. Someone is always going to have it easier, just the way this game is - and lets not pretend Shaman are insanely complicated either.
False. No ranged dps has a better interrupt than Elemental and none of them bring Tremor, Skyfury, or Grounding totems or Earthquake’s sustained knockdown.
Elemental is good in raids, great in M+, and fine in PvP (as fine as anything can be in Corruption-land).
Blizzard is literally fixing the core issue of Enhancement in Shadowlands. God you are so whiny. Literally the type of player I was referring to in my original post about self fulfilling prophecies.
Now this I can agree with 100%.
Research “bus shock”. That’s what kicked it off.