Look him up he has been the game director for years. When he became director the games tarted going down hill.
This is what comes up when you google him.
Ion joined Blizzard just before Wrath of the Lich King launched and has worked on all raids and dungeons since then. In 2015 he rose from Lead Encounter Designer to Assistant Game Director, under Tom Chilton, and in late 2016 was promoted to Game Director when Chilton left the team for another Blizzard project.
We do not know for how long his influence in the game as director started from. This stated he has led the down fall of Shaman until the SL remake and DF. But yea he straight up said 2h era of shaman is over with. But he is also the person that when asked why they keep nerfing demo warlock in legion he said it was because they didn’t want you to play that spec.
So we’d still have to have 2 different trees set up within the singular tree.
Not against it, but I find it unlikely they are going to completely balance, etc everything twice.
Example?
What talents do you feel should be dropped.
Every single guy since TBC (well before Ion) moved enhance away from 2H. Its not just Ion. its everyone since the beginning.
How is the lawsuit coming?
What do you define as “down hill”?
All the things that pointed at making the game go down hill started in WotLK. Before Ion.
WoD was not Ion, which people also point to as the largest drop.
The first full expansion he was game director over, was BFA. We actually do know when his influence in the game as director started from.
That started in Classic. It wasn’t until extremely recently that shaman got better. So history actually says the opposite happened. That shaman got better under his watch.
Removing our totems, removing shocks, turning us into a poor mans fury warrior. Removing the syngery between SS and Earth shock with earth shock removal. Nerfing Enhancement Healing for all aspects in bfa because of a pvp tournament, removal Shamanistic Rage our only defesnive we could use in stun.
Command tables, all of the systems people have hated since he “officially” became the game director.
In legion all 3 were removed. And yes they were returned in SL but again removing them in the first place.
And what about
Again these were done as well.
Yes and I said in bfa we were nerfed.
You might have been excited, but that was a bit portion of our class identity. Again they do need to be reworked for the modern game but a lot of people liked having totems to drop since we didn’t have a buff like priest, mages, paladins and so on that we could give our group.
We do not know for how long he has been making director decisions so that is questionable as they were released in wod. But even with the negative feedback about the table he kept them in the game.
And this is just with our class but I digress you might think he has been a good director but with how Enhancement became poor mans fury warrior and removal part of our class identity totems and everything else that was done to shamans yea Down hill.
Ion wasnt in charge until BFA. So Ion brought them back.
Removed before Ion again?
And then buffed. So give credit where its due.
I think 2 expansions ( about 4-6 years) before he took over, is enough of a time period to assume he wasnt making director decisions.
But if you are going to just say anything bad from wow, even if it was 5+ years before he was director is his fault…you do you.
Yes, I am happy that enhancement is finally relevant in content. I am sorry you wish it to return to a state where people dreaded seeing one in their group.
Those people are the problem with this game. Every spec has been viable for quite some time now. People who think they are better than they really are demand competitive only specs like it makes any difference when they are getting carried. If you aren’t in the race to world first or setting key records, any spec is fine.
Did I say this? No I didn’t I pointed out what Ion directed for our class to be and now how it has changed for the better. Maybe I wasn’t clear enough What was done in SL and DF for Enhancement Shamans is returning us to what we used to be. Going from a poor mans fury warrior without the sustain too what we are now is a god send for us that love the spec. But the fact that we had been changed and left and nerfed during this time yea we had gone down hill and we are better.
I also will say that what happened to Enhancement since Ion started is what the game director wanted for us. And it was down hill until SL and DF. And again a lot of us liked having totems to bring a buff to the group. They being removed upset quite a few of us. I do believe how they have done Mana spring totem talent is the way they should take our totems.
Thats all I want to play Enhancement shaman and be just as wanted as other classes. And to quote you we are.
I also liked this idea too, just make the totems float around the shaman like our shields, or maybe a totem belt visual or something that moves with the character, then its a bit more justifiable if the buffs aren’t as powerful because they are no longer destroyable (at least for long duration buff totem effects) nor require GCD to upkeep (presuming buff totems are made into permanent effects that can be changed at the players discretion similar to warrior stances/paladin auras)
To be clear all other totems with short durations/cooldowns/offensive based totems would still function as they do now.
I think they should link the totem to certin abilities. EX when you get a wf proc it drops a wf totem. And another wf totem will not drop unless you move out of range or the totem dies/expires. Healing totem drops when you cast healing spells and so forth. And they will not drop new totems until the other one is destroyed/expires or you move out of range.
That is a fantastic idea imo, anything that can save a GCD given the sheer amount of abilities we rotate through to be effective in PvP/short duration PvE fights would be a massive QoL/performance improvement.
For instance, most skirmishes I find myself dropping WF totem/frostshock/healing stream/wolves/doomwinds/heroism before I can really start a rotation depending on the fight, which adds up to around 5-6 seconds GCD for melee abilities and a bit more for spellcasting (I haven’t rechecked which is which yet, iirc spells are 1.5sec GCD and melee gets 1.0sec GCD)
Idk about making it so you can’t drop totems that give buffs/making buff totems more like mana spring, but for short duration totems/CD totems I like the idea a lot.
Well as stated thats why you tie those totems to specific abilities. Like LL, SS and so forth. Make it so you drop those totems with our regular rotation. we do not have many buff totems so it would be easy to link those too abilities that we use. And just make it so you cant keep dropping them over and over again like you can with wf totem now. MAke it so new totems drop when old are killed/expire or move out of range
So like air totems would activate off wind abilities, earth totems off earthshock, fire totems proc from flameshock/lavalash, healing/water totems off healing spells (maybe earthshield?)?
Would need a way to let the shaman configure which totems will be dropped when these abilities are used for it to still feel “shamanish” I think, but I really like the idea.
It might be faster to implement the old totem system however since that’s already been coded before and debugged mostly and would just require some modifications to bring it to live… kind of hard to say without actually looking at the code though. Hopefully not spaghetti code…
Well for ex. Fire totems drop from flame shock and LL. For enhancement we would need earth shock back but yes. To solve the problem of what totems will be dropped give us the totem selector like we had that we could choose all 4 totems and hit a button to drop them that we have the choice of what to drop when we use those abilities that trigger the drops.
Yea I agree, we basically sayin the same thing. Totems drop on abilities + the ability to select which totems will be dropped when that particular school of magic/ability is used, these changes would definitely help cut back on the ability bloat for shaman which has gotten kind of out of hand in the last several expansions and give the class a more streamlined feel.
Again I think buff totems should remain long duration (2 min)
(maybe all totems should just be 2 minutes standard and their effects brought inline accordingly assuming totems will still be stationary/damageable)
That kind of gives other players a reason to actually target totems like tremor totem, which would completely shutdown fears in area if they don’t target the totem. Pet classes would be able to deal with totems pretty easily, I don’t feel like it would be a major issue to make it 2 minute standard for all totems and then there can be talents that change the totems to short duration but increase the strength of the effects like the difference between old healing stream and the new.
For those that want short duration totems/stronger totems these talents could easily be fit into the shaman tree, by reworking the talents towards the bottom, and just make totem recall standard ability as it was before, it is a completely undesirable talent for every spec. It’s just not worth taking any shaman end of tree talents, the last 2 tiers are pretty much a dumpster fire right now
I really like the idea of using 2h weapons. But like you’re talking about, there’s a lot of issuses that would have to be resolved in an elegant manner.
Less windfury procs (but maybe the dps would even out since the procs we would get would hit harder)
Less maelstrom stacks from swinging less. Maybe the talent could 2x the maelstrom stacks you get from autos to make up for the lack of an off hand.
Flametongue. Plus it’s interaction with lava lash. Maybe the talent could allow a 2h to be enchanted with both windfury and flametongue. Also another option could be removing the flametongue interaction and just not having access to flametongue, if that’s easier to choose. I’m cool with less buffs before i can start fighting.
Maybe there’s other im not thinking of too. But it makes me think of them making daggers off limits because the swing speed is too fast. And they didn’t want to have to code “balance workarounds” for us to use them.
It is almost the same issue Frost DK’S have. Procs and what not we have. If they give us 2h it has to be done correctly not half a** like they did with frost and how long it took them to get it working correctly
That would make for an interesting talent, so you could choose between buffing WF with a third attack when it triggers with possibly a bonus to proc rate, or the other talent lets you have two weapon enchants on one weapon.
Although unless I’ve read it wrong, lavalash doesn’t benefit nearly as much from flametongue as it did back when we could enchant both weapons with WF or the frost enchant we had… can’t recall the name at the moment - did frost damage + 50% movement speed reduction.
Would like to see the frost enchant come back too, as well as rockbiter/earth magic.
Rockbiter could function like the old combat rogue with mace weapons specialization, 10% chance to stun for 2 seconds on hit. Heck even 1 second would be great, that or it causes spell interrupt/knockback/slows casting speed. The random stuns would be a bit much and the class already has plenty of RNG going for it, or rockbiter could reduce the targets armor by like 25-40% helping level the playing field a bit against plate at the cost of magic damage/crit (see below).
I’d like to see flametongue changed to give a 3-9% spell crit bonus, as it’s completely useless for elemental as it stands. There’s the talent for 5% on fire damage, but fire damage is a fraction of total damage, especially in PvP. I literally have no reason to use a weapon enchant as elemental shaman and that’s simply not right, flametongue needs to be useful as a baseline ability which adding spell crit to it would be a perfect solution given all specs reliance on spell crit.
Granted for 2H you’d need two weapon enchants for this to come into play, it may need both this talent and a 3rd strike on windfury for it to be effective… 3rd strike on windfury definitely needs to be strategically positioned within the talent tree so that it’s not accessible to a DW build as that would be completely OP and upset balance.
