Constructive Feedback - All specs

Classes Shaman
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Hello Shaman Devs and enthusiasts, here’s some constructive feedback that discusses specific abilities and talents. Hope it’s helpful.

Earth Elemental (Class):

Iconic and good for class flavor, but is a bad ability. When used for taunting, it is irrelevant in any other context than leveling, because it is instantly one shot. With Primordial Bond, it is a very bad defensive, as it only provides a 15% health buff. I have seen it pull mobs walking past them when other class pets did not, even though it didn’t taunt them and wasn’t commanded to attack them. It fails as a defensive.

Spirit Wolf (Class):

Perhaps the DR from this talent is used as a justification to deny Shamans another defensive. But this ability is also bad, because you can’t do your rotation while in Ghost Wolf form and you have to wait for it to stack. It is strange to have to sit in Ghost Wolf form and do nothing during a damage event while your team continues to hit the boss or you wait for your arena team to bail you out, because you have no defensives left. There are many one shot mechanics from dungeon bosses that cycle DPS-targeted abilities on a faster timeline than your defensive cooldown, making Spirit Wolf useful but a large damage loss to use.

Reincarnation (Class):

This is an iconic ability that needs help. It is disabled in PvP. It costs time like a normal death for the mythic plus timer. You revive where your body is, which can be covered in puddles. You revive at low health, and because there is constant ticking damage and mechanics, you usually just die again. It is usually not worth pressing.

Earth Shield, Healing Stream Totem, Chain Heal, (Class):

For Enhancement and Elemental, these abilities are very weak and almost not worth pressing or taking. But since it is what we have, we do. I think we at least need to move them around. The two most useful talents are at the bottom of this area in the talent tree, Elemental Resistance and Refreshing Waters. I would move Earth Shield to where Chain Heal is, because Chain Heal is really not useful for Elemental or Enhancement. The current pathing means that you have to spend many talent points to get the one or two actual talents that you want. Regardless, they are very weak.

Windveil (Class):

Cool concept but not realistic. There are few scenarios where you will successfully interrupt a mob specifically to get the DR in advance of a damage event before somebody else kicks it AND the cast just so happens to be timed perfectly such that it occurs when you need it. Give players the agency to press a defensive when it is needed, don’t leave their survival up to good luck.

Maelstrom Weapon (Enhancement):

Maelstrom weapon stacks need to be displayable as a bar or combo point-like display. It is a class resource required to play the spec and other classes don’t have to use an addon for this. I understand it’s a buff, but tracking buff stacks when it really is a resource makes Enhancement more complicated than it needs to be. Bars are easier to track peripherally than numbers.

Overflowing Maelstrom (Enhancement):

Good concept, like a Word of Glory. But you end up spending many globals healing yourself when other classes just have an additional defensive, which costs one global. It also requires that you track buff stacks, which is more complicated than it needs to be. And you run out of mana! Then you can’t even use it. And Elemental does not even get this.

Doom Winds (Enhancement):

The proc rate needs adjustment. You can have it proc exactly when you need it and then you keep up with the other classes on the damage meter. Or, you can go five minutes without a proc and struggle to contribute damage… and then get multiple procs back to back on one mob, overlapping each other (which deletes some duration of the buff too). Very cool ability, but the RNG is simply too unreliable for how much damage it contributes.

Sundering (Enhancement):

Worse ability than Primordial Wave. P Wave was guaranteed to hit targets with flame shock and would convert to P Storm after. Sundering is a frontal with limited range and it contributes 3% or less damage. Sundering used to incapacitate targets, which helped a Shaman control mobs. Mob control contributes to survivability. My question is, what now is the point of Sundering?

Stormkeeper (Elemental):

Make it baseline 30 sec to line up with Ascendance, rather than a choice talent node to do so. When Fury of the Storms sims higher, you take it. But a 45 sec cooldown makes lining cooldowns up unnecessarily hard.

Earthquake (Elemental):

Consider making this follow the target or reworking it. Tanks constantly kite mobs out of the earthquake and you lose a lot of damage. Also, melee party members complain that with many earthquakes down, they cannot see puddles and mechanics and then die. Try it out, some mechanics are impossible to see with that many earthquakes down.

Thunderstrike Ward (Elemental):

Calling this out as an example of a cool ability that will never be taken when it is a choice node with a baseline damage increase that sims better. There are multiple of these.

Stormstream Totem (Restoration):

This ability hits hard and feels great to press. The problem is that it is RNG. You are lucky if it overlaps with the moment that you really need it and unlucky when you get back to back procs on an easy pull. This is a common feedback theme: survivability should not be dictated by RNG. Deeply Rooted Elements has the same problem. I would give up this apex talent to get a properly tuned Earthen Wall totem or APT, which were pruned.

Some general themes from above and thoughts:

  • Survivability is a problem.
  • Midnight pruning streamlined rotations well, but overpruned and damaged class identity (Restoration in particular, which lost a lot of fun buttons).
  • General pruning seemed to ignore unique cases. Example: Thunderstorm knock up and Totemic Recall (pruned) allowed Shamans to compensate for being squishy by having a lot of mob control. You might not die to rot damage from a Windrunner Spire axethrower mob if you can stun it a lot. There was a push to reduce mob control in Midnight and that had a larger negative effect on classes that depend on that mob control to compensate for not being as tanky as a DK.
  • Racials are way too strong or weak and are limited to certain classes. Shadowmeld is great. You can trivialize many mechanics with it, but some classes can’t be a night elf. I like WoW lore so I get why, but the gameplay impact is a problem.

Consider adding your feedback about specific abilities and talents below - I think it’s easier for Devs to make targeted changes with that kind of feedback.

Thanks for reading.

-Odin

4 Likes
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Earth Elemental’s rework into a 3 minute CD has been a downgrade for everything except raiding. The baseline talent is worthless in any serious group content because its only baseline function is to be a tank pet, but it’s far to fragile to withstand performing that function above a relatively low content threshold. This makes Earth Elemental a minimum 2 talent point investment just to actually function as a personal defensive CD in group content, for which a 15% health increase on a 3 minute CD is very underwhelming.

Meanwhile, having its duration cut in half in exchange for that reduced baseline CD makes the baseline pet much worse for the primary content we would actually want to use its tanking functionality; solo content.

I would much prefer to see Earth Elemental reverted to its previous 5 minute CD for 1 minute of duration, and its node made into a choice node with a personal defensive CD option like Stone Bulwark Totem.

I said this before in my pre-Midnight appraisal of the talent tree. Spirit Wolf is absolutely phenomenal in the very specific circumstances that favor it. That being: prolonged boss immunity phases with rot damage. In any other circumstance, this talent is a massive throughput loss in order to achieve its defensive value (albeit one I’ve had to make the choice to eat for the sake of living what would otherwise be unavoidable one-shot damage in the past, such as the mana bombs on Vexamus back in DF).

I like this talent a lot in a vacuum. But if Blizzard is hesitating to give us better passive or active defenses because they’re counting Spirit Wolf among our defensive options, then I’d rather lose it in favor of something that actually fits into more than one or two encounter profiles per season.

Reincarnation is a legacy ability vastly out of touch with the modern game at this point. I’d trade it in a heartbeat for many other anti-death effects, my personal choice being the old Necrolord soulbind that let you keep fighting for a while after dying. Combine that with an effect that if we self-heal enough during that pseudo-dead period we remain alive at the end of the effect, and we’d be in business.

I was very excited for Therazane’s Resilience making effortless Earth Shield maintenance a thing for DPS shaman and providing a substantial boost to our self-healing capacity. But then Blizzard nerfed our self healing coming into Midnight, so having 100% uptime Earth Shield was only basically bringing us back to the self-healing throughput we previously had in the first place without an active Earth Shield, leaving our typical in-combat self-healing right where it started, and nerfing our maximum self-healing potential.

Healing Stream Totem has remained a joke of a talent for non-Resto shaman for as long as it’s been back in our talent tree. For Enhancement there could at least be value to be gotten from it by allowing it to benefit from Overflowing Maelstrom’s healing boost effect, but Elemental would need something else to even put it on its radar.

This is not helped by Elemental Resistance being similarly pathetic. The talent being limited to only certain damage types requires very high knowledge of encounters, trash mobs, and key routes to determine if it even applies to the content the shaman is doing, and even when it does, the application method combined with the tiny buff duration means that it’s only reliable the buff is going to intercept relevant damage in the case of group-wide rot, and even after all that, the numeric value of the buff is relatively tiny for how niche this talent’s application is.

Chain Heal needs to be added into Refreshing Waters’ effect, straight up. At least for Enhance/Elemental.

The same as Spirit Wolf, this is a defensive that is great when we can get it, but has too many circumstances that can deny us any value from it, and this is a huge problem if Blizzard is counting this effect in their estimation of our tankiness.

In the first place, we can only proc this effect at all if there is actually an interruptible cast involved in an encounter, which is extremely rare on bosses. Second, we only get the effect if we were the one to get the kick, which can also be a lottery, especially in uncoordinated groups without established kick rotations. Third, the duration is exactly the same as Wind Shear’s cooldown, making it very easy for the effect to fall off at just the wrong moment with nothing being cast for us to re-proc it. Fourth, I lied on point 3, because the talent has no consideration for Resto’s Wind Shear CD being almost 3x longer than Enhance/Ele’s, meaning that even if kicking on CD, a Resto shaman is only getting a hair better than 33% uptime on the effect.

At minimum, consider buffing the effect duration to something like 15-18 seconds so DPS shaman have some grace time to get another interrupt before the effect falls off.

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I can’t tell you how many times earth elemental has prevented deaths for me in m+. I keep it with the taunt, and use it if the tank dies. It won’t last long, but it lasts long enough for us to either battle res the tank or run back towards where the tank is. Many times it turned full wipes into 1-2 deaths. It’s useful as is.

Also storm stream isn’t rng. It comes after nature’s swiftness. Save it for high impact times. For example in spore fall, I can’t nature’s swiftness to chain heal on the boss’s last akoe before intermission, but save the storm stream for the intermission phase, casting ascendencr then storm stream then double healing stream (all with totemic chain heals procing) for a big burst of healing. If you’ve just carrying it whenever you get it, you’re doing it wrong.