Grease lightning is still the best.
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Rsham is one of the best for damage lol. Look at logs
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You clearly didn’t test shaman in DF alpha/beta. If you did then you would know that shaman wasn’t well positioned at all.
The people who said shaman tree was good were not shamans. They clearly didn’t understand the utility they were seeing, but shamans did and it was not well liked. Take stoneskin totem, without thinking about it it seems good, until you realize that there is maybe 1 in a 1000 situations where it might be useful. Physical damage isn’t a huge problem for tanks and group members rarely take it, making it a talent that no one ever picks. The bottom half the class tree for enhancement is really bad. The capstones are awful. It’s all super niche utility that isn’t worth taking, QOL stuff that needs to be baseline, or useless talents. So many totem talents when enhance barely uses them and doesn’t need the talents. Why would enhance need natures swiftness? Answer is they don’t and it’s 100% useless for them, meaning an entire capstone gone. It suffers from trying to please 3 different roles, healer, caster dps, melee dps, and because of that there are useless nodes for each of them making it a horrible class tree.
People thought the class tree was good when it first came out relative to other class trees. The problem though is that those class trees got iteration and reworks and shaman got nothing. So what started off okay comparatively, turned out bad. Every other class I’ve played has a better, imo, class tree than shaman.
As far as spec trees, you can’t just look at 1pt vs 2pt nodes and get the full story. What you’re not seeing, at least in enhancement, is that many of the talents are extremely polarized. Meaning that if you go one build those talents are now useless. How? Enhance is designed so that it’s specs are all or nothing, so if you go stormstrike you need ALL the stormstrike talents to make it good, not even great. Same goes for elemental, if you go elemental then stormstrike becomes useless and thus any stormstrike talents are useless. That’s why Totemics design is problematic, 1/3-1/2 the talents are useless depending on the build because of how polarized enhancements builds/talents are. We also have 2-3 nodes that are non-throughput and/or don’t really fit the playstyle thus no one picks them ever.
The only spec that looked hopeful going into DF was enhancement and it had a 25% aura nerf to everything weeks before launch. It was reverted to 10%, but we still ended up 3rd-4th best melee dps and that was until .0.7 and then it was a gradual fall to obsolescence. Elemental gameplay was boring/clunky in alpha, boring/clunky in beta, and boring/clunky at launch and it’s damage has been middle of the pack all expansion, which isn’t the worst but combined with a terrible gameplay it’s not good either.
We also barely got touched design wise since the intial DF alpha implementation. We got a few talents moved around but design wise we got nothing and prayed every single alpha/beta patch for changes we were begging for. Alas we got nothing and our wants/needs are still exactly the same. I could literally post my exact DF alpha feedback for TWW and it’s still 100% valid, nothing has really changed.
I’m a big advocate that ALL reworks need to be done by launch or it needs delayed. I wanted DF delayed because of exactly that and the massive balance changes that tossed previous testing out the window. I want the same for TWW, if they can’t get all classes reworked and balanced then it needs delayed. Forcing people that like X class/spec to wait 3-6 months for a rework so they don’t hate the game isn’t a viable solution and actively hurts the game. It just show some really poor management on the part of Blizzard.
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Why cant we upgrade graphics? Why cant we have an elemental spec that fully delves into the lightning fantasy? 
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How about anything. Literally anything at all?
Well this is them basically saying nothing big like raid buffs coming for shamans at the very least. Wasn’t direct feedback or anything but shamans got mentioned in passing that we won’t be getting a raid buff because we shouldn’t need one, so we do exist in some capacity for them lol.
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They gave up they can’t even give us a new ascendance look we are doomed.
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I feel like this has happened before…
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Vivivdly remembers posting absurdly long crafted feedback posts on the forums right before BFA launched and having to reroll druid again because elemental shaman was so bad resto shamans were easier to quest as. We were told we’d have to wait for the big rework in 8.1, but it turned out just to be % increase to our abilities but no real fundamental changes.
It feels like the core problems with shamans just keep having the can kicked down the road, which I suspect may be because nobody wants to have to deal with making more unique totem art for each race.
(I’m already gearing my boomy back up as we speak because it feels exactly the same again)
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Shamans aren’t real
You do realize that ever since Greg Street left Blizzard, Dev communication went to $#!^ right?
I expect zero interaction with Devs in this game.
Play the class if you like its current state, quit if you don’t.
Don’t expect much.
No one sane takes Coldest Snap. Cold Snap’s sole purpose is double Ice Blocks for emergencies. It’s only marginally useful in situations where you are 100% sure you won’t be dying.
Regarding the frost mage rework: as someone who plays non-meta specs for fun, having my parses jump from the 30s to the 90s in a single day with pretty much no changes to build/rotation was WILD.
As for shamans, like monks, the class capstones are really bad IMO.
We need a rework.
TBH, at this point, I’m starting to miss simple things like Searing/Magma totem…
Elemental is fine. Enhance is insane.
Monks.
This happened in freaking Vanilla too, and multiple other expansions IIRC. Bus Shock, for the people who know.
Maybe they were just gonna remove the class when nobody was looking, but 2 or 3 people may have noticed.
“Hey, didn’t I have a Shaman?”
“No, I don’t think so”
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At this point, I think it’s becoming increasingly apparent that Ion is the one resposinbile for holding back the shaman class. Perhaps he just can’t be bothered to relearn the class and so has instructed his underlings to not make any changes. This despite the fact that he hasn’t played his own shaman in some years now I think.
i agree your doomed.
ghostcrawler was a really abrasive dev from what i remember from his posting in the forums. i still remember his condscending post about hunters complaining about arcane shot being removed. oh boy it did not go over well. yeah if were gonna get communication like that i can do without it. all that does is lead to open animosity between the devs and the players.
Believe me, would have much rather have been forgotten this expac than the load of crap they did to Shadow since 10.1.
Really wish the Devs who worked on Shadow this expac left us alone and messed up Shamans for awhile. 
It was honestly better than nothing.
At least we had some insight over what was going on.
And you could see in-game that he, at least, read the forums.
Bugs reported here were fixed in game in a few weeks at best.
Now, bugs reported on alpha might be fixed on the last patch of an expansion…
no it really wasn’t.being told that your wrong and we’re right and we know more than you is NOT productive.
he was also the author behind that oh so brilliant
“heorics are hard” article.
which was really just a low key condscending jab at the playerbase.
so true brother 123
We’re 5th of 7 in dps and 6th out of 7 for hps pulling from keys level 10 and higher. That position remains unchanged in high keys. So how is that one of the best? Either you’re trolling, willfully ignorant, or can’t read/count. Oh my, you’re from moonguard. Think that answers it.
2 Likes