Yes. I remember, I was there. The shaman trees were among the most successful in the game at being based on utility instead of throughput, as the devs had said was their intention.
They were still godawful because all that utility was super niche, undertuned, and/or based on a version of the class that doesn’t exist anymore because they were essentially copy/pasted from Cataclysm- and earlier-era trees without regard for how the class and game have changed since then, especially in what role totems play.
The shaman class tree has sucked since the DF system was made. Succeeding at the system’s stated goals of not being throughput focused does not mean it wasn’t still crap overall.
This cannot be further from the truth. Insinuating that some change is coming, followed by assigning all of this as “doom”, is a literal translation to shut up and wait. That or I’m witnessing someone manifest actual lunacy.
I feel like, maybe I was the exception to the crowd on shamans, but I was not thrilled about the shaman’s state going into DF. They basically gave us all our abilities back that we already had as talent points and said, here ya go. Utility that is so niche you might use it for one dungeon expansion boss or one set of trash somewhere.
And our end cap nodes are so non impactful and basically just QOL they should just be baked in or higher up the talent node list like they are for everyone else lol. It’s hard to be excited about things like “Nature’s Swiftness” when you see other classes get things abominations limb, avatar or even time anomaly to name just a few.
I’m hoping there’s something cooking somewhere because it has felt so underwhelming for a while that I switched from shaman being my main to being a third alt when evoker came out up until this last season because I had hope things were going to change.
The Elemental are abandoning the shamans because we abandoned them in Dragonflight. Shaman of the Alliance and the Horde were supposed to help the Primalists.
I’ve always loved the fantasy of Shamans and made mine sometime in Cata but have preferred Warlock since Legion - they’ve kinda felt meh for the last several expansions. They’re due for many things but utility strength, defensive options and build variety are the 3 areas I think are most needed. Shamans should be one of the most epic classes to play at all times.
That’s the skinny of it honestly, there are literal volumes of notes and feedback on shamans and what talents could be pruned or changed along with why some hero talents aren’t working and suggestions for build paths.
For example, for defensives I think we might as well fold the cooldown reduction and the reduced cooldown talents just into Astral Shift itself because we only have just the one. Rocky even with the 5% damage reduction talent point and 10% max health can barely keep you alive if at all once keys are high enough or tyrannical plays a part.
I think it quite telling that the single moment of plot relevance shaman had in an entire expansion themed on elemental dragons was Smolderon taunting us for making him Firelord while we run across the bridge to his boss room.
I wasn’t too thrilled with the Shaman trees, either. True, the Class tree was all utility and very little throughput… but most of it sucked or was lackluster. Heck, Shaman is the only class I can think of where you can just not take any of the capstones and be fine, because they’re just that bad. Maaaybe Totemic Recall would be worth the points, but it doesn’t effect HTT, MTT, or SLT so that’s debatable.
It’s ridiculous and stupid that they have done nothing for shamans. Stormbringer STILL isn’t even working with Lightning Bolt talents for elemental and we don’t even know if that’s intended or a bug.
Other classes are getting fine tuning done on their hero trees and shaman hero trees aren’t even finished.
I love the class and it’s been my main since Vanilla but at the moment it is a potato of a class compared to some others.
The class has many good ultility options still and occasionally 1 of the 3 specs may shine above mediocrity in a patch here or there but the talent tree and amount of button bloat has been very poor for quite a while.
Ele turned into a YOLO RNG spec just waiting for Ascendence and lavasurge procs and it is just clunky to play, it desperately needs a better way of spreading Flame Shock. Resto has the same problems as always with a lack of externals as a healer. Enhance seems to get nerfed any time its near the top…then rebuffed close to end of expacs to be competative again.
It seems for a long time the class has been last on the list of “work to get done” for the dev team. Hero talents still don’t fix the issues our talent trees have
Is the glass half full or half empty? Out of 48 (!!!) nodes in the class tree, 39 were single point nodes. That’s more 1 pointers than some classes have in their entire class tree combined.
I think it’s a good place to end the tangent though.
Here is hoping we see a shaman rework that includes more defensive uptime and something to bring to a raid.
