I think the worst part of it that everyone is always like, well you guys don’t need a rework cause look at all this utility you bring! You can barely count poison cleansing or tremor totem because they’re helpful in all of 2 situations during an entire expansion at best.
Windrush totem is super positional and requires extra talents and gcds to reposition it compared to things likr roar or zephy that last longer and impact an area around you so there’s no need to stack tightly.
Then we have two different roots or slows, one of which shares a node with wind rush totem and it’s not like 90% of classes don’t have some built in or easily obtainable slow to match anyways.
Heroism is no longer unique or hard to find and for a class all about totems and buffs initially our totems have very little impact at this point.
I don’t have the beta, but did they fix the Farseer AI yet? Cause having your grandparents waste elemental blasts at dead targets or pull extra packs without our control is such a great class fantasy.
The biggest drawback for the ancestors is how often they kind of idle for a minute before casting and then vanishing, and yeah I believe last time I checked they were still tossing their elementals blasts kinda wherever instead of prioritizing what you’re hitting which would be nice.
I do disagree mostly. But that’s because totems are a core part of the shaman identity. Or at least it should be. What I can agree with is having so many utility totems with a short uptime and range being a problem. While some classes like druids can just click a button to give raid wide speed buff, shamans have to click twice to place a totem somewhere and hope everyone steps over it.
I don’t mind totems being key to our identity, and if they were a powerful condensed cooldown centered on it, like healing tide totem is that’d be great. I kind of miss the permanent totems because it was a consistent set of buffs we could provide to the raid.
Granted, I’d love to see something with a bit more bang like some kind of elemental totem that whipped up a storm or brought forth a wave of tiny elementals but something more than a 10 second duration super niche totem would be nice.
Indeed. However, the totems have long CD, or small radius for a long, long time. It seems they refuse to fix the issues with totems, which is why I said they’ll never give a rework.
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.
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.
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)
