Nice ideas shuffling the fire totems around where they are best used with mechanics that actually back them up. I could get behind the Earthquake suggestion if it’s balanced to account for the lack of interaction with mastery; maybe something indirect via chain lightning similar to Crash Lightning. As it stands, I just don’t see Fire Nova working for Enhance in its current form without a serious cop out like 1 Flame Shock and back to linear scaling or some form of limited Flame Shock spread.
I’ll add a shout-out for Resto to bring back poison cleansing totem and a moderate tank / single target CD as well.
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I just updated Restoration to have a reworked Surge of Earth that instead consumes the remaining charges to heal the target for the total amount.
As for poison cleansing, it would be nice, but I don’t see them changing what we can dispel as much as it would be nice to have. I believe this is specifically a PvP reason as Resto Shaman is already a good healer against Rogues. If you wanted to trade Poison for Curse, maybe…as we originally were Poison and Disease, but this is just something, despite wanting, I think has no chance of happening — I will add it though.
If curses actually meant anything in PvE or poison wasn’t as punishing in some instances, I’d have no problems with the niche dispels, but it is kind of a sore point as all other healers have at least 2 relevant dispels; only priests are in a similar situation with magic/disease.
I believe the fact that priests and shaman have an offensive dispel is why they don’t get access to poison cleansing.
PvP balance strikes again. Though it does have it’s uses in PvE, I think in PvE there are at least 4 classes not counting DPS shamans / priests that can make up for an offensive dispel.
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Offensive dispels are definitely not just for PvP. Blood Elves were brought en masse to the Zul fight in Uldir because of how strong the dispel racial was for clearing adds.
Purge and Dispel magic have significant uses in PvE. I would argue the Druid enrage dispel is significantly more niche. Purge/Dispel (and its greater cousin Spellsteal) are also incredibly strong for Mythic+ where mobs generally tend to have buffs that can be removed.
It’s true, I like the purge and wouldn’t trade it, but poison is definitely noticeable on my priest or shaman; DPS being accustomed to just being cleansed by the majority of healers doesn’t help either.
Come to think of it, I just went through the list of dispel-able curses on Icy veins and aside from one curse in SoB, the rest are countered by mechanics, a nuisance (hex), or flat out labeled as ignorable. I’d argue curse dispel is more niche than purge.
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Add poison cleansing totem back.
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Set and forget cleansing isn’t helpful, and would result in nerfs elsewhere.
Huh? Did you not ever play when it was a thing? It was extremely useful. With all of shamans long cast spells it was the one thing that allowed you to respond to poison and keep healing. Where as a druid can pop instant hots all day. So a druid having to cast another instant poison removal isn’t going to buy them as much as it would shamans.
True, but I wouldn’t be against a totem on a longish CD like 1.5m that empowers your normal cleanses for 24 seconds or something.
You could file this issue under encounter design rather than class design too however.
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And it was removed because it hard countered entire toolkits of rogues and death knights ( specifically cleansing totem) without a cooldown, spammable as long as you had mana.
It entirely shut down specs in pvp. It was removed because of this, with the reason stated that dispelling something should be an active decision, and not something that you do passively without thinking about it.
You can make the argument for abolish poison, but after they removed cleansing totem, poison cleansing totem, and disease cleansing totem Shaman got entirely overhauled to no longer deal with poisons OR diseases, moving into curses and magic.
Passive cleansing totems are not coming back — Tremor Totem saw countless reworks, from all totems no longer being considered physical so they couldn’t be placed when silenced to no longer being usable after the fear is cast, instantly negating the fear (and cooldown charm/horrorify effects) and this is the closest thing left in game that shamans have that can be compared to a pulsing dispel. It now has a cooldown, and a short duration.
I agree that it would be nice for Shaman to remove poison. But a passive cleansing totem is not the way to do it. Reworking cleanse to do poison over curses is. Or maybe Blizzard feels that the fact that priests and shaman both have an offensive dispel, the tradeoff is not being able to dispel the most damaging DoT found in dungeons, because they can remove a bevy of other things that monks, paladins, and druids cannot. That’s called balance.
Being unable to remove poisons isn’t a detrimental feature to why Shaman are behind in mythic+ healing…Not having a tank cooldown or many instant casts, OR passive damage is. Spending the GCD on a cleansing totem, or spending the GCD on the cleanse spell results in the same effect…not to mention no healer at all has a AoE cleanse ability.
cough revival cough
But your points are fair. I’ll concede it as an encounter design issue rather than a class issue; there are more important things on your list to tackle first.
I was unaware of revival’s existence. Regardless, they would still need to change Shaman’s cleanse removal. As it stands, each healer class gets 2 removals alongside magic.
A cleansing totem for shaman would remove curse and magic, with the third removal being offensive purge. Unless you change curse to poison.
Either way, its still not the main reasons why shaman lag behind. As you said, its encounter design. I agree that there are more important things to tackle first.
Making nature’s Guardian baseline with Earthgrab Totem in its place as suggested elsewhere would really bring some choice back to that row, mostly for enhancement, while focusing that row solely on mobility.
Utility totems all around could use a bit more health for PvP as well.
I think the play is to instead move some of the talents around, rather than Nature’s Guardian becoming baseline.
For Elemental, swap Earth Shield with Wind Rush, essentially creating a mobilty tier and a survival tier.
For Enhancement, swap Static Charge with Nature’s Guardian, creating the same thing.
Ideally, though, just making Earthgrasp a PvP talent solves the situation easiest. Addressing Nature’s Guardian is more work than I think they would put into at this point (As I am betting the xpac is delayed due to covenant abilities, soulbinds, and legendaries rather than classers).
Calling static charge a mobility talent is pretty generous, but it could work if some of your other defensive suggestions are implemented baseline instead (separate wall, MSW healing, etc.) since that setup actually removes a viable defensive talent (speaking mostly from PvP perspective). Not sure if that is any more elegant than Nature’s Guardian as baseline, but it’s definitely hard to justify picking only one of Earth Shield or Nature’s Guardian when both are sometimes barely enough.
Bunching up the defensive talents on one row forces us to take a mobility talent and removes the choice of taking two defensives talents. I’d rather the rows stay as is if NG isn’t made baseline.
If they were actually willing to do anything about the talent rows though, then I don’t see why they couldn’t just make NG baseline and swap in earthgrab. That seems like the most elegant fix to me that actually improves survivability while also creating a mobility oriented row. Doesn’t seem like any work at all since they would just be making one talent baseline and replacing it with an already existing ability.
Right now, NG is the talent that doesn’t seem to fit. The earth shield row is already all defensive oriented - DR from gw and improved AOE stun.
NG is the odd man out because it is in no way mobility oriented like the other two talents on its row.
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i want them to bring back the option of 2h weapons back for enhance, but i really have a doubt that will ever happen