It wont let me post in the Dragonflight alpha shamans feedback thread so I guess I will post here. Hopefully the shaman dev takes a glance at shaman class forums every now and then. Or maybe someone who does have access to the alpha forums can lend a hand to transfer the message.
I am a very passionate shaman PvP player for many years. I even went as far as to make a new WoW account, level to 10, and then subscribe so that I could post in the forums because my original account was banned on the forums around 15 years ago when I was in middle school (being immature).
I am by no means the best player, but in Shadowlands I sat around 2300 rating primarily only playing 3v3 and doing duels sometimes.
To put it bluntly, once damage numbers get tuned for all classes, Dragonflight is not looking very good for elemental in pvp and I will explain why I believe this to be the case.
Elemental/Enhancement are the only dps specs in the entire game that do not have any real form of HARDLINE defensive cds.
Mages have Ice block - a hardline emergency defensive cd
Shadow priests have dispersion
Hunters have turtle shell (in the past deterrence)
Warriors have die by the sword
Death Knights have AMS as a hardline stop on damage/negative effects but they can also choose to stack icebound with an anti-magic zone together + rune of sanguination
Monks have Touch of karma. And in dragonflight, looks like they will be able to stack Dampen harm+ Diffuse magic+ fortifying brew all at once.
Paladins have a few bubbles
Rogues have cloak + vanish which is a hardline stop on incoming damage
Warlocks can place their teleport behind a pillar and position such that when they teleport, it becomes a full stop on incoming dmg for atleast 3-4 seconds until the enemies catch up, they also have gateway to another pillar as a follow up. In DF looks like they are getting soul link baseline back as well.
Druids arent the best but they still have the option to go bear +use survival instincts for 50% dr+stack barkskin on top. Atleast while they have those things running together in bear you cant really kill them for a few seconds.
Evoker - idk anything about this class
DH - their tree isnt out yet so I will hold my comments. EDIT: DH tree is out, they have free netherwalk in the havoc tree (100% reduced dmg taken for 6 seconds but you cant attack, basically dispersion). Darkness and blur too ofc.
But as you can see, nearly every class has a reliable strategy to put a hardline stop on incoming damage. With comps like rogue mage etc, it has become a norm for so many classes to have hardline stops on damage, its basically a necessity when you PvP against players who play at a level where they can coordinate damage with precision.
You might be thinking, how have shamans been a class for 15+ years if they have never had a real defensive and why is it suddenly a problem now in Dragonflight and not before? I will explain. In the recent past, shamans have used borrowed power to make up for their pathetic defensive ability. In shadowlands for example, shamans often went necrolord and specced into soulbinds which gave survivability to Fleshcraft. So you could astral shift + fleshcraft + bm trinket and hopefully try to get by. In worst case vs comps like RMP, you could swap to a legendary with earthen harmony (ele/enh loses access to this in DF). In battle for azeroth, you could stack azerite traits.
In WOTLK and Mists of Pandaria dps shaman was great to play in PvP.
Get a load of this guys, did you know in MoP, you had access to BOTH astral shift and shamanistic rage as both elemental and enhance??? + stone bulwark totem incase those two werent enough. And astral shift + shamanistic rage were both 1 min cds and astral did 40% dr, shamanistic rage did 30%, you could stack them.
In WOTLK, elemental had 50% damage reduction all the time. This was a time period where armor was the king defensive stat of the game, every melee primarily did physical damage (even ret paladins) in wotlk. And shamans had literal tank levels of armor, they also had astral shift as a passive ability so anytime you got stunned or silenced, your character would just wall itself lmao.
So its no surprise to anyone here that the blizzard developers have decided its a core design aspect of shaman for it to lack any hardline defensive like ice block, AMS, or dispersion and I know they arent going to change this anytime soon because they want classes to be distinct. This is ok, I have accepted this. However, in the past expansions, there were other ways to make up for this. MoP, for example, having astral shift and shamanistic rage both on a 1 min cd is pretty insane.
Finally, getting to the point: while the shaman talent trees are great in many ways and have received alot of positive attention, from a pure PvP perspective, can anyone tell me what the defensive capability of shaman is in Dragonflight? Its literally just astral shift. Atleast in shadowlands, you could get necrolord soulbinds and then stack a fleshcraft cast with astral shift or equip earthen harmony. But when dragonflight comes out, and I go against rogue mage #999, tell me shaman forums, what do I do other than press astral shift? Are dps shamans doomed to only ever que with warriors who can intervene them? Turbo and thundercleave for the rest of the expansion?
Shamans have some pretty OP gimmicky heals, enh can get like a 40-50% heal in 1 button and ele is no slouch either. But incase you guys didnt notice, mortal strike effects in dragonflight are being doubled back up to 50% like they were in wotlk. So prepare to not rely on those heals as much anymore.
Solutions:
-Found it a little odd they decided to give soul link back to all warlock specs but w/e. I feel like its actually shaman that needs that passive astral shift effect back again which we had in wotlk. No way to survive rogue mage without it.
-Give shamanistic rage back to only enh/ele so astral shift can be stacked with it. They can make it 3 min cd idc.
-Put earthen harmony back on the class tree rather than in the resto tree.
-Move earthen wall totem from resto tree to general class tree.
-Make the new stoneskin totem not suck horribly for pvp. 10% physical dmg is just laughable. Its 2022 not 2008, nobody does physical dmg in this game except warriors. Rest is all magic/bleed. And 10% is really low.
(Obviously dont have to do all the suggestions at once, that would be OP)
I am open to suggestions/criticism, if anyone can tell me what to do in dragonflight against rogue mage #999 other than “go play with an intervene warrior and hpally”, I am all ears.
