Hello Again Developers!
After a few weeks of testing changes to Farseer, I would like to give general feedback on the gameplay loop, performance, and potential issues with the build.
Here are a few logs of me testing Farseer:
Edit: The fourms do not allow me to link WCL, unfortunately.
1. The Gameplay Loop
With the introduction of Whispering Waves and the new interactions with Ancestors, the main spells of the build are not ironically Riptide and Healing Wave. The Farseer Tree allows to choose your own destiny to a degree with how many ancestors you can generate and at what frequency they tend to stay around. From the updated build these Ancestor’s now additionally cast Healing Wave when you do which in return also cleaves (just like your Healing Wave would) when talented with Whispering Waves. Therefore you have this interesting aspect of brute forcing healing waves into targets which on paper sounds cool, but when in actual use is sort of a problem.
1a) The Healing Rain issue
Its quite clear that you opened pandora’s box with the introduction of surging totem in the totemic tree. The quality of life update that makes healing rain instant cast is so heavily desired it already puts Farseer in a tough place due to its healing rain having a relatively long cast time. Not only that, you have made our Season 2 Tier set revolve around Healing Rain which effectively doubles down on this issue. Quite frankly, this spell needs to go instant cast baseline immediately to stop giving Totemic an expansive QoL advantage.
The other reason Healing Rain is an issue is due to the suggestive gameplay loop. Even at roughly 20% Haste it felt awful to stop casting Healing Wave in order to cast Healing Rain because it effectively neutered your Whispering Waves Healing completely. There were some attempts where I focused on putting Healing Rain down on CD and Insurance almost did more effectively healing than Whispering Waves, which quite frankly is insane due to this talent being a capstone and cornerstone of a hero spec.
2. Performance
The Whispering Wave update with Ancestors fell extremely flat. The coupled reduction of Ancestor Healing, not only made the buffs irrelevant, but quite frankly might be net neutral at best. This even includes the change to allow our Mastery (which is a joke btw) affect the cleaved spells as well. For an example, (this is in the logs) I was able to generate an 8 riptide HW cleave from an Ancestor, the ancestor’s Healing Wave did a whopping 338k healing and the 8 cleaves did an OP 33k per heal for a total healing of 602k. Not only that, but the Mastery value of a target that requires 0 healing is 0, and this happens more than often (explained further below). That value even at current health pools is not reaching even 10% of a players health bar. So the pay off for really good play is roughly 1/4th a standard chain heal. Not to mention the Chain Heal is a smart cast and more times than not doesn’t over heal. This doesn’t even factor in two major issues; Over healing and the ability to “start over.” We haven’t even touched upon the ability to press dmg globals (or in this case completely avoid them outside of acid rain).
2a) Over healing and the ability to “Start Over”
Over healing in this build is extremely easy to do because you are always trying to generate as many ancestors as possible via undulation (aka Healing Wave) and gamba talents to ensure the “Healing Wave Cleaves Must Flow.” You literally cannot stop casting Healing Wave, dmg or not. Breaking up the task of generating these ancestors by for example casting Healing Rain, insert any other shaman spell not Healing Wave, or doing an actual boss mechanic is extremely punitive. Not only do you lose Ancestor count and uptime, but also lost in translation is the RNG element from the CDR of Riptide, which allows your cleave count to go up as well. Losing ancestor uptime actually kills the spec. So a spec that requires almost no outside influence via boss mechanic, spamming of a specific spell, or dungeon mechanic seems a bit misguided without some way to snapshot what you currently have out or a spell that can quickly redeploy riptides to keep your cleave count up. The other issue that fails to meet muster is Whispering Waves nor Ancestral Awakening are smart heals (one is on targets on riptide placed targets and the other is now a dumb heal since DF). Chain Heal quite frankly not only is 4x as powerful, but is also a smart heal. People tend to follow the path of least resistance and the lagniappe of the easier spec also being the most powerful in terms of HPS makes Farseer so irrelevant in greater than 5 man play. Who would want to play Farseer when Totemic gives you a more powerful and efficient smart heal and an instant cast Healing Rain that plays perfectly into your Tier Set?
3. Potential if not Major Issues
At bar none the next build should have a line read “Farseer: Healing Rain is now instant cast.” This is quite frankly the bare minimum to get people to even look at the spec as it is currently built on PTR for next season. You guys really backed yourself into a corner with the Tier Set. Secondly, you need to figure out a way to either:
1) Buff Cleaves substantially or allow for Riptide Counts to climb past 10 via a new riptide application spell, CDR increase, or spell applications that is not Healing Wave (think Walmart, Stack it High let it Fly Mantra) a lot of little cheap heals (because quite frankly that’s what they are currently)
2) A spell to either freeze the healing you have in place, or a spell that will redeploy riptides quickly (something like Wellspring)
3) Reverse the ancestor healing nerf.
4) Move AA to be accessible in Riptide Build (left side of the Tree) and make it a smart heal (reduce the heal at the expense of making it 1 talent point).
5) Possibly make Hydro bubble be more meaningful to a degree (just spit balling here)
6) Reintroduce Reservoir Tier Set Spell into the Spec or Farseer Spec Tree to further support the idea of Farseer you are trying to flesh out. Possibly even allow Healing Surge or some other non Healing Wave spell to interact with it as well.
In Conclusion
I am hopeful we can still get this right. I am just trying to be honest about the current situation though. If this does NOT change, Farseer will have an almost zero percent play percentage because Totemic is quite frankly in a different tier of performance and quality of life.