The ancestors are most certainly not going to be wipe-savers. Unleash Life is a 15 second cooldown, and ancestors last 6 seconds baseline. That’s 40% uptime even before any of the nodes for extending their duration, adding additional spawn procs, or Ancestral Swiftness. With all of those effects, Resto is probably looking at more like 60-70% uptime.
Anything that has 40%+ uptime is not a wipe saver, it’s a throughput tax. Farseer healing will be balanced around maintaining high uptime on Ancestors through Unleashing Life on cooldown and/or proccing additional spawns off Riptide, such that Farseer Restos who let their Ancestors routinely fade out will simply be behind their intended throughput level. It’s just another layer of setup to simple rotational healing on a spec that’s already overburdened with setup on its rotational healing.
I’m really hoping that totemic is good because I enjoy pretty much all the totems resto plays with. But I’m scared that the tree will stink because enhance really doesn’t play with many totems… how will they make it equally effective?
I’m also super curious. Restoration Shaman is one of my fave healer specs and I absolutely love the class fantasy/theme of totems. Resto is really the only Shaman spec that mainly utilizes them for throughput and whatnot.
Off the top of my head I can see Totemic bringing further quality of life aspects to totems such as additional charges, cooldown reduction, maybe added effects. But at the same time I can’t really see how creative they can truly get with it given that a lot of the class tree is already dedicated towards totems. Are they going to come out with a new totem? Is it going to provide a whole new party/raid wide utility for us to bring? Will that in turn force Shamans into going totemic due to the usefulness of this theoretical utility?
I’m excited to see what they do with the other hero specs and equally saddened that I’m looking forward so much to those as a result of Farseer being such a letdown.
I’m honestly just expecting them to bring back vesper totem with a new name for Totemic and a bunch of boosts to dmg/heal or cooldown for existing totems.
Will be better then farseer as long as the numbers are not super low. It also would explain why it wasn’t added to the talent tree, it was being saved for use as a hero talent.
This is the clincher for me. It either needs to be a new totem, or it needs to do something to make enhance want to use the existing totems. The existing totems are either too weak (healing stream) or too situational for enhance to bother with (unless its one of those rare situations where a certain totem is actually useful).
This is pretty much what I’m expecting at this point, and while I know Restos will love it, man, is that underwhelming for Enhancement. Basically be a fire and forget CD that we either have to macro to drop at our feet, or interrupt one of the highest APM specs in the game to manually target, and we can’t even leverage the healing versatility without losing substantial damage.
Which feels doubly awful as an Elementalist Enhancement shaman, because Stormbringer is almost certainly going to be a lock-in for the Storm build, which I find utterly miserable to play.
Yeah, as a resto main I can’t deny that I would be happy to get it back but do feel bad for enhancement possibly only having one option for builds if the totem sucks for them.
Button bloat might be a resto problem, but this is one button I would be willing to find a place for
Yes, this is my fear/complaint as well. Throughput Tax is a perfect way to describe it.
There’s only two ways to “balance” this: Either we are base-line balanced and playing into Farseer makes you Overpowered. OR we are balanced around optimal ancestor play, and our baseline healing is bad.
We know that blizzard is going to choice the later, meaning our baseline kit will be taxed as compared to other healers - and we will be forced to spend our precious GCDs on maintenance buttons like Unleash; or pulling the ancestor-gamble lever again by pressing Riptide when it the CD ends. Also the way the Hyrdobubble works, there’s no way for you to take agency over it. Even if you force an Ancestor using Unleash or Nature’s swiftness - the Hydrobubble doesn’t even spawn until the Ancestor goes away? So if the tank is about to die, I can’t even “oh Sh*t” him with a quick Hydrobubble external.
I hate pressing Riptide on full HP targets in order to apply hots and roll the dice for DRE procs. And Farseer leans INTO that playstyle. It’s the antithesis of why I selected Resto Shaman as my healer main.
My preferred resto playstyle is Lava Surge + Master of the Elements. And maybe I’m a sicko, but I actually LIKE the playstyle of weaving active damage into my healing rotation. Extra charges of Rip, Cooldown on Rip, Procs on Rip, the interaction with Hydrobubble – all this detracts from my preferred playstyle.
And what makes me actively ‘Sad’ about the whole thing, is that Master of the Elements is part of the connective tissue between Ele and Resto. When Hero Talents were first spoiled, and they mentioned that they sit “in between” two existing specs, my Hype level was at 11, maybe even 12, to see what they cooked for the Ele-Resto crossover. And, well here are…
I actually like both play styles you described. I like weaving damage spells to boost heals and I also like playing a riptide covering HoT style build.
I feel like it won’t be too difficult to keep good uptime on ancestors. And honestly until we see how powerful their “similar spells” are we don’t know how big of a hit our baseline kit will take, but it probably won’t be that bad because they also have to balance the baseline kit of Ele and Resto totemic into this equation.
I get that. But that HOT → Payoff, healing profile already exists in Disc Priest, MW, and R-Druid. So If I want that experience, I have an outlet for that. I’ll point out that you are posting that comment on a Druid afterall So I’m not saying, is that profile shouldn’t be in the game, I just wish that the Devs would differentiate the specs more; make them MORE different and unique. What it appears they are doing is homogenizing all the healing classes into the same archetype.
I posted a few hundred posts back that there are two RShaman Playstyles:
Battlecaster - Active Damage weaving, with talents like Stormkeeper, Acid Rain, Lavasurge, and Master of the Elements.
Build up and Payoff - Where you focus on throughput, amplified through Cloudburst Totem.
And in my heart, my disappoint comes from an obvious and overt missed opportunity. It doesn’t take a deep-lore shaman historian to say: “Oh, Master of the Elements is a good build around for Resto + Ele… And Totems generally (and Cloudburst specifically) will be the Resto + Enhance build around.”
Honestly I’m not sure what resto and enhance have in common. I kind of wish Farseer had been for Ele/enhance (focused on Lightning/feral spirits/earthquake, Spiritwalker had been for Resto / Ele going with this ancestral theme but instead of the boosts to lava burst / riptide they just focused on spells both specs used which would include lava burst but in a more interesting way like you said master of elements gameplay. And then Enhance / Resto maybe could have been Shadow Hunter? Bring back Searing totem and chain harvest maybe? Shadow Hunter was a healer but didn’t really melee at all so it wouldn’t be a great fit for enhance but I’m not sure totemic is either.
All totemic really can be is either a new (old but brought back) totem, or additional modifiers to existing totems. Something like healing stream totem also having a magma totem effect.
You know what just occurred to me- Farseer revolves around prim wave, Totemic will likely be vesper totem, and Stormbringer gets chain harvest. The devs prove to shaman that they are so far down the idgaf tree that our new and exciting hero talents are just the covenant powers.
I think Totemic is actually a pretty cool theme for Resto + Enh. When I think Totemic, I think of the WC3 tauren guys that ran around with the huge caber totems.
Imagine if they had some sort of like Totemic Crash ability where it’s just: Cloudburst Totem… but for damage. You store up a bunch of damage, then slam it down massive Caber causing AOE ability that does triple damage if it hits 1 target kinda deal. Maybe it knocks down targets or something cool.
The support talents could buff the existing totems. Or maybe you could combine two totems (one from each spec) into one button: [Sandstorm Totem] replaces Windfury and Earthen Wall and gives you damage reduction + extra AAs… or [Tailwind Totem] which combines and replaces Windrush and Mana Tide.
A cloudburst style dps totem would be cool for enhance.
I’m not sure what they’re going to do because resto is already bloated, and enhance doesn’t really use any totems so… maybe people are right and they are just going to plop vesper totem in there lol.
I made my own versions of each of the Shaman hero paths a while ago for fun, and this was a major recurring issue in designing… well, all of them, but Totemic was by far the hardest.
I went into the project with these goals:
No new buttons
Each talent does the same thing for both specs
Don’t force builds/deep talent selections
And I ran into problems immediately. Even what seemed like it should be the easiest spec to build, Stormbringer, turned out to be a challenge because while Elemental and Enhancement at least both share the same role as dps and a handful of abilities like Lightning Bolt, those abilities’ roles in each spec’s kit is completely different.
While I was ultimately able to get all three paths filled out to my satisfaction, it was a challenge, and I had to abandon the No New Buttons rule all but entirely – two out of three of the paths had to be hung on a new keybind because there was just nothing to hang something on otherwise without violating rule 3. And as overburdened as our bars already are on this class, breaking Rule 1 was the lesser evil than breaking Rule 3.
TBF if the melee spec was tied with “farseer” it would’ve been ironic. They can’t “see” farther than melee, and I think Stormbringer is the best name for ENH and Ele as long as it’s actually around storm and not more Lava Burst crap that this spec already has too much of. MotE revolves around the Flame/Lava Burst aspect, Surge of Power effectively revolves around the Flame/Lava Burst aspect because you have literally no other way to spread Flame Shock and yet an entire half of the spec tree revolves around either fire damage or Lava Burst damage.
My issue with this is what part of Ele has anything to do with spirits and/or ancestral themes? ENH summons literal spirit wolves to aid in battle. The most Ele does with spirits is a glyph to give a floating version of someone they rezzed or Ghost Wolf for travel. It thematically to me makes more sense for ENH/Resto.
Cloudburst, personally, isn’t even fun in Resto though. The amount or prep work for something that is going to be underwhelming just isn’t worth it. You either A) have to set up so far out that you’re most likely overhealing to beef it up, B) you have to pop it early so you just get less value from the 30 second CD on it, or C) you have to be healing everyone up from like 20% hp to make the healing itself worth and the pop of Cloudburst to actually feel like it did something.
In raid most of the time it feels as though by the time your totem is ready to go from amping it hard, other healers have stolen your thunder. Revival for one from MW monks, Tranquility AND Rewind from Presevoker (I don’t think Rdruids use it right now but I don’t play them much so I don’t know in raid) may take a second to heal but it doesn’t take several seconds of healing only a few people before it actually hits everyone the way amping a CB totem is, idk what paladins have so they can bubble hearth out of this convo, and priests have a little setup but nowhere near as much as CB totem needs. Disc can get into Ultimate Penitence pretty quickly w/ a Double Raidiance cast, and Holy I’m not sure on.
Cloudburst has been something we’ve had to choose for throughput but as Lokka has stated that comes with Throughput Tax or you run Chain Heal build into an early OOM.
TBF I enjoyed Vesper Totem and Chain Harvest was fun but would’ve been cooler if it had more design behind it.
For me the issue runs into our outdated spenders and the dynamic of Ele shaman itself. You either are a Meatball Minigun with instant casts in abundance between Stormkeeper and the proccs for Lava Burst, or people hate having a spender that’s a cast the way Ele Blast is because everything else in this spec is an instant cast. Flame Shock? Lightning Bolt/Chain Lightning (only 2 casts a minute because Stormkeeper). Earth Shock, Eqarthquake, Prim Wave, Liquid Magma Totem w/ Totemic Recall, the old Icefury build once you cast it for charges w/ Frost Shock. It’s all instant cast and none of it really feels synergistic or complimentary to one another, which is exactly why we get Meatball Minigun or Lightning builds and nothing that does both together.
So I’m not saying, is that profile shouldn’t be in the game, I just wish that the Devs would differentiate the specs more; make them MORE different and unique. What it appears they are doing is homogenizing all the healing classes into the same archetype.