First, it makes me giggle how many people are like “but i dont take one of the most important talents for elemental”
Second, the talents are mostly just +healing or +damage with very little effect on the rotation. If thats the goal. You hit it. But it does make them sorta boring.
Overall impression: bad to mid.
Good: summoning ancestors is definitely the vibe. Additional charge to Lavaburst/Riptide is good, but would he better if it also gave an extra Lavaburst charge to Resto. Ancestral Swiftness looks good. The bubble given by resto is sick. I also like the spirit walker’s grace node.
Bad: A lot of talents seem to just buff ancestors in uninteresting ways. Far worse than the buffs for the four horsemen. I highly recommend interacting this with something like ancestral totem, reincarnation, spirit link, recall, farsight (crazy for a farseer, right?), and resurrection buttons.
I don’t get why this is connected to Unleash Life for Resto. Lastly, the defensive option for this tree is one of the worst released so far. Almost every defensive node on these is overpowered, and we get… 3 more stacks for Earthshield?
If this is a problem bc a shaman tank is in the works, I can understand. However, if it’s not, this seems like it wasn’t given very much thought.
obligatory shaman tank request
Posted this in the other thread, but then I saw this official one.
The two healing classes I generally play are shaman and druid, both resto. Comparing this tree to the wildstalker one makes me nervous about something:
On the wildstalker tree it seems like every talent both increases damage and healing done. Ostensibly wildstalker resto druids are going to be using cat form to DPS, and all of those DPS bonuses would apply, right? On the other hand, all of the DPS increases for farseer seems to be elemental-only. That is, the ancestors still DPS, but for example, when I cast acid rain, will they also cast acid rain? Or are they going to be casting a ‘similar’ heal spell that doesn’t do damage? It seems like splitting all the talents so hard like that it’s going to be weird to balance. I’d also be interested to know what ‘similar’ means in this context 
Could we get a bit of clarification on this? One of the things I really like about rsham is that it’s still capable of some intense damage. I’m curious how that’s going to remain the case when other healing classes seem to be getting buffed, but not poor shammy.
I’m in no way a high tier shaman but I do love this class. So I’m going to echo what a lot are already saying: “stop making us choose fire vs lightning!”.
A spec called “Elemental” should use all the elements. Look at Enhancement, they’ve got a good rotation through all the elements (lava lash+flame shock, stormstrike, ice strike+frost shock, sundering, etc). So why is Elemental only lava burst or lightning bolt/chain lightning?
The Farseer hero tree would be okay if it didn’t enhance this issue by being tied to lava burst and primordial wave. Also, summon elementals rather than ancestors if you must summon anything!
I fully agree that the problem is fundamental to the trees and the core problem is that making specs for 2 different trees is really really hard when they have no spells in common. The only one that works so far is Frostfire mage.
In fact I have yet to see ANY healer tree where I feel that both fantasy and gameplay have been well executed. The best I can say is that some trees such as Farseer are not actively horrible while lightsmith and Oracle are true trash tier design.
In a perfect world I think blizz would be better making these talents single spec not cross spec as this decision has so radically constrained the design space and so we end up with many boring passive nodes where spec A has spell X buffed, and Spec B has spell Y buffed just to fill out the tree.
Inb4 the Enhance/Resto hero tree capstone is ‘Prim Wave summons a wolf for 7 seconds. The wolf bites people’.
Sorry to be glib, but ‘summon pet that does pet things and doesn’t interact with the player at all’ talents suck. Building a hero tree around them? Big yikes. Also a bit over Prim Wave, not gonna lie.
I get the intention thematically with recalling ancestors, but there’s got to be a better way of implementing it. Heck, a bandaid fix could be having the ancestors effectively be visual buffs on the player. +20% mastery but with a firey ancestor latched onto me? Still lame, but at least there would be some base level of interaction.
Trying to think of mechanics that could make use of calling on the ancestors… maybe lean into Echo of the Elements?
I have a lot of thoughts that I will come back to post, but I want to start with just this one:
Remember playing Warcraft 3, controlling that Farseer hero, and all those Lava Bursts he was throwing? 
An absolute miss on class fantasy here.
That is not what he said. Quoted from the discord :
Theme: Decent, could probably be a bit better (we aren’t really pet healers)
Power: who cares (yet) but it’s not super powerful - imo this is probably a good thing, however further buffing Chain Heal is scary
Interesting?: not really. I dont think this would change talent builds much, and pretty much just means we do a bit more healing now is all. It’s pretty bland
Overall it’s… meh. Could be much better with some changes, but certainly not as bad as Oracle or Lightsmith
Considering it looks like the other option is Stormbringer…what if one option is for lava burst and the other is lightning based?
Man, I must be the only one that actually likes the Resto side of this hero tree. The Ancestors theme is fun. I also vastly prefer the Primordial Wave/Riptide play style over Chain Heal. So far, it’s looking like Resto Shaman might be replacing my monk as my main next expansion. I already know that the art animation for the bubble is never going to live up to what I imagine, even if it’s awesome.
On the theming front, this is a huge win. It’s felt for a long time like Blizzard has forgotten that ancestral spirits were supposed to be a cornerstone of the class’s fantasy, so I love that this path is built around them.
But good grief, what a letdown mechanically. My first thought upon reading this was that it’s basically just giving Ele and Resto a second version of Elemental Overload with different graphics, but upon further reflection it’s actually just Holy priests’ Divine Image with higher uptime.
At best, this tree is a big fat meh that just sort of passively increases the output of everything you were already doing. At worst, it’s forcing a bunch of talent picks in the process, and likely an entire build pick on Elemental.
This coming out while there’s also an ongoing thread on this subforum about Elemental desperately needing a spec rework also raises a pretty serious issue with hero talents in my mind, which is that hero talents by virtue of being designed to be shared across two different specs could seriously disincentivize the devs from undertaking spec reworks, no matter how desperately needed, because doing so has the potential to also require reworks of both their hero paths, which would then knock on to effecting the performance of the other two specs that didn’t need reworks. So do the devs undertake the rework, potentially creating a lot more work for themselves in the course of needing to fix what the rework breaks about the hero paths and the other specs attached to them? Or do they just let the broken spec languish?
I know where I’d bet my money.
The deeper we get into hero talents, the more I’m convinced this is not a system worth following through on.
So a spec built around random procs of extra spells is going to get random procs of random spirits that might be up to cast random spells.
Queue in Henry Cavill saying one word… uck
Would be good to know if there is an internal cooldown as well. 8% chance on lava burst but with the amount of LB we throw out in AoE we could have a lot of Ancestors out.
If there is a cap, what happens when we summon a new one? Does an old one get replaced and thus cast the elemental blast from expiring? With no internal cooldown this could be a flurry of elemental blasts and a ton of lava bursts being copied.
I main resto druid but have always used ele shaman as my main alt/dps. And, got to say haven’t loved it in a while and I don’t think these “hero” talents will help. Contemplating a swap. Granted there’s a lot of missing detail so much of ele is wrapped up in buffs will the ancestors interact with those (gain from or proc them)? But more to the point everything in the farseer tree is based on builders only one node effects the spenders. And, you’ve chosen the fire builders. Why? Why not work hero talents independently or off the spenders so it doesn’t matter what build you use?
Perhaps consider basing the tree on mana/maelstrom spent > does x. This would work for all gameplay/builds and not lock you into fire/light or a specific talent.
I like Pwave, but it’s not as baseline/iconic as something like Mortal Strike, which is fine to base a tree on. Flame shock / lavaburst (but not Pwave) would be a more universal talent that straddles Resto/Ele.
Overall passive procs, even with great graphical effects, are very boring. A passive proc like this certainly can’t anchor a Hero tree, something that I think is supposed to be evergreen? Black Arrow, Demolish, etc. these are at least something that looks fun to press.
PWave has been absolutely baseline though for fire builds?
I am just imagining so many ghosts appearing … seems visually crowded.
What im curious tough. if If I cast Riptide and my Ancestor cast one does it count as 2 for Prime Tide Core. Cause it has way to be quite good.
I dont really like offerying from beyong for Resto. Elem get strong Cooldown while resto doesnt.
Spreading flame shock as Elemental is such a chore that I am already put off by this tree being based around Primordial Wave. Unless Ele is getting a convenient way to refresh/spread flame shock the same way Enhance does with Lava Lash, I will probably just default to only using Stormbringer because I do not want to play another expansion of janky FS management in every M+ pull.
Also, the constant choice of “You are either a Lightning of Fire Shaman at the expense of the other one” does not feel exciting at all. That feels like a mage thing that we are just copying. I was hoping one of our hero trees would emphasize all 4 elemental schools in some way rather than just making us pick the hero tree that matches with the fire/lightning build that our current tier set makes us play.
haha, I’ve hated Primordial Wave from the beginning, and LOVE Vesper Totem (Chain Harvest is good too, but I prefer shorter cooldown abilities).
As for the hero class, I heal 99% of the time I play this game. The two specs I play most are Holy Paladin (main) and Resto Shaman (main alt), and Herald of the Sun for Holy Paladin looks SUPER fun, while Farseer seems to be really bland by comparison. Bland doesn’t mean bad, necessarily, and I think Farseer will probably be a really solid and functional set of talents for healing in raids especially. Unless they’re taking away the talents we already have for a second Riptide charge, this hero spec makes it look like we’ll get a THIRD Riptide charge, as well as cooldown reduction on Riptide when an ancestor disappears, as well as Riptide having a chance to summon an ancestor (and a chance for ancestors to summon more ancestors when they disappear, which will give us more Riptides)
I feel like we’re going to get amazing HoT coverage with this hero class. Just doesn’t feel like it has much of an aesthetic OOMPH, you know?
First and foremost, there should be a follow up dev post to let the shaman community know if there are any intentions to reiterate class or spec trees like you have done with almost every other class. The amount of neglect we seem to get on an expansion to expansion basis seems intentful at this point.
Now to the Heroic Talent Review:
I understand the idea of the tree; to summon ancestors to passively add more healing on top of what we currently do. This healing comes in the form of direct healing and DR’s from Hydrobubble. However, one of the more criminal things so far in terms of communication of tool tip are the following:
Can you proc more than one Ancestor? If you felt like this was communicated in the tree, please re-ask the question as to why many others are not sure either.
Does the Primordial Wave Riptide, PTC Riptide inherit the same characteristics of a normal casted riptide; aka does it inherit the ability to proc ancestors if you choose that node?
What is the actual baseline value of Hydrobubble? I get this is prob not the general time for tuning obviously but a number in the ballpark to start would be nice. Why? Because the DR has a decay involved so one would assume the shield value will be quite large for a 10 second decay.
What was the discussion involved with QoL of Earth Shield? The 3 new charges help reduce button presses, but why are we STILL not considering a permanent shield just for simply QoL purposes? For instance on Mythic Tindral, my ES and my secondary ES shields get eaten alive, have to refresh what seems like every 15 seconds, which for a shield is absolutely ridiculous.
The Capstone:
I get the idea around having another longer option to apply an ancestor (especially since this entire tree is HEAVILY leaning on RNG). However, I don’t think Natures Swiftness → Ancestors Swiftness is it.
What kind of fix would I do? The tree is clearly cooking around riptide, UL, and primordial wave. It definitely seems also that Pmwave is here to stay from a dev perspective. The Capstone should put a cherry on top of the sundae (tree). It currently doesn’t. So lets consider 2/3rds of the tree which in my opinion are very good, and develop a capstone that puts a cherry on top of those abilities.
My Capstone:
Ancestral Roar:
When you use primordial wave, all summoned ancestors roar, shooting out chain heals (tuning percentage/value) OR apply Hydrobubble to allies. Will toggle back and forth between CH and Hydrobubble every pmwave. Make the chain heals the OG golden ones too!
For elemental Its elemental blast and Lavaburst.
I think the intent of the tree is A tier 2/3rds of the way down. Again, the capstone needs A LOT of work.
Edit:
Also what are we doing with Undulation since its actually tied to Unleash Life? Likewise for currently Natures Swiftness. It would seem there would absolutely need to be a tree rework in order to fufil your own design philosophy.