Hello
I’ve been toying with the talents and thinking over how a rotation would come to play. How complicated is Enhance shaman looking for us? I’m sure there would be some things to iron out once it comes out but its looking like there may be A LOT of buttons to be pressed and not enough time to get to them all.
I don’t need a BFA fury warrior level of simple but is Ele a little lighter on the buttons? How does resto feel like its going to be for you guys?
The complicated part won’t be with the rotation, but with all the utility to keep track of. There will be a spell or totem for about every situation which will make the button bloat real lol
And we thank the lord for that
Almost all of our talent points are going to be spent on buying back our current spellbook. It really won’t be significantly more complicated than it is now.
Not sure how I feel about resto yet. I like the amount of utility and buttons we have to push now-- I’m not too keen on micro managing a bunch of totems that feel more like maintenance buffs limited to your party. Poison cleansing totem is the only one returning that I’m excited about.
I’m less worried about how many new buttons we might be gaining than i am about how many of them are going to affect party management in raids.
Many years ago, the dev team made a statement that they were moving away from party-based buffs toward making more powers raidwide. Yet here we have utilities like Stoneskin Totem that are going to require putting a shaman in the tank group to be useful. What’s wrong with reducing the radius on these types of effects (while making them targetable) and extending the benefit to raid members outside of the party?
It just seems like awkward and regressive design.
I do agree with you about the concern of totems only being for your party. It is a bit tedious but I think that lessening the radius means we would have to play better and reposition totems based on movement and boss size and such. Which we should and could do. It’s not that bad.
I mean
You just summarized totems as a mechanic in general.
….if I could play Shaman without totems 
I enjoy totems. Just not how some of them arbitrarily ignore targets for not being slotted into the same “box” in the raid. My raid utility shouldn’t be contingent on getting the raid leader to enable it to work.
That is unfortunately kind of what its turning into right? Everyone buffs everyone then there are no support type classes anymore.
I want to smack things with my totems.
Well on one hand, Support type classes don’t really work in the M+ era because of the group sizes. They’d either be mandatory or a hard carry.
On the other hand, healers are starting to morph into support classes due to their hybrid dps/heals nature and buffs… especially in DF. Of course, this causes problems for the Healers who don’t have externals and/or poor DPS.
As for totems, I guess it comes down to why someone plays Shaman… what class fantasy are they interested in. Personally, it’s the nature magic, master of elements archetype that I enjoy. Totems are just part of the package.
I don’t mind them as much as Ele/Resto but certainly for enhance, regardless of how iconic it is, dropping WF totem every pack feels like nostalgia just for the sake of it.
Guess it’s always been my gripe about the Druid & Shaman in WOW…. Neither one ticks all the boxes for me. Shamans have the magic but come with totems, Druids don’t have the totems but are all about Astral power and Elune (plus I loathe the Eclipse mechanic).
If only we could have the Diablo 4 Druid in WOW……
Called content
I do hope that the new tree allows us to take a more totem focused style or a beat down and chuck bolts and shock style. A little of both is cool but I do see what you mean. Totems becoming necessary for mythic would be frustrating and its what lead to the everyone having the same buffs going into WoTLK.