I'm starting to understand the Shaman plight

Community General Discussion
1

Not saying I agree with them, but I can see their opinion (for Enhance, at least).

I was expecting The War Within to make Enhance less passive AoE (Virtually every melee ability cleaves in some form) and give us some more elemental abilities to use (Especially since Lava Burst gets replaced with Elemental Blast). But no, it seems like Blizzard wants to really double-dip AoE sprinkling through the RNG Hero Talents.

Maelstrom stacks are kind of meh since we generally use a whopping one of three spells offensively (Elemental Blast, Lightning Bolt, and Chain Lightning), but weirdly have no option for the other two elements our Elemental Puppies Buff (Lava Burst and Icefury should totally be a thing).

And the Hero ‘Talents’ are really boring:

  • Thanks for bringing back Searing Totem, a pointless, forgetful totem you don’t even place down.

  • Our totems are still extremely boring despite ‘Totemic’. Why does Surging Totem have zero synergy until it’s fully talented?! Until then it’s just another ‘place and forget’ totem that has no relevance.

  • Where’s the crazy Totem ideas? How about a Totem that can mass dispel or a Totem that gives a mini-lust without exhaustion? Or a Totem that summons an elemental that matches one of your Elemental Spirits?

Stormbringer is actually in the same kind of ‘meh’ boat:

  • Tempest requirements are impossible to track or line up. 40 Stacks of Malestrom weapon spent? Really?

Thanks Shaman developer team. I’m so glad I get to look forward to being a passive AoE turret farting useless Totems every 30 seconds.

2 Likes
2

Shammies are getting some sort of rework/changes next week so your problems might be answered then fyi.

3

Wait, really? That’s cool. I was just thinking about how much I missed Searing Totem after playing some Classic.

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I hope so because… it’s bad. Like, Totemic desperately needs a talent to look forward to.

5

Primal Strike now does 5% more damage.

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The cleave on our melee attacks is actually a very minimal part of our AoE. Almost all of our actual AoE power comes from Crash Lightning, Chain Lightning, Hailstorm, Flame Shock, and especially Primordial Wave. All of our AoE is either an active ability, or a short proc window created by another active ability.

You don’t get to be one of the highest APM specs in the game by having most of your damage be passive.

Maelstrom is the core of our existence, and its spenders are a huge percentage of our damage. Everything we do revolves around building and spending it as fast as possible. Elemental Blast is what leverages all of our elemental wolves, as it being Elemental damage means it counts as fire, frost, and nature simultaneously.

Elemental Blast, Lightning Bolt, and Chain Lightning all serve distinct roles in our kit that makes determining which one to use very clear, which is important because we’re already busy juggling half a dozen other abilities that are all constantly shuffling their priority, so we don’t want to be needing to make split second decisions on which spender to hit on top of that. We already had to do that in S2 when we couldn’t reach Elemental Blast’s talent node in AoE build, and had to be constantly double checking our current wolf buffs to determine whether to cast Lava Burst or Lightning Bolt as our spender.

3 Likes
7

Shaman sounds like a complicated class to play, but perhaps great for those who are good at it.

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Crash Lightning makes our Melee AoE, Flame Shock is spread through Lava Lash, Hailstorm is only effective with Witchdoctor’s Bones and Ice Strike. Primordial Wave is just used because of our Tier Set bonuses.

And it’s extremely boring. Instead of having a catch-all spell type, just make individual spells and make them stronger than Elemental Blast so Elemental Spirits are even more rewarding.

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Wordup’s feedback on the beta shaman thread is to me the best rational explanation of all the issues and possible solutions.

1 Like
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I say Blizzard should give Shamans ice fury so its mandatory they use it in their rotation else their dps will tank :smiling_imp:

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Yes. And that is only responsible for a tiny portion of our AoE damage.

It’s also important to note that Crash Lightning does not make our Stormstrike, Ice Strike, and Lava Lash hit multiple targets. It gives us a short buff window during which casting Stormstrike, Ice Strike, or Lava Lash procs a small AoE burst of nature damage which is attributed to Crash Lightning in damage logs and meters.

Yes. But maximizing that damage requires manually targeting and strike each Flame Shocked enemy with Lava Lash to apply Lashing Flames, or it’s only dealing half it potential damage.

I’m assuming you meant Legacy of the Frost Witch, because Witch Doctor’s Ancestry is our CDR on Feral Spirits through generating MSW stacks.

Legacy is one of the smallest bonuses to frost damage available to us, topping out at only a 25% buff for 2 talent points in our point-starved capstone tier. This is only 5% more than we get from a single frost Elemental Spirit, and far less than Frost Shock gets from Hailstorm, which is a 15% damage increase per stack, up to a maximum of 10 for a 150% damage increase.

Hailstorm is the greatest driving power behind Frost Shock, followed by Ice Strike’s 100% damage increase. Frost Witch’s 25% is negligible, and rarely run except for the specific purpose of simplifying the rotation by eliminating the need to do the manual Lava Lash thing for Lashing Flames, which is what you normally drop for it.

Just plain false. Elementalist Enhancement has run Primordial Wave all expansion, despite only our S3/4 tier set hooking into it. Primordial Wave is a phenomenal tool in Enhancement’s kit, and has been one of the main enablers of our gameplay loop, providing instant full stacks of Maelstrom Weapon (which also results in an instant ~20% refund on Feral Spirit’s cooldown), a personal Bloodlust (20% Haste, +4% per Lightning Bolt hooked off of it to a maximum of 40% Haste), and a multi-target Lightning Bolt cast at the power of 7 MSW – and that’s all just from our talents, not including any of our tier set bonuses.

Primordial Wave does substantial damage. If you’re looking at logs/meters and wondering what the heck I’m talking about because PWave is always at the bottom, that’s because the damage attributed to PWave in those records is only the small direct damage the spell deals when you cast it. Its real burst damage – the follow-up Lightning Bolt – is attributed to Lightning Bolt in logs.

To see all of this in action, here is my log from Primal Council a few weeks ago: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/KNp7ALbjhxnfDRy8#fight=28&type=damage-done&source=3

Notice:

  • Lightning Bolt is my top damage ability, dealing about 150% more damage than Chain Lightning, and nearly 300% more than Elemental Blast, despite Chain Lightning gaining all the same Nature damage increases Lightning Bolt would be, Elemental Blast benefiting from more wolves, and both spells being cast far more times. This is because you’ll also notice that I had the same number of Lightning Bolt casts as I had Primordial Wave casts down at the bottom of the list, meaning every one of those Lightning Bolts was triggering off of it.
  • Frost Shock is my 3rd highest damage source, despite me not running Legacy of the Frost Witch.
  • Crash Lightning has a dropdown filter showing two different records of damage for Crash Lightning. This is because one of those records is for the AoE nature damage proc triggered by Lava Lash, Stormstrike, and Ice Strike, and amounted to a little less than 7% of my total damage over 185 procs.

The complexity of choosing your spenders is not about matching up colors, but about maximizing Elemental Blast cooldowns to line up with Feral Spirit windows, and deciding target priority in AoE between wider damage spread, or higher priority target damage.

We had that color matching game in S2 when Elemental Blast was outside of point budget in AoE builds, which forced us to juggle Lightning Bolt and Lava Burst on M+ bosses. It was not fun, but annoying, not least of all because Blizzard’s UI does bump all to show us which elemental wolves we have out without hunting for the wolves themselves in the chaos of melee, or trying to pick their icons out of our bloated buff window.

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I miss when i could have a very simple yet effective, if not optimal build for enhancement last expansion. It’s got too much going on for me to enjoy it anymore, i look at all the buttons and feel lost as to what i’m actually supposed to be pressing from moment to moment. I prefer a rotation of fewer more deliberate buttons.

Hoping the changes coming to shaman involve providing this option once again.

13

Fingers crossed for next week.

Wondering if we see a major re-work tbh. Especially for Enhance, which of the 3 specs, is the best positioned (And has been through DF). I am doubting a major rework. Guessing we see some nodes go from 2pt to 1pt and maybe some shuffling of positioning/pathing, but not getting my hopes up beyond that.

Maybe I’m wrong.

Either way…We have incredible themes / lore, but have been left in old WoW in terms of gameplay. I don’t think it will take much (i.e. we don’t need some crazy spec rework), but hopefully we get a few adjustments to make the specs more engaging and fluid in ST → AoE → ST shifts in M+ and for the love of god…some sort of class wide unique buff/cd in Raid (Skyfury/SLT/WF).

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Delete Warriors

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I still think getting rid of Elemental Blast and giving us Lava Burst and Ice Fury (instead of Frost Shock imo) as Enhance would spice up the rotation a little better. There’s nothing else to really press for our Maelstrom Stacks offensively, otherwise.

Elemental Blast, Lightning Bolt, and Chain Lightning… Wooo~ Getting that elemental class feel. /sarcasm.

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Wish feral would get some positive attention, but instead we get gutted.

also please no. I love ele blast as enhance

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which is great - assuming the changes are good - but it does worry me that these “big changes” are happening so close to launch, it leaves little time for proper testing, balancing, and bug fixing.

pretty much every other class got gradual changes throughout the beta.

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I dont really think adding more spenders would be very interesting. It would just be: check wolf buff>match spender to majority of wolves. Currently the loop, in low target count, is more interesting as youre trying to get max MW on 2 ele blasts and a Pwave lightning bolt.

19

Wait, what?

Feral Spirits > Primordial Wave > Lightning Bolt > Spam Ele Blast.

Man, that is super interesting. It’s just so Zzzzzzzzz…

20

Thats… thats not the rotation :dracthyr_hehe_animated: