I see all sorts of people along all 3 specs hitting pretty high IOs and CR in PvP. Yeah, it seriously lacks defensives, but it really cranks out some heals and dps. Plus, its a pretty fun class to play.
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The 2 DPS specs combined have less than 2% representation in the 5-9 key range and it just gets lower as you go up.
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Does that mean it’s bad though? Or just not fun to play for the chads who like 3 button rotations?
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Target capped AoE and bad defensives are both pretty big hinderances in M+.
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If that’s a metric for a class being good or bad then DPS DKs and WW are far worse since they both have lower representation.
Well that’s one metric. You can also look at raid parse reps, or arena ladder reps, or rated BGs if anyone still plays those.
This exactly. Difficulty to play, smoothness of rotation, and button bloat are subjective.
Being squishy, being hard target capped on aoe, and our only group benefit (lust/hero) being brought by specs that are currently meta are objective.
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WW got a much needed revamp pretty early in alpha. DKs have also gotten a fair amount of attention though it seems in contention whether that attention was good or not.
Shamans have gotten nothing.
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The output is fine, it’s just that Shaman is very weak defensively and also has no unique group utility.
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This thread isn’t “Why hasn’t Shaman gotten any changes in TWW yet”. It is “Is Shaman actually THAT bad?”
Again, by your metric, the classes that are “worse” received changes before the one that is “better”. the thread has nothing to do with what has or hasn’t gotten changes and entirely is Shamans in the current expansion are as bad as people say they are.
I don’t get what your argument even is. DKs and WW are bad, yes, which is why they are getting changes. That doesn’t mean shaman is good and I already told you the reasons why it’s bad in M+ so I don’t know what you want.
Also both shaman DPS specs are individually worse than WW.
I think, for me, these are some of my issues.
(ELE PoV) Say you’re going to spread flame shock without magma totem. To open, you’d probably want surge of power buff (which you get after using a spender) combined with prim wave to get 4 flame-shocks out, then you need to get another surge of power buff and hope flame-shock is off it’s 4.5 second cd, then you can begin your actual rotation… oh wait one of the mobs died… or you hit flame shock before prime wav hit the target and put flameshock on a target that already gad it and a flame shock fell off, now you’re not getting the full splintered elements buff and earthquake buff isn’t gaining as much and youre losing cdr on prime wav if DRE procs. Or more likely, you drop magma totem and it doesn’t spread flame shock because there’s a step, a very small ledge, or incline/hill. And then finally when you’re all set up, you’re spamming lava burst praying for a DRE proc that will most likely happen when just about everything’s dead.
Improved Flametongue Weapon and DRE being a required talent choice.
Love my earth ele, but oh man does it suck when you pop it because it’s your 5 mins 15% cd that dies immediately because it generates threat.
There’s also the totemic recall bug of not resetting the correct totem all the time.
Ank is cool, but most rot damage or minor damage that goes out will kill you immediately upon rez.
If you want to do keys, you’re kinda forced into dwarf because spamming healing surge is not a practical way to survive since most dispells are not curse or poison.
Fire Ele dying to ground AoE abilities (although the clip of Ridmark’s ele dying in DHT was funny).
We can get a 10% DR every 30 seconds if we can find the talent point to throw into Stoneskin Totem except it’s only physical damage. I think priests get a flat 10% DR every 20 seconds and it’s off the GCD? lol
Oh yeah they gave enhance an extra 2% magic DR last season… only enhance lol.
For the first two seasons Ancestral Defense did the opposite and made us take an extra 2% damage.
I’m sure there’s more I could say but it means nothing unless there’s a WoWHead article for the devs because they don’t read the forums.
Edit: thank you for coming to my tedtalk
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Playing an Ele Shaman recently and nothing is more tedious than worrying about the Flame Shock DoT. For a spec that does so much beefy direct damage, having to work around a DoT with a cooldown and a backwards method of spreading it with Surge of Power it feels really unwieldy. The only way to get around this clunk is going into deep Flame build to take Liquid Magma Totem, and even that is target capped.
- Honestly, I would just delete Primordial Wave from Elemental, then carbon copy it onto Flame Shock. Flame Shock would then only be pressed every 45 seconds (maybe they could lower that down a bit to like 20), then Flame Shock could be used as a mini burst CD for Lava Burst spam. Remove the reliance of Lava Burst being baseline (crit) buffed when firing into a Flame Shock target to let Lava Burst stand on its own. Just take the weird DoT minigame out of the class in my opinion.
Another small gripe I have is Icefury. Absolutely love the spell as an idea, but in practice, it just feels super clunky? It’s nice to have Frost Shocks to use when movement is needed, but spamming 4 in a row feels like such lazy class design to me, on top of the cast time and long cooldown Icefury has. This spell could feel so much better.
I think Maelstrom energy is extremely annoying as a resource too. It’s almost always either at 50 or 100 and then you just spend, spend, spend. It hardly even feels like it exists to me, or I find myself annoyed that I’m capping it every 3 spell presses. It doesn’t feel rewarding to me ping-ponging around with it idk.
I love Ele Shaman in concept, but like you touched on, there’s so many quirks to it that seem very backwards. It’s like you have a flow going but the spec literally stops you every so often with these weird inconsistent moments that make you question whether or not you actually enjoy playing it at all.
Another random thing I find disappointing about Ele is that I feel like my totems don’t really offer THAT much in group utility. I hardly find myself needing to ever really make use of them. That could be a “newer to Elemental player” issue, but like what do we get? Oh, a totem that slows or roots enemies (many classes have this), a 2-minute CD speed boost in a small area is nice but like why does it need to be 2 minutes lmao? Stampeding Roar on Druid is baseline a 2 minute CD and just better at 60% movement speed and can be talented down to 1 minute. Capacitor Totem is pretty nice and feels like what I would expect from a totem on Shaman, good utility.
Not to mention how absolutely boring it is that Fire Elemental… increases the speed at which your flippin’ Flame Shock does damage and makes it last longer. Oh joy. So much fun. Thanks for putting a quality of life effect into my main class CD. It really doesn’t feel all that impactful other than being able to spam Lava Bursts for longer, which you’re doing anyway all the time. Man, I guess I just really hate current Flame Shock lol.
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Honestly coming from SoD, I can say somehow a re release of a 20 year old version of the game somehow has a better flameshock mechanic than the fast paced evolved version of retail.
I feel like the burn rune should be baked in or a capstone at this point.
Flame shock lasts 18 seconds hits 5 targets… but likely this would be OP but also make the spec feel way less garbage lol. But I will say shooting lava bursts like a turret can be a huge dopamine rush.
I think this could be remedied by adding a damage reduction component to lightning shield honestly.
Right now it’s just a thorns type ability. But what if it like … added a flat 10% damage reduction to it?
Or whenever someone takes damage from
Lightning shield they do 20% less damage to the shaman for the next 3 seconds?
Overal shamans need a form of passive damage reduction to go with our astral shift.
When AS is on CD, the only other option we have is the ghost wolf DR and that takes 4s to wind up.
Either way. Making it more complicated to down a shaman is definitely needed. There’s a saying “train the blue” for good reason 
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You keep saying classes then talking about WW. WW is not a class.
Absolutely criminal meanwhile warriors just apply war paint and can also hit d stance and atleast hit buttons but we have to AFK like an idiot waiting for our wall to tick up.
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