Going to copy in my wall of questions from a shaman feedback thread for 8.1 as these are many of the questions on my mind atm. Most are in regards to the scale of changes that came out for enhancement.
Why did we wait this long for number tuning? We were told we had to wait until 8.1 for changes but all that changed was talent numbers.
How can you justify this in relation to what Ion told us towards the end of beta? That the classes listed (enhancement, elemental and shadow) would be get their rework in 8.1.
Did he misspeak and a rework was never planned?
Do you somehow think that enhancement is working fine and only needed balancing? That the whole shaman community is overreacting and being toxic memers? (What else are we to do we can’t seem to get feedback when we ask polity, throw temper tantrums, or attempt to make massive reddit and twitter threads.)
In a more general sense honestly why did any of the 3 classes directly mentioned need to wait since beta to get what they received in 8.1. Near as I can tell Elemental shamans wanted you to go further than the numbers and minor talent/ ability rework. Even more ignorant on the spriest side but I have heard enough rumbling to assume they were hoping for more as well. I can guarantee Enhancement were wanting more. Do we just have a logical disconnect between how the community understands the word rework and the developers?
Do you honestly think on the development side that we won’t be back to the exact same state within a week of the patch landing that we are in now? A new cookie cutter talent build because they are all STILL mostly boring passive things that just get mathed out to who does the most damage in X scenario. We will still be limited by praying for RNG streaks as there is still no safety net to keep us doing damage if our god of luck of choice hates us that night. We still bring nothing truly useful or impactful to the raid or group.
Why are so many abilites that were once core parts of being an enhancement shaman or a shaman in general locked behind talent choices?
What exactly identity wise are enhancement shamans? Are we buffers cause we lost all of that years ago. Are we self enhancing ourselves to do things because some of the abilities say we are but rotation-ally we don’t feel like we are. So that leaves me with how we feel rotationally, weird electrocuted slot machine shaped like a warrior. I keep up 1 self buff every 15 or so seconds, spam a builder and put a drinky bird on the one button that does damage. Once in a blue moon I get really sparky and hit the ow button for 15 secs straight and everyone laughs how I finally procced.
An overall suggestion might it not be in our best intrest in the intent of improving player to developer communication to have some access to said developers not filtered through a forum, angry ranty posts, and a CM trying to transfer the message. I am not saying something that will leave the developers swinging in the breeze to get tore up but maybe a moderated thing every Friday say. Tonight on wowdevs twitch we have the fury warrior team lead hanging out with I dunno Lore of some other CM. They shoot the breeze for a bit maybe answer some more in depth questions from players than Ion can answer. Or have some of the community leaders from the class discord sit down and have a discussion of the class with said developer what works, what doesn’t, hopes for future development, hair brained ideas, etc.
I do understand that many of my questions are too long to answer in a Q & A but I want to make sure they are noticed because I do feel immensely like Blizzard ignored all of our feedback in the thread as has been the usual for this expansion and want to put it somewhere more high priority to read than a shaman thread. I have tried to provide context to the questions that lost it when moved from a specific feedback thread to a general thread.