Shamans absolutely adored Chain Harvest in Shadowlands including myself. It was just a fun ability to press. This would be a really nice replacement for AG since it already works with all 3 specs so it can just go right in AGs spot.
Chain Harvest would be an active global we have to think about and actually press rather than passive like AG basically is (macrod into ascendance mostly) while still being a semi strong healing/dmg CD. Can be tuned as needed of course. It could look really, really cool when updated with Shaman visuals too.
Please think about replacing AG with Chain Harvest in the class tree. Buffing Healing stream totem doesn’t really work as a replacement for a variety of reasons:
-Healing Stream totem can be killed very easily in PvP, leading to very little gain in replacement of AG
-Healing Stream totem heals 1 person at a time, and its single target healing is way weaker than AG even with an 80% buff (ele) or 100% buff (enh), so this will not feel like a good global to press. Won’t be noticeable like AG was
Edit: It doesn’t even have to be chain harvest honestly, we just need some form of personal defensive compensation especially for Ele and Enhance. Losing AG is not just losing off healing, its losing a major personal defensive too.
That doesnt really replace Ag in any way, its just more mobility which tbh we really dont need. It can be defensive of course but our mobility is honestly pretty good. Ele is ranged and has blink or spirit walk, thunderous paws/spirit wolf, and has wind rush it takes in pve+root, lasso and cap, perma slow as well. Enh has feral lunge+gust/spirit walk, thunderous paws/spirit wolf, 60% 8 sec slow (if talented) baked into our rotation, etc. Sham mobility is actually pretty good, don’t feel like I’d really need door at any point. If anything that should prob go to priests, they desperately need more mobility lol.
People want Chain Harvest because of how strong it felt when being used. Realistically, for an ability of that strength to exist, it would probably have to be a capstone talent and someone would lose something huge out of their tree. If it were to return in place of AG, it would likely be significantly nerfed into a slightly more dmg Chain Lightning + Slightly more healing Chain Heal. There’s also the problem of changing it from Shadow dmg to something more thematic with Shaman and that would then probably allow it to scale with mastery… which would be an absolute nightmare.
I think it would be doable, especially since they can tune it any time they want to and also mess around with the cd. They could also remove the crit CDR from it too which would help make it a bit simpler to tune and deal with. And yes it would likely not be as strong as it was, thats fine, but they can get it close enough to the strength of AG where it won’t be missed nearly as much as it will be right now.
At this point, it doesn’t look like they’re are going to budge with the AG changes nor give us a comparable alternative. And as sad as i am to see it go, i think it sheds light to what i see as a bigger problem. The entire bottom left side of the class tree is now basically useless for enh. I see this as such a design failure, especially bc its the CLASS tree. They went through the trouble of removing the enh only talents from the tree (which i would argue was a net negative change for enh) but they have never really addressed the talents that skew almost 100% for ele/resto.
I think there are good opportunities to make spirit walkers grace or natures swiftness be impactful spells for enh whether it be as a mobility, healing, defensive, or just plain maelstrom generation options. But if its deemed useless for a single spec then either it needs some change or it doesnt belong in the class tree.
Yeah you are 100% right about all of that. Its a huge problem that the entire side of that capstone area from spiritwalkers down is just useless for enh.
That is definitely a pretty big design failure overall, like they could definitely have NS do something a little different for enh like maybe ‘your next maelstrom weapon spender is empowered by x% and has x% increased crit chance’ or something, spiritwalkers could be mobility for sure like ‘x% move speed granted when using spells for 15 sec’.
Just random ideas there nothing concrete but they definitely could make it more useable for enh, its kinda ridiculous that it isn’t.
Chain Harvest would be incredible as an alternative to AG, especially if it applied flame shocks/riptides like it used to with the legendary. (even if they have to nerf it or give it a longer cooldown)
If they let shadow keep Vampiric Embrace, Boomie keep Nature’s Vigil, why should shaman lose AG entirely?
They could either do what you said with chain harvest, or just nerf the ability if they think it is too strong rather than straight up removing it with no compensation at all for the loss of healing utility. (Healing Stream totem buffs reallllllllllllly don’t cut it lol)
Cant tell you how many times I killed an alliance with Chain Harvest in WPVP. Actually had a BM hunter which outgeared thought he could kill me easily by of course stating ranged popped ascendance and then chain harvest which hit him and his pets and took me from 1/4th hp to full hp and watched his health drain while I was slamming him with my Windblast. Good times. I would perfer Chain Harvest over what we got any day.
But I got the feeling that Chain Harvest was an ability that they regret making.
I honestly figured it would just be an elemental based spell kind of like ele blast, so it’d be the chain harvest animation but with fire/ice/lightning mixed together for the actual colors. That way it fits all 3 specs at the same time.
Cant really do that honestly since it would ideally be going in the class tree for all 3 specs, so it will work mostly the same for all 3. Just need it to do decent damage and healing on a 2 min cd or something, thats all we’d need it to do dont need to get more complex than that.
[PvE perspective and no PvP experience] For raiding and M+ I don’t think adding Chain Harvest as a replacement for AG would even be remotely close to compensating for the loss of AG. I think this is doubly so for Ele compared to Enhance, provided it still would interact with MSW (insta cast and throughput amp); it would be comparable to the gulf between Enhance’s Healing Surge vs Ele’s Healing Surge.
Assuming it’s better to use for its healing over its damage, it still would not fix the fact we flat-out lost a personal defensive CD since that was a huge aspect as to why AG was strong for Ele and Enhance on top of group healing. And if it ended up being more viable as a damaged CD, then that issue becomes more severe.
There’s also the fundamental difference between AG and Chain Harvest’s healing profile (Periodic 3 target smart heals over 10 seconds vs Single instance of healing on 5 targets). While a large burst heal on 5 targets at the right time would ofc be useful, AG providing healing spread out on multiple targets over a period of time works better for rot damage and synergizes with group/raid wide healing from healers since it helps smooth out heal pools, especially during multiple damage events (Canisters on Ovinax, Princess intermission, the AoE channels on the 2nd boss/3rd boss of DW/CoT respectively).
The rub with this is that there would be huge disparities regardless of what they do. If they make it functionally the same for all specs, then Enhance’s and Resto’s version would be massively better than Ele’s, given that Ele lacks any amps for their off-healing. If they change it so it’s a nature/elemental spell so it can scale with Ele and Enhance’s mastery, they would need to nuke its base damage portion significantly; otherwise, it would quickly scale to where you’d use it as damage CD which does not fix the issue of losing group utility. It would be massively stronger for Enhance over Ele unless they let it Overload as well, but then it would turn into a damage CD, assuming it would still provide Malestrom. Having it apply Flameshock would turn it purely into a damage CD for Ele for spreading Flameshock in AoE when you you’re not using Ascendance to get your dots out, especially with the Pwave change (leave it alone pls for the love of god).
Honestly, it wouldn’t work too well with an Ascendance ramp since you’d pop Storm Ele > cast Stormkeeper > cast Chain Harvest > Ascendance, meaning you’re losing uptime on Wind Gust stacks. Pre-pull full openers would be even worse since we’re already starting pre-pull around 3.5 with both Storm Ele and the Fury of the Storm Ele out before Pwave into Ascendance; adding a cast time would lead to uptime loss on Storm Ele, SK Ele, and Wind Gust. Stormbringer could NS it but that would mean not having NS during ascendance for say a EB, Tempest, or a movement global; you’re 2nd or 3rd Ascendance ramp would need you to hold NS or you’d be stuck hardcasting it at a loss of uptime on your Ele’s. Farseer would be able to use Ancestral Swiftness for it to pop grandpas, but that would lose you a 2nd instant Lava Burst, which would hurt since Grandpa windows are small. They would also need to code it as a damage spell so that if you cast it while Grandpa’s are out they would cast a damage spell instead of a heal, but it would likely have them cast Chain Lighting which does nothing for single target.
All that is beside the point, since it would still do nothing to fix the fact we lost a defensive/off heal combo CD.
This is pretty much my gripe. I get them not wanting us to have such a strong healing/defensive CD given AG is miles ahead of what Vampiric Touch and Nature’s Vigil can do given that those two abilities heal a single target based on single target damage abilities vs AG hitting 3 targets for 20% of all damage AND healing, even though it’s healing on a target per second is capped at a value of 20% of max health. They could have increased the healing cap, reduced its duration, or reduced the % of damage/healing that gets converted. Them ripping it out is awful.
Healing Stream changes don’t even cut on personal survivability since 2-3 cast of Healing Surge is about the same amount as the healing done by the Totem if it only healed you for its duration for Ele and I’m willing to guess that a 10 MSW Healing Surge would beat it too as Enhance. As a group healing CD, you’d probably get more value using the GCD to refresh Earth Shield on yourself/another person compared to HST.
My largest issue with this is that we didn’t just lose a strong off-heal ability; we also lost a defensive/survivability tool since using AG, even if you’re the only one who is in danger of dying, could be the difference between life or death.
That is exactly the problem. If it were just offheals that we lost I would not be as concerned, but AG can also be used as a major personal defensive and likely one of our best. This applies to PvP as well, over 6 rounds of solo shuffle it did 40 million healing total, half of that was to myself. There have been so many times I got to my 2nd ascend, was close to dying, but was able to utilize AG to keep myself alive and get a kill.
Losing that is such a huge hit to personal survivability. And the replacement being a 100% healing stream buff for enh/80% for ele is insane to me. The amount of globals required for Healing Stream to do 50% of the work AG does is way too many, especially for enhance. On top of that, it isn’t a personal defensive, it heals 1 person every 1.8 seconds for 100k on PTR lol, that is so bad its unreal. It isn’t instant healing like AG. Lastly, its also killable in PvP and has basically no HP, dies in a global, so even if it did a lot of healing people would just kill it instantly.
I am really hoping to see some form of personal defensive compensation for losing this. It doesn’t have to involve off healing at all either. Enh is already one of the squishier melee, losing AG is going to be so bad especially in PvP.
My personal ask was this: Move Burrow to the class tree, make Stone Bulwark Totem baseline and either buff Stormweaver a little bit or add a new defensive PvP talent in Burrows place. The reason I say this is because no other melee in the game has to choose a major personal defensive in their pvp talents, they have everything in the class tree+baseline, they only have minor defensive choices and defensive improvements in their pvp talents. This would provide more access to our defensive talents for PvE and PvP while not having to add anything new.