Replace Stoneskin Totem with Earthen Wall Totem in Shaman Class Tree

Classes Shaman
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Earthen Wall Totem - Spell - World of Warcraft (wowhead.com)

Currently no one takes Stoneskin Totem, and it is largely a garbage capstone. It only reduces physical damage. It is an embarassing addition to the game, and will never be taken over other more desireable talents.

Earthen Wall Totem is a totem that not only provides group utility for Ele and Enhance, but is desirable enough to compete with other talents in the same tier. It also offers synergy with things such as Totemic Projection, and Call of the Elements.

Stoneskin Totem is a lackluster group utility/defensive, that should ultimately just be exchanged for Earthen Wall Totem from the resto tree. You can leave the Resto tree talent in, allowing them to have 2 stacks of the totem if they take both.

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Stoneskins still good in M+ for big tank pulls and bleeds, but that’s about it. Honestly should just do 10% dmg reduction across the board, but god forbid shamans get a DR cooldown.

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Anywhere that stoneskin would be good, earthen wall would be infinitely better.

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They should also make Ancestral Awakening a single point talent.

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For some odd reason, I don’t see a “stoneskin” totem in the restoration talent tree or in the shaman’s abilities, did it get removed from the game?

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I 100% support this. It would be huge for enhance in pvp if that had the ability to actually melee and this would help. The only thing it really suffers from right now is it’s ability to live. I heard the Ion considers Reincarnation a defensive and it cant even be used in areans, what a joke. Not to mention warlock as that but better and it still gets a crap tone of other defensives. Give us Earthen Wall Totem, Give us Shamanistic Rage, and give us the stun/heal on ghost wolves back.

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This would be awesome! We need defensive totems for all specs 


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It is in class tree as capstone

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Hard disagree.

Pve wise, ewt is much more useful than stoneskin, but its locked to a relatively small area which means in high movement fights (Sennarth, Diurna), a lot of it can be wasted. Stoneskin is ok for very specific few instances (bleeds, bigger tank pulls that are mostly phys, melandrus).

The one change that would be really good QoL for pve, is making EWT have the range of stoneskin, and not having it be limited to an area.

If you send EWT to stoneskin, you are basically impeding resto from speccing AG (smaller cd) EWT and Call of the Elements (which is mostly used with EWT to double it) at the same time in raid, all things that you actually kind of want, cause there’s no way you’re actually spending that many points on garbage talents in tiers 8-9 just to reach. Hell, the path to stoneskin is currently horrible already, you’d be forcing people to take the path with less skill points to reach capstones. The resto spec tree is already full of not-choices that do nothing (earthen harmony, aa, improved pw), and are an excuse to just to force you to spend 3-4 points to reach to the capstones.

Better idea: move the choice node for tranquil air/stoneskin up, and design an actual capstone for the spec tree that isn’t virtually useless on almost everything. Because frankly, you could even have boss fights that do phys, but everything and their grandma is magical right now.

Also, make Poison Cleansing Totem actually useful, not the piece of hot garbage it is right now in pve.

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I honestly think EWT becoming a Class Totem would be a great change. More ways then one.

Enhance is currently a wet toilet paper in terms of defensives, this actually will see it in play.

Resto having the option to get 2 EWT be amazing as they are in need of help.

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If you want EWT in the class tree, it has to not be in row 10.

Also, I don’t really think EWT would be of that much help as a “self” defensive specifically. It peels 1% of your hp from damage taken. If you get hit twice by 100k, all it does is peel “your hp*0.01” twice. At 340k hp, that’s 6800 damage reduced out of 200k damage, translating to 3.4% DR (it scales with your hp), and this is while inside the area. Its near insignificant for self, it’s designed for group environments because the goal is to consume the 100 procs within the 15 (18) second window. It’s good for group rot, not for individual hits.

In order for EWT to be good individual DR, you need to have something boosting your hp in proportion to the damage intake. (And as you may suspect, future seasons may not necessarily make it scale better, because so will incoming damage).

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Stoneskin Totem
To the topic, I think EWT is in a good position within the Resto tree, and that Stoneskin/Tranquil Air totem are just in a bad position in the general shaman tree. Stoneskin and Tranquil Air should probably be where Brimming with Life is instead.

Mainly, this would provide more early game totem play. It’s about the right place for the amount of power. It’s fairly balanced or can be balanced considering when paladins gain their own auras of Devotion and Concentration.

I think is arguable that with the absolutely proliferation of magic damage the totem should provide something in the range of 2-6% reduction against ALL damage. I’d say, we’d probably have to see the cooldown dramatically adjusted for such a scenario. I would also say that the combination of both the new position more easily accessed by all shaman and the strength of it would still be in line with paladins auras or druids mark of the wild versatility. It’d certainly be something that’d feed into the strange discussions of “What does the shaman (uniquely) bring”; periodic % party damage reduction.

Brimming with Life, Replaced?
I think Brimming with Life is a hold over of an Azerite trait that I just didn’t like. Brimming with Life’s stamina benefit should be integrated. Ideally baseline. It comes with some other issues that would not make me miss it, if it were replaced. Most of these stem from balance over the ages.

  1. Reincarnation “is good, but it can be better”, yes of course. But I feel like paladins got a battle resurrection, and the real benefit could have at least been an improvement to the amount of health/mana we gain after getting up.
  2. I think this is roughly equivalent to the Evoker’s “Tempered Scales” trait, which surpasses shielded mail armor values naturally, essentially effective health against physical attacks.
  3. It’s boring. It’s a passive and expensive Power Word: Fortitude.
  4. Or Veteran of the 3rd/4th War, except in an extra awkward spot in the tree.

Improving the Capstone
If we’re talking of improving totems, talents, and totem talents, I think it’s an interesting area of discussion.

  • Poison Cleanse Totem (PCT): Move it up a level, the current place of Totemic Focus. Increase the # of stacks removed at a time to 5.
  • Totemic Focus (TF): Add an improvement to PCT and Healing Stream Totem (HST), increasing the number of party/raid members that benefit from PCT and HST at a time by +1/+2
  • Winds of Al’Akir (WoAA): Swap position with Spirit Walk/Gust of Wind. Integrate the cooldown benefits from Go with the Flow. Mechanical change of the totemic speed benefit from +8%/+15% becoming active when 3 totems are active to a discrete benefit per totem of +2%/+5% per totem
  • Go with the Flow (GowF): Can go somewhere else. I would move those 2 free points to either the current position of Poison Cleanse Totem or to the capstone as a kind of superlative benefit to all totems.

Strange Ideas, read [New]:

  • Prelude to Voodoo, 2 point talent, in place of Poison Cleanse Totem’s current position: Placing a totem causes a 5/10% of shaman’s hp physical damage absorb shield for 5 seconds on 4 nearby party members that resists spell pushback while the shield persists.
  • Big Bad Voodoo, 1 point talent, area of strange nigh invulnerability. Causing the shaman to channel all friendly damage taken in a 5 yd range (can be improved by TF) around the totem 6 seconds. At the end of 8 seconds, the totem explodes flinging, hexing, or cursing nearby targets, radius and power of the effect expands based on damage absorbed. Destroying the totem halts the effect, but causes the attacker to be cursed.
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Resto is not impeded anymore than it is now from choosing AG, EWT, or CotE.

They already can get a double reset without speccing down into stoneskin/tranquil air (which most resto aren’t doing anyway).

So the conversation for resto at least, would be, is having 2 EWT from talents better than AG or CotE? I’d argue the answer is no (AG is a powerful cooldown, CotE allows you to get 2 of them anyway while also resetting additional totems), so nothing would change, and they’d still get EWT from their spec tree.

This change is to make available a useful group cooldown totem to Ele and Enhance. I am also going to make a dummy out of myself and assume you didn’t read the entire thing:

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Cool, so in situations where you have a group:

  • 5 man Dungeons
  • M+
  • Raiding
  • 3v3 arenas
  • Rated BGs
  • unrated BGs
  • 40 man BGs

EWT would be a great group utility to Enhancement and Elemental shaman. I don’t know why you are discussing it as a personal defensive as that was never indicated or intended to be the reason for suggesting this change.

Furthermore, the argument that it must not be in a specific talent tier is weird given the other examples of talent tier discrepancies between specs
 Ascendance is a capstone for Restoration tree, but is two tiers higher for Enhancement or Elemental. Both Elemental and Enhancement have ghost wolf affinity and Refreshing Waters, but Elemental has them in tier 3, and not only in tier 6, but sharing the same choice node.

Again. in case it was missed, Resto is keeping EWT in its current location in their talent tree. Speccing into it in the class tree would simply add a second totem.

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That would be cool to see, resto shamans able to put down 3, other shamans put down 2. or is it 4 and 2? Wonder if you could cheese bosses with a few shamans.

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This would be a great change for all three specs. Adding survivability with an already existing spell and it wouldn’t be too overpowered either. Hopefully they rework shaman talents before it gets too late into the expansion.

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Probably not cheese, but certainly be useful — My first Razsageth kill had 3 dps warriors, and we each used Rallying Cry to help offset certain points of burst dmg to ease healing. Stacking cooldowns isn’t unheard of.

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Certainly would be useful, in pvp double earthen is already strong, quadruple would be like 18seconds (time?) of immortality, i’d imagine.

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I dont want a switch I just want stonekin totem to be of use. Tranquil mind and Stonekin arent last row worthy im sorry

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The class tree has several crappy niche talents. If you put a good one in there, everyone will take it (it will basically be OP). They can’t put in something that strong unless they make other talents that can compete with it.

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