The Shaman class never got their promised overhaul/ talent revamps in Vanilla like most (all?) other classes because of the sudden serious illness of CM Eyonix, which led to the incident know as “bus shock”.
It was initially planned for patch 1.9 along with the Paladin changes.
Later the Shaman overhaul was moved to TBC , where the class was also made available to both factions.
So, is this fact going to be be taken into account or will Shaman forever stay in the poor shape it was at end of Vanilla?
There’s nothing that can be done. TBC changes to the Shaman class exceed the Classic project’s mission statement. Hopefully, we’ll get a shaman rework in two years if Blizzard releases Classic TBC.
Shamans were not in any kind of awful shape. They were used in raiding, had good pvp and farming potential. I don’t see why anyone is complaining. Shamans won’t get a rework, that would require rebalancing all classes, which then makes it not Classic…
This is one of the best examples of why it would be nice to have changes, but not TBC-level changes.
Shaman overhaul, much like Melee Hunter overhaul to ranged in an earlier patch of Vanilla, completely changed enhancement Shaman’s fantasy from a 2h melee into dual-wield melee, which completely changed how the spec was played.
Instead of a burst-heavy class relying on Windfury, the new Shaman was now dual-wield, which dealt damage in smaller bursts than the old one, not to mention how lame DW is compared to 2h.
So, my suggestion would be to add elements of TBC talent tree to Vanilla. Make the talent tree better(in fact, you can do this with ALL existing classes and specs for a sort of 1.5 TBC talent lite) but leave Shaman’s class identity intact, similar to how Survival Hunter was melee before the revamp.
Actually, if you all agree with us unanimously on some reasonable changes, I can quarantee the devs would listen.
That’s the problem. The majority of us, including myself, will not agree with you. Letting in one change leads to another and then another. Changes to shaman requires changing all classes/specs, requires retuning raids, which requires changing itemization, so on and so forth. You might as well go ask for wow2, because it isn’t happening in Classic, especially since they aren’t going to scrap 2 years worth of work…
It wasn’t in because of the major illness of a Shaman CM Blizzard employee, which led to the bus shock incident that resulted in the Shaman class being neglected, arguably, until today.
This is the patch release including the various class improvements: Warrior + Warlock 1.6, Hunter 1.7, Druid 1.8, Paladin 1.9, Priest 1.10, Mage 1.11, Rogue 1.12
So, the point im making is that you could take some talents from the TBC tree and put them into the Vanilla tree, where there’s plenty of space left, and modify them in a way that wouldn’t disrupt or upset the original design philosophies of Vanilla (such as Enh has 2h spec)
For example, Dual-Wield Specialization from TBC would become Two-Handed Specialization:
Increases your chance to hit with 2h’s by 2%/4%/6% and increases your weapon skill with two-handed weapons by 4/7/10.
Of course, enh also gained substantial damage boost from transforming the spec to DW, so all this would also have to be taken into account with the Classic revamp.
Edit: Also, the cooldown of Stormstrike was reduced to 10 sec, that’s a pretty big one.