Didn’t they get a rework during dragonflight? If so, then why is it still an issue? Is it cause it’s too complex or too simple and want it harder to play? Or they are bloated and needs to merge spells or outright removing them? Or are you wanting them to just remake shaman from top to bottom to appease to your needs and not think of the bigger picture not just raiding or pvp or mythic plus?
What is wrong with shaman?
- button bloat?
- complexity?
- too easy?
- not fun?
- boring?
- not enough buttons?
- complicated?
- too confusing?
2 Likes
I think chain heal costs too much mana, and I don’t care for PrimWave.
2 Likes
elemental is just lava burst spam
and in pve you need to take the build that replace earth shock…
its just not fun, only resto shaman maybe is ok but could be more, such good totems are pvp talents…
2 Likes
Probably the main one I’ve heard is that Tempest, the main stormbringer ability, for elemental does less damage than lightning bolt.
6 Likes
I don’t think Enhance has enough buttons, to be honest.
I’d rather have Elemental Blast replaced with Lava Burst and Frost Shock gets replaced with Glacial Spike. To replace the random stat buffs, each element gives you a fixed stat when cast with 5 Maelstrom stacks. This way it synergizes way better with the Elemental Puppies than Elemental Blast and makes you pay attention to which Elemental Wolf is out.
The only thing I’d really want for Enhance is better Totems. Poison Totem is super niche. Stoneskin Totem just doesn’t offer a lot. Most of the Totems, outside of Fear and Capacitor need a serious buff.
1 Like
The frost mage spell? That’d be weird.
I do wish they’d beef up the animation for frost shock though. Especially when hailstorm is in effect. They gave earth shock a fantastic new animation a few years back. The other two are sorely lacking in comparison.
Outdated graphics from Vanilla, Wrath, and Cata. We’re still using a placeholder model for Ascendence. Earth shield has like 3 and a half pixels. Can’t even see earthen wall totem…
Design that doesn’t keep up with current gameplay.
“Ankh is a defensive”
Elemental is a lava burst bot
Enhance GCDs are spent trying to self-heal
Talent tree is full of double-point talents
8 Likes
The core problems are:
- Weak defensives.
- Lack of meaningful and unique utility
- Target capped AoE
Elemental has more issues than enhancement. One big issue that’s been harming elemental for 2 seasons now and will continue to harm them with the Farseer hero talents in TWW is degenerate gameplay where you’re spamming Lava Burst 60-70% of the time.
Stormbringer for elemental doesn’t function well and we don’t know if that’s intentional design or bugs since Blizzard doesn’t communicate. It’s not tuning issues, it’s core design. Stormbringer was clearly made for enhancement and they just slapped it together for elemental with little care or concern for how things work.
3 Likes
I’m a person and my name is Anakin.
1 Like
We’re in great shape we got ankh the best defensive in the game.
3 Likes
my resto shaman is doing well , so there that
they are one of the two original support specs (paladin is the other).
their whole support system has been gutted. they used to have a very wide arsenal of totems that could be dropped to either fill in buffs that were missing in a group or to address game play in real time.
you used to be able to drop four totems at once each with different abilities.
as someone who did the original quest lines with my shaman in like 2007, I want to use all the totems that I spent hours earning. I actually liked the shaman quest lines. they made me feel like a shaman.
but today, you drop one and that is about it.
my healer main is a shaman. from a healing perspective, I have no real issues with the class, other than my totem comment above. I think it brings a lot to my m+ pug experience.
however, with the apparent rise of a “support” class, i want my totems back so I can support like I used to.
Need moar defensives, something to help in big pulls. Stoneform is my second defensive. Thats not really great design.
Chain heal should either heal for a lot more, or cost less mana and also the fact that ele and enh are almost always in two totally separate tiers for most patches in most expacs that they almost play like they are entirely different classes.
There are many issues with Shaman. I would say that some of them are:
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Defensives
Shamans have very few defensive options, and we often have to rely on Ankh, which has a cooldown of 30 minutes. Of course, this always has been a thing, Shaman has few defensives because we can heal ourselves but this design doesn’t make too much sense when other classes have been getting more and more defensives, and things are going to get worse in TWW.
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No raid buffs or useful utility for raids and M+
This has been something that Shamans have been complaining for ages and Enhancement did get Windfury Totem, but Elemental and Resto still don’t have anything, which in theory could be ok, but since Dragonflight Blizzard has introduced so many good stuff and utility for other classes that Elemental and Resto are basically alone. I think it’s pretty funny how Blizzard says they don’t want to give raid buffs to everyone and then let Rets have 2 of them.
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Elemental rotation is outdated
The class is just kinda outdated, not only visually but also mechanically. Ele basically doesn’t work, you have a builder and spender but your builder is so much better that you end up pressing it with more priority than your spender. There’s no direction in how Ele should be played, it’s just a complete mess.
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Resto Shaman cooldowns are just bad now
Spirit Link is just a bad cooldown compared to what other healing specs can offer. Basically every other healer has some niche that they can offer while Resto is just there.
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Visually Outdated
Self-explanatory, we still have a spell that transform us into some ugly abomination from Cata and Elementals from Vanilla.
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Shaman DF tree isn’t compatible with the direction Blizzard is going with the new ones
The Shaman tree has a lot of meaningful choices and it’s well designed overall but, Blizzard has been going on the opposite direction with other classes and cutting on 2 points talents and hard choices, so we suffer, despite having a tree that is theorically good.
There are some other problems but I guess these are my biggest complaints. I would love if Blizzard at least adressed the rotation and visuals part of my complaint, I guess I can live with being a bottom spec but being unfun and ugly kinda sucks.
2 Likes
That’s a take.
Enh shaman is like twisting my fingers to get my rotation out.
1 Like
There’s a lot wrong with shaman right now that’s been wrong for a long time, but there are two glaring issues that I’d love to see get some kind of clarification. One is Tempest for Elemental shamans which replaces our lightning bolt every so often from proccing enough and using enough maelstrom. The problem with it being that it doesn’t work with any of our other talents that benefit lightning bolt in any way nor our class mastery at all. It’s so bad in single target elemental shamans have a cancel tempest macro built in because it’s a dps loss to cast it because it hits like a wet noodle.
And the other problematic issue from a functional side is the Farseer hero spec for restoration. Essentially you call ancestors to help heal with you and you can proc them Ancestral swiftness or from using Unleash life. The problem is that Unleash Life is a shared choice node with Undulation, which is often utilized for single target healing because it’s not generally our strong suit. It could easily be solved by letting 2 undulation procs bring out an ancestor so it doesn’t brick that choice node and they’d come out only marginally faster if we were spamming our mana hungry healing spell.
There’s a ton of other issues from the severe lack of defensives, no longer bringing any kind of utility that isn’t outshined by others, fundamental issues with the elemental shaman tree in design and just that all our tree’s need a serious point clean up and rerouted and our capstones are laughably bad.
One of our capstones Nature’s Swiftness is literally given to resto druids on the 2nd row of their talent tree, and it actually buffs their spells by 100% when they use it.
That’s a real brief summary of shamans issues (excluding enhancement and pvp). I’d say resto is probably in the best spot as a whole but preservation evoker basically outshines it in every conceivable way even with it’s range nerf.
I’ve been a Resto main in Raids since MOP, occasionally dipping into Elemental. From a Raider’s POV:
- Weak defensives. Astral Shift is pretty much the only defensive we have, but apparently Blizzard considers Reincarnation as a “defensive” which is just wild to me.
- Elemental is just sitting there spamming meatballs because for some reason they decided we should have Primordial Wave instead of Chain Harvest or Vesper Totem and made entire tier set bonuses revolving around it.
- No unique utility or buffs. Like… why even bring a Shaman to the Raid when an Evoker can do everything a Shaman can, but better?
- Most Totems are super niche and are rarely useful
- Capstones in the Class tree are very weak. To the point that you can just NOT take them and be fine.
- Most of the animations are really outdated. Especially the modal for Ascendance that hasn’t been touched since it was introduced in Cata. We even use to have a glyph similar to the Druid’s Glyph of the Stars back in WOD, but Blizzard took that away for… reasons?
- None of Elemental’s spenders for a build > spender class feel impactful to use. They hit like wet noodles and are basically just there to proc buffs for Lightning Bolt and Lava Burst.
- We’ve had the same modals for the Elementals and Ghost Wolf since WOD, while classes like Mages, Warlocks, and Druids have gotten a whole host of new Water Elementals, animal forms, and demons
That’s just how it’s felt to me for the duration of DF. Going into TWW, none of that is being addressed and they’re introducing new problems:
- Stormbringer’s Tempest is so weak, it’s better to run /cancelaura macros and just cast Lightning Bolt instead
- Totemic’s Surging Totem costs so much mana for Resto that you would go oom after using it like 4 times and it’s replacing Healing Rain
- Farseer’s ancestral spirits are really weak and force Shamans to take specific talents deep in the Spec trees to even spawn (P.Wave for Elemental, Unleash Life for Resto).
- They introduced a new damage type - Stormstrike (Nature + Physical)… and don’t give it to Shamans. They gave it to Warrior’s Mountain Thane instead.
- Shaman now have the most 2-pt talent nodes of any class or spec
For one of the most iconic classes in the game, they (Blizzard) have really been neglecting it.
2 Likes