Shaman Survivability and how to improve it

Classes Shaman
1

There is a lot of discussion surrounding shaman survivability and it seems to be brought up as one of the major reasons the class is falling behind a little in multiple game modes.

I thought I would first list the survivability options that shaman do have, and then also list some of the common suggestions I’ve seen recently as far as how to improve it.

Currently Shaman of all specializations have access to:

  • 6% Magic Damage mitigation
  • 8% HP increase
  • 20% HP heal when falling below 35% HP every 45 seconds.
  • 2 min cooldown 60% damage reduction for 12 seconds. -OR- 1.5 min cooldown 40% damage reduction for 12 seconds.
  • Earth shield: Passive heal upon taking damage. Needs to be refreshed using a global.
  • Stoneskin totem: 10% Physical damage mitigation for 15 seconds every 24-30 seconds. Needs a global to activate.
  • 2% avoidance. If it’s working :joy:
  • As Resto: 6% damage mitigation with Earth shield.
  • Ancestral Guidance: more of a group sustain utility, but applies.
  • Healing stream totem: more of a small group sustain utility.
  • Earth Elemental: 1 minute uptime of 15% increased HP, 5 minute cooldown.

Now for some of the common suggestions:

  • Astral shift given a second charge.
  • Astral shift baseline 1.5 min cooldown.
  • Bring back shamanistic rage.
  • Improve Reincarnation.
  • Make Burrow usable in PvE
  • Give Ele and Enhance access to 6% DR on Earth shield
  • Greatly reduce the cooldown on Earth elemental / boost its defensive benefits.

From what I understand, shaman survivability in difficult content doesn’t seem to match up with other dps when dealing with rot damage or big hits. This seems to be due to a lack of multiple defensive active abilities, as well as lesser sustained survival options.

I would like to throw a few more ideas around which hopefully not be too OP:

  • Let storm weaver PvP talent be usable in PvE for enhance, and the heal could also be off the global cooldown.
  • For Dps specs, earth shield never runs out of charges when used on themselves.
  • since shaman have always been more of an offensive utility class vs defensive utility, perhaps some of their spells could apply debuffs to enemies that reduce their damage in some way.
  • Buff elemental warding to be 6% for all specs and also increase resistances to elemental damage types by an additional amount.
5 Likes
2

I dont really play Enhancement so ita hard for me to speak to that. And it seems like they want Elemental to be a glass cannon. Not my idea structure but it is what it is.

Heres how id suggest making up a little more durable.

The Class tree should have a few more modifiers to Earth shield. Things like (as you said) permanent on yourself. I think it should also have some talents that make it a HST that follows you. Health ticks every so often and, again, only for the shaman.

It also like to see a talent that allows us to eat a charge intentionally (on a CD) so we have a little more agency.

These should be choices if course, if you get these you skip other things but more self healing on a class like ours doesnt seem like an insane request.

Id also like to see the Ghost Wolf passive healing return. I have no idea why they removed it ans before that made it PVP only but i can only conclude they hate us.

For Elemental, they should have the option of trading some damage for leech. I havent thought about it too much, so i cant say how it should be done.

3

I would heavily appreciate the 6% DR on ES and Shamrage. Burrow would be neat as well. Think my favorite idea is the ES on the sham doesn’t need to be refreshed. Would make playing double ES much more enjoyable in Keys or Raid.

2 Likes
4

Im guessing Burrow is for non-tanking situations. Because otherwise isnt it going to reset aggro on the mob?

1 Like
5

This is a discussion worth having. Apologies in advance for the long post.

As far as the passives you’ve listed- they’re better than nothing I suppose, but none of them are strong enough to really make a difference. If we’re going to lean into passives then they need to be significantly stronger.

-They could buff elemental warding significantly. Currently its 4% magic damage DR for ele/resto and 6% for enhance. They could buff this to like 20%. We are the masters of the elements after all, and this would still leave us with a weakness (physical damage).

-Brimming with life giving an 8% health increase could be buffed. Most melee and some ranged have a health boost and this is one of the weaker ones. For years the mitigation model for blood DKs was/is to take the damage and heal it back, which led to them getting spiked to death routinely. The solution was to give them more health to keep them alive long enough to heal. The same could be applied to shamans.

That stuff said I think the real problem comes in the form of our active mitigations.

-Astral shift. 40% DR on a 2 minute timer with a choice node to make the cooldown 1.5 minutes or make it a 60% DR. This is a good cooldown, unfortunately it isn’t usable while stunned/CCed and its our only one.

-Earth elemental. Pocket tank that also boosts your HP by 15% while its up. Useful while soloing, but in group content a 15% health boost isn’t a huge cooldown, and you have to hope it doesn’t taunt at the wrong time and get your group cleaved. It also has a long 5 minute cooldown.

-Ancestral guidance. Converts damage into healing for your group on a 2 minute cooldown. I really like this one. I have no problem trading a personal cooldown for a group cooldown, assuming we have the rest of our kit aligning with others.

-Reincarnation (ankh). The giant purple elephant in the room that the rest of our kit is balanced around. In the beginning shamans were the Horde counter to Alliance’s paladins and reincarnation was their answer to a pally’s bubble. Both are a way to not die when things get spicy. Sounds good on paper.

The problem is the cooldown. A paladin can get their bubble cooldown to 3.5 minutes while ankh still has a 30 minute cooldown. Sure- the brimming with life talent increases the refresh rate (to a max of 7.5 minutes) while above 90% health, but in challenging content you don’t spend much time above 90% health. In my experience you can generally use this once per dungeon and it certainly isn’t up for every pull in a raid.

How I would fix shaman defensives.

-Buff the brimming with life talent from 8% health increase to 20%. This is not out of line with what other dps have access to.

-Astral shift I would leave it as is, but allow it to be used while CCed.

-Earth elemental I would make a choice node with Shamanistic Rage. 30% DR on a 1 minute timer.

-Reincarnation I would reduce the cooldown significantly. If its going to be counted on as cooldown then it needs to be more reliable and usable in all content. I think a 4 minute timer would be fair. Most defensive cooldowns have a 1 or 2 minute timer, while the strongest have longer cooldowns. This puts it at a slightly longer cooldown than bubble.

6

I wonder if a personal buff to the shaman of the stoneskin totem or earthen wall totem effects would make sense.

Add in a talent option in the class tree to trigger these effects somehow.

7

Worth noting only enhance gets 6% magic DR, ele and resto are stuck on 4% Im pretty sure. At this point I just want anything on a short cooldown that will allow for us to survive a bit of ticking damage, astral shift is great for the big one shots but you have to save it for them.

8

Passive defense boosts are all well and good, but the thing that really sets us behind at higher level play is lack of cooldowns. In high level content, personal survival comes down almost entirely to having enough personal defensive cooldowns to survive major unavoidable damage events on bosses. If you don’t have a cooldown available for every such damage event, you just plain die. This is where shaman’s defensive toolkit is utterly inadequate.

20% would definitely be overkill. The vast majority of group damage in PvE is magical, this would essentially be giving us as much always-on defense as other some other classes have to spend a cooldown for.

While making Earth Elemental a choice node with a real personal defensive is a good idea, I’d rather they just give us a second charge of Astral Shift and save us the additional keybind than give us a second defensive that does basically the exact same thing.

I’d go with splitting the 15% Max Health increase off of Earth Elemental into its own button, more like +30% current and max health for 12 seconds, 2 minute cooldown, or something like that, to stay on theme.

What I’d really kill for, though, is something like rogues’ Feint, a short CD active AoE defensive.

1 Like
9

As a passive I think you’re right. However, they could make it an on use with a passive baked into it. 10% passive reduction to all (physical & magical) damage, with a 1.5 minute cd to bump it to 30 or 40% for 10 seconds.

Same thing for ancestral guidance. Passive leech, but then on use work as it does now.

Return shamanistic rage as it was back in wrath era.

10

I love having Earth Shield along with my Lightning Shield when playing elemental, but it feels bad having such a long cooldown on Astral Shift. I’d love a second charge like Evokers have on their defensive or a way to reduce the cooldown by using spec abilities.

11

I feel like reincarnation should get a rework. It’s an iconic Warcraft ability and has just been left to rot for decades. I don’t know how they could possibly tune it to be balanced in PvP, but at least for PvE it just needs to reset for each boss fight and preferably you should rez with full health.

1 Like
12

Completely agree. But I can see it being abused in M+ if the cd is too short. That’s a problem we have now that didn’t use to exist. They have to design classes around peoples “clever use of game mechanics” in dungeons.

The cooldown could be lowered, but reset after each boss fight is begging for abuse I believe sadly.

13

Sorry I meant raid bosses. I think a once per dungeon use or perhaps 10 minute cooldown would be fine. You’re right though, someone will find a way to abuse it. But off the top of my head I can’t think of anything that a soul stone couldn’t also do.

1 Like
14

I actually want it gone. After seeing Ian call it a defensive I had decided I would rather it be gone then be in the way of Shaman get actual defensives. I want to note, Warlock can self res too and they have actual defensives so it was bull for Ian to say from the start. But if this is the argument for shaman being stripped of survivability then I would rather it just not be there.

3 Likes
15

Not sure on its cd. Soul stobebis superior because it’s usable on party/raid members.

I get this, and it definitely shouldn’t be considered a defensive, but I do like it and want it to stay. It needs a shorter CD and needs to just be considered one of those cool class spells that might be OP in certain situations, but not game breaking to flood raids/dungeons with shamans.

16

You’d be extremely hard pressed to find a situation that could be abused by a shorter CD Reincarnation that wouldn’t still be better abused by at least three other classes.

Reincarnation’s cooldown should be cut to 10 minutes baseline with resets on raid wipes, in line with the cooldown on actual battle rezes, at least.

It also needs to either bring us back with enough health to not instantly die to passive AoE, or grant some kind of brief immunity period so we can actually use it if we were killed by anything that leaves a murder puddle.

6 Likes
17

That would be cool, if after reincarnation we ressed with an ethereal aura that granted immunity for 3ish seconds

1 Like
18

The bottom line is that if reincarnation is going to count as a defensive then it needs to be as available as other defensives. Once upon a time Shield Wall had a 30 minute cooldown, too.

I do like the idea of a 3 second grace period where you can’t be gibbed again to let you get out of murder puddles (lol I love that name), but to keep it balanced we would also have to be unable to attack or cast for those three seconds.

1 Like
19

I would love to see stormweaver and burrow added to the spec/class tree respectively. I would probably put burrow as a choice node with earth ele and stormweaver replacing the flat healing surge buff talent.

That plus some sort of passive dmg reduction (which I feel like there are plenty of options to easily introduce) would go a long way.

A cool passive defense idea I came up with.

[Earthwarden]: Earth shields absorbs a percent of all healing done and when earth shield drops u get a barrier for that amount.

Also doubles a a way to visualize when earth shield drops bc that can be kinda annoying to track

2 Likes
20

Would everyone else be unhappy if they just let us turn into wolves and things didn’t hurt like it used to a while back?