The same could be said for the Elemental shaman. If the Enhancement Shaman is the “Air” aspect and Resto is the “Water” aspect, that means that Elemental take both “Fire” and “Earth” aspects in one. The way I viewed it is the druids were given a fourth spec in order separate or balance out the class/spec design. As it is there are four class specs under the Druid, whither or not it is just a separated spec. This leaves the Druids with four specs while the rest only have three. If the Shaman class were able to Tank back in Vanilla, then why is it that they lost that role while the Druids continued. So by your logic, why is it that the Druids are the only class to be so versatile that they can be MDPS, RDPS, Healer, and Tank, while the rest only get three or two? Regardless of how it used to be, to make it fair and equal to all classes, Druids should lose one spec so they have only three. I don’t think that should be the case at all.
I’m talking about two separate religious beliefs not the same:
The Druids have different Sects that follow a certain aspect of the druid specs i.e. Druids of the Claw (Guardian), Druids of the Grove (Restoration), Druids of the Fang (Feral) or possibly Druids of the Wild (Balance). Four religious beliefs under the Druids banner. Which logically gives them four specs to choose from.
The Shamans follow the elements. As there are four elements, the shamans have the possibility of performing any role needed, depending on which element they decide to align with i.e. Therazane {Earth} (Warden), Thunderaan {Air} (Elemental), Smolderon {Fire} (Enhancement), and Neptulon {Water} (Restoration).
That isn’t what I meant. If you read some of the other posts, it mentions certain elements to certain specs. This is where I laid out the elements to spec.
By lore, I mean that a Shaman follows the elements and Astral plain, not that a certain spec follows a certain element. These are just suggestions that, from my knowledge would fit into the world, lore or otherwise.
Thank you for your ideas and for pointing out any inconsistencies I might have had.
But Enhancement is not the Air aspect. Resto is not the Water aspect.
As an elemental shaman, I heavily rely on “air”, “earth”, “fire”, and “water” to dps.
Right. The druids had 4 specs under 3 spec options.
Shaman were not actual tanks in vanilla. They were stand in tanks for trivial content. I mean, paladins, bear tanks…were barely tanks in vanilla…and they WERE tanks. If you werent a prot warrior, you werent a real tank.
Because druids were actually intended to dps in cat form, and tank in bear form. Shaman were obviously not intended to be a tank.
So only Druids get four spec? I get that they could choose between Tank and DPS within one spec before. Why is it such a problem to consider what I, and others within this post, have been proposing? I’m well aware that it’ll probably never happen.
Yet they were able to. Meaning that it is possible for them to have been classed as a tank. It’s is quite possible that the developers didn’t even think about this originally.
Once again I have to stress that I was going off of what other people in the topic have suggested. I never said that this is how it is in the game. What I said was that it could be a way to reason it out. I’m also not against giving all classes a look over in terms of possibly adding a new spec. I personally think Priest should have a light DPS Spec instead of two healing specs and a Shadow. That is just my opinion. Yet this topic is with the Shaman area, so my focus is only on the Shaman class.
My point is they already had 4 functioning aspects, hiding under 3 specs. So it was either get rid of one, or split them apart. its why they have been the only class in the game to get 4 specs, and any other class has a spec basically removed for anything being added. Outlaw Rogue. Survival Hunter.
So for druids it wasn’t so much as added (as would have to be for tank shaman), but split apart what was already there.
Right now, there is no shaman tank option. What might have been able to been done under trivial circumstances 15 years ago doesn’t matter.
I mean. A hunter could also. Time to add tank specs for hunter.
And this involves retconning lore to make it work. Shaman haven’t ever been split up this way, but suddenly we’d have to have all specs reworked, redesigned, spells redone…
Yet, to do this split, new mechanics needed to be made in order to make them unique. A CHANGE had to be made to the game in order to make this work. Yet there is no room for any new idea/prospect/consideration to be in added.
Yet lore was changed to allow Tauren to be Paladins and Dwarves to be Shaman. This was not in the origional game neither. How many different realms have we gone through where new ideas and new training could be added into the lore of the game?
Why not? Why not bring back the old Spec that has disappeared? Once again, my focus for a Shaman topic was on a Shaman topic. I have always seen Shamans and Druids as two sides of a coin.
Not sure I would say shaman tank, as even though shaman tank is possible an even was a concept for enhancement, that point is gone. Could see using he totems to add some tanking stats to the shaman while they are active, maybe with some of the totems being used as a form of active mitigation even.
I actually think all four elements would fit a tanking shaman, from the idea of earth being the magic mitigation aspect, wind for movement, fire for threat, and water for physical mitigation.
Though i would rather see a change to elemental to make it a spec that uses, and fuses the four elements. Making it that comboing different elemental spells together creates a new (or enhanced) elemental spell. Like using a fire an wind gets you lightning, earth an fire gets you lava, water an earth mud, and even water an wind getting you ice. It would give the elemental shaman a feel of truly being a master of elements of sort, where the other shamans utilize the basic forms of elements, the Elementalist delves deeper int their truer an combined forms.
Shamans were obviously tanks and there was obvious support for this. You’ve stated that Feral was separated due to balancing issues. The same is true for shamans, but they decided to remove any tanking capabilities moving forward.
These talents are all found in the enhancement skill tree. It is beyond obvious that this was by design. This matters because it’s supported by the lore, mechanically and by initial design. I mean still to this day there is a shield named “Salvaged Mekacycle Shielding” that is on shaman loot tables dropping out of Mechagon that is flat out a tank shield…
There is a clear confusion of identity here and I would argue that they make a 4th spec happen!
Blizzard had every intention of making both paladins and shamans able to tank in the base game. The problem was that, back in vanilla, there were only 3 talent trees for each class - no more, and no less. Shaman was always viewed as a more offensive-oriented class compared to the more defensive-oriented paladin, so they ended up getting a DPS focused tree with some tanking talents and mail armor, as opposed to the paladin having a tanking focused tree with some DPS talents and plate armor.
The constant struggle of trying to keep paladins and shamans balanced against one another while remaining fundamentally different is why blizzard ended up removing their faction-unique status. They, admittedly, screwed up and had to find the cheapest, quickest workaround to the problem they created.
But this is nearly 15 years later. We’ve got one class with 4 specs, another with only 2, and we know that blizzard is capable of making things work in both situations. There’s no reason at this point to deny 4th spec additions to multiple classes - not just shamans - in order to provide new and more varied tanking and healing options; other than the lack of profit in it, of course.
And that’s why, regardless of how vocal we get and how much we request or demand shaman tanks, it probably wont happen: Because if there’s no way to monetize it, blizzard wont do it. Activision is all about the bottom line profit, not making their products fun or enjoyable.
I agree. I would love to have a DPS Light Priest, not a shadow as a Lightforged is focused on the light and not the shadow. I would also like to see different beast forms for druids, not just Cat and Bear. Hell Worgan already are in their Feral Beast form
Yeah, no. Pet AI/Pathing is terrible. I don’t want to have to rely on a pet to do the job. I especially never want to be liable for blame incase the dang thing decides to take the worst path imaginable to either stand besides me or grab another mob.
Well you could instead of having it be a pet that paths and moves, have it be a stationary totem pet. Give it something like a ranged attack maybe a fire bolt attack/taunt, and the shaman either has a ground targeting they use to place it. Though you could have it pop near the target when you are targeting a mob, if we can use both that gives the shaman the ability to move it to a location quickly if they need to re position/move the boss (though how to know which way it faces an so where the boss would be facing might be an issue.).
No to single element specs. Figure out how to make the tank spec use multiple elements. I didn’t make this class because I wanted to be a wind warrior, or a fire mage. I wanted to be a master of all the elements. Stop trying to water down one of the last few things that set us apart from other classes. We use more than just physical+(generic magic) damage. Shaman get nothing special, except tremor totem, and multiple kinds of magic.
They should double down on this aspect, and let people spec for a single element through talents, and whatever will replace azerite gear, or focus on all elements.
Quite frankly, anybody that tries to claim that Enhancement shamans were not, at least initially, invisioned as tanks is either ignorant or deliberately dishonest. It is VERY clear from the original talent tree and abilities that this was the idea. You do not give a spec those defensive talents and threat generation like that if you don’t expect them to tank at all. You can stamp your feet and go on about how they only ever did it in trivial content all you want, but it changes nothing and is inaccurate. They were the counterpart to the paladin.
Paladin :
Prot - Tank
Ret - DPS
Holy - Heal
Shaman
Enh - Tank
Ele - DPS
Resto - Heal
Just because they were not successful tanks does not mean that they were never intended to do so. Guess what? You would not have used a prot paladin for “serious” content either, they didn’t even have a taunt back then. Would you say paladins were never meant to tank? Of course not.
The lack of meaningful Shaman tanking was never about intent, but executuon.
Quite frankly, there were many specs in vanilla thay were not viable (prot paladin/balance druid) and it is more about the inadequacy of blizzard to design the specs than it was the roles they were inteded to fill.
Shamans were just not good tanks back then, and rather than adjust the spec to improve their capability, blizzard changed the concept of the spec. This was facilitated by breaking the class barrier for paladins and shamans in bc, allowing the two classes to no longer need to be balanced around each other.
I suggest everyone invested in this discussion look up a shaman named Sharicasmi. If you all were around in WOTLK you may remember him.
I think it was more along the lines of enhancement being a dual tank/dps spec, just like feral was for druids (having both bear and cat talents in the same tree, to fill both roles).
The only problem was that blizzard abandoned the shaman tanking idea early on. Instead of elaborating on it, or making it feasible, they chose the easier route of simply throwing paladins to horde and shamans to alliance and making each class “unique”.
If shamans had kept a semi-tanking focus until the specs were all split up, they might’ve had the same treatment as druids: With enhancement being split into two separate specs, one for tanking and one for melee dps.
Unfortunately, it’s a much harder process now to add a fourth tank spec for shamans. I hope they do, but with how notoriously lazy and money-focused blizzard is lately, I dont see it being very likely.
I have also always assumed that enh had a similar idea behind it as feral, dps and tank in one tree. It clearly didn’t work out. Most shaman players, especially older ones, never gave up on this concept. Not a surprise considering some of us did in fact tank dungeons, at least way back when. Never liked dw as much either but I may be a salty old man.
Blizzard changed their approach and design philosophy for the spec. They decided that enh was going to be a furious primal melee beserker type of class. They even, if I recall, basically stated on at least one occassion that they want shamans to be dual wielders and that we would need to accept that they aren’t going to give us any love for 2h because that was their new vision for the class.
Blizzard has, almost endlessly it seems, struggled with enh shamans. We were often weaker in dps, or our utility was given to others, or we got left behind in the race to homogenize classes. I still remember feeling like the only guy in an entire BG without a worthwhile CC. I haven’t played the retail version of the game since cata, and decided to stop back by the shaman forums out of curiosity only to see the community clammering for help or attention the same way it always has. Very disappointing, honestly.
Back on topic however, I think there is definitely room to add a shaman tank spec. They used to do it, and as people have stated it can play off certain elements very well to give some good thematic and lore friendly abilities and mechanics. There is not a very good argument against a 4th spec seeing as how the precedent for it has been set. Other than “nuh uh too many, unnecessary, druids are special”. I say go for it.