A legend and a madman here. Where I first raid healed in Cata nobody told me How to mouse use mouse over commands. I did alright, but to parse well like that? Damn he must’ve been really good
You clearly have no idea what you are talking about when it comes to enhancement. The spec is dead boring, its too RNG, you are forced to play a certain set of talents… etc etc oh and its one of the worst raiding specs. The entire spec has gone UNCHANGED from 8.0. The landslide build is only good for ST and its not much of an increase over ascendance build. Ascendance build is a fire n forget build thats great at everything. The problem, is you guys don’t listen, the solution have been repeated over and over.
I know of several players, DPS and Healers who have never used an addon and are clickers and will beat down a keybinder in a New York minute. I wish I had their skill. They’ve both tried to explain their techniques to me, but it does revolve around both of them just being superior players. I’ve often told them I’d hate to go up against them if they ever decided to keybind.
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MI have no issues healing a 10 on my shaman now. It can be difficult with lower item level but 8.1 has breathed fresh air into restoration shamans. High Tide changes really changed things around. The OP is having social issues, not issues with the balance from what I see. Yes, mythical are hard. Pugging then is a nightmare! However, with the right people even low geared players can complete a ten (not in time).
I would like to add that Elemental is not bad either. They have insane burst damage and both specs bring A TON of utility to your dungeon.
Tanks down? Tank pet
Feared? Tremor Totem
Cursed? Dispelled
Shield? Purged
Heal? Got it
Hero? Yes please
Stun? Yup
Kite adds? Totem
Battle Rez? If talented
Speed boost? If talented
Oh yeah, spirit link!!! Tank low during necrotic??? Group up! 100% HP!
I am sure I’m missing something here…
When you bring a shaman to the group just like any other class, you need to make the group around what synergizes.
Shaman healer - pally or monk (poison disease dispels)
No need for a mage because you can hero and kite
Before you start make sure that your team understands how a shaman works!!! Group up for chain heal! Some people don’t know. Inform them. Make the group right.
Thank you, Tinkerizmo for recognizing what I was going to call out too. The mage tower challenge and the challenge of M+ are intended to be challenges of two completely different kinds. The OP is comparing apples to oranges. While M+ is intended to be for gearing characters, the mage tower was supposed to be a badge of honor similar to other badges before it, like the gold DPS/tanking/healing proving grounds, etc.
It’s also important to point out another line in the Blizzard post which goes along with something in the OP’s own post.
In the Blizzard post: “Spoiler: All PvE content is designed so that you can beat it”
In the OP’s post: “I was watching players actually tackle the mechanics, like that big mob after the second boss and tanking him at the right place for LOS, and the small mobs before the third boss. As the key holder I was happy how we were progressing, it made it quite easy on the heals which meant good progression.”
So you’re saying when you perform correctly, you can clear the content. When you perform at a higher level things are easier due to the lack of needing to cover mistakes. Sounds to me like that is working as it should be. Even more, it sounds like the above is saying when you perform correctly the hard content CAN be completed.
Spoiler: Things ARE easier when you perform at a higher level. The easiest example is standing in fire. If your DPS stand in fire, your healer has to use both mana and healing time bringing the DPS back to full health. Now maybe the healer is strong enough to do that a few times or maybe the tank is strong enough to not need healing a few times while the healer heals the DPS. But ultimately the DPS standing in fire is wasting group resources: healer mana, healing cooldowns, healing global cooldowns, tanking cooldowns… These things are limited. Use them up and the group might have no way to deal with, say, a later damage burst which is a normal part of the fight and dies. In that case is the content something that can’t be completed or is the content fine and players simply shouldn’t have been standing in fire?
Exactly.
Do I think that some affix combinations and/or affix/dungeon combinations are harder than others? Significantly harder to the point that maybe things should be adjusted or harder to the point that some race/spec combinations get excluded by virtue of being slightly less than perfectly ideal? Maybe. But it has nothing to do with the Blizzard making content that can’t be completed.
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Fixed some of that.
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Shaman has the widest utility kit in the game for M+ without question. They may not have that home run spell like Shroud, but I’ll list all the things they have access to to put it into perspective. Elemental has even more utility than the other two specs, so I’ll mention that specifically.
Purge - used to be useless in Legion, one of the best utilities in the game in some dungeons.
Hard CC in Hex - Mandatory for Infested in many ways.
A ranged interrupt on a standard CD. So for Enhance, they have a ranged interrupt, for Ele they are the only ranged IN THE GAME with access to a short cd interrupt, and for Resto they are the ONLY HEALER who has an interrupt outright.
AOE stun - One of the few left in the game, and modified by talents. Hugely useful for many reasons in M+, especially thanks to infested and the re-commitment to trash being hard.
Rock Elemental - Invaluable. One of only two total utilities like this in the game - basically a get out of jail free card if a tank dies, may die, or you overpull in any way, especially on accident. Loses the competition with Bombkin though, as their is a 1m cd, but as a 5m cd it has WAY more health and can actually tank bosses for a significant period of time especially if it gets heals.
Ankh - Feels like a mandatory part of their defensive kit in many ways, but past that an extremely powerful wipe protection in a world with very few other options. Its either Soul Stone, or struggle to get a different brez off when you are doing intention death skips. Was almost going to be useless but that toy only lasted like 2 days so gg
Knockback. - Not as useful as it used to be, but still very nice for the new and improved Sanguine. Ele only obviously.
Earthquake knockdown - Ele only, and absolutely invaluable. You would never know how much this helps because no meter is going to track it, but it makes a HUGE difference in BFA M+ with as many dangerous mobs as there are now.
Earthbind totem - Not the best slow in the game, but still not bad in a pinch.
Tremor totem - returning for BFA, with very niche usage, but extremely strong in AD.
Water Walking - Extremely niche again, but something no other class has so if it ever becomes useful that’s your only choice.
Wind Rush Totem - One of two aoe speed increases in the game still, and the other one is on Feral Druid LUL. Tough talent row though.
Astral Recall - Very useful if you hearthed to get to the dungeon but didn’t realize you were in a group with Ythisens until its too late.
And of course Bloodlust - You can say drums are the same, but Bloodlust is better. And its obviously such a huge impact spell, the better it is the better the class slot is. Mage and BM hunter bring this though, and they are both perfectly capable in the meta atm.
Really, any three of these combined would be enough for me to think they are a top tier pick.
Ele’s knockback and EQ knockdown, alone are enough to make them a top pick for me but Resto being the only healer with an interrupt, alongside access to an AOE stun AND rock elemental is just nuts.
The problem is enhance. They have less valuable utility than the other two specs, and they are melee. You aren’t bringing 3 melee, and you aren’t winning the competition easily against the top melee atm.
But I look at Ele and Resto as absolutely insane value for any 5 man, with ele slowly working its way into tier 2 for me. I’d have them only behind bombkin in terms of ranged DPS.
Hope this illustrates Shaman’s position. If at any point some one says Shaman is not a good pick atm, they HAVE to be talking about their lack of survival and mobility, because their throughput is finally good if not above average, and they easily have the widest utility kit in the game by no small margin.
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I was pushing server firsts backs in Wrath in ICC and the only addon I used was recount. Granted I was a hunter, but I didn’t use DBM or anything else. Raiding without addons IS doable.
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That was a long time ago.
Fights have been made so much more complex and demand such perfection that now add ons are mandatory.
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Most fights today are not any worse than Putricide, Sindragosa, and LK on Heroic.
Perception doesn’t come from nowhere. All 3 specs underperformed significantly on an average player, and regardless of dps/heal numbers the utility of shamans is very diverse but far too weak in its implementation.
Why do we keep going from expansion to expansion, patch to patch, with such severely unbalanced utility packages from class to class, spec to spec? Why does ONE class in the game have shroud? Why do moonkins have 1 minute cooldown trees, what kind of crap is that?
Some utility is just so insanely broken that other classes would have to do a lot more damage to make it worth not bringing those classes from a pure utilitarian point of view.
Social issues matter in an MMORPG.
The point is not that shamans don’t have utility; they have it by the boatload. The point is the specific parts of utility that are actually really broken or strong are either mirrored by other classes who also have much stronger utility besides that or too niche to be useful.
Shamans are a lot stronger now than they were, but nothing has changed in terms of applicable utility, which means they still won’t be desirable for high-end content when the other good choices are available. As a result of this, it will trickle down into casual play, because it always does. Numbers tuning is great and necessary, but so is utility tuning, which hasn’t happened at all… functionally since legion. Mages got their snares neutered but they are still good-ish. Otherwise the changes are too minimal to be good enough.
Speaking specifically on shaman, I would like to see some or all of:
- Mana tide totem for dps shamans.
- Talent option to greatly reduce cooldown and duration of earth elemental, and unlinking of earth elemental and dps elemental.
- Baseline thunderstorm castable on friendly targets, and talentable for resto.
- I’m not sure that an offensive purge warrants losing a school of dispel.
Speaking more generally, I just cannot understand the utility spread in the game.
Why do rogues and DH, two of the best dps, also have one of a very small number of sap abilities (where mobs don’t aggro while cced allowing skips), while other melee dps like monk doesn’t, warrior functionally has no cc, dk functionally has no cc, feral druid has root… etc etc. It makes no sense. This behavior should really be universal.
Give other specs shroud - arcane mage and survival hunter make perfect sense.
Give other specs magic/physical damage debuffs - spriests for magic and warriors and feral/guardian druids for physical makes sense to me.
Why can’t frost death knights snare equivalently to frost mages?
This are only a few things on a very long list. On the face these things sound like homogenisation, and to a point they are, but this sort of homogenisation has very little effect on class or spec identity and greatly increases versatility of class selection.
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I mean Method’s Sco (Scott McMillan)'s highest m+ this season is +15 Tol Dagor, while his lowest is +5 Temple of Sethraliss. His average is +10 for the majority. And he plays BrM one of the easier tank classes for m+. Make of that what you will, but its not like one of the best raid tanks in the game cares much to be pushing high m+ dungeons beyond his average +10s and his occasional +15s. He’s also rockin a 360ilvl ring to boot so…
That’s not entirely true. If do enough homework on boss mechanics, m+ affixes, and aren’t experiencing tunnel vision/zoning out, all the information you need is on that screen. Not all of us can process the information the way it is displayed as intended by Blizzard, so addons assist us in assimilating information in a more player friendly interface of sorts. That’s why there’s different UIs, and players can customize them to their liking. It’s all about how best you assimilate information and what you need to assist your gameplay. None of it is absolutely necessary
You managed to sneak this by me and my guild made fun of me for it.
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I mean, most people in Method don’t care about pushing keys, they’re actually having most of their core players spamming islands for Azerite right now in prep for the next raid.
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Exactly! What’s the real point? What do you get beyond doing +10s besides to push yourself? Bragging rights? Does anyone really care?
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OP, there’s a lot of things you’re not going to be able to do in the game. The post you linked to is correct: it really is okay to run into content that you cannot complete. The idea is that the players rise to the challenge, not that Blizzard lower the standards; that’s an idea I think we can all agree on: getting better and hitting those plateaus is the point of the game. We go from one difficulty level to the next, and as the content seriously challenges us, we look for more possibilities within our class’s toolbox and how to best use the tools available to us.
The problem arises when the devs cannot balance the classes so that all of them have an equal chance of reaching a preset plateau. Now it’s the class devs who have run into a problem that they cannot complete.
To be clear, the problem isn’t the philosophy. The problem is the devs who are supposed to make sure that every class can get there…and don’t.
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What do you get beyond doing +10s besides to push yourself?
Pushing yourself is the reward, though.
Ahhh, to have that kind of time…
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Don’t even.
“I don’t have time for that” is the saddest excuse ever: either you make time to get it done because it’s a priority for you or just admit that it’s not worth your time and stop thinking about it. But you do not complain about the results you’re not getting because of the effort you’re not willing to put in.
Nowadays, I get like an hour or two a day to mess with the game, and you’d best believe I want that hour to be a good one.
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