I want evidence that Blizzard’s marketing dept is in charge of class design.
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They might be in charge of the fact that not enough resources/time is devoted to class design overall making it so that the team of people involved need to cut corners. Shaman being said corner.
Marketing doesnt disperse a budget. Or set time tables for development.
Yes, but they probably have the biggest influence on the people that do make those decisions.
So you’re suggesting that it’s good business practice to bungle user retention in a subscription-based business model by ignoring thousands of posts of feedback, not releasing even incomplete testing material until literally a week before announcing you’re done making major changes, and being fully radio silent in the face of broad community concerns about the state of an entire class?
You are critically underestimating the importance of novelty to any media experience. A huge part of why so many fantasy works fail is because they bring absolutely nothing new to the table, just rehashing the same tired tropes in slightly different arrangements.
Shaman are a hugely novel aspect of the Warcraft setting, right behind and intertwined with being the franchise that popularized monster races like orcs being more fleshed out and even potentially heroic figures. It is a massive mistake both creatively and business-wise not to capitalize on something that sets the game so far apart from your bog standard Tolkein-wannabe.
This is called innovation. One of the biggest factors in a successful business.
- WoW is and will always be a PvE-first game. More players care about PvE than PvP. Every time they try to encourage players who don’t otherwise PvP to PvP for a quest or event, they riot.
- Right now, it’s not entirely a numbers thing. It’s to do with the new Hero Talents. Sure, if they doubled Tempest’s damage, it’d probably be worth using instead of cancelauring, but that’d be bypassing the issues it has. It replaces Lightning Bolt, yet doesn’t work with Mastery, which contributes a huge percentage of damage that Tempest won’t gain. It doesn’t work with most Lightning Bolt affecting talents. Even the lightning Rod hero talent just doesn’t function unless you also have the base lightning rod talent outside of hero talents, last I heard. The Tempest cast is cancelled if you start the cast and then the buff ends before it finishes - when Shaman already have a system in place to prevent eating GCDs like that built into Ascendance. Maybe redundant given the talent issues mentioned earlier – but it doesn’t work with Stormkeeper, meaning you can use your 2 or whatever minute CD, get a tempest proc, and then have to rush and throw out a casted, unbuffed, non-mastery spell to be able to use your cooldown that only lasts for about 10 seconds. When you probably popped it in the first place to burst something, but now you’re forced into a weaker ability, delaying the actual burst.
And that’s just Tempest.
(It also didn’t scale with haste before an undocumented change)
A lot of Shamans want to see some level of rework on their base talents too, but at least they FUNCTION. Hero Talents aren’t really in a functioning state yet.
In PvE though shaman hasn’t really shone at any point in an expansion that had many aspects of ‘elements’. It would have been a good time for them to do a bit of a rework on the class.
It’s been middle of pack at best for most of PvE content the entire expac. It’s not so much the dps/hps output of the class as it is the way the specs play and lack of talents/externals that most other classes seem to get.
I mentioned PVP because I have no concept of what they’re like in PVE. I imagine that they’re just fine for pretty much every facet of the game except maybe the top end, I don’t know. I’m sure you can clear all reasonable levels of content as a shaman and it’s fine. Maybe Enhance just feels not fun to play for most people because it has a lot of button bloat, but ele seems fine.
I don’t see the value in getting mad over the hero talents right now because it is beta. People were complaining about hunters not long ago and now they’re singing glowing praises about the rework they got.
Such as? I have no experience with shamans in PVE really. They seem to have okay utility to me.
How shaman were during DF is irrelevant to any shaman complaints atm.
You do realize that prepatch and TWW release is measured in weeks, not months now right?
And shaman hero talents arent even functional and we dont even know the intent of many?
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“Don’t complain it’s only Alpha, it’ll get fixed”
“Don’t complain it’s only Beta, it won’t go live”
“Be quiet and wait until next time, it’ll too close to release”
This process happens every single expansion. Maybe not for Shaman every time, but for feedback in general.
The expansion releases in LESS THAN 2 MONTHS.
Shaman have been leaving feedback since the moment they could test their Hero Talents and have gotten nothing from Blizzard on it.
Hunters were told in advance that their Rework was coming in a future Beta Build, and then they got the promised Rework.
It’s been total silence for Shaman, as far as anyone knows, nothing is coming.
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Well I’ve already established that I believe shaman players tend to be histrionic and even when their class is fine, they act like it’s a critical meltdown. So it is difficult to parse what is an actual issue with shamans.
I didn’t say not give feedback. I said getting mad over hero talents not functioning seems, idk, not intended and will probably not make it to live.
Just because you make a statement based on you not understanding the issue, doesnt mean anything is “established”. Other than you not understanding the issue.
The class is not fine on Beta.
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It really is staggering that across three expansions now centered on: the earth itself bleeding to death; completely upending our understanding of the relation between life, death, and spirits; and ancient elemental dragons trying to remake the world; the most plot relevance shaman have had is Smolderon taunting us for making him Firelord back in friggin’ Legion while we’re running across the bridge to his boss room.
Elemental has been consistently the worst spec all of DF in terms of tuning, group representation, and mechanical gameplay, having been reduced to almost literally a one-button spam spec for the last two seasons – a gameplay loop that one of their hero trees is set to continue.
Cool. -_-
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Its weird to think that a class that has gotten a thousand times the love of dps monks can still complain
And MW monks have received 1000 times the love of the entire shaman class.
Go complain about WW monks. One class needing help doesn’t disqualify the plight of another.
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Shaman doesn’t bring any buff to raid or a key group. Outside of Astral Shift, we have no defensive.
Resto: no externals to put on another player for DR when most other healers have atleast 1.
Ele: brings absolutely nothing to a group. Other casters all have some kind of buff or something they offer the team and do better damage.
Enhance: maybe would be the only one someone could argue for soley because of WF totem. But even enhance lacks in the self sustain department compared to most other melee.
People voicing for shaman updates aren’t doing it because the class is pulling poor dps/hps numbers (though they’re not anything to write home about), the class just doesn’t offer as many benefits compared to most others. It can feel clunky to play compared to other classes and the community has been wanting the same changes done for multiple expansions now with no dev response.
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Monk has been a staple both in PVE and PVP for multiple expansions, they have a raid buff, tons of defensives and mobility and they’re getting a re-design along with all other classes, doesn’t seem that unloved to me, and all that despite being one of the least popular classes since they got released.
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Blizzard is ok with it , shaman players probably not , but hey someone has to warm the bench 
Shaman are either that meme of Escobar waiting, standing by the pool.
Or they’re the meme of the parent holding the baby girl, while the boy struggles.
And ofc Shaman are the skeleton in the pool chair at the bottom, lol.