why did we lose both of both damage reduction totems….what was the design decision? Is this supposed to make the game more fun for new players? bECAUZE LESS BUTONS? You mean get rid of buttons that keep you alive but not get rid of the 7 pointless RP flavor buttons they have right? Feels bad to play I am just falling over…
This is my first prepatch to an expansion btw so are all these dogsht class changes final?
I use to play a lot back in the day, I’ve not been around for much high end cotent in a long time due to life in general, but I’ve been around for a number of prepatches.
Balance usually goes out the window. Sometimes it’s because some classes get a move that’s overturned for later content, sometimes it’s because you don’t yet have a move you need yet.
The most hilarious and offending example I can remember was the wotlk prepatch giving paladins divine storm, which at the time was unresistable holy damage aoe on command and a short cool down of 6sec iirc that hit at full force even if they used a bubble to go completely damage immune. A ret player in AH blues and greens could tear through someone in late tier pvp gear for a little while. Elemental struggled some with lava burst being a fairly late in leveling but the xpac wasn’t bad for it since thunderstorms introduction made the spec fun.
So it’s possible things are out of tune (so many potions and foods healing for 0 being a sign of this mess) and can be fixed. Ngl I’m a little worried given the classes I tank on still feel amazing and powerful, my fire mage is less interesting now but still disintegrates mobs sadly faster than my more geared shaman, warlock feels similar, warrior I hardly noticed a difference, frost mage still shreds mob packs, but elemental feels squishy.
I will say healing in general feels awful, like trying to put out a house fire with a sprinkler. Resto is eh but manageable, holy priest still works but it’s damage is gone, like go wand something days again, and any hybrid dependent on tossing an off heal or self heal just does nothing but waste a GCD. Evoker healing looked like a struggle to me before, now it looks like a furious button mash to pray for procs and do even worse.
That is to say enough specs are bad or at least feel bad that I think we’ll hopefully see some good patches or the game may have few healers left as an entire role in the game seem pretty rough at the moment. I can’t image the game going back to the to the choices being warrior, rogue, mage, priest, or reroll these days like it once was.
For the first time I may reconsider my choice of tank, range, and healer I level this go around but take it with a grain of salt I’m fairly casual these days and by no means an expert anymore, just a fossil that remembers some old times.
I hate astral shift, we need more earth spells for defensives. I prefer the aesthetic of Stone Buwark Totem over Astral Shift.
they could give us one Stone Bulwark Totem, with shields and astral shift damage reduction, and burrow as a default talent over pvp talent.
They’re final for now yeah, but they’ve done a lot of class changes during the small patches in the last two expansions so I assume they will do that here too. Which means instead of having to wait until 12.1 for changes, we may only have to wait until 12.0.5 which I think is like 2 months after launch or something.
And yeah, Shamans got dunked on by the pruning. We lost AG in TWW s3, and then in Midnight we lost Stone Bulwark totem and 5% DR from Primordial Bond. Ele/enh shamans have been screaming about this the entire beta cycle, its literally one of the first things brought up on the very first page of the Feedback: Shaman thread in the Midnight Beta feedback section. We also lost a lot of utility via Totemic Recall going away and didn’t gain anything passively in return.
Theres plenty they could do. They could add a talent to the class tree like “Improved Earth Shield: Earth Shield grants the Shaman x% damage reduction and the healing bonus is increased by x%” and then they could’ve just made Astral Shift a 1.5m CD baseline so we could talent into making it 1 minute or choose to make it a stronger 1.5m CD (whereas now we have to talent into making it a 1.5m CD or a stronger 2 min wall).
meanwhile MW just afk clicking insta cast huge heal buttons now like a joke. wut a joke
Probably close to final for Midnight release. But as a live service game, nothing is ever final.
I know a little late to the post but I have a thought. It very well could be the lead in for a shaman tank spec finally.