Take a look at our Shaman tree and see how bad, uninspired, underwear streak it is.
Think of how disconnected, uninterested, unimpressive you would have to be as a person to think up something so bad.
But then go look at another tree, like Shadow Priest, and see that their capstone talents are different idols of old gods that each do a different thing in line with that old god. Isnt that pretty neat?
Even if something isnt revolutionary or fresh and never been done before, it can at least be thoughtful and cool, right?
Why dont we have something almost exactly like that for each element? How is there not branches that cap down for Air, Fire, Water, Earth? Why, instead of that, do we get Totemic Surge??? Edit: And Instinctive Imbuements, which is the most microbrain QOL “let you press one button instead of 3 and call it a talent” expletive Ive ever seen in my life. Its also CONNECTED to Reactive Warding while INVALIDATING Reactive Warding.
Why does it feel like the backwards thought process of these clowns is to, rather than fix the class or fix the tree, just force our meta to change around this dump thats on our plate?
Tidal Waves to effect Chain Heal?
Chain Heal not actually worth using that often?
Well youre in luck!!! Your crap talent tree has Chain Heal talents that people were not taking before! Now they have to! Look at this graph showing the use of these talents going up! We fixed it!
Okay just to be up front you invalidate your own post by comparing Shadow Priest spec tree to the Shaman Class tree. You can’t do that, every single spec tree is more thought out overall than the class tree and typically has cooler things. If you look at the Priest class tree, the capstones are insanely generic just like Shamans. “Fade reduces damage you take by 10%” “damage increases by 3%/healing increased by 3%”. It’s dishonest to randomly compare a class tree to a spec tree like that. For example, comparing Enh spec tree to Shadow Priest spec tree, I don’t feel any envy at all. I think enh has cool capstones and some pretty cool talents throughout the tree.
The devs don’t follow the same logic for spec trees that they do for class trees nor do they have to adhere to every single spec ie Druid class tree has 4 specs to think about (2 dps, 1 tank, 1 healer), etc.
You already know I agree with you about the class tree, it’s completely uninspired and uncreative imo. But you can’t make such a bad comparison. Compare class trees to class trees. And you can do that while still making your point, for example just compare our class tree to hunter or Druid or warlock or mage. They all have far more interesting capstones, nothing like totemic surge. I don’t even think NS should be a capstone, and I’m not a fan of QoL being a capstone either but it’s more acceptable than NS and especially Totemic Surge.
Our capstones could and should be element related and we absolutely should have paths in the class tree for the elements. Earth/nature path, fire/lava path, ice/frost path, lightning/air path. I feel like our class tree should be the easiest to design creatively but it feels so devoid of that. It’s bland and talents feel all over the place.
Imagine having Fire Whirl from plunderstorm as a capstone node, and maybe it’s on a choice node with “Cyclonic Elemental” where a cyclone elemental envelops you (like Dathea in Vault of the Incarnates). Both increase movement speed and grant immunity to roots/snares for x duration, but fire whirl damages enemies you whirl through and cyclone elemental pulls enemies towards you. Maybe they would act as upgrades to Spirit Walk/Gust of Wind. Just ideas I’ve had for a while and I wish someone very passionate about shaman would take a turn with the class tree.
I havent invalidated anything. The premise is fine and true whether we talk about the Shadow tree or just the Priest tree, or any class tree. Look at the Priest class tree. Its divided right down to middle as Shadow and Holy, talents pathed well, splits into four useful things that tie into the whole of the tree.
Fade is very good. Its a personal Grounding Totem on a shorter CD, removes all snares, leaves behind the image, and, if you take the capstone, also blanket damage reduction. That is good.
Where is our air branch, where we get choices between Grace Of Air Totem or Windfury Totem, and offshoot talents from there that capstone down into “Air totems have ward 3, must be hit 3 times to be destroyed” or “air totems now have 100 yard range”?
Nothing, actually. Just totems all over the tree that are choice nodes, are useless, capstone into “Some have reduced cd” is not the same.
Damage and healing % is what we have in the tree already with refreshing waters. You know what that should be, being attached to Healing Stream? “Water Totems are 130% more effective” or “Healing Stream Totem now heals for 50% more, adds additional Mana Stream Totem buff while active”.
Angelic Bulwark is very good and thats all we even need to say about it. Compare Angelic Bulwark to Instinctive Imbuements. Which would you rather have?
Even Phantom Reach is so much better than anything on our capstone row. It doesnt need to be “more thought out over all” it just needs to be, at a baseline, thought out to some degree. Continuity.
Devs to not follow logic
This is just making my point with extra steps. Youre hung up on the idea of the Shadow tree while my entire point is that you get clearly better things in all trees, but we should have more correct, more channeled paths for ours, like four elements and capstones for them, similar to the Shadow tree.
It isn’t really. You cannot compare a class tree to a spec tree when the premise of the post is “look at how good this tree is compared to this other tree”. Spec trees are very different from class trees, they have far more leeway with spec trees because they do not have to care about 3-4 specs, they only have to focus on one so naturally it gets cooler things. Enhance tree is way cooler than the shaman class tree for the same reason. You can say Fade is good, sure, but “damage reduced by 10% during Fade” is extremely boring. Their whole class tree though follows the themes of the priest class a lot better than ours follows the theme of the Shaman class however.
And again, the shadow priest class tree is done better than ours yes, but you compared Shadow Priests capstones to the capstones we have in our class tree which again is not a fair or good comparison. You would need to compare the Priest class tree capstones with Shaman class tree capstones for a fair comparison.
And yes, we do agree the shaman class tree is very disorganized, feels disjointed and lacks any sort of theme. Which is wild considering Shaman has one of the most clear themes out of any class in the game aside from maybe mage and dk. Its all about elements and totems, yet our tree has no distinct pathways for elements at all. No fire/lightning, no ice/wind, no earth/nature, nothing. Its just all over the place. It is one of the least interesting class trees in the game and for some reason we are forced to take things like Chain Heal (a spell 2 specs dont use) to get to Earth Shield (a spell all specs use) on top of the other issues.
Our entire class literally has 1 ice spell for example, class tree could improve that by having some passive talents improving Frost Shock (it has one) but maybe you can talent into Icefury (since it was removed from Ele) as an improved version of Frost Shock, as in it would just replace it, do a lot more damage and be on a longer cd. Thats the kind of stuff they could do.
honestly they removed a lot of what could make shaman game play fun. That they never touched.
The elemental buffs from utilziing earth shock had an option to do more overloads. if they had focused on stats around that htere was a cool weave gameplay that just simply didnt have the dmg output, but was super fun.
so they dumbed it down to just try to use a lava burst before any other nature spell to maximize the dmg of that other spell.
then they got rid of that.
right now were really just a basic caster, hit lava burst, earth shock, and if nothing else hit lightning bolt. For ele this isnt exciting. summoning pets isnt exciting anymore. THe big boy was fun. Lava burst spam wasn’t exactly fun but it looked cool.
now we neither look cool nor feel cool.
i disagree that we should be focused in on an element. it is more in line with the class fantasy to have the ability to utilize all elements. Once we start getting too niche we are just a mage.
While the idea is cool in theory, the Spriest example falls flat, and a main point of discontent among the community that there’s just no active capstone talent (heck, the whole tier 3 of the talent tree has ZERO active abilities). The idols are all passives, and only 2 of them have visual effects that actually stand out (summoning stuff around you).
I agree, however, that they could explore Shaman themes better with the sides of the talent trees.
Farseer spirits are essentially a reskin of Elemental Overload. Theyre a satisfying, unique avenue for something that already exists.
Priest leaned into dichotomy of Light and Shadow, and so you see that their tree is channeled as such, right down the middle, half Holy ending in Holy capstones, half Shadow ending in Shadow capstones.
Understand that the point is not that every talent is flashy - sometimes theyre just thematic or useful. Get your heads around that.
Enhancement is weapons and totems. Look at our spell book through expansions. That should put Totemic Surge, if its going to exist, in Chain Lightning’s place. Hex in Astral Shift’s place. Nature’s Guardian in either Cap Totem or Purge’s place. It should put all totem enhancements, Static Charge, Jet Stream, Ascending Air, maybe Elemental Resistance, into Totemic Focus - similar to how Warlocks have Teachings of the Black Harvest to improve all demons as opposed to multiple talents to improve individual ones.
There should be four capstones, and can go left to right as Earth, Water, Fire, Air. Possibly Stoneskin Totem, Cleansing Totem, Liquid Magma Totem, Grace of Air/Wrath of Air/Stormlash Totem.
Edit:
I would even take passive group-wide buffs of these totems. Even that would feel like we can bring a unique thing as a Shaman that is seen and felt. If the line has to be walked between things that look and feel good, and reduced buttons, then it has to be like that and can still be done better.
I do believe that if theyre going to prune they need to go back to what they did in Legion and lean into “class fantasy” per spec again. It got crushed and hated on when it was announced but it was maybe one of the few things Blizzard did right once everyone had the hindsight, and now youll find a sentiment of Legion being the best, or at least the favorite, of very many people. If buttons have to be reduced so the game can ultimately get worse to fit into console gaming then I dont see how or why they wouldnt go back to Legion style pruning.
Aren’t there technically 6 elements? Spirit and decay being the other two. Enhancement ending with lightning ascendence (air), wolves (spirit), and primordial (former spirit, now many) kind of follows that. And elemental was always either fire on one, air on the other (kind of still is). Restoration has/had water and spirit mixed up with earth.