Feedback: Shamans

In Development Midnight Beta Test
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Feedback: Enhancement

Removal of Thunderstorm - negative, minor defensive ability, should be baked into Nature’s Guardian.

Removal of Stone Bulwark Totem -negative. Was implemented for TWW, not a really strong cooldown anyways - but atleast something, should be baked into Earth Elemental passive

Thorims Invocation - positive it now also affects Doomwinds - why not make it one button less and transform Stormstrike into Lightning Bolt when at 10 Stacks always instead of a talent during a cooldown- provides simpler rotation and also direct visuals as it replaces Stormstrike

Raging Maelstrom - positive - current UI does not a good job in highlighting Healing Surge

Ride The Lightning - very positive Talent implementation!

Deeply Rooted Elements - will continue to be a not desired Talent as Ascendance on use provides burst on demand - change DRE to trigger 100% of X-Cast of Tempest / Or Sundering (Ascendance for Stormbringer / Hot Hands for Totemic)

Apex Talent Row 3 should also increase the range of Crash Lightning to 30/40yards.

Lightning Lasso - back to a pvp talent- negative change, enhancement shaman lacks CC

Guardians Cudgel -removal - negative change, enhancement shaman need a reliable stun, make this talent either stun on use or stun after 0.5 seconds. It still can be dispelled.

Maelstrom Weapon needs a own UI - with the removal of Weakauras enhancement is one of the speccs that will feel really bad in terms of UI design. Pair this with the permanent implementation of Thorims Invocation to make enhancement more up to date with other speccs.

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Apex talents for resto shaman:

With only a 10% chance of proc, it currently feels very wasteful to put the extra 3 talent points into the follow-up apex talents.

2 Likes
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How are we lacking on CC?

Arctic Snowstorm, Capacitor Totem, Earthgrab Totem, Windshear.

2 Likes
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First and foremost, stripping abilities from a spec or class does not make it better. Just because certain people are unable to grasp the concept of how to manage cds and play Shaman, should not be a reason on why pruning is taking place.

Shaman is a totemic warrior, from what I see, Totems nowadays are mainly Utility, the Only offensive totem we have left that is under our control is Surging Totem, and thats requires Totemic spec. The fact that Sirging Totem got its cd doubled is beyond me, saying that wasnt fitting to ghe rotation properly, now it feels super slow and doesnt do anything apart from buffing abilities, dmg from totem is almost nothing, also the fact Surging totem is ona higher cd strip us from having more frequent Hot Hand, yes you can extend it by 2 sec for 10 MW spend. Additionally, why Feral Spirits are Passive ability now? Like excuse me? This is a root cooldown ability to Enhancement, why this is being butchered down to being a passive. At least give this ability a nid choice to people who like to press buttons and pop cd whenever they please, instead of having them baked into other abilities.

Going back to totems; is Healing Stream Totem for enhancement suppose to be a joke? 3.8k heal per tick on 400k health pool? I think the fact that this is already static heal is enough punishment. Next; why Tremor is sharing nod with Poison cleansing totem? Why I cannot have both? And this is in Shaman talent tree not PvP, so ots not like you should be too restricted in PvE… The only good thing was ability to lower cd on Capacitor totem, still not enough, but better than it was.

Lava Lash being in Shaman tree is beyond me…

So Shaman doesnt feel like we are using many totems from Midnight foreward, I literally am speced to 3 + surging totem (fire totems that spawns randomly doesnt count, as this is beyond my control of actually putting them down).

Mastery; why this has to be changed? Why this applies only to Stormstrike now? Makes no sense…

So Bulwark totem is gone, so does the Totemic Recall, Primodial Wave, Ice Strike, Elemental Blast, Thunderstrike (this I dont mind as it was always Elemental Ability) and most importantly active Feral Spirits and Hailstorm.

Also, the fact that now we do not really have to spend MW on Healing Surge right away is a great addition, However, seems like MW is mow a bit redundant, as can be used only for 2 abilities (3 if you go for Sundering and its other 2 nods); Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning. Why there are no more spending abilities like other classes have, this was always strange to me that Shaman have a build up mechanism, but only 1 ability to be used to spend it on single target and 1 for multi target, feels weak and boring, Elemental Blast was at least something different to use and has its perks as well.

I like the fact that spending MW it lowers cd of Stormstrike and Lava Lash, that we can extend the Hot Hand buff (but 3 secs per 10 stacks would be a bit better), Crash Lightning is cool being part of rotation, but the fact that Apex abilities evolve around it is a bit odd. But rotation feels empty, if you dont get hot hand proc’ed then it is stagnant and slow, unless you play fully haste, then maybe that helps. But even with 2 charges on stormstrike lava lash and Crash Lightning, would be all we rotate with, Surging totem being on 1 min cd it certainly slow it down, Frost Shock without Hailstorm makes it weak, and for some reason building MW just feels very slow now.

And for the love of God, please make MW being tracked in a better way, I was able to do it in WeakAuras, basically changing colour of the indicators to different colour, making it easier to track and see exact amount of MW beyond 5 and before reaching 10…

Please, do not butcher the class and specs just because you guys “feel” its the right way, listen to player base. It felt like it was being done in DF and TWW in some way, and these changes are just shambles.

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Blizzard:

  • Situations where lots of ability-modifying procs can be active at once, causing an array of buttons on your action bar to be highlighted, giving a sense that all of them are urgent.
  • Specs that sometimes get flooded with so many resources that managing them becomes overwhelming or unimportant.
  • Gameplay with high actions per minute—this can be physically demanding and uncomfortable.
1 Like
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Shamans were always much more demanding than other classes, but once you master it, feels extremely rewarding.

I understand that there is too many flashy things going on the screen, there are certainly other melee classes that could be up other people’s alley, like WW Monk, that it is also fast pased combat, or Watrior.

And what kind of Many reaources Shaman has to deal with? maelstrom Weapon, that is being spend on 2 damaging and 2 healing spells? Might as well get rid off Forceful Winds, because it is super random and makes Enhancement even more random at times, just buff overall damage of Windfury and be done with it.

Problem with Enhancement is not button bloat or difficulty on how to play it, since Hero Class being introduced for easier playstyle people choose Stormbtinger, for more complexity; Totemic. Enhancement suffers with too many rng than any other specs: windfury, forceful winds, hot hand, flametounge, deeply rooted elements, its mastery and now added voltaic blaze having a chance to trigger Fire Nova? On top of that you have searing totem in totemic that is out of your control, like most of things, so what we fo, just press things and other stuff happens randomly, its like hoping for spells to crit…

And Totemic Hero Class has nothing to do with totems per say, apart from the fact that you get Surging totem that got nerfed to the ground, and searing/lava totem that spawns randomly. And then talent to make your totems bigger and have higher range, for what? For useless Healing Stream Totem or Earthbind Totem? Yes you get other bonuses in this spec, like sundering on hot hand etc. But thats about it.

Thing that I havent touched on previous post is that why is Purge so low in the Shaman tree and most importantly, why access to it is so hard? Again, spell that has been with Shamans for a long time, we have to spend enormous amount of skill points to get it…

Stormbringer also brings randomness to the spec with Tempest. Yes every x amount of MW spend you get it guaranteed, but this also being random, makes damage inconsistent and random.

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I’m probably in the minority, but as a player who does pretty much only open world (no raids, mythic+, or any sort of group activity) I dislike what you did with Maelstrom Weapon (MW) charges not being able to apply to Healing Surge. Instead now I have to track Raging Maelstrom (RM) in order to be able to heal. I’m guessing it’s a bug, but the charges to RM reset every time I use an ability that generates Maelstrom charges.

So instead of being able to use 10 stacks for a massive heal, I have to use them as soon as I’m getting them in order to avoid wasting it. If you indeed choose to go live with these talents, then you need to make it so the stacks don’t reset everytime we use MW charges. Let us pool this buff up to 10 for a big self heal when needed instead of feeling like we have to use it instantly or else we waste it.

Also, on live, I used to just look at the overhead visual effect of the charges and know that I can use MW for an instant damaging spell or a heal. But now, there’s a second buff to track only for healing and it’s quite frankly more overhead than needed. I much prefer the version on live where MW charges can either go to an instant LB or a heal.

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I don’t like Enhancement after the Legion rework, since it shows the spammy direction it took after WoD, and the spec already had a lot of issues from WotLK through WoD. Apparently, I agree with you that we are Totemic/Elemental Warriors, and we should have some kind of offensive Totemic ability available across all Shamans (such as Liquid Magma Totem).

The issue with Enhancement Shaman right now, and even in TWW, is the fact that you literally spam Stormstrike over and over again while Lava Lash falls behind, depending too much on RNG. As I said in my opening post, Enhancement Shaman falls back into the same category as it was in TWW: you sit on two Stormstrike charges while Lava Lash is almost never used, and RNG is still far too high (Stormsurge, etc.). The toolkit feels weak if you need reset mechanics just to be playable.

I want to see a better Maelstrom Weapon generator, where our abilities hit hard without being spammy, with longer cooldowns and no reset mechanics. If our abilities generated 2–3 MW stacks on each press, the spec wouldn’t need to feel so hectic. It would slow things down a bit and allow you to calculate when you’ll reach 10 MW.

For my taste, RNG should be removed (besides WF-Proc), and MW should be set as a consistent generator. This way, it would be less RNG-dependent, and you could actually plan and calculate your MW stacks.

Also, the hard-hitting Stormbringer fantasy doesn’t exist for my taste. Why can’t Stormstrike, after a Tempest proc, trigger Windfury and bypass armor? That would at least give us the true feeling of being a STORMBRINGER!

1 Like
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I agree that spamming Stormstrike is not fun anymore and it feels spammy.

However, as Totemic Lava Lash is one of your primary damage, once Hot Hand triggers, and with Surging Totem this was cool, having guarantee hot hand every 25 seconds, this at least you had a control. This is why changing cd to 1 min makes it bad.

The RNG of Enhancement is far too much, and pruning abilities is not a solution, Windfury is random already and we have zero influence here, and this is why Hard hitting abilitites wont exist much for Enhancement, since auto-attacking and windfury plays a lot of here.

Back in Cataclysm, Searing Totem used to be primary source of damage for Lava Lash, yes it was taking time, but at least once you stack them 5 fireballs on target, it was hitting hard.

10 stacks of Maelstrom Weapon is something that grew on me, but I was against it from the time it was introduced, since there is absolutely no need to stack it 10 times, just slows down the spec, it used to be 5 stacks and it was absolutely fine, I think that what it should go back to, and add more spenders for crying out loud! The spender we get after using Primodial Wave (in Midnight this gets replaced by Sundering, for some stupid reason) is cool, hits hard and its an AoE. There should be more melee spenders rather than ranged, LB and CL can stay, but 2 more spenders for situational purpose would be nice. Fire Nova could be a spender after all, sound stupid but at least we could control it, rather than having 30% chance for this to be activated After using other ability, its like ; lets decrease amount of abilities and bake them to other abilities and add some RNG to them aswel so it wont be too OP…

Today I have found out that Demon’s Bite has been oermamently removed for Demon Hunter, making tha lt spec even worse to play. Irrelevant to Shamans, BUT this is a great example of devs removing choice more and more with each expansion. RPG is about players to build characters the way they want to, not playing them the way Devs intend to… imagine you buying a custom made table, wait for it 2 weeks and it comes different to what you ordered, beacsue shop owners thought This one will look better in Your living room. Stuff like this been happening over and over again, do we really have to go until first Major patch for half of the specs and classes to be Redesigned because it was a bad choice from the beginning of the expansion to prune certain abilities? And then devs are like: we listened to the player base… NO, YOU DID NOT!

More totems for Totemic certainly, and I think Call of the totems should make an appearance, dropping multiple totems at the same time as we used to.

The only way to enjoy the game at this stage would be rerolling to something remotely fun and engaging, as removing stuff from the game because 5% of players do not know how to play their class After addons being removed is not a solution here. Not to mention, you guys literally implemented one button rotation to the game, so do not understand why Flashy and Popping stuff is an issue for new players? And another thing, while leveling the character we learn how to play the spec, as we get abilitites gradually…

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Forgot to add this:

Clearly this game is making way to the consoles, that would explain 4 button rotations OR, more disturbing, to the mobile phones.

Would like to say that FF14 is playable on PS4 and PS5 and had plenty of buttons to press, and not gonna lie, it is balanced and quite satisfactory to press them in order to finish up the rotation.

Why Blizzard is aiming towards New player base that always has to complain about complexity of the game, if its too hard then play simpler games like Mario or Candy Crash…

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Well I used to be Mythic Progress Raider… I want the game to be easier since it is not fun and enjoyable anymore after I have played TBCC.

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Look i get it, difficulty could always be adjusted, on any point of the game, even mid season. But class complexity will be playing part of being difficult IF the Raiding or whatever other high end content you play is scaled too high.

You can have 10 active abilitites and still enjoy the games content even on higher level, one does noe exclude the other. But this is why they introduced one button rotation, for people who dont get the rotation of the spec, to be played by anyone and eventually learned by whoever is using it at some point,

Besides, the variety of content in Wow is vast, you have a lot of solo content, that even includes rabked PvP, delves 1 to 3 players, mythic+ 5 player content and raiding that is up to 25 players, so there is something for everyone, not to mention, that all of that can get you tier set pieces, without playing Raiding. On top of that, difficulty should be also for everyone, hence M+ has it the most specific, as each key gets small difficulty level. So how didficult is Mythic raiding has nothing to do with abilities we are getting removed, if anything this will kill the fun, as we are going to press 4 same buttons for an entirety of expansion, regardless of content you play, if you ask me, its redundant and bad class design.

Could understand if instead of sone abilities they make room for new ones, then that is fine, as class fantasy becomes less relevant at this point.

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I want to see the fight and enjoy the fight and not fighting my addons. Thats a big difference. TBCC showed me how simple class-mechanics can be while you can enjoy the fight.

1 Like
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I’ve been trying to stick with my Shaman, but after spending more time in beta testing dungeons , I really need to vent about how slow and clunky the spec feels without Tidal Waves and Tidebringer.

Without these two mechanics, the entire healing rotation just loses its flow. Casting feels sluggish, every heal feels like it takes an eternity, and the spec goes from “responsive and rhythmic” to “wading through molasses.” These passives used to smooth out the gameplay so much—reducing cast times, speeding up our ability to react, and giving the spec that signature snappy feeling.

Now? Everything feels like it hits the brakes the second combat starts.

And don’t even get me started on Chain Heal. The throughput is painfully low right now. It’s supposed to be our iconic group heal, but it barely moves health bars. When a spell has a long cast time and doesn’t heal for much, it just feels bad. It doesn’t feel rewarding, it doesn’t feel impactful, and it definitely doesn’t feel competitive.

I’m honestly hoping the devs take a serious look at this. Without Tidal Waves and Tidebringer, the spec loses a lot of what makes it enjoyable, and the current healing numbers on Chain Heal just don’t justify how slow everything feels.

Anyone else feeling this, or is it just me?

2 Likes
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But this is not TBCC, and TBC in general was a different way of playing end game, it was really limited to what you can do, and class design was simple. You really cannot compare TBCC to nearly 20 years later in developement…

And on top of that, what was back then, is better to stay there, it is called nostalgia, and no matter how you try to recreate it, it will never be the same. Just my opinion.

What we need is massive changes to the talent tree and what exactly should be defining the spec and hero class.

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Why are you so triggered? This is such childish behaviour.

Most of the player base are literally casuals, and if I say that the specs are overloaded with nonsense, I don’t even want to imagine how others feel.

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To be honest, while I was writting this post I was rarher smiling, not triggered, just stating what is my opinion.

I would only assume that since you played TBCC and were amazed with simplicity, you must have started playing game around either Mists of Pandaria or later. Here is the thing; there are many iconinc or rather Core abilities to specs in WoW, like Spirit Wolf for example. This has veen in the game forever, with different effects along the way, now if you take that and bake it to some lame passive, people who play this spec for over 14 years, will be disspointed and will vent about it.

Another thing is that what kind of overloaded nonsense are we talking about? Because personally for me, the overloaded crap in Enhancement is RNG that has the most of all spec in the game, we do not need more of that, dont want to plat a lottery spec. Lava Lash has been in the game since Wotlk, and has been permanent part of Enhancement almost every build, imagine this being removed or baked into some other ability as passive…

What I am saying is, that not many players would like to stay and watch their characters swinging auto attacks in order to kill mobs. And those who do, they go and play classic, simple as that mate :wink:

If you like TBCC, then why would like to implement all that stuff into retail, where you have a game that suits you.

But I did not come here to get into personal fight about what it is like on Classic, I came here to make sure that Devs are listening to what veteran players have to say about specs and classes as well, and not implement something because of their opinion is this and that, and then mid expansion they either reverse it or add more things Just for the sake of adding it, only to be change or removed next expansion. This is a bad class design, instead of building on what we have, specs are being redesigned every expansion, Hunter and Priest had like 5 redesignes since Dragonflight… why disturbing people playstyles and change things around, rather building on it? You dont get to see it in other MMOs, either they add more passive or active abilities each expansion, and eventually when it is getting out of hand, they tweek certain abilities and try not to change rotation too much, as people been playing it for YEARS, not months or weeks… The fact that some of the other specs have to choose between one or the other active ability, instead of having both, why? Nobody is forcing you to have as many buttons to press, and the problem now is, that because talent trees has been reshaped, there is no way that you could play without Lava Lash, while on TWW you can, there is a way of avoiding it, and go for Ice Strike, THAT is my problem here, Devs are stripping people of building their characters the way they want to, then what is the point of talent tree in the first place where there is a small room of choice? This feels like coming to your friends house to play and he tells you that you cannot be Iron man, but if you do, you are not allowed to beat other guys. Basically, we are being told how to have fun, and it is not what RPG and Gaming in general is about.

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Totemic Enhance is so boring now, no thought goes into your totem placement with the 1min cd and not being able to refresh using totemic recall so you can proc all 3 motes twice for the free primordial storm makes it even more bland. we lack defensives as well. Sigh

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Primodial storm is now on live as tier bonus (unless im missing something), and Totemic is far more engaging that Stormbringer’s Stormstrike and LB spam, at least it has some rotation (at least on live servers now).

I was excited when they introdcued Stormbringer until I saw it live and quickly realised how Boring that Hero spec is, literally no need to play Lava Lash nor Hot Hand, therefore Ice Strike was the choice, spamming Stormstrike with LB/Randomised Tempest and later people were going for Primodial Wave, so thats why it was redesigned.

Defensives we have, right now, on Beta a lot of things been removed, dunno how this plays in PvP as had no chance to test it, but rotation feels weak and slow, and on top of that Lightning Bolt that you build 10 MW to unleash hard hitting ability, and it literally hits like a wet noodle, and Chain Lightning is even worse than that…

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Farseer Restoration Shaman: Ancestors do not cast a spell when you cast Stormstream Totem (should presumably be Chain Heal, as it is with Healing Stream Totem).