Fix Shamans Survivability

The number one issues shamans have had for years is our complete lack of defensives. We get focused down hard in pvp and now with the band aid and borrowed powers being removed we need this addressed ASAP.

The Azerite Pack Spirit play was the one way to stay competitive in pvp without a personal healer, I actually enjoyed the playstyle of turtling up in Ghost Wolf form. We can’t do anything else in Ghost Wolf other then kite and it’s not like we’re a druid and have all sorts of advantages through shapeshifting and a whole range of abilities to play with.

Perhaps you can expand on the Ghost Wolf turtling style in Shadowlands? Blizzard you we’re definitely on to something with this.

There are other ideas that are thrown around a lot, like bringing back Shamanistic Rage. I don’t see why this can’t be a PVP talent in place of things like Ethereal Form which frankly is more of a liability.

There’s also class design flaws, Enhancement has to choose between spending MSW procs on healing or damage, the spec is fighting itself especially when you look at other self healing melee specs.

The healing outside of MSW is attrocious even with Swelling Waves. Then there’s the matter of going OOM after four casts, it’s probably more efficent to just try and LoS and stay in Ghost Wolf for the Spectral Recovery heal and that’s if you can actually go LoS!

Our mobility has been dwarfed by old classes and new, Monks and Demon Hunters run rings around us. Mobility is a huge issue for trying to survive and Ghost Wolf’s ability to kite has be diminished over the years of boosts to other classes. Even with Spirit Wolf talent you’ll find yourself hard pressed to get away from classes that can train on you hard.

What I’d like to see is improvemenets to our healing, make it so we can properly heal ourselves. You gave us a hybrid tax when pure classes like Fury Warrior can out heal a Enhancement Shaman if both go toe-to-toe, it’s ridiculous.

Give us the means to shift in to a defensive playstyle, buffing Ghost Wolf and improving the style of play you created in BFA so we don’t get deleted. Allow us to Astral Shift whilst stunned and perhaps giving us a few passive abilities that react when we’re crowd controlled as ability bloat is a thing again.

Increase our mobility through new abilities or improving on the old. Shamans are glass cannons that can’t do much to stop the damage and can neither run away from it. Frankly we feel like a classic car, back in the day we we’re agile and quick, but now even the more common cars have passed us by.

When Shadowlands comes out I don’t want to be applying bandaid fixes to the class that has core baseline problems. I’m looking at conduits, I want to mess with with all of the new interesting ones and not constantly looking for ways to make me tougher because you haven’t addressed this number one issue.

If you feel that shamans need more protection in PVP, please reply and show your support. You may not like my ideas on Ghost Wolf turtling, but the main issue here is trying to get Blizzard to improve our survivability. Share your thoughts below and I’m eager to see what ideas you all have also.

#FixShamans

13 Likes

Completely agree that shamans need more survivability, mobility, defensives and healing capabilities. It’s ridiculous to depict the shaman as hybrid class when every other pure dps class outheals dps shamans.

3 Likes

I’ll be honest, I hate the ghost wolf turtling strategy, but I do agree that Shaman survivability is garbage and something needs to be done about it. I feel like they could benefit from a HoT or something, so they can continue fighting while staying alive, instead of jumping into ghost wolf and running around like an idiot.
Also maybe a passive that reduces the CD of Astral Shift by %x secs when you take spike damage.

2 Likes

Few ideas I had when I went for my morning run,

Lightning Shield

Lightning Shield should be remade in to a AoE cooldown.

Aesthetically similar to Warcraft 3 and Heroes of the Storm whilst giving us some much needed survivability, it’s a shield after all?

Mechanics:


Lightning Shield
No Mana
40 Yard Range
Instant Cast
30 second cooldown

Imbue the target with lightning, causing [DMG] to nearby enemies within [15-20?] yards for 10 seconds. Creates a static absorbing shield on the target for 20% of their max health, [DMG] done will increase the static absorbing shield amount by [small %, but noticeable amount]


Visually:

Three giant balls of lightning sweep around the target, much-much larger then the current version of Lightning Shield.

Conclusion:

It’ll be a impressive way of fighting many packs in the open world PvE, the initial absorb shield would give us some breathing room and the more damage the shield does, the longer it’ll last on the target.

It’s a target based spell so you could place it on yourself or a friendly player, giving them a shield whilst increasing your own damage. It would also be a nice way of getting more damage in as a resto shaman.

In PvP it’ll be useful for the same reasons, it’s a nice absorb shield for those that are training you. You’d have to be careful when to use it as it’ll break light CC abilities like Blind. It could also be used to sweep out stealth classes if you know they are close.

This could also be modified to increase MSW or Fulmination stacks.


Far Sight

Far Sight should be remade in to a utility spell whilst maintaining it’s original form.

Similar to Warcraft 3, it should discover invisible and stealth targets.

Mechanics:


Far Sight
No Mana
Unlimited Range
2.0 second cast [Modifed by Haste]

Changes the viewpoint to the targeted location for 1 min. Discovers enemies that are stealthed and invisible in the targeted location allowing the shaman to see them for the next 10 seconds.


Visually:

Visually it should remain the same, those discovered won’t know they’ve been discovered by the shaman, there will be no debuff or graphical effect for them.

For the shaman however, the next 10 seconds the players discovered will appear as if they weren’t stealthed or invisible. They will also have a orange glow surrounding them for the shaman that lasts the 10 seconds.

Conclusion:

One of the worst match up’s shamans can face in PVP is against rogues, giving us more utility to combat this whilst not adding to the ability bloat is ideal. If you can catch the stealth and invisible players out before they have their chance to open with abilities such as Sap and Cheap Shot will make surviving easier.

Casting Far Sight on top of the shaman would indeed catch out the stealth and invisible classes if they were near the shaman, but by then it’ll be very tricky to knock them out of their stealth invisible state as they would be too close.

It’s just another little tool to add that could aid us and fits the shaman flavor.


Shamanistic Resilience

This will be a passive for enhancement shamans that will greatly increase their survivability.

For too long in PVP enhancement shamans have had to sacrifice damage for healing, this needs to be fixed as the spec is fighting itself.

Mechanics:


Shamanistic Resilience
Passive

For each stack of Maelstrom Weapon used, the shaman will be healed for [2%?] of their max health. Whilst in Ghost Wolf, generate 1 Maelstrom Weapon every second.


Visually:

Perhaps a nice effect on the shaman once you’ve used your MSW showing that you’ve been healed.

Conclusion:

Based loosly off Thrall in Heroes of the Storm and using our Ghost Wolf turtling techniques in BFA.

Allowing the Shaman to heal whilst dealing damage is essential, most melee classes can do this now. In fact, classes like Demon Hunters and Fury Warriors can out heal a shaman, who has the hybrid tax of being able to heal. This is just feels very wrong to me personally.

Giving Ghost Wolf the ability to generate MSW allows us to kite and respond with a powerful Healing Surge+Shamanistic Resilience heal or sets up a Lightning Bolt play from range, that will still proc the Shamanistic Resilience heal.

This could also be modified so Elemental Shamans could stack Fulmination in Ghost Wolf and make Fulmination proc the Shamanistic Resilience heal.

I would absolutely love this sort of gameplay.


So there’s some ideas I had this morning, of course allowing us to Astral Shift whilst stunned and perhaps giving us back Shamanistic Rage would be nice too.

3 Likes

100% agree with your post too.

I really don’t understand why Ret Paladins as an example have access to Instant FoL outside of their dps rotation (granted it’s a talent but it would be nice for Shamans to have a similar thing)

1 Like

all would be easy to fix, but I guess they don’t want to change it. Very clear at this point. It doesn’t take a lot of work to change astral shift to shamy rage and give healing surge a 10s cd without eating msw or something like that.

Id say increase the value om armor on shaman and give shaman something like “protection from the elements” which we “master” so like 10% reduce damage from spell damage. Make astral useable while stunned.

In my opinion sadest thing is when you compare Havoc Demon hunter to Enha Shaman it is like complete oposite Havoc have great heals, great mobility, great cc, great cds… Enha shaman have none of that… Hack you even need to talent to have some kind of good CD… And its sad because Enha shaman is most beautiful spec in WoW and its hearth breaking to see him in the state hi was/is.

I watched tiqqle play arena for a bit. He tried all 3 specs. He could stand enhancement for 4-5 matches. Ofc didn’t get any wins. Than i proceeded to search for other enhancement pvp on PTR. Could find to watch 15-20 matches. Only 2 wins for enhancement both of which was 2vs1. Lol.

Didn’t play arena myself. Did u you play some?

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I need to test it but the latest update made all our abilities cost mana, we already run oom fast spam healing for practically nothing.

Astral shift change is welcomed, still can’t use it whilst stunned and still no second defensive. Hopefully not but, looks like our feedback has fallen yet again on deaf ears.

Was sad to watch. Most were dbl dps teams where he just died in the first stun of the match. He died within 10s against ANY rogue team.
Just sad

you cannot even build up your dmg, which is now lightning bolt and Hailstorm.
Stormstrike does negative dmg since it is heavily reduced by any armor or will be dodged/parried all day long by leather classes.

I played with enhance on ptr. I usually die before I can hit the first stormstrike.
Autoloss against any rogue team (but that is no difference to bfa actually).
With a healer I can pump good dmg but i am always on the brink of dying as I cannot save myself when my healer is in cc.
Also while I have high sustained dmg, my burst is not existing and I have 0 CC. Casted hex LOL which can be dispelled by 50% of the arena teams ggs with so long cd.

I mean shamans were always weak against rogues but at this point it is just laughable. They don’t even need to pop vendetta in the opener to 100-0 me in CS+Kidney. Trinketing the first kidney doesn’t even do much because I sit there with 40% health and cannot do ANYTHING.
It would be better if we actually could survive the first 30 seconds of a game, but we just cannot. Rogues put you 8s in cc and your healer 16 secs followed by another 4-6s from their teammate, so how do you survive 24 seconds without any healing or def cd LOL

1 Like

Having [Pack Spirit] Azerite traits and/or [Spectral Recovery] base line for the [Ghost Wolf] would be nice.

1 Like

Rogues and a number of other classes on the PTR are hilariously broken Rogues being the worst, it felt like classic wow dieing in a stunlock haha. I’m even struggling to pump that much dmg when not focussed or have a healer at least compared to most other classes.

I think I figured out why Healing Surge base is so pathetic, its because of Conduits… we’re going to have to rely on them (wooo relying on 3rd party system again) we’ll likely be forced to give up, utility and some dmg conduits.

so there’s focussed lightning which gives our spells an additional 10% dmg / healing per msw stack, refreshing waters conduit which boosts it by an additional 30%, There is an earth shield conduit which boosts healing on that target by another 12% - not sure if that’s resto only though. Then there’s the conduit which means earth elemental gives us 40% extra health.

so we can buff HS by something like 150% with 5x MSW and using earthshield (not exactly how these %'s will scale on top of each other) then you have the pvp talent on top of that. So it might heal for ok amounts.

However - that means a) our damage is gimped and b) doesn’t help us when we’re stunned / controlled / trained and we can’t even get to 5 x MSW stacks.

But yeah the Conduits situation is why i think blizzard aren’t changing it and its stupid but alas we’re getting used to it right?

well max rank is I think 30% buff to healing surge so it is still pathetic now you also have to add the other conduit that increases msw by another 10% so you got total 30% + 50% + 100% with 5 msw so a whooping 180% buff to base surge, what a stupid design lol

this is prob why we still won’t get shamy rage because they think this is good LOL

sadly it is nerfed in pvp so 0*2000000000% is still 0

i will not play this garbage anymore if we don’t get any buff and ability added. 15 years of trash can is enough for me

You having a laugh? Shamans are very strong healers.

They are talking about elemental / enhancement

Then the title should say “Ele / Enh” because Resto are gods.

Well, Op has gone well in depth to let us know he talks about dps side of shaman. Emphasized on enhancement. Maybe you shouldn’t reply to titles only.

Barely…

I perhaps should of added dps shaman specs to my post but if you’ve got more to add then you’re welcomed to share it with us all.

I wouldn’t say Resto shamans are strong in arenas or in pvp in general when you compare them to how other classes are performing. Comparing them to gods is really misjudging the current pvp meta.