Idea to improve gameplay for farseer its nearly great!

Classes Shaman
1

Hi all,

I was reading through the hero talents for shaman farseer and I want to provide some idea’s that i personally think is gonna make the gameplay feel a lot better than i think it currently does.

Its definatly on the right track but I would like to spice up the ancestors with a few easy tweaks.
So far you can summon the ancestors in 3 ways :

  • press primordial wave
  • get random procs from lava burst and Riptide
  • press ancestral swiftness

The resulting payoff

  • more output
  • cast hydrobubble / elemental blast (which is basicly only output)
  • bit of CDR

Right now, it feels like you just a buff to primordial wave / natures swiftness with some random extra’s so now and then when you proc on your spells. I would love to use this mechanic to lean more into the farseer theme of seeing in the future and asking the ancestors for guidance. To do that you can add the following.

  • Change the CDR node to say: After you cast 3 times lava burst / riptide you appeased the ancestor, granting you the CDR (maybe increase it) and increase the damage / healing the ancestors do
  • Increase the time the ancestors are alive but reduce initial damage they deal.
  • when there are 3 appeased ancestors are up at the same time, the grant you ascendency (procs ascendance for some time) and expires the ancestors. (which will trigger hydrobubbles / elemental blasts)

The intended idea for the gameplay is that during your standard rotation you might get an ancestral proc. Naturally you will appease it, the earlier you appease it the more benefits they give you as they have a set lasting duration of doing more damage. This means that when higher damage windows are required you can use your buttons that manually summon them you can spawn them in and ascend them at the same time. But as soon as you appeased 3 you get ascendancy and they expire with a big burst. To get maximum value out of them you might want to consider only spawning 1 more in, give appease them until they are nearly at full duration and THEN summon a third in, appease it and proc the ascendancy for maximum value.

I would suggest maybe make the summon ancestor a unique spell with 2 charges instead of tying it to existing spells to really give the mechanic its own space (take it off gcd)

Hope anyone reading this like this!
Cheers

2

I like that you are proactive.

Other than that this talent tree does not address any of our issues. And that it doubles down on already boring mechanics… But the worst thing is that as a healer procs are the worst thing imaginable.

You have two options: Keep the proc but if you tune it such that the ancestor becomes “relevant” in your throughput. And the consequence of this is that you can either (A) overheal a ton with your ancestor… or (B) not have it when you need it.

You could balance its proc such that you have an ancestor consistently doing things. But at that point, it becomes a pet and it has to be nerfed. So its not an HPS relevant skill.

That last option is what Blizz did with the equivalent spell from Holy Priests… Nerf it so hard nobody wants it.

Its a similar issue with our T4 tier set. If you buff it by just a fraction of a %, we become gods in Raid scenarios spreading riptides like cancer. OR, you nerf riptide so much it becomes just another GCD to buff other heals. Its a catch 22 situation with no solution.

So no. I hate RNG. I hate to be locked into talents I dont want… a TON of stuff I dont like.

These Hero talents need to be scrapped completly. And re-done from the ground up with a mechanic that actually gets me exited.

1 Like
3

Hi Uda,

I get your point in RNG for healers, which was why i was hoping to address it by the mechanic i posted above. It should give you some controllability on WHEN it explodes with the ancestors. Yes there is still a proc involved but by having a button that lets them be summoned on command you should remove the biggest headache

As far is I can see is shaman is lacking in 2 departments majorly to be considered for meta pve (leaving pvp out of this as resto is actually decent in the meta) :

  • Defensives / survivability
  • Raid utility

I think partially defensives are already adressed but i think it needs some proper DR but thats just tuning. For raid utility it might be an interesting choice node where you can choose between hydrobubble/elemental blasts and maybe a buff that increases the damage dealt of all dualelement spells and abilities when they expire. That way you can give some interesting raid synergies.

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Heya Altruin,

The deficiencies of RShaman are much more than just that. I can give a really detailed comprehensive list if you want to read a brick of text… :slight_smile: Either way, ALL those deficiencies need to be addressed in a talent tree rework. And until I see it, I think its just stupid to publish Hero Talents. Even warriors got “notes” next to them warning of future talent changes. We got squat. No explanation. NADA.

The TLDR from a gameplay perspective (the most important IMO) is: We got a TON of buttons/talents that do nothing at all. Their only purpose is to buff 1 or 2 skills. Thats it.

We waste so many GCDs in this its not even normal. Even for DPS we got “extra stuff” to do to buff our spells (Stormkeeper, Flameshock, Master of the Elements)… To name a few.

And having so many modifiers is really bad. Because you are stuck in a situation where if you got ALL modifiers, your Healing Surges heal for 800k and Chain Heals for 400k (per person, to 6 people). Which is massive. No other healer can do something like that.

So you either (A) nerf the modifiers or (B) the base abilities.

If you take option (A) you dont play the modifiers. Just heal like normal. If you take (B) you heal like a wet noodle UNLESS you got that. Which is a degenerate strategy for a reactive healer (unlike DPriest that are proactive and have shields to pad their “ramp up”). This is reason #1 TLDR of why were not meta in all PvE content. Because we “ramp up” healing but got none of the tools to pad that ramp up.

Adding ancestors to that degenerate gameplay of infinite modifiers is just bad. We need LESS buttons not more.

Additionally, you speak from a Raid perspective. Dont forget M+ also exists. And we have been left in the gutter for the whole expansion. Being nerfed in M+ because if blizzard buffed us, we would be so OP in raid it would not be even funny.

Additionally, the whole concept of having pets heal for you is degenerate. Look at druids. 30% of their healing is done by pets they summon. Which means that their whole gameplay revolves around summoning these pets so they heal for you.

With a special caviat: Ancestors duplicate our healing. What is it gonna be? Some sort of Ascendance proc 50% of the time? That gives SO MANY issues at the moment. Because the CD is so powerful it needs constant nerfing.

As in: If our BASE healing is OK… with Ascendance we go Super Sayan and can heal a raid on our own every 3 min. If our BASE healing is crappy, then that CD is in line with other healer CDs. They already had to nerf it by not having Ascendance contribute to Cloudburst. It was getting ridiculous at some point.

So knowing what happened with Ascendance… I am confident that Shamans will require throughput nerfs to compensate for ancestors duplicating stuff 50% of the time. OR, make ancestors so weak it wont be worth taking.

And I know this with 100% certainty because HPriests got a very similar spell. And it has been nerfed since Legion basically. Because Blizz is incapable of balancing it.

So its an ALL or NOTHING strategy. It makes “totemic” choice pointless. Because they will have to alter our base HPS. Its mathematically inevitable.

Blizz is getting themselves in a corner when it comes to balancing.

1 Like
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Keep in mind that the numbers for the damage/healing done is a work in progress and we can get a good idea of what blizzard will end up with them.

They told us that they want the hero talent specs to be a 15% increase in our throughput more or less. In the case of farseer where the throughput is tied to ancestors, it is pretty easy to calculate.
We know that as resto you will summon one each 15 seconds (unleash life), and another each 45 seconds (capstone). There is also a small chance on ancestor death (15%) or on riptide cast (15%).
So the uptime will be (considering 45 second cycles): 4x6 = 24 seconds uptime. You can also increase that uptime by 15% to 27,6 and a further 15% to a total of 31,2 seconds. (the above is napkin math, and just aprox).

So the uptime will be close to 66% with procs and stuff like that. Which means that ancestors will make us 20-25% stronger when they are active (which is blizzard’s target number).

To be fair, I liked the talent tree, although I have some things that I would like to see changed/make sure:

  • What do ancestors DO while active. And I mean visually. It is actually pretty different to be able to see 3 ancestors on your side casting and unleashing chaos with you, instead of having a small effect go off that you can hardly see. I think this should feel visually like warlock imps for demo.

  • The defensive part of the tree is a joke. I know that our defensives need some love ON THE CLASS TREE SIDE, but it is a joke to get 5% more hp on nature’s guardian or 25% more heals from earth shield.

6

Look. Trust me.

When the formula outputs a binary result of OP or Trash, no in-between… I can tell you right here and right now that its not a “tuning problem”.

The end result will be a nerf. Because having shamans in the gutter is much better than turning Shamans into the HPalas of Exodia S2.

I gave similar feedback on Augs. And people answered the same thing as you: “they will tune it”. Well sometimes the system itself tells you its impossible.

HPalas are right now in this situation. Just from the fact that they have an off-CD instant cast AoE healing spell. If they buff that by a bit to make it meaningful were back to exodia in M+. So instead they decided to focus on Raid balance (where HPalas are OK) but leave it in the gutter for M+.

Thats not a lack of tuning. Thats the fact that the spec by design does not allow it.

Unless you begin saying things like: XXX spell/talent does YYY more in 5 man content only. For every talent/skill. And IMO this change is inevitable. It will happen eventually.

But by being stubborn (not sure if us or the devs) we are creating a lot of pain in the community.

I get that. In Raid or M+? In fact, can this system be balanced to give a 15% in BOTH raid and M+?

The case is NO. Its built into the system.

We will end up just like today with the T4 tier set. Where its so nerfed for M+ its borderline useless. Just because if you buff it by a fraction of a % we would become gods in raids spreading automatic riptides like cancer.

That is not a tuning problem. Thats a system design problem.

So we are limited to 1 ancestor? From what I read, we could perfectly have 3 ancestors for 12s and none for 20. You dont know.

In the end, it just feels bad.

What I would expect from a Resto-Ele tree is to double down in the DPS/Healing dichotomy aspect of RShaman. With things like healing reduces cast time of DPS spells. Or DPS spells reduce the cast time of healing spells.

Things like that.

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Napkin math dude, it is approximation. It is just to infer from the numbers bliz gave us how much uptime they have in mind. And with those numbers we can infer between 50-70% (it will not be 15, nor 100%).

Monks, palas and Dpriests have this theme. I do not think that many people picture this with Resto shamans (they have some interactions with lburst/healing rain, but nothing major). Not that It’s bad, but it would be weird to base an entire hero spec on that (but hey, they might use it on totemic).

But it IS built into the system.

With your example, the tier set is 2 passive bonuses that are added into gear.

The talent specs have 11 nodes, where they have MULTIPLE passive nodes that increase the throughput of certain abilities by x%. Those nodes are exactly there to balance the specs.
If a spec needs help in raid but not in m+, then you buff the nodes that use X spell but ignore/nerf the nodes that buff Y spell.

Yeah I get that if you were a developer you would have made a different tree. Everyone would have made a different tree in a multitude of ways.

The matter of fact is that blizzard made this talent tree and gave it for feedback. We have 2 choices:

  • Tell them this tree sucks and we would like to have X,Y,Z (anyone will give their own ideas like we are brainstorming)

  • Tell them that X,Y,Z node is good/bad, they have this interactions which is good/bad, this spells feels bad/good, and we liked/disliked the theme of this node.

The mages are always doing the second and get the best things. Maybe it’s because they actually give good feedback.

8

Im a healer. I dont want napkin math or an approximation. I want a deterministic or predictable way to know when those dudes will appear. And what will they do.

50 to 70% overall uptime in 1 boss fight is irrelevant. Take the last one from EB. I want uptime when the add is up.

And that is less than 20% of the time. But its when I need them.

Additionally, tying the RNG summoning to riptide is dumb. Riptide is used to get Tidal Waves and Deluge. So its a “pre-preparation before the big damage” situation. If im gonna be full of ancestors in my “prep time” I dont want them.

And tying the summoning to 1 ability that we dont even talent in M+… so RShaman is already tight on GCDs to add another GCD to the formula. That add better be Goku himself to justify yet another GCD in “prep time” we have to use.

Passive damage while healing is a mechanic that is too OP to allow certain specs to have it and others not.

Its like combat mana regen. Its too OP for healers not to have a version of it.

So I digress. We need to have a mechanism like that.

OK. If shaman rotation is spreading riptides and chain healing in BOTH raid and M+… How is that not a system built for failure? And just because in a Raid context you get more riptides out on average than in M+… how is that not going to affect this?

Also, to summon them we have to press Unleash life. A button used ONLY in raid context. How do they plan to balance out the fact that now in M+ we cant use Undulation? How will they compensate for this? And if they do, will it make us OP in Raid? How?

Its delusional to believe that there are X spells that are only used in the raid, and Y spells that are only used in M+. It does not work like that. Not for RShaman, not for any other spec.

And its a problem.

I gave my feedback already. Delete this PR crap of a hero talent tree we have. Its as if they made it up really fast because otherwise they would not have anything “new” to present.

Rework the Spec. And THEN do hero talents. Or at-least, communicate CLEARLY that they wont rework us. And THEN i can start giving my feedback.

Until then, its a waste of time to talk about these talents. And I will clearly communicate this. I wont pretend as if they dont have work to do…

The title of this post is "its nearly great ! " and the answer is NO. Its nowhere near great.

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Yeah, the hero talents need the core classes, specs, and talent trees to be well-designed, which for most specs is not the case. Blizz keeps repeating the same mistake over and over and over again: rather than fixing up the game’s underlying foundations, they keep adding more systems and other unnessesary bloat for the sake of making some marketing or producer dudes happy. And then they spend an entire expansion trying to balance the mess they created, get half-way done, and then add more bloat because the next expansion is coming out.

Most of the hero talents will not make the game more fun to play. On the contrary, they will just make the game more convoluted, requiring more WeakAuras to play optimally.

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Not the case.

MW have a good foundation. Not perfect. But a decent one.

And their Hero Talents are in a good spot as a result.

Now they need to do the same with Shamans. Then we can talk about Hero Talents.

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