Outdated class design

Classes Shaman
1

Hello you,

I have played every single iteration of shaman throughout the years. From the good ol’ days with 2H windfury, to Stormblast one shots in MoP, to the gutted windstrike in WoD and the odd in-between in Legion.

I do like the overall support role of a shaman, totems, predictive gameplay with tremor, grounding and such. Thats not where my issues take root.

Mobility, cc and defensives on the other hand, that needs some work. But i already believe you do have some of the answers already.

Astral.. i dont know who thought that defensive was a great idea. Its boring, it has no use in stuns, it lasts 6 seconds.. its mediocre damage reduction at best and the cd is even quite long.

Simple fix? Give us back Shamanistic rage. Works in stuns, has multiple use cases because its also a way to regenerate mana. Especially in pvp, enhance ooms badly. This would help with that. The cd is shorter and it fits the class far better.

Mobility, ghost wolf to disengage combat.. can be dispelled, silenced.. doesn’tprevent any cc and you have to spend talents for it to remove a slow? What… come on. Make that baseline? Or give us back our movement speed boost while wolfs were up. To keep up with the pack. Something has to be done.

General crowd control..

I mentioned that I did like totems, thats mostly for utility, but having a stun totem.. that has 5 health and takes 1 auto to destroy, is bad. Its better now without WA, but its still bad. 3 seconds even.. and we have to invest 3 points for it to be a somewhat shorter cc?

Make it baseline 4 sec stun on a 45sec cd.. and simply remove those talents and put in something more exciting.

Also.. hex, make it instant cast with 5 maelstrom - we sacrifice damage to cc, that should be fine. In MoP heals, hex etc all worked with maelstrom, AND they didn’t even cost mana. Sort of like pala holy power.

And the last, but no the least..

Those new talent nodes that give 3% agi, 2% haste.. get rid of it? It feels mandatory to get base stats and its insanely boring. Talents should be about choice, alternate your playstyle. It feels.. rushed. Like.. you didn’t know what to put there. Bob, just do 1% damage increase. Ay ay, sir!

That was my 5 scents to update the class using already existing material. Then you won’t have to spend that much time figuring out what to do..

5 Likes
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Agree, we are the only class that can have their spells destroyed with 1 auto attack, stun totem, tremor etc.. every player on higher rating will instantly kill your cap totem, what is even the point, you can cheese it and put it far away from them and when its about to go off transfer it under them but why, when other classes can just stun people with 0 effort

3 Likes
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I agree that totems should play a bigger role in the class, but instead they’ve been pushed aside over the years, now being high-CD situational abilities while retaining their dumb 5 HP weakness. Heck. they could be 5% of your HP and they’d still be easy to remove - but maybe they’d require an actual ability and not just an auto. P.S: I still want my Sentry Totem back! xD

Your points about Ghost Wolf are also very valid. We’ve come a long way since it being a 3 sec cast… but I think that, at least, it should be undispellable. I don’t mind having to run an extra talent for it to remove snares, although I think that choice node (Spirit Wolf/Thunderous Paws) could probably have one of the effects baseline.

I also agree, completely, that Hex should be subject not just to Maelstrom stacks, but also to Nature’s Swiftness (for us caster specs). Spending a critical ability for a clutch CC should be a valid option. You can’t imagine my face when I used Ancestral Swiftness to insta-CC on a Delve and got subsequently pummeled xD

Astral Shift is not too bad. I understand that not everyone has to have super strong defensives, but -as it stands now- Shamans are one of the squishiest classes. So we DO need something in the defense department.

Lastly, I can’t agree more on the new %stat nodes being boring and lazy design, while also being universally strong. A properly designed talent should be stronger than a base stat increase within its use case, even to the point of being mandatory in a certain build but totally skippable on another. That’s what talents are about.

I have my own array of issues with class design from the Elemental POV, but I’ll leave those for another time xD

2 Likes
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Shaman was always in a terrible state after Classic - and even in Classic, when Blizzard designed a whole tier set just for one of the possible specs (Naxx Resto).
And since then Blizzard has not the slightest idea (or interest) to fix the class or what to do with it. The best thing is to move on and play a class Blizzard knows that it exists still in their game.