Quick and short; A shaman without an earthen spec is like a priest without a holy spec, it’s at the core of their class archetype.
If you look at core abilities and class hall mounts it’s very obvious that each element has a main spec, except for earth.
I’ve made comments on Youtube about this and lots of people hop on the wagon, they wanna see an earthen shaman tank spec too! And there is literally nothing wrong with it whatsoever, on the contrary it is awesome in many ways! It makes the class more whole and it brings another tank option to the game (which is especially good cuz we need more tanks).
Hope this becomes a thing so I can play my favorite role in PVE on my main.
Tank with BL would be really awesome! Earth can also be dps ofc, but it is known for being tanky
Yeah both makes sense, a DH with a bow sounds really cool to me
I’m down with this. My Mage wants to heal, and Evoker would like to give tanking a go. Though additional specs for Midnight onwards might cause issues with the new hero talents in TWW…
What? All of a sudden now DPS DKs wont have “heart strike” (a “blood themed” spell) because “blood is for tanks”? Or Fire Mages wont have “Ice Block” because its a “frost spec spell”? And the list goes on…
And as a final note:
I am tired of this SoD thing. For the love of god people, stop shoving this in retail. Whoever likes SoD go play SoD. Simple as that. Leave retail alone.
SoD is a different universe. You CANNOT compare classes with 10 talents and 5 buttons to retail. Even IF you got the runes.
Also “people”… what people? SoD dosent even come close to the participation numbers of Retail.
Mentioning SoD for Retail is the equivalent of saying : Whel HC was “popular” so we need HC in retail too. NO. Its madness !
Eeeerm, Heart Strike is an exclusive blood dk ability btw. Did you mean Death Strike?
Ofc not… Nobody here advocates for pruning classes (again), specs can bleed into each other and WW hero talents area clearly playing on that. Though on the mage subject, I’m sure that mages wouldn’t mind a glyph that would transform iceblock into a fire or arcane equivalent… They were all real happy when blizzard implement spec specific barriers in terms of aesthetics.
You say that, but what makes you think they can’t come up with a new kind of tanking niche? When they added tank DH we thought there wasn’t any room for another tank, yet they’re different to both brewmaster and blood dk.
That’s just a non argument. If we were going to wait for perfect tuning in order to get something new, we’d be stuck in 2004. I fully understand the argument of “can we make sure what’s there already works better first” I’ve been banging on for a dk rework myself (especially after seeing the ret rework). But blizzard is blizzard, they’ll get very excited about something and hyperfocus on it for a while whilst misunderstanding the player’s actual ask (not naming any particular allied races here…)
Tanking is generally quite a solid pillar of this game, adding another is likely to be a good gamble.
Now if you told me, add a support spec to shaman… Now that’s a tricky conversation, because clearly they still don’t know how to balance one support spec, let alone two! Even if thematically it makes loads of sense, a shaman you know… Enhancing others with the elements…
Tanking has 3 main forms of dealing with incoming damage:
(1) Mitigation : Reduce the damage intake.
(2) Self Heal : You take hit you heal it back.
(3) Total avoidance : Dodge and Parry.
There is no other form to deal with incoming damage unless you fundamentally change PvE. For example : One way to deal with incoming damage would be to be able to interrupt tank-busters for example. And make a tanking spec based on that. But at the moment that is not possible.
So once you set the “basics” of how a spec should generally work, you add all the utility and details of each spec.
So. Lets dig deep.
So point (3) has been homogenized by blizzard. Back in the day, there used to be tanks that relied on Dodge and Parry. But it was ditched because it was too RNG. You either died 1-shot or took 0 damage. Nobody wanted to play those tanks. Not fun. And I agree.
So today every tank as ~ similar values to parry and dodge, and both do the same thing.
As for points (1) and (2) : Its a spectrum. On one side, you got specs that are pure mitigation (Prot Warrior) and on the other-side you got specs that are pure self heal (DK tank).
All other tanks sit on this line. Prot pala is more similar to a Prot Warrior but with some self-heal capabilities. Meanwhile, DH tank is more similar to DK tank but with some mitigation capabilities.
THEREFORE : When you analyze the situation you realize that prot pala is not a recolored prot warrior. It has a niche on the spectrum.
SO. A shaman tank. Where on this spectrum would it lay? And is that niche occupied by some other tank or not?
I am positive. When things make sense. I have a track record of that.
The most recent one is a post by Gambunt in the Shaman forums at the moment:
In that forum I give reasons to why some things are cool and make sense. And why some don’t make sense.
I also have a track record of being correct:
DF PTR with Preservation Evoker range. Said it would be a problem. It IS.
10.1.7 PTR with HPala and Aug. I said it would be a problem. It WAS.
Also, seeing the truth is not “being pessimistic”. Everything is interlinked : Reworking a spec has more implications than just “tuning”. It affects OTHER specs that have nothing to do.
For example: If they ever rework RShaman, because its the only healer that brings BL then it might affect FMages and other specs that also bring it. And THAT has to be taken into consideration as well. Something most people dont.
If that is being “pessimistic” then so be it.
That is why thematically they are in the spectrum “mitigation”. One more extreme (Pwarrior) than the other (Ppala).
But Monk sits in the mitigation spectrum because of stagger. And they dont have a shield. Druid and DH dont, but they sit on the self-heal spectrum. One more than the other.
Does not matter what gear you use. You still sit on the same spectrum line.
Its unique on HOW it accomplishes mitigation. Not the WHAT it accomplishes.
Prot Warrior does this with IG and Shield Block.
The only difference is that Stagger does not reduce incoming damage. It only delays it. So its not in the “pure” mitigation spectrum. Prot Warrior does it better.
Its supposed to “self heal” the stagger damage. That is why it sits somewhere in between pure mitigation and pure self heal. Less mitigation than PPaly, Less self heal than DH tank.
