Shaman wishlist for season 4/War within

Classes Shaman
1

Here is a list of stuff i hope that Blizzard does to help shaman for season 4 and the future.

  1. Defensives:

This is our biggest folly.
We are one of the squishiest classes in the game by far. Season 3 Dragonflight has really highligted that.
This m+ season is filled with oneshot mechanics way too quick. And shaman just can’t follow.
Our defensives just plainly suck.
Playing alts has given me a high dosage of sadness for shaman defensives.
Arms has Ignore pain and Spell Reflect on a very low cd that are really good defensives. They have defensive stance also to give them a very high amount of defensive uptime. And they still have die by the sword and rally.
What does shaman have? Nothing good.
Why does ghost wolf take 4 seconds before becoming decent? Bear form is instant and way better.
Astral shift is barely better than Obsidian scales, yet evoker has 2 charges.
Earth elemental is a 5 minute cd. You would think it’s a very strong defensive to compensate. Nope! It’s worse than Desperate Prayer.
We dont even have strong group defensives. We have Stoneskin totem. Its only slightly useful on 1 singular m+ boss. Smashspite in BRH. Thats it.
Mage has mass barrier which is insanely strong in any scenario.

For season 4 or war within, i would strongly suggest that shaman gets a defensive makeover.

Ideas like:

  • Spirit wolf now grant it’s damage reduction inversely.

  • You instantly get 20% damage reduction when entering ghost wolf, decaying slowly. Going out of Ghost wolf instantly removes this effect.

  • Make Earth elemental a choice node. Either its a defensive with a 2 minute cd. And it gives an actual useful amount of health, or its a 5 minute tank helper - and the tank helper should just be immune to damage, but lasts 20 seconds.

  • Make ankh Reset on keystart. I dont get why this isnt a thing yet.

  • Maybe combine Astral Bulwark and Planes Traveler.

  1. Mass AoE
    There is a clear difference at being bad at a thing, and completely unable to do that thing.
    In this case, for shaman, it would be mass AoE.

Elemental’s AoE spender, Earthquake, Is just way too weak because its tuned around Echoes of the Great Sundering, Magma chamber and Mountains will fall. But guess what?! You cannot get all three without giving up a lot of single target. Which is a choice that you will never make in 99% of the cases. So maybe buff it to an actual viable number.

Enhance does NOT have a mass AoE spender at all. The way we are supposed to do mass AoE damage is by pressing crash lightning. Unfortunately, it does no damage. The buff you gain is nice for your overall, but its not amazing either. Maybe place power into it, or give us another way of doing mass AoE. Like making alpha wolf a baseline feral spirit ability. And then replace Alpha wolf in the tree with a new talent that spawns a third wolf that is empowered.

  1. Flame shock is cringe

For both Elemental and Enhancement, the meta builds revolve around flame shock spreading.

For elemental, its methods of spreading flame shock is just plainly outdated. Maybe make LMT consistant and lowering its cooldown would be nice.

For enhancement, we have a very annoying talent called Lashing Flames
We have to individually place a debuff on targets so they take double damage from flame shock. Essentially rendering the flame shock spreading useless. Cause a lot of our damage comes from this talent. You can technically play a frost build where you dont take Lashing flames in m+, but you do noticeably worse Single target.
Here is an idea for how to fix this annoying talent:
Using Lava Lash on a target already affected by Lashing Flames, will spread Lashing Flames to a nearby enemy affected by flame shock. Enemies affected by Lashing Flames cannot have flame shock removed.

  1. Utility

Shaman has a very large utility belt. Unfortunately it doesnt matter when 90% of is useless or can be brought by a better class.
Our most unique utility in the class tree, is Tremor Totem. Its good on one boss in m+ and useless anywhere else. Why? cause nearly every single fear, charm or sleep effects are kickable. Its only Rezan where its useful, and you can just line of sight for 1 second. Thats all you are gaining. Every other fear window, you can negate.

Shaman has really good AoE stuns. Thats nice though.
BUUUUT
Our offhealing got hit the hardest for little reason. Im gonna take stance of enhancement here:

In season 1 we were meta, with shadow priest and boomkin druid.
Nature’s vigil and Ancestral guidance are the same cd. But the uptime of Vigil is double the length of AG. Vampiric embrace is a lower cd, also with a longer uptime.

They capped the healing that you can do with AG, but not vampiric embrace and vigil.
Likewise they also nerfed the healing enhance can do with their healing abilities - you know, the ones where you gotta sacrifice all your maelstrom weapon to use it.
Back in season 1 you could full heal yourself. Now you can barely heal 60% of your health with max stacks.

I talked earlier about Stoneskin totem being bad, But did you know its a choice node? It shares its spot with Tranquil air totem. Which prevents cast pushbacks and interrupts. Completely useless. Especially since Quaking is gone.

Enhance does not want to use a single capstone node in our class tree. Ret palading uses all three.
I would love to see a class tree rework soon.

Please share your wishlist for shaman in season 4/War within :slight_smile:

5 Likes
2

These are my coments for both Ele and RShaman in PvE:

(A) Defensiveness: The issue is not shaman. Shaman does not need more buttons to press. The issue are 1-shot mechanics that make DR defensives so valuable. In S1 for example, we did not have these 1-shots. We had really hard healer checks.

So classes that could heal themselves reigned supreme in S1. Enh with free Healing Surges and AG party healing is one example.

And the elephant in the room: There is a massive difference between classes that stack vers, and those that do not. Dudus and Augs have many more deff buttons than a Shaman, and they flop just as easily. They need constant babysitting from the healer.

Why? Because they dont stack vers. Like palas and rogues that show up with 44% to a key (PERMA -20% DR).

(B) Utility: Shamans have too much. Just remove tremor totem (among other things) from the game already. 1 or 2 utility spells that are IMPACTFUL is orders of magnitude better than 8 that are not.

Its frustrating to see the stubbornness to keep shamans “as they were in 2004”. Well news flash: 2004 was 20 years ago. Times change. So should the shaman.

(C) Damage profile:

The reason Earthquake hits like a wet noodle has noting to do with balancing it around talents like you mention.

It has everything to do with the damage profile of Ele. Long story short, the problem is Lava Burst and its guaranteed crit.

Shamans have a button for EVERYTHING. And that is a problem. And the latest example of why its a problem is our current tier set. When it went live, we were doing OK ST damage. But absolutely destroyed in cleave situations. So it was nerfed to do “OK damage” in cleave situations. But that left our AoE and ST damage lacking.

Should they buff anything else in our kit, we would be in the exact same situation. And that is why Ele needs a bold overhaul.

This is my wish list for ELE:

(A) Remove ALL ice spells. Period. Its sucks to play, its not fun to play. Remove it.

(B) Split the talent tree into TWO sections (Left and Right). If you take Left, you focus on Lightning ONLY. So Lava Burst and Flame Shock is literally taken off your bar. If you take the Right section, you focus ONLY on Lava Burst and Flame Shock. And LB and CL are taken off your bar.

Left == ST and cleave and some AoE. While Right == ST and cleave (but less than left) and a lot of AoE.

Ditch the Gainers/Spenders idea and focus on cast time reduction. So Elemental blast (2s cast time) becomes baseline. And Earthquake (2s cast time) also becomes baseline.

But, casting Lightning or Fire spells reduces the cast time to 0s making it instant cast after some resource gathering.

DONE. That is what I would do with elemental.

For RShaman DPS rotation (only) I would go the same route, but simplified.

Healing spells reduce the cast time of DPS spells, and vice-versa. Making weaving DPS in between heals much more organic and fun to do.

Those are my overall wish-lists.

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(elemental) Some good ideas but I personally like the builder/spender gameplay

I would indeed remove icefury or AT THE VERY LEAST make it a passive that make frost shock impactful without having to press an extra button. I d like to see IF debuffs gone though, it’s really not fun to manage.

I also agree that the way we have to play around our stats feels bad. I should be happy to have an upgrade not have mixed feeling because if it has crit it’s useless in st , if it has mastery it’s useless on aoe (what other class needs to reach a capstone for their mastery to actually do something?)
The auto crit must go OR lvb needs to scale differently with crit.

We need a way to cleave efficienctly, can’t rely on a tier set for that…

And yes, utility and survivability…

4

To be honest, elemental can be fixed by taking a decision on the direction the spec goes and just sticking to it. Whatever it is. Anything would be better than now.

Today the talent tree looks like Blizz had no idea what to do with Ele, and just slapped everything/random stuff there…

5
  • Placing totem is GCD waste.
  • The effect of the totems is so weak that nobody cares about even destroying them except counterstrike totem which health takes one auto attack maybe.
  • There’s like 20+ totems in total? Enemy players can kill enhancement shaman in one stun. Totems are useless in such fight
  • Totems should be simple ‘follow us’ sticks and works like the aura in the specific area affecting all in range (not party only) Everybody would love to be close to the shaman.
  • Placed once there should be no need to recast ever. Some limit of active totems could be in place.
  • PVP should not be based on versatility. Some classes stack them as a main stat giving them hugely unfair advantage in world PVP.
  • When shaman is in stun it can not make any hits. No hits - no resources. No resources … no damage / no heal / no survivability.
  • The lack of defensives is following as for few years.
  • Because of that I’ve cancelled a subscription long time ago. I’ve return to test what changed and… I’ve found out other classes has some new abilities and better burst damage when shaman is still designed as glass cannon without cannon…

I don’t see any hope for this class spec. Subscription cancelled…

1 Like
6

Was referring to PvE though.

However, I have been told that apparently we are strong in PvP now.

7

My only wish that one of the hero talent trees is more melee focused and no longer need to feel like a melee elemental shaman…

Man how i miss rockbiter/boulderfist and hailstrom…

1 Like
8

They have lied to you :smiley:

9

I feel the same tbh , if TWW hero talents don’ fix our defen sive situation and mass AOE damage , then ill think ill cancel sub also.

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From a design perspective, the Elemental Shaman is severely lacking, with minimal impactful changes since Cataclysm.

The gameplay mechanics of Ice Fury are abysmal. A simple fix would be to grant Frost Shock 4 charges with a 6-second recharge time. This adjustment improves gameplay while maintaining similar functionality. In Season 2, success hinged on flawless execution, otherwise, DPS suffered significantly.

Elemental Shaman’s scaling is woefully inadequate, as evidenced by the current season’s uselessness of critical strike rating. The argument that Shamans have a 50% higher crit damage falls short when the base damage of our spells is negligible.

Talents often end up as dead nodes due to the constraints of our Lightning/Fire build. Particularly in this season, “elemental weaving” results in a loss of damage rather than the intended benefit.

Our AoE damage output is equally disappointing. The lengthy ramp-up time required for our abilities often gets disrupted if mobs move out of Earthquake’s range. Moreover, we seem to be the only class limited to effectively dealing with a maximum of five targets in AoE situations.

And i pray that Totemic spec is not Support Hero Talents

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They should ditch the “support” concept. I dont know why they would insist on this even after ample evidence of how disruptive “support” stuff is.

13

spreading those pessimistic posts everywhere i see, every single post you make is depressing. interesting behaviour

14

Do you disagree with my statement : “Support” rolls have not been positive for the overall game. S2 with Aug? You think that was appropriate ?

Answer that first. Then comment on my “attitude”.

And then. Please go to the Priest forum and watch the player feedback on “Oracle Hero Talents”. And read what people thing about that too. To make sure you are convinced its not just my opinion on this.

And stop with this negativity. Answer that before saying if im “negative”. Because if to you being “positive” means agreeing with whatever nonsense people post here then I don’t agree with that “attitude” of yours.

I agree with things. And I disagree with things. I my right to both. As do you.

15

hahaha you’re unreal! No i will not answer more of you seriously because i know that you only grasp on to straws and don’t answer me properly, somehow thinking that you’re still alive in the conversation. You’re an awful addition to anything if this is how you behave. It really is pathetic.

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Im sorry. How am I supposed to answer to this :

This is your response to my opinion on “support rolls” in WoW. And there is nothing in it other than “im negative”.

Please elaborate. Cause I really dont get what you are saying with “holding on to straws”. Holding what?

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