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  1. #21
    I Don't Work Here Endus's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Protoman View Post
    I don't think Feral Spirits was hard to balance, they just nerfed it after beastcleave got so popular and when it went on a 2min cd instead of 3min but went a little too overboard and never really buffed their damage back. It should be more like Gargoyle type DPS and not treants.....I heard that even priest's shadowfiend does more DPS, wonder if that is true. Just buff base damage, buff spirit bite so it does noticeable damage to enemy HP, and improve scaling with AP and maybe even our wep damage so it's damage scales properly as we gear up.....doesn't have to be OP just not negligible damage.
    The big issue with Feral Spirits is that they aren't JUST a DPS CD. If they just did damage, they'd be easy to tune. The issue is that they ALSO heal the Shaman, and increasing that damage increases the healing. They also (on live, anyway) bring a stun and a sprint, which is a significant amount of utility.

    The healing thing, though, is significant. Consider that in WotLK, health pools were tiny and easy to burn through, so the healing made the window to burst an Enhancement down more narrow. If their damage had kept pace, popping FS in PvP during Cata might have made Enhancement effectively immortal, garnering huge self-healing while also providing extra damage and utility, and said healing works even while the Shaman is stunned or the like, unless it's an AoE attack that catches Shaman and wolves both.

    Enhancement's definitely needed a DPS cooldown, but with Ascendance, that's less of a factor moving forward. Especially since they can also grab Elemental Mastery. A 2nd/third DPS cooldown isn't really as critical as it was during Cata, when it would've been the first and only. That said, I do think FS needs to be retuned a bit, to make it more clear the emphasis is on self-healing rather than DPS. Or go the other way, if they want it to be DPS and not survival. I'm not saying they're ideal as they are, just that the reasons they've fallen so hard make sense.


  2. #22
    The amount of healing wouldn't be an issue really. If they increased the damage output, they could just reduce the healing percentage to counter that.
    Similar to how Feral Spirits also heal, Ascendence also functions as a gap closer. So if you bring up double duty as an argument as to why damage shouldn't be higher, bringing up Ascendence isn't really convincing.

    IMO they could remove Feral Spirit healing if it where an issue of having both higher damage and still retaining healing, as long as the rest of our selfheal abilities remained potent enough w/o it.
    They could, or rather should do the same with Ascendence really. Cant they make that "meleeing on range" thingy a separate ability?
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  3. #23
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    I think it would be better if you always had them with you, like a warlocks demon, because we would really need the anti-CC-sprint and stun.

  4. #24
    I gotta say, I do miss the days of wrath when having wolves up was like having bubble. Despite the fact that I was squishy when they went down, that short window of fun made me want to pvp on my shaman. As I mentioned in another thread, and as endus mentioned just now, a huge reason wolves feel so weak is that not only is their damage low, but because of the insane difference in HP, their healing is so low. I'm know blizz wanted to nerf wolves, mostly for pvp concerns; it's why they reduced the duration and cd, but they need to make up their mind now.

    The fact that they've gone an entire xpac already with little to no changes to wolves, leaving them in their current piss poor state, and we're this far into beta and there still isn't any solid change, baffles me. While I would love to see it return to the damage cd it once was, I'd settle for blizz clearly stating what they want from it, and making it worth the time to push the button.

    Could someone confirm apx. how much wolves heal you on beta with the glyph? I did some ghetto napkin math and with 20k ap I figured about 2k per hit. Feels about as weak as it is on live imo if that's close. Perhaps if they officially want to make it used for the heals, they need to either buff the glyph or the base healing amount.

  5. #25
    Quote Originally Posted by Vattenmelon View Post
    I think it would be better if you always had them with you, like a warlocks demon, because we would really need the anti-CC-sprint and stun.
    No, this would just make us a pet class. If i wanted to play a pet class, i'd be a hunter, warlock, or unholy DK. and currently in MoP spiritwalk is a baseline ability for enhancement.

    Personally I rarely pvp, once in awhile i'll do BGs or world pvp with friends. I'd like to see the healing the wolves do reduced and see the damage increase to be used as a decent pve CD. or as others have said, tie it into the ascendance CD.

  6. #26
    Pit Lord Protoman's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Endus View Post
    The big issue with Feral Spirits is that they aren't JUST a DPS CD. If they just did damage, they'd be easy to tune. The issue is that they ALSO heal the Shaman, and increasing that damage increases the healing. They also (on live, anyway) bring a stun and a sprint, which is a significant amount of utility.

    The healing thing, though, is significant. Consider that in WotLK, health pools were tiny and easy to burn through, so the healing made the window to burst an Enhancement down more narrow. If their damage had kept pace, popping FS in PvP during Cata might have made Enhancement effectively immortal, garnering huge self-healing while also providing extra damage and utility, and said healing works even while the Shaman is stunned or the like, unless it's an AoE attack that catches Shaman and wolves both.

    Enhancement's definitely needed a DPS cooldown, but with Ascendance, that's less of a factor moving forward. Especially since they can also grab Elemental Mastery. A 2nd/third DPS cooldown isn't really as critical as it was during Cata, when it would've been the first and only. That said, I do think FS needs to be retuned a bit, to make it more clear the emphasis is on self-healing rather than DPS. Or go the other way, if they want it to be DPS and not survival. I'm not saying they're ideal as they are, just that the reasons they've fallen so hard make sense.
    Yea, but the healing can always be adjusted after buffing the damage. And especially now in MoP where they only do DPS and healing with utility separated.....plus gained an actual dps ability which is also nature damage so suggests they should be doing dps, it should be even easier to buff their damage. I definitely want to see them do good DPS, even if we have to give up some healing potency.....as long as heals are still noticeable I don't mind.

    As our original and signature DPS CD, it should do respectable DPS......doing less then one LL or less then a shadowfiend is pathetic. I don't think we have enough DPS Cd's to just let this one slide as a support CD, esp because Enhance doesn't have a way to pool resources and chain attacks together for burst whenever we need it like other resource based melee can, we gotta rely more on these CD's for burst DPS since rest of our damage is more like consistent, sustained DPS......even LL can't be saved we gotta use it right away to keep up our DPS and pressure.

    Ascendance is good, but thats on a 3min CD.....and EM is just crap for DPS, both regular sustained DPS but especially for burst DPS because of no extra abilities and only passive damage......we aren't going to put out much extra pressure with faster melee swings (esp when we don't use MW5 right away either in PVP, use for heals/hex, and WF has an icd so faster swings can only do so much). This is why I keep saying our EM should reduce the CD of SS to 5-6sec instead of 8......that would simulate faster attack rate with melee abilities like other melee can with a similar haste CD, or how Elem can squeeze in 3-4 extra LB's over 20 sec with 30% Haste.......I would trade most, if not ALL, of that 30% haste to passive damage for 5 sec SS's......I think 10% haste and 5 sec SS sounds more then fair.

    Quote Originally Posted by Vattenmelon
    I think it would be better if you always had them with you, like a warlocks demon, because we would really need the anti-CC-sprint and stun.
    I agree with the other guy, no thanks on being a pet class. Pets are so annoying IMO, I prefer temp pets but effective while they are out (which FS is not currently, except mebbe for self heals).

    I really hope this future update to pets will actually fix them for good.

  7. #27
    Quote Originally Posted by Omanley View Post
    The amount of healing wouldn't be an issue really. If they increased the damage output, they could just reduce the healing percentage to counter that.
    It really is as simple as that. They hit like wet noodles, and enhancement want them back and to be useful, not as a defensive CD, but as offensive. Since they've had all their utility removed in MoP (no more stun or taunt and they've been put into other abilities im not really happy with, but hey) what's the harm in putting their damage up but reducing their healing % on the damage done, making it back to the same amount of healing (perhaps a little less) and giving us another DPS cooldown that I think we're pretty much all agree that enhancement shamans need.

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  8. #28
    I Don't Work Here Endus's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Protoman View Post
    Yea, but the healing can always be adjusted after buffing the damage.
    Yes, but now we're talking 20/20 hindsight and such. I wasn't saying the decision they made was the RIGHT one, just that it's an understandable one.


  9. #29
    Recap time!

    - So, I think we can all agree that back in WOTLK when Feral Spirit first came out it was considerably better than the version currently live for a variety of reasons including as previously stated, Enhancement's health pool coupled with the healing effect at the time. So when looking at these two expansions (WOTLK & Cata) we can see a large shift in the use of Feral Spirit from:

    -WOTLK: Our Signature DPS Cooldown; It worked not only as a great self-healing tool, but as an additional stun (outside of Fire Nova Stun at the time), a taunt if need be, in addition to it being a great DPS cooldown. Very high priority

    To..

    -Cata: Not even considered to be a DPS cooldown, in a PvP sense this was mainly used for the Spirit Walk ability tied in with Feral Spirit. In PvE this was used if everything else was on CD and Feral Spirit happened to be up, became a small DPS cooldown with the Tier 14 bonus set; nevertheless very low priority (situational for PvP)

    Quote Originally Posted by Endus View Post
    Enhancement's definitely needed a DPS cooldown, but with Ascendance, that's less of a factor moving forward. Especially since they can also grab Elemental Mastery. A 2nd/third DPS cooldown isn't really as critical as it was during Cata, when it would've been the first and only. That said, I do think FS needs to be retuned a bit, to make it more clear the emphasis is on self-healing rather than DPS. Or go the other way, if they want it to be DPS and not survival. I'm not saying they're ideal as they are, just that the reasons they've fallen so hard make sense.
    - Couldn’t agree more. Enhancement went from having two DPS CD’s in WOTLK (Fire Elemental Totem & Feral Spirit) to effectively having no DPS cooldowns in Cataclysm (With Fire Elemental not applying Searing Flames in Cataclysm it renders the totem itself a DPS loss when compared to the DPS lost with Lava Lash), and moving forward with Pandaria, this one was of the biggest concerns with the spec.

    -Elemental Mastery will take the role of an additional DPS cooldown depending on how well it works with Enhancement Ascendance, which is what I think you’re talking about anyway. But when considering Elemental Mastery outside of Ascendance, I feel that the spec doesn’t have enough benefit from Haste to warrant the talent choice,; so it will be interesting to the damage lists from EOE & EM.

    - When considering the future of Feral Spirit, I would personally like to see the healing reduced (proportional with damage increases). I would also like to see some sort of passive or change to the ability that allow the Feral Spirit to be able to gain a benefit or to be able to activate additional damage based on your weapon imbue.

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