Sucks to be Shaman? Warlords of Draenor = NO HIGHLIGHTS.

[Deleted]

Personally i would prefer a discharge mechanic, if you destroy it, the killer gets discharged and stunned based on the duration left.

Rogue destroys Capacitator with 2sec left until discharge -> 3 Sec stun.

I think indestrutible is not a good mechanic, trying to dodge it or choosing to eat a stun is a better one.

I think a discharge mechanic would be quite interesting, but maybe too punishing for the enemy I'm not sure. Maybe a flat 2 second stun if killed, otherwise 5 seconds? Weaker than Shadowfury if destroyed, stronger if not. Definitely an interesting idea though.

Most of them are talented like Shockwave / Leg sweep and Shadowfury, not baseline like capacitator.

Yeah, this is a good point. Our totem tier has the potential to heavily improve the functionality of many of our totems, but we do still have access to most of them as baseline regardless.

[Blithe]

Tp makes it far more useful indeed but many Shaman choose Call of the Elements or Totemic persistence, that doesn't mean that they don't have Capacitator on their bars.

Still, waiting 5 seconds for such a clunky stun mechanic is bad design considering it's easily killed and avoidable. You could argue that we have options to counter this, but having to utilize a Glyph or Talent to bring it up to par, or at least be half-decent compared to other similar stuns in itself constitutes bad class design. It's inexcusable and time after time this is how Blizzard seems to design our class: we're given something that sounds cool, but in itself is very questionable to use and requires a talent, or glyph to fix its obvious issues thus resulting in a band-aid fix.

As someone already said, I'd much rather have a 3 second area of effect stun with a 1 minute cooldown that doesn't have such drawbacks than this bullshit. It's as simple as comparing Polymorph with Hex, or Travel Form or Cat Form with Ghost Wolf.

"I'll still use it, but I won't be happy about it" is the mindset this totem brings with it, and that's something you don't want to facilitate.

[Hekili]

Looking at H Garrosh 25, here's some stats on pet classes and pet damage.



The caveat here is that Enhancement Shaman FET uptime will drop to around 20% in 6.0, when our AOC trinkets are gone. I'll look at that in a minute.

There are two specializations that get more damage from pets than we do. Beast Mastery Hunters and Demonology Warlocks are built around running with pets. It would be especially alarming if we got a similar percentage of damage from our pets as they do.

Next, we pair our Enhancement Shaman vs. the other two Hunter specializations. Fire Elemental Totem uptime is ~30%, based on having H Assurance of Consequence (4/4). That grants us 15% of our total damage output on the boss, which is similar to what Survival and Marksmanship get from their pets, and their pets have 100% uptime.

Affliction and Destruction Warlocks are hard to factor in, because their talents allow them to opt out of having pets in general.

In any case, there are two classes who appear to get more damage out of their pets than we do. If your metric is % damage, EM+PE means you're a pet class. If your metric is uptime, then Enhancement Shamans and Destruction Warlocks aren't pet classes.

However, in 6.0, we'll get to add SET. So our "% of time with a pet out" assuming we're using on CD, would look like this:



How long are fights, typically? 7 - 8 minutes seems common. Between just these two elementals, we're looking at 50% or more pet uptime for most fight lengths. Yes, we'll have to manage mechanics and make sure we're not popping cooldowns during immunity phases and make efforts to line up with boss vulnerabilities.

If our Storm Elemental doesn't do a fair amount of damage, it won't compete well with the other options in that tier, right? If it's primarily a utility CD, then its use will be hindered by Fire Elemental being higher priority for DPS output.

So yeah, Storm Elemental feels weird to me. We seem like a pet class based on how much damage we get out of them.

[Deleted]

snip

Have you shown this to Watcher or Celestalon? I've actually mentioned this once or twice to them but never got a response about it.

[Blithe]

Have you shown this to Watcher or Celestalon? I've actually mentioned this once or twice to them but never got a response about it.

What would showing them that information do, exactly? All I got from the information was Elemental up time on a fight-length basis, in addition to Storm Elemental and Fire Elemental conflicting in priority? I'm a little confused.

[Hekili]

Have you shown this to Watcher or Celestalon? I've actually mentioned this once or twice to them but never got a response about it.

Nope, I just threw it together to see if my impression of the Enhancement specialization has been incorrect. I feel pretty justified.

I do appreciate our DPS output, but I don't feel like there is a clear vision for Enhancement. We don't enhance much of anything, and putting more DPS in pets feels like the opposite of what we need. Everything that actually matches our theme is shared with Elemental and Restoration, except for Windfury.

[Blithe]

Nope, I just threw it together to see if my impression of the Enhancement specialization has been incorrect. I feel pretty justified.

I do appreciate our DPS output, but I don't feel like there is a clear vision for Enhancement. We don't enhance much of anything, and putting more DPS in pets feels like the opposite of what we need. Everything that actually matches our theme is shared with Elemental and Restoration, except for Windfury.

Enhancement had a clear focus when we could talent into totems that would enhance our party or raid. With that in mind, and homogenization across all classes, we don't seem to "enhance" anything anymore.

[Omanley]

We already have to talent TP for that effect, and a melee range stun aoe stun is already being brought by many classes (instantly) with longer duration.

Ah, I thought It'd be a given that Projection would be melted into the skill, my bad Well, it is capable of stunning multiple targets, so the shortened ramp up is to compensate that. If we kept the glyph in addition, we could make CPT an instant aoe that way, but at the expense of a glyph slot. I dont get the longer duration part though. Afaik, there's only two classes providing a 6s stun, rogue and paladin (kidney shot an dhammer of justice). Seeing how they are the two original stun classes, that seems only fair.
A 2-3s charge up is shorter than many think. The usual human takes roughly a second or even longer to realise the totem is there, not mentioning noticing what totem it is. By the time they react, it will be very close to get out of range. With those changes, CPT (projection baked in, shorter ramp up, higher cd to compensate) would be reasonably balanced, imo. If you need an instant stun in pve...glyph slots shouldn't be as restricted as in pvp, with ls, and hs for enh.

- - - Updated - - -

Enhancement had a clear focus when we could talent into totems that would enhance our party or raid. With that in mind, and homogenization across all classes, we don't seem to "enhance" anything anymore.

That, and being the only one utilizing imbues. The usage of a lot of elemental spells only made it worse. Other problems include talents not really designed for enhance in paticular in any case. The only shaman talents that vary specialisation-wise are the new lvl100 ones, and they revolve around empowering shocks (elemental themed), summoning elemental pets (elemental themed) and essentially summoning a volcano from a totem (elemental themed).

The only things they did in regard to enhance-specific fighting:
-removed the icd from wf
-Ascendence nerf
-EotE for SS/LL
-imp LL perk
-Feral Spirit buff

Imo, this idea of mine would be one of many many possibilities of giving us back direction and individuality as a specialisation. Or my idea on a holy power-esque secondary recource.

[Kralljin]

Still, waiting 5 seconds for such a clunky stun mechanic is bad design considering it's easily killed and avoidable. You could argue that we have options to counter this, but having to utilize a Glyph or Talent to bring it up to par, or at least be half-decent compared to other similar stuns in itself constitutes bad class design. It's inexcusable and time after time this is how Blizzard seems to design our class: we're given something that sounds cool, but in itself is very questionable to use and requires a talent, or glyph to fix its obvious issues thus resulting in a band-aid fix.

As i said, it has a clunkly mechanic but considering that it is a 5sec AoE Stun which can become a ranged stun with talents needs some serious drawbacks.

The extremes on both sides need to be brought down, reduce stun duration and make it less clunky.

[Deleted]

Too much complaining on both sides.

Shamans are awesome.Period.

But being awesome as a class doesn't mean that the class doesn't have issues. Some people ask for total design change, others want some small changes and others like the specs the way they are and perform now. Everyone of them can back their claims with arguments which, despite the grieve they get for them, are very true.

I would also want to point out that change for the sake of change has always been a big part of mmos and especially a big part of wow philosophy.

Now IMO there is one main issue that causes these problems, the fact that there is very little difference between the arsenal of spells used by all three specs. This makes it harder for devs to balance the specs because a change in 1 spell or talent affects the outcome for the other specs. As a solution for this I would say that best way would be to separate the elements between the specs (ex: fire for enhance, lightning for elemental and water for resto ) and as a result separate the spells used by the specs. To back this up I would like to bring up the example of mages and warlocks which were very difficult to balance cause they shared so many spells between specs. When those changes happened for these classes all of their specs managed to be more competitive. But this would classify as a major change and I don't see this happening. And don't even think I want to see it go live tbh.

On the other hand I would like to point a few issues that I consider them to affect the performance of the specs.

For elemental shaman I think the main issue is our Mastery. Overload affects our main nuking abilities: LvB, LB and CL. This cause problems when it comes to balancing between PvP and PvE. On top of that we also had EotE which also made life harder for the devs. And tbh with the implementation of Multistrike even harder to balance. So how do u balance a class that has so much RNG and who's abilities, if all things proc, could just obliterate an opponent. They tried to balance this a little by nerfing EotE for PVP and further more with the complete change of EotE for WoD. I see them trying now to shift a little of the dmg to other abilities so that our mastery won't impact the game that much and also to provide a more smoother transition through tiers. We need to wait for the numbers to come out in order to see how this is working out.

As for resto I would like to point out two things. First one is Mastery which is in a shitty place atm with no use at all. It's pointless debating the reasons behind this statement. Second I consider that the main issue with resto is the lack of control over the healing. Most of the healing of this class comes from smart healing totems, talents and spells. So this causes a lot of problems. Resto shamans need to heal and actually be involved in the decision process. That would improve the feeling of healing with a shaman and also restore them to a more respectable place among healers. As an example to this issue I would like to point out the Monk healing at the start of the expansion which was at a similar level. The problem has been addressed successfully by blizzard and I am confident they will find a way to make this happen for resto shamans as well.

I have far less experience with enhancement shamans, especially after they removed the 2h weapons from their arsenal, but I think they are not as bad as some people claim they are. There are some things worth changing for QoL and maybe even to give them an alternative play-style but I will let them speak for themselves.

I like shamans and especially elemental spec and I will continue playing them no matter what. But the best part about playing wow is that u always get changes being small or big, but these changes, the nerfes and buffs is what kept us playing wow for so many years. So the only thing we can do is dream and wait, and even cry a little. It's still part of the game.

Happy dreaming!