Shamans and the totem mechanic, is it time for change?

[Dragonsoad]

Hello, long time lurker first time poster here. I've only been playing shaman for a couple of weeks but I've been playing the game for a long time and love the idea of the class. I feel that in it's current implementation it just isn't as fun or impactful as playing other damage/healing specs and I think a lot of it has to do with redundancy. I'll go spec by spec to clarify (Keep in mind I have never played enhancement although I love the idea of it.) Let me just start by mentioning some overall things that I think would help the feel and fun of playing the class speaking from a pure PvE situation.

1. Elementals being removed from totems and acting like more traditional summon spells. It is very important that they remain not under our direct control unless the primal elementalist talent is chosen. We are asking the Elementals for help, not controlling them. I even think they should remain uncontrollable with the talent and just have reinforce and empower(?) made baseline with the talent and passive when they're out. We are not hunters or warlocks, we are not forcing the elementals to fight, we cannot force that and the elementals are not our friends..they are destructive forces of nature beyond our control. Keep in mind that resto only uses Earth Elemental, Enhancement with Storm and Elemental with Fire. Should change the glyph of fire elemental to be "Glyph of Elemental Summoning - Reduces the duration and cooldown of your summon elemental ability by 50%"

2. Each spec only getting one type of totem (everyone keeps grounding and capacitor and earthbind and talent totems ie utility), meaning resto only uses water/earth elemental, ele with fire (totem and elemental) and Enhance with air (totem and elemental) to match ascendancy forms and also passive weapon enchants.[Consistency]

3. Shields be made passive with the choosing of a spec and without duration and charges with the exception ele for fulmination, earth shock renamed for elemental to be lightning shock. Resto still gets earth shield, but can't cast it on self. Resto should probably get a buff to compensate idk what though.

4. A new shield for enhancement, preferably air shield to match #2, it can do something like water shield where it has a passive and active effect, something akin to storm elemental like passively increasing haste by like 2% (random number) and active healing those within 10 yards for x amount (very small) when damaged split evenly.

5. Every spec should have an elemental theme: Resto with Healing Water(Primary)/Protective Earth(Secondary), Elemental with Offensive fire(Primary)/lightning(Secondary), and Enhancement with supporting air(Primary) & offensive fire(Secondary) these should all match ascendancy forms. Meaning resto does more healing than shielding, ele fire damage is greater than lightning damage and enhacement does raid utility(meaning spells like feral spirits are a higher % of damage done than spells that just do damage) greater than single target damage. Enhacement's healing through storm elemental/ancestral guidance and feral spirits should not be higher than say a ret paladin using sacred shield and Light's hammer.[Consistency].

6. Get rid of these totems that are used basically on CD and make them more impactful, idc if it's a demonology warlock type of system of building up elemental fury and then using it (CD permitting). ie. Healing stream would take less elemental fury (say 25) then healing tide (say 75) but healing tide would have a long CD (like now).

7. Can someone please explain to me why shocks share CDs in this day and age? I mean..cmon. Is it really OP to use flame shock and fulmination back to back? It just feels restrictive and not fun.

8.Why does Unleash Elements exist post 6.0? It's literally just a button I hit every 15 seconds that buffs another ability. It's not fun and would be fine as a longer CD so that the talents buffing it would stay, it's neat on paper but not fun in it's current state.

9. Each totem/spell should fit the theme of the type of magic being used ie. Water = Healing, Earth = Shielding/Defense, Fire = Damage, Air = Support. What I mean by this is say earth shield not having charges gets added flavor text to be something like "Cloak a friendly unit with the regenerative power of earth reducing damage of the next hit taken by x amount every couple of seconds." Have it act like a shield (earth) instead of healing (water).[Consistency]

10. Searing totem is by far the least impactful and most annoying spell I have ever used in the game to my recent memory. Something needs to dramatically change to it, or it needs to go in favor of something like the lvl 100 talent liquid magma, just buff it's damage really and make it projectiles look like the talent and make the talent just empower it for more damage on a long CD. As a way to buff single target damage.

11. Astral Recall should always return us to either orgrimmar or stormwind, remove the glyph requirement and this spell instantly gets some use by letting us have 2 different hearths, if this is too OP why do we also have a garrison hearth now? With the guild perk both AR and Hearth have the same CD so what's the point in having it if it doesn't take us somewhere else?

12. Grounding Totem - why does this not work more like a version of the Death Knight's anti magic shell with like a 3-5 min CD that absorbs x amount of magic damage before being destroyed. Is this too much? It could also just absorb 10% of magic damage taken by raid until it hits a certain threshold like 50k damage.

13. Totems in general, I like the idea of a elemental fury type system where then the text could be changed and instead of summoning a totem in a static place it's summoned but the range is increased to match it's more impactful nature and just dropping the totem from the name. something like healing stream totem going from what it is now to something like "Healing Stream - Invoke the spirit of water through a physical catalyst at your feet to come to your aid (?) that heals random a random target for x amount every y seconds lasts z seconds costs 25 elemental fury 1 min CD." Still buffed by rushing streams talent. ie. "Healing Tide - Invoke the spirit of water through a physical catalyst at your feet to come to your aid, Heals all targets for x amount every y seconds lasts z seconds costs 75 elemental fury 3 min CD."

Restoration

• Earth Shield - Why in the world does this skill still have a.) charges and b.) Such a pitiful duration?
  Wasn't this one of the things the pruning was supposed to fix unfun spells like these? They're iconic and should remain but they need QoL badly. (Hopefully fixed by above suggestion)
  The healing increase I'm okay with as a way to buff our single target healing while not buffing AoE healing (unless you chain heal a riptide'd earth shield'd tank with unleash life...but I'll get there, hold on.)
  
• Water Shield - See above.
  
• Searing Totem - Why in the world to resto shamans even have this spell? SMH
  
• Healing Stream Totem - While this ability has been around for a long time and even in big raids can be a big part of our healing done at the end of a fight, I feel it's very unfun to use, no ideas for this at the moment but something has to change in one way or another. With an elemental fury type system totems like this could be changed to being used less frequently and being more impactful (this = fun). Hopefully elaborated on above.
  
• Call Fire Elemental - For resto, remove it.
  
• Call Earth Elemental - Make it autocast a shield on people instead of a taunt. The shield would have to be casted on non-earth shield'd targets and only absorb like 10% of their max hp and last for like 10-15 seconds per person. Numbers can be changed, this is just an idea to make Earth Elemental useable in raid situations as preventive AoE shielding. (Taunt still a spell just not defaulted to auto cast while in groups of more than 3/4?)
  
• Spirit Link - This can remain as is but change it to "Invoke the spirit of Air that.....(same effect/CD)...within 10 feet of the caster. Lasts 6 seconds"
  
• Riptide - I am okay with this ability in theory, but why do the glyph and draenor perk contradict each other? I feel like it should heal for more as well in the form of having a longer duration (to help synergy with high tide and chain heal) and the glyph being scrapped. EotE should be good enough to blanket riptides for High Tided chain heals.
  
  Elemental
  
• Thunderstorm - This needs to take the place of earthquake and chain lightning's draenor perk should reduce it's cast time by say 10-15% per stack of the perk. Could also get rid of the damage increase (or at least decrease it to 10-15% same as casting time reduction), buff it's base damage to compensate. [ Consistency]
  
• Thunderstorm (live state) - Renamed to Lighting Explosion/Electric Feedback, still does everything Thunderstorm does now. Add some flavor text like "Makes your lightning shield explode causing all enemies around you..."
  
• Lava Burst - When I first started leveling this spell hit for a lot, now at 100 it seems like it barely hits for more than lightning bolt crits. I would be okay with making this only castable under the buff from Flame Shock (Lava Surge) and increasing it's damage to compensate. I think this should be our highest damage move for single target fights . Change learning Lava Surge(currently level 50) to same level Lava Burst is learned (currently level 34) to support this.
  
• Shamanistic Rage - I don't like this ability, but I understand why it exists. IMO, I would rather see it gone and a passive buff to all specs. For ele and enhance to compensate and for resto to compensate for not being able to earth shield yourself.
  
• Mastery: Molten Earth - This mastery seems okay but the fact of the matter is it does a good majority of our damage and is passive (!= fun), the damage of this needs to be toned down and split among lightning bolt/chain lightning/Lava Burst. Still buffs live earthquake ( now = Thunderstorm). Change it's wording to indicate it's more lava than rock. [Consistency].
  
  Enhancement
  
• Lightning Shield - changed to Air Shield (to match storm elemental and ascendancy form) gives some sort of attack speed buff passively to increase single target damage with a chance to heal friendly players around you for x when the caster takes damage. [Consistency]
  
• Fire Nova - This will probably get nerfed in one way or another, should see some buffs in other areas to compensate. I would think in the form of AoE healing via storm elemental and feral spirits.
  
• Feral Spirits - I think this spell should also heal all targets within say 10 yards for the damage the wolves do as a way of increasing enhancement's raid utility through healing, possibly even buffing Ancestral Guidance talent.
  
  I feel like these changes bring shaman's more in line with my vision of them being a more offensive/active oriented class as opposed to the more defensive/passive oriented paladin.
  
  I think the minor glyph should be added to change the appearance of our elementals to be more akin to the furies of draenor and they should all be ranged to avoid melee clutter baseline, with the exception of a taunting earth elemental.
  
  
  

I would love to hear any thoughts, comments or concerns with these proposed changes.

[shamantime]

*snip*

Shaman isn't really an "offensive" class in terms of its themes. Totems were pretty much the epitome of defense. You buff and protect your allies with totems. If anything the majority of Shamans' totems should highlight that defensive/anti-cc theme Shamans are known for with totems like Grounding, Windwalk, and Tremor. Of course this doesn't mean Shaman shouldn't have any offensive totems, there could be a few outliers all though,especially damage-wise, they should be more "impactful". Things like Searing Totem and Magma Totem shouldn't be a standard for offensive totems, instead think of powerful effects for a totem that we see in Prismatic Crystal for Mage and Statues for Monks.

[Deleted]

Yes please, change that totem system...i bet blizzard wont even read these type of threads though

[Rezhka]

From PvP wise, totem as short cd utilities are fine by me. What's bugging me is the GCD and element restrictions while most defensive utilities are being stacked on one element (windwalk, capacitor, and grounding on air duhhh). And that restriction is forcing me to get Totemic Persistent talent, kinda dull to me while i love some totem projection on some case.

I agree totem on PvE is pretty much drop and forget, especially for DPS shaman. Since they've become utilities cooldown, their significance on raid is kinda diminished to compare with old time totem that provide exclusive raid buffs for the whole fight at all time. But its also fine by me. I mean they're still being our utilities arsenal despite of the up times.

Of all totems that really feel dull to me is Searing Totem. I think it's the only totem that direly need a rework, so it's not being such passive fire stick with insignificant (if not shitty) damage and role. Maybe a little tweak like increasing it damage and make it multishot to all targets with Flame Shock, will make it worthwhile for Ele to spread multi Flame Shock on cleave fight.

[shamantime]

From PvP wise, totem as short cd utilities are fine by me. What's bugging me is the GCD and element restrictions while most defensive utilities are being stacked on one element (windwalk, capacitor, and grounding on air duhhh). And that restriction is forcing me to get Totemic Persistent talent, kinda dull to me while i love some totem projection on some case.

I agree totem on PvE is pretty much drop and forget, especially for DPS shaman. Since they've become utilities cooldown, their significance on raid is kinda diminished to compare with old time totem that provide exclusive raid buffs for the whole fight at all time. But its also fine by me. I mean they're still being our utilities arsenal despite of the up times.

Of all totems that really feel dull to me is Searing Totem. I think it's the only totem that direly need a rework, so it's not being such passive fire stick with insignificant (if not shitty) damage and role. Maybe a little tweak like increasing it damage and make it multishot to all targets with Flame Shock, will make it worthwhile for Ele to spread multi Flame Shock on cleave fight.

I very much like the multi-shot idea for Flame Shock. Especially in PvP that would be nice, it would kind of give Elemental rot damage in 3s.

[Moofahssa]

First post here after reading so much regarding our pretty much useless totems. Been a resto shaman for some 8 years now and through all the changes (both good and bad) over that time I can still say I enjoy playing the class. I have not read all previous posts so I apologize if this has been mentioned in a previous post; one thing I would be okay with when it comes to our totems is the ability to place them where we want to, not Totemic Projection, where it has to first be dropped then repositioned, but an ability like a hunters Trap Launcher whereby we can activate it or not and allow us to drop it at our current position or at the targeted area. It would be nice to drop that Capacitor Totem, Searing Totem, Healing Stream/Tide Totem in a place where it might actually be useful, instead of having to run to a spot (through fire or suppression fields) to drop it.