Hi,
I have a shaman level 60 currently and I am debating whether to get it 80, and whether I would even bother playing if it was 80. I play a priest holy/disc right now but I wanted a new healer so I tried shaman. Now I do understand the class pretty well but I wanted to know how some things work when pvping/raiding at 80.
First thing is, totems. As an elemental shaman which totems should I be using? Currently to level I use the Armor Totem, Totem of Wrath, and the Mana-return totem (I don't use any air totems to level because they are a waste of mana, there ain't any good ones yet). Lets say I'm dpsing an instance do I just keep those ones out, or do I put the strength/agility earth totem out if we have loads of melee dps? What about if I'm a melee shaman and someone wants tremor totem out, do I sacrifice the strength/agility totem for that?
It's not like a priest puts Power Word Shield on someone, but then loses 200 spellpower for the duration of the shield, and then spellpower goes back up when the shield is off. Because that is what shaman feels like. If I was dpsing an instance as elemental, I wouldn't use anything other than Totem of Wrath fire totem no matter what anybody said to me. Would I be wrong to do that?
What about in pvp? To be honest I am dreading 80 pvp. Again its like totems are so inconvenient. I know what you are going to say, use specific totems for specific situations but the whole gameplay feels broken. We have the totem bar, but not all totems last the same duration, so I tend to have the 5 min totems on the bar, and I have all the other totems on my action bar. And because there are so many its just so confusing.
The class feels like this: A priest can do whatever spell he wants, whenever he wants (as long as its off cd). As a shaman, you can only do 2-3 things at once. You can't AOE slow while using a strength buff. You can't remove diseases while you haste buff is active. And its like the decisions you have to make don't even make sense. Why do I have to choose between and AOE slow or a strength buff? Choose between strength and spellpower, choose between HP regen and mana regen, etc. The class feels SO limited compared to other classes. Imagine a rogue can now only have a maximum of 4 self-buffs and/or target debuffs active at once. They would suck.
I can imagine someone posting dps meters and I'm not as high as I should be because someone made me put frost resistence totem down. If someone meter spammed when I used totems that helped everyone and not just myself I would be pretty annoyed, and that is bound to happen. What does everyone else make of this?
Another thing is I keep seeing that shamans benefit from haste more than any other stat. Now to be honest I would have said get nothing but crit and spellpower. Wouldn't an 80 elemental shaman do some awesome dps with all crit and spellpower? The resto tree also benefits from crit. And I haven't noticed any talents to make me want to increase my haste. So can someone explain that to me please?