Shields for Shamans and Holy Paladins

[Tempos]

I think everyone would agree that all Resto/ele shamans and all holy paladins use a caster shield, simply because they are itemized for the respective classes. With cataclysm coming, resto and ele are going to have the more readily available staves and caster offhands that now provide the now worth while spirit. On the mean-hand, Holy paladins will be able to benefit from the offhands, but not the staves (seeing as Paladins cannot equip staves lol.) Both will still be able to use shields, but would only be superior in a PvP setting for the added armor and the special abilities for paladins. The problem may become that shields will be very hard to come by, and most players will still want them for the extra survivability they provide.

The ideal solution? Get rid of caster shields (and in a sense just removing shields from Shaman period), and increase the base survivability of shaman to compensate. Shaman have no real talents that prop up the use of shields to begin with, and no real lore to support the use of them either. They were honestly put in vanilla wow to try and equalize Paladins to Shaman.

Now, that seems like a lot of dev work to do for a whole lot of nothing. The real beauty comes with what that opens up with paladins. Give holy paladins tank shields. Add a deep holy talent that converts the stats on the tank shield into healing stats (like strength to int and stam to spirit.) This would allow a higher itemization of shields in raids(and could be a good stepping stone on possibly removing spell power plate all together.)

Please, tell me what you think!

**On a side-note, I currently do not have an active WoW account so I am unable to post on the official forums. If any of you out there think this might be a good idea, could you please post this on the official forums, I would really like to see this change happen.**

-Tempos of Shadowsong
-Stelsol of Balnazzar

Peace

[M4d2m0A]

Spirit is going to be a mana user stat. It's going to be directly tied with mana regen for casters. Ele shamans get a talent that takes their spirit and gives you hit rating from it. With this in mind I'm sure they will be putting spirit on caster shields.

I don't see what the big deal is, I personally like having shields. Just think about it, would you rather roll for an item thats designed for only 3 specs in the game, or have to roll against all the other people that can use offhands or caster staffs (5 classes, 12 specs, NOT including shamans)

Shamans originally got shields because you had to spec into 2 handed weapons for enhance. I think it was a tier 2 or 3 talent, meaning that even as enhance you were using a shield until lvl 20-30. It wasn't until TBC that shamans got dual wielding as a talent and 2 handers as a trainable skill.

I think that this would be a very unnecessary change.

[SolSphere]

Posted:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...656598&sid=1#0

[builderthebob]

Actually, the lore does support shaman using shields. Far Seers in WC3 used shields, and some shaman bosses in WOW used shields. I doubt they're going to rid of shields for any lore reasons. But honestly, I agree, just get rid of caster shields. They're honestly not going to make an abundance of them, and some shamans still have a hard time getting Bulwark of Smouldering Steel.

Besides, they're definitely not going to get rid of shaman ability to use shield, especially in Cataclysm due to reason which can't discuss without getting myself banned.