I did not actively participate in the WoD alpha/beta/PTR - i mostly just read about the changes.
There were a lot of balance patches during the last few weeks before the WoD pre-patch was released onto Live servers.
I was quite confused that pretty much the only shaman changes were constant mana cost reductions, no major damage tweaking (some EQ buff?).
Which is rather strange since most other classes got dmg buffs/nerfs of up to 40% on certain abilities - and i am not convinced that Shamans just happened to be perfectly balanced even before the "number tweak" phase began.
Then a few days ago, one of the blue devs tweeted on the whole "mana" thing:
Q: "Any reason Ele has 0 mana regen whatsoever? Are they just intended to be horrible in WoD because there is really no reason."
A: "Their damage spells have almost no cost."
First i gotta say i am confused by that dev answer - by their logic, it is best to have no mana regen and no cost on damage spells?!
What about off-healing and utility in PvP and PvE, most of those spells require quite a bit of mana?!
Somehow i doubt that Druid/Paladin/Priest DPS specs are having these same mana regen issues that would prevent them from using off-healing and utility spells...
And then today most shaman damage spells got their mana costs halved again in the october 23rd 6.0.3 beta build!
I got no clue wtf is going on:
- Why were almost all the changes that happened to Elem/Enha in the past month (or two) just about massive mana cost reductions?
- If Elem and Enha have such awful awful mana regeneration, how are they to use off-healing and utility in PvP (and PvE i guess)?
- How are Elem and Enha doing so far on the damage meters (or simulations)? Are they really in a fine place, or is blizz ignoring the issues?
- Are the rest of the hybrid/dps classes also experiencing this "awful mana regeneration" issue, or is it a dps-shaman-only problem?
I always liked the fact that my Elem and Enha can toss out a bit of healing and utility when needed - and not just through big cooldowns like AG.
I dearly hope that blizzard is not forcing shaman DPS specs to play like pure DPS specs, where we just focus on DPS without the "hybrid" off-healing or utility...