Ghostcrawler answered some of the often question that are floating around shaman forums here and on other MMO discussion based websites.
First of all thanks GC for taking your time
I would like to go one by one and analyze his answers a bit.
That is actually (at least for me) pretty good news, as long as it does competitive damage with other AoEs.When will ele not have to run into melee to do aoe?
When you're casting Earthquake?
That it actually a good question for Telluric Currents. But that will have to be tested if it is worth to go deep into the elemental tree for hit, or to take something from Enhancement tree and something from Elemental. This will also depends on gear.1) Are resto shaman now the only healer being forced to spec into a hit talent to supplement their active mana recovery ability? Paladins now apparently get the hit that was in enlightened judgements for free?
Our goal was to not have all of the healer talent trees to be mirror images of each other. So a priest might get one thing for free and have to talent into something else. As long as the end result is pretty similar (e.g. the priest can't get everything for free and just be able to spend talent points on candy) then it should be fine.
We all have to agree that Thunderstorm (apart of pvp fun) was a very bad try for an AoE spell, but still i think the question was posed wrongly. It is not true that every class got something that changed their gameplay. Yes, TS is not a spell worth 51p talent, but so is not Disperse etc.Personally, I'd like to know the rationale behind the fact that the Elemental Shamans did not recieve any spells that alter their rotation on 'primary' targets. Their level 10 effect was something halfway between a mana restore, an AoE, and a pvp gimmick. Our capstone of the talent tree is an AoE. I can't think of any other dps spec that doesn't get something 'unique' that changes their rotation from the other specs.
That's just part of the shaman design though, namely that Enhancement still cares a lot about spells instead of being a 100% melee weapon class. I'd argue that Enhance and Elemental still play fairly differently (such that you do have to adjust when respeccing). I'm not sure the mage design, where there is virtually no overlap among talent trees, is a superior model. It's just a different model.
"Thats just part of the shaman design, namely that Enhancement still cares a lot about spells instead of being a 100% melee weapon class" i have no idea why is GC talking about enhancement shamans while the question was aimed to Elemental.
If GC says we should not worry about mana, i will not. I believe it would not be big issue if enhas would have some problems getting OOM, and blizz would do the needed actions (boosting primal wisdom etc)Mana - I've heard mana has recently begun to be an issue for Enhancement in the last few beta builds. Will the ultimate solution just be to tweak Primal Wisdom s'more? Oh, and what about all that discussion about moving Primal Wisdom to being part of Enhancement's lvl 10 skillset? It's going to be hellish on new Enhancers not having their primary mana restoration technique until much later. Also on the table here, and I'm sorry it touches on totems again - a full set of totems or an AoE rotation kills Enhancement's mana very very quickly. It'd be nice if the mana cost got reduced on some of these abilities.
It's not the intent that Enhancement has to worry about mana a lot. Generally you should have enough mana to do what you want to do. It's a model we're still adjusting. We haven't quite established a base regen for the casters and healers that we're happy with and every time we tweak that, it affects the Ret paladins and Enhancement shaman, who aren't really supposed to be mana-constrained.
I dont know if anyone already tested the the new maelstrom effect. if yes please post your findings here.
Personally i still think that elemental and enhancement tier 1 talents are a bit gimmick and hope that the 3% critical strike is still a placeholder / the number will be different. If it would be haste, than it would be awesome for all 3 specs. but 3% critical strike for 3 talents points are just silly.This is the kind of thing I'm talking about. Tier 1 of Enhance is one of the bigger culprits. While tier 2 has one talent that's really attractive (nigh on required for Elemental and Enhance), tier 1 is pretty bland. People would prefer to skip over Imp Shields, and Elemental Weapons is a flat spell power buff that scales with level rather than gear.
The model we're trying to use for all the classes is that you can't just soak up no-brainer talents in the first few tiers. Often there is a dps talent, and then a survival talent and then maybe an efficiency talent. You definitely get the first one, but you often need to get one of the others to progress down. This is what we mean about not being able to cherry pick just throughput-oriented talents and skipping everything else that is utility, etc. It's an evolving process though. I'm not sure I could point to a class yet and say "There. We nailed it."
Im not trying to say that every our talent should be utility, but a 2 points to increase totem range for 12yards? These are not the right steps to accomplish the " we want to get rid of boring lackluster talents"
I can remember from vanilla, that we actually HAD talent that increased the range of totems and was removed, because devs didnt want us to have to spec into the talent that increases range on totems. And here we are now. On the other hand, the totem talent in restoration tree seems to be way more "fun" and better solution.
As long as it might be a challenge, i believe if elemental and enhancement tree would get revamped a bit, we would have the need to go that deeply to elemental tree.Also, Enhance has 9 "required" points in Elemental - would be 10 if it weren't for Ancestral Swiftness - on top of their own tree being filled up, which highly limits their utility options (well, to be more specific, limits them to 0). Even if an additional point or two were freed up, they may feel obligated to spend those to grab the third point in Acuity (which I don't like as 3 points to start with - it creates a 'floater' point in Elemental specs rather than getting us stuck around tier 4 needing to pick a full utility talent, which I think is a good thing. But I digress), or Improved Shields, even though all three are fairly marginal DPS gains.
Yup. This is a challenge. As I mentioned above, Enhancement likes spell damage so it's hard to put anything in Elemental that Elemental wants that Enhancement also doesn't want.
Hmmm Fire Shield ? > No seriously, its a good thing that we are talking about the usefulness of shields for Elemental spec. BUT not another RNG PLEASE! (sorry for the caps, i heard i get more attention while using it)Lightning and Water shield do not seem that useful for Elemental in many ways.
Agreed. This is something we're discussing. A new shield doesn't have to be the answer though.
I gotta agree with GC here. It was a completely silly question. It is a talent that increases something that you often do. If it would be changed to Earthliving, people would start complain its talent dependant on RNG imbue. If it would be changed for Riptide. Well, its kinda the same. Riptide has CD, and lasts way shorter than ES.- Nature's Blessing doesn't feel like a bonus when healing earth shielded targets, it feels like a penalty when healing targets without it. If the intent is to make shamans better tank healers, perhaps make it work in some other way. Perhaps change it to Earthliving or Riptide instead of Earth Shield?
This is the kind of feedback we struggle with a lot on most classes. As soon as something grants a bonus, it feels like a penalty when it's not up because players are very efficiency-focused. If it was say Riptide, wouldn't it feel like a penalty whenever Riptide wasn't available? Or a penalty because every heal cost that extra GCD for Riptide in order to behave at maximum efficiency?
Yep the lad speaks truth. We want to be treated like other hybrids. Look at warrior (no not with shadowmourne), they are doing crazy damage. If the kitty is well played they are also doing crazy damage. And they still have more survivability than we do. But yes, make us DPS comparable and youll make a lot of people happy.Honestly GC when our dps is competitive with the other hybrid specs you barely ever see us whine. We just really want to be as good as others. It's when it isn't that we come out in masses to whine about everything. Since our totems are our thing they are what is an easy target for our QQ. I guarantee you that if we do competitive DPS and never fall behind the endless Shaman crying will be puddles instead of rivers.
I agree with that. I think a lot of the complaints about "we're the only class" or "are buffs aren't awesome enough" only come to bear when dps is low. As I said recently, we think Enhancement dps was competitive when there wasn't a lot of movement involved and when you weren't competing with guys using orange weapons. We can fix the movement problem. We don't think we need to fix the legendary "problem" because those Shadowmournes will all be banked at level 85.
Also GC you stated that we were fine on static fights (DS, fester). As long as this is actually true, we were GCD locked all the time. We have too much little damage contributors.
Again a bit weird question, they are not the same spells, they are situational. Chain heal is only 4 targets glyphed, and i believe that rain HR will not have target limit. Thats good for fights where there is lets say damagin aura o infest-like damaging spell.I honestly don't see how healing rains AND chain heal are needed. Both are AoE heals fill the same role (heal people grouped together).
They are different spells with different niches. Chain Heal excels when you have a small number of players injured and Healing Rain is more for those big bursts when everyone takes damage. There are enough occasions when you need to heal say more than just the tank that we think healers can stand to have several different strategies to deal with it.
Yep that is what we need. O'SHIIIT button, i believe that we are almost only class / spec with no "at least" oh shit button. Shamanistic rage-like ability that reduces the incoming damage for atleast 90% percent. That would help us also in PvP.(4) Any chance that the stoneclaw glyph can become baseline or something? I'm mostly fine with the totem utility vs. buff thing, but it seems fairly weird to have this non-scaling bubble as a secondary effect of a totem. If it can't be baseline, is it being compensated for? Hance isn't exactly a survivability powerhouse.
We are changing a lot of glyphs. It's too early to know which ones we are keeping. If this one dies then we might consider putting in the functionality elsewhere.
Well i came here for open discussion, so anything comes to your mind, please post here.
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