Originally Posted by
Omanley
/signed.
Cant wrap my head around that change really, not mentioning increased cast time to 1.7s, and Hex not even friggin' taking control of the target away. Plus there's crappy CPT and Bind Elemental, as niche as it was, got removed. Shaman CC will be beyond bad.
The entire work they did in terms of dealing damage as enh was switched from heavy burst with Ascendence to Ascendence being more of a mobility tool, really (with a very long cooldown), and being more based on applying pressure with lots of uptime, which is a nerf in that enh has the worst mobility as melee.
The fact that blizz replies to concerns about mobility with "You'll have UE sprint and GW ololol" and totem concerns "Totem talent is fine, people use it trolololol" tells you a lot.
Looking at survivability, HST was turned braindead, Healing Tide made resto only, AG nerfed...so big nerfs to selfheal.
In terms of mitigation, shamans were never very strong.
SBT can be insta killed as an 1m cd absorb you'll have to talent, doesn't stack on itself and requires a constant amount of damage taken over it's 30s duration to fully be made of use, and it's possible 50% uptime messes with other earth totems, which would bring us back to totems being bad.
And as Darksoldierr pointed out, we have no combat-reset button, like others have it with vanish, bubble, dispersion, deterrence, ice block, touch of karma or how it's called and whatever else is out there atm.
Soo...nerfed selfheal, unsufficient absorb, no oh-shit! button => questionable survivability. Dont forget for MSW healing we need the uptime we wont have.
Totems are still subpar. Without exception, the majority of our utility consists of immobile short range aoe effects, that have for the most part only 5hp, lock other totems of the same element out, are not useable during silence despite having physical drawbacks and aren't even strong effect-wise. Your run-of-the-mill totem grants either equal or (mostly) worse versions of other, comparable, pvp utility.
To make it short: Totems are the weakest form of utility. Wether in the form of absorbs, stuns, heals, "reflects", cc breakers or what have you.
Summed up:
-Bad/Worst cc
-Bad/Worst mobility
-Bad/Worst survivability
-Flat out worst utility
We made up for the above (the 3rd of which wasn't as bad as it will likely be in WoD) with Ascendence burst, which will be castrated come WoD. Take a guess wether or not number passes will turn this around. They need to friggin adress these issues, or we're screwed.
-Replace totem tier with a mobility one (damned good tools, I'd might add) or improve ours a lot base line (buffing UE sprint to 60-80% speed and removing snares would be a possibility, or adding a leap that transforms into GW, similar to druid talent)
-Redo totems in terms of restrictions. Remove the 1totem/element restriction (Esp with elemental Totems and SBT, totem talents will be a bother to take otherwise), period. Make some totems undestroyable, like EBT or Tremor, buff others health, maybe make ST/MT/Elementals mobile (fire totems could be carried by hot winds, Elementals could have theirs imbedded in their bodies), allow Grounding/Tremor to be used while silenced, etc. They are different-from-each-other tools and need differing balancing, obviously.
-Make LS glyph baseline, GW and CPT as well, and maybe FS (FS to bring some selfheal back that works without uptime)
-Make Hex instant cast and make it take away the target's control, as it already does against npcs.
-PROFIT