Anyone else think that Totem should not be considered as spells?

[Altrec]

Ok, since this change is going to happen it is time to look at what to do to help Ele/Enhance. Since the devs seem to be under the impression that nobody silences Enhancement anyway I say we just make Enhance immune to silences. :O
As for Elemental I have no idea I guess they are screwed.

[Blitond]

Resto's OP, and they can't understand why anyone wouldn't just play the FoTM spec?

If you're looking at a 1v1 scenario, then yes healers are OP. They will always be OP, and it's how it's always been.

If resto is OP, then so is holy paladins and resto druids. If this nerf goes live (and it looks like it will) then blizzard needs to significantly nerf holy and resto as well. Both specs have better representation at 2200+.

[Deleted]

Ok, since this change is going to happen it is time to look at what to do to help Ele/Enhance. Since the devs seem to be under the impression that nobody silences Enhancement anyway I say we just make Enhance immune to silences. :O
As for Elemental I have no idea I guess they are screwed.

Of course enhancement get silenced! And actually its maybe the worst think can happen to enha. If maelstrom gets 5 stacks and u r not rdy to self heal in time that maybe your end. And a smart opponent will know when this time comes, and silence the shaman. And above that, here comes the totems nerf. Grounding totem dropping is most useful for enha shamans and not elemental. Cause enha must go melee in order to dmg their enemies, and stack maelstroms for self heal and/or insta hex. So if i get silenced and not be able to drop grounding I m totally fcked. Especially against mages..

[Omanley]

All I can say to all of this is: Thank god I didn't repeat my mistake from last time and resub for the new x-pack, and waited how the game developes over the first few months.
I didn't really expect them to super-buff ele/enh, but I wouldn't have in my wildest dreams thought they'd step so low and crap on the whole class like that. Esp after cata beta, where I got the impression they cared at least a little, fixing quite a few things.

They're either completely dumb/ignorant for not realising how much they're ruining totems with that (and not realising that totems weren't even remotely overpowered (haven't been for eight years)) OR they are complete a**holes for doing this on purpose to spite us.

And in before someone accuses me of trolling or conspiracies or w/e: Are there any other options then the two above? I cant think of any. Everyone playing a shaman with at least a little bit commitment knows what crap they are doing right now. You have to be either ignorant or a douche to perpetrate something like this. Yeah that's right, taking the last positive iconic aspect of a shamans' totems out of the game is a crime against shamans imo.

It's comparable to removing druid forms, stealth, death grip and mortal strike. Unthinkable.
Totems were to strong..hahaha

[shell]

If you're looking at a 1v1 scenario, then yes healers are OP. They will always be OP, and it's how it's always been.

Resto's OP, and they can't understand why anyone wouldn't just play the FoTM spec?

This quote was in response to this one,

and what is up with ppl thinking that shaman is resto, resto, resto.

This is neither here nor there, but I don't think healers are OP because they're healers. That seems to suggest they're OP because they can heal. That's not really the case though. It's all the stuff that they can do outside of healing: their utility, their survival cds, their cc.

Part of the reason there aren't a lot of disc priests currently is because their survival, outside of their heals, took a hit from not having Focused Will. This is changing in 5.1. Holy priests have never really been seen as an OP healing spec. They don't have anything like Pain Supression; they don't even have an aura mastery.

Holy Paladins and Resto Shamans, as far as I know, were no where to be found on the arena ladders in Wrath. Historically, as far as I know, Resto Druids have pretty much always been OP except during Cataclysm when their survival took a hit.

So to me its not that they're healers, its the whole toolkit, that can make them sometimes too strong. I mean...that's the reason for this nerf, right? Resto's toolkit is seen as too strong and so the dev's are nerfing them. Unfortunately, the dps specs are getting caught in the crossfire.

[Bobzor]

GC up doing his thing on twitter again. Starting to think that he's just trolling for his own entertainment. Will probably release new patchnotes soon with some compensation to ele and ehance. No other way to explain it tbh.

[Endus]

This is neither here nor there, but I don't think healers are OP because they're healers. That seems to suggest they're OP because they can heal. That's not really the case though. It's all the stuff that they can do outside of healing: their utility, their survival cds, their cc.

I don't think that healers should have the capability to keep someone up under sustained focus.

Delay the inevitable? Yes, sure. But it should move a "takes 5-10 seconds to burst them to death" to "takes 20-30 seconds to burst them to death". As it stands right now, I just think healing overall is way too powerful in PvP.

And before anyone says, again, "but that would make them useless", no, it wouldn't. If you're up against a 3 DPS team, and you can drop one in 5-10 seconds, while they only get their target to 50% due to your heals, you're winning. You shouldn't be able to keep them up indefinitely, ESPECIALLY with instant-cast heals (I'd be more open to heals with big cast times providing such sustainability, which improves PvE performance too), just delay the death long enough for your allies to turn the tide.

PvP isn't a raid fight. You don't have to keep them up for 5 minutes of constant healing. You just need to keep them up until the enemy starts dropping.

I also really, really dislike the whole trinity system, and I don't think it encourages good design. Most bosses in WoW boil down to "here's your role, and here's a bunch of mechanics that you can 100% ignore because the boss is too stupid to ever use them on you". Tanking's the worst, but healing as a role is meh. I'd rather see a system where much more damage was avoidable and everyone had to help slap some heals on as necessary; having healers tends to encourage bad gameplay. Look at LFR; most DPS just ignore mechanics because the healers can heal through it and the tanks can't lose threat. Not "fun", in my mind. But that's a debate for another day. I'd rather see a world where everyone was a hybrid.

So to me its not that they're healers, its the whole toolkit, that can make them sometimes too strong. I mean...that's the reason for this nerf, right? Resto's toolkit is seen as too strong and so the dev's are nerfing them. Unfortunately, the dps specs are getting caught in the crossfire.

It's never really that the other healers are terrible, though. It's that any other healer is so much better. If you're playing the "bad" healer spec, and go up against a team with the much stronger "good" healer spec, your team's gonna lose. Not because you're not doing your job, but because the other guy does it so much better.

It's the same reason Elemental is crap in PvP right now. They've got awesome tools. Everyone else has more of them and better ones. If everyone were tuned down to Elemental, it'd be just as fine as buffing Elemental up to their point.

My issue with healer strength right now is that, if you don't lock down the healer, you typically can't burst down the DPS. So their comp forces you to fight them a certain way. I dislike that, since it minimizes the variation in PvP and makes it much more predictable; either they'll try and kill the healer, in which case he's ready for it, or they try and kill the DPS, and the team lulz and heals through it and wins. If you could go either way, the healer would have to be ready for anything, and it would raise the skillcap, allowing you to more easily play mindgames, which is what PvP SHOULD be about.

[Deleted]

I also really, really dislike the whole trinity system, and I don't think it encourages good design. Most bosses in WoW boil down to "here's your role, and here's a bunch of mechanics that you can 100% ignore because the boss is too stupid to ever use them on you". Tanking's the worst, but healing as a role is meh. I'd rather see a system where much more damage was avoidable and everyone had to help slap some heals on as necessary; having healers tends to encourage bad gameplay. Look at LFR; most DPS just ignore mechanics because the healers can heal through it and the tanks can't lose threat. Not "fun", in my mind. But that's a debate for another day. I'd rather see a world where everyone was a hybrid.

You basically describing GW2 system here..

[Lavindar]

You basically describing GW2 system here..

I thought the same, but I think the post is going a bit offtopic, this is the shaman forum, not the healers forum.

Anyway, I think this situation it's pretty the same that the time they took druids ability to break roots shapeshifting, and I hope in the and they revert this change too, for the looks, the patch will go live with this change.

[Frazzle.d]

Right in the feels guys. As a Hunter, I too find it confusing at times what I'm meant to do while disarmed. Thankfully the Monk Grapple move is being nerfed to the level other disarms work at in pvp, but for years I have always used a weapon chain; I feel as though there isn't an option for PvP Hunters out there, particularly the non BM believers, to keep in the game a bit longer at the cost of damage. You can always turn off Trap Launcher, but then blanket silences stop us from laying traps because they are magic school abilities

It's not a common occurrance and will get rarer after 5.1, but it is annoying to get blasted by a blanket silence if stuns and interrupts are being used on, say, a healer while you are powerless.

[paror]

My issue with healer strength right now is that, if you don't lock down the healer, you typically can't burst down the DPS. So their comp forces you to fight them a certain way. I dislike that, since it minimizes the variation in PvP and makes it much more predictable; either they'll try and kill the healer, in which case he's ready for it, or they try and kill the DPS, and the team lulz and heals through it and wins. If you could go either way, the healer would have to be ready for anything, and it would raise the skillcap, allowing you to more easily play mindgames, which is what PvP SHOULD be about.

Comming from 2300+ rbg and 2100mmr ele shaman here(not boosting, just mentioning what I am seeing on those ratings): People(not only shaman) die in a global atm, with insane warrior burst, demo/destro burst, frost/fire mages (before that hunter) So I am not really agreeing to that statement.

People can however heal 400k+ in a heal the point at the moment is you cant really react to a 400k damage in 1/2 globals as a healer.

So I would love to reduce burst damage a bit, lower healing burst output but increase more sustained healing. So you need to land cc to actually kill something but dont need to chain cc 5 mins. and the healers needs to be smarter with mana and cd's (more tbc model)

Just my 2 cents.

p.s if no buffs, there is going to be a major shaman class dropout I fear. People are already tired of the bullshit blizzard is giving them and to add that fucktard gc tweets on top of that. Really..... He just doesnt fucking care. at all....

[shell]

It's never really that the other healers are terrible, though. It's that any other healer is so much better. If you're playing the "bad" healer spec, and go up against a team with the much stronger "good" healer spec, your team's gonna lose. Not because you're not doing your job, but because the other guy does it so much better.

It's the same reason Elemental is crap in PvP right now. They've got awesome tools. Everyone else has more of them and better ones. If everyone were tuned down to Elemental, it'd be just as fine as buffing Elemental up to their point.

True, but I'm not holding my breath on specs being brought up or down to a similar playing field. Plus, I think on some level it benefits them to have an 'OP' spec here and there. Many players seem to like playing dominant specs. If the differences between specs aren't big enough then no one stands out which could be seen as boring. At least that's my observation, when I see the reaction to nerfs, and the response is usually 'time to reroll.' For all I know rogues are perfectly viable but they were brought down and now I hardly see them in the ladders. Warrior seems to be the new rogue.

I dislike that, since it minimizes the variation in PvP and makes it much more predictable;

I agree with this. I've never understood, when the whole pve v pvp debate pops up, the argument is always that pve is bad because its scripted. So is pvp but most people just don't know the script. For some reason, people will read about/figure out how to defeat raid bosses but they don't spend the same time learning how to defeat spec x...then they go on the forums and tell blizz to nerf them. High-ranked players aren't just good because they play their class/spec really, they're also good because they know the other classes/specs really well. So when you have a high-ranked 3v3 match, each team knows exactly what the other is going to do, they're just waiting for the other to make a mistake.

[Endus]

Comming from 2300+ rbg and 2100mmr ele shaman here(not boosting, just mentioning what I am seeing on those ratings): People(not only shaman) die in a global atm, with insane warrior burst, demo/destro burst, frost/fire mages (before that hunter) So I am not really agreeing to that statement.

People can however heal 400k+ in a heal the point at the moment is you cant really react to a 400k damage in 1/2 globals as a healer.

So I would love to reduce burst damage a bit, lower healing burst output but increase more sustained healing. So you need to land cc to actually kill something but dont need to chain cc 5 mins. and the healers needs to be smarter with mana and cd's (more tbc model)

Just my 2 cents.

Yeah, I'm not saying "just nerf healers, everything else is fine", I'm talking about a major overhaul making healing both significantly less effective AND damage, but the damage nerf being a bit lower, so that healing can't keep up forever.

But we're getting sidetracked and I didn't want to turn this into a "discuss PvP healing" thread. This thread is about Shaman totem changes. I just wanted to make that one aside about healers to explain the basis of the rest of my stance towards this change and the PvP design ethics that are resulting in it, not to derail the thread into a new topic.

---------- Post added 2012-11-20 at 08:33 PM ----------

I agree with this. I've never understood, when the whole pve v pvp debate pops up, the argument is always that pve is bad because its scripted. So is pvp but most people just don't know the script. For some reason, people will read about/figure out how to defeat raid bosses but they don't spend the same time learning how to defeat spec x...then they go on the forums and tell blizz to nerf them. High-ranked players aren't just good because they play their class/spec really, they're also good because they know the other classes/specs really well. So when you have a high-ranked 3v3 match, each team knows exactly what the other is going to do, they're just waiting for the other to make a mistake.

I usually try and describe PvE as a fight against an unfair opponent, and PvP as a fight against an equal opponent. The only way you CAN beat PvE is because of the predictable nature of boss patterns.

But you're right; particularly at higher ends of PvP, players become more predictable. I like using chess as an analogy because it's a similar player vs player setup, but you'll often see two masters sit down and play the first 20-30 moves in about a minute. Because they know all the openings and how to react. It's once you get past that early stuff that things start to get complicated. PvP in WoW is much the same; you know the rules and the game, and so does your opponent, so you can know that making move X will force them into response Y, or maybe Z.

I think it's getting TOO preditable, and it's a big part of why I don't enjoy it (whereas I DO enjoy PvP action in plenty of other games, even games which are entirely PvP-oriented).

[Teriz]

This is a very surprising (in a head-scratching sort of way) change. I don't understand it. Yeah PvP resto is strong, but they're not OP in any sense. At least not anymore OP than other healers in PvP.

I wish I knew what Blizzard is thinking in terms of direction for the class.

[Omanley]

I wish I knew what Blizzard is thinking in terms of direction for the class.

I wish THEY knew what they're thinking. :P

Tbh what they say sounds like they felt shamans were always OP (which would explain A LOT), so there wasn't much need of patches in comparison to others :P.
"Totems are so op, dont even think about buffs." Along those lines

[Endus]

On this GC tweet from yesterday; "it was intended as a nerf to totems. Now that they do things (not just buffs) they were hard to counter."

I have always, always supported the totem design, in that totems were low-health and killable, despite people complaining that this made them too vulnerable. I have always said that this vulnerability was the tradeoff to their potential, and that it was what kept them balanced; they were relatively easy for literally anyone to counter, particularly melee.

I cannot see how totems are "hard to counter", unless your opponents are just not very good and are ignoring your totems completely. Hard to prevent them being dropped? Sure. They were usable while Silenced, and some of them had powerful on-drop effects. But they have ALWAYS been easy to remove. No other class has an AoE slow that can be negated with a single instant cast or a melee swing from one of the people caught in it; a frost trap is going to leave that patch on the ground and you'll have to go around it. That killable nature has ALWAYS been the counterpoint, and it was a very significant one.

Tremor is supposed to break fears when dropped. That's what they changed it into. Grounding Totem has, as well, always been useful immediately when dropped. Killing Healing Stream/Tide, or Earthbind/grab, these all vastly reduce that totem's benefit. Spirit Link Totem has a really strong first tick, but you can kill the continued effect just as easily as the others. The only utility totems we have which could be the issue are ones they changed to be precisely this reactive. The others are the healing ones, for Resto, and rely on your opponents not killing them like they should be. It's the equivalent of complaining "nerf ice block, I keep blowing all my cooldowns to try and burst through it and it doesn't help". That's not an argument against Ice Block, that's an argument explaining why you're bad at this game.

Totems are the only killable utility in the game. That's already a massive restriction on them; literally anyone can remove them, not just people with an offensive dispel. If the idea is that they're too strong on that immediate drop so they want it to be more controllable, then I think they should remove that killable nature. Or at least increase the base health to a highish value, like say 10-20% of the Shaman's health, with Glyph of Totemic Vigor at least doubling that value. Force people to lock our totems out with interrupts and dispels, but make them nigh-unkillable when we can pull them off. Both makes them ridiculously unusable in PvP.

They should be either easy for anyone to remove OR easy for anyone to lock out. Not both.

[Omanley]

Well put, endus. People are just to lazy to target totems. Blizz doesn't look into this any further and reches the conclusion: "People bitch about it all the time, so they must be overpowered".

[Teriz]

I wish THEY knew what they're thinking. :P

Tbh what they say sounds like they felt shamans were always OP (which would explain A LOT), so there wasn't much need of patches in comparison to others :P.
"Totems are so op, dont even think about buffs." Along those lines

That could explain it, but I just can't believe they would believe that given the facts. Shaman have never dominated PvP except in Vanilla, and even that was a chance situation. Even at their strongest point which was at the beginning of Cataclysm, Resto Shaman were mainly effective against other casters. Focused Melee would rip them apart.

Heck, if Shaman are viewed as OP, then what about Mages or Spriests? Does Blizzard view those casters as balanced?

BTW, has anyone tested the full implications of this yet? For example, can Mages spell-steal totem effects?

[Omanley]

Tell me about it. It's just how it sounds.
They should go all the way if balancing something unique is to much a hassle for them.

I can assure you though, with indestructable totems unrestricted by elemental type (which would be the actual meaning of making them equal to spells) we'd be stronger than before, even if they were unusable while silenced.
It would also fix some design issues along the way (like SBT requiring long uptime, and blocking other earth totems).

Being honest, I didn't notice the aspect of totems being placable during silence that much, partly because you get used to it, partly because yes, enh is not silenced THAT often. That said, you definately WILL notice them being locked out through interrupted spells as ele.

I know it is sad totems losing their uniqueness, but if that at least would cause them to be like spells completely, I wouldn't cry about it that much. Ele gaining a sv cd usable during stun/silence would take care of the prob mostly.
And technically, totems have stopped being unique long ago (with the advent of distributed buffs). The aspect of them usable during silence will be noticeable now that it's gone, but hardly when still in effect. The heavy restrictions of destructability and shared elemental types though were a heavy hindrence though.

I doubt blizz will compensate us like that though.
The first time we were on the benefitial side of homogenisation, afair, was when they turned buff totems into spells last beta.

[Lavindar]

(...)
BTW, has anyone tested the full implications of this yet? For example, can Mages spell-steal totem effects?

Man, if mages steal one more of the elementals I will be pissed.