The 5.4 Shaman Thread

[iggie]

I don't like the FE glyph change. And I would honestly prefer if they changed the enhance 2piece to only work with Windfury.

Same, it's going to lose 10% for no reason, we will still try and time it with Ascend/and other cooldowns. I was loving how everything lined up. I don't see a reason why they'd fuck with it now. I guess it's their way of throwing us a small hidden nerf. Hopefully if we bitch and moan they will remove the change.

MOANNNNNNNNNNNNN

[Barky]

Guess I'll have to do a lot of PvP'ing then, the season 14 looks amazing honestly. FINALLY a proper wolf set...!

Yeah man it looks amazing, though all I will hear in my head when I have that wolf hat is

'Here comes the King of the North, King of the North, King of the North!'

[Deleted]

I wait with baited breath the essay from Endus blinding us with figures and mathematics - a statement of "Guys this is beta, it's ptr it's not live - wait and see.." to be followed by a "guys they can't fix everything in 1 patch, wait for the next one.."

Resto shamans - propping up other healers via manatide since...

/bury your head in the sand!

[Razecog]

Yeah man it looks amazing, though all I will hear in my head when I have that wolf hat is

'Here comes the King of the North, King of the North, King of the North!'

Why you do this. ;_;

[thetom]

Resto
I think what ghostcrawler said is really important, those datamined patch notes are not final by any means, and i do not believe that the buff to 10 man resto shaman that they said they were looking into was the riptide mana cost reduction, the buff to riptide glyph and the buff to chain heal glyph. I still think they're gonna buff us with something more concrete ( well i'm hoping...)

The new 2 piece is really underwhelming, i wish the 20% extra healing to our target from earth shield would be part of the absorb shield, not only the ridiculously low earth shield ticks... it's not gonna do a difference

The new 4 piece straight up suck, the only way i could see it as useful in 10 man ( because it doesnt work with healing rain) is with the use of chain heal. Our mastery already takes care of topping people when they're low, if we use the 4 piece with tank heals the big part of the 2nd heal is gonna be overheal. Useless and i think it should be reworked, but if it isn't i'm keeping tier 15 2 piece ( amazing with healing stream glyph in 10 man on nature,fire,frost dmg fights).

Ele

I think ele is in a fine spot right now, not at the top single target, but they have a good burst and good utility, they also have really good cleave. The change to UF is kinda confusing, blizzard really wants us to use that skill that would make our rotation quite weird imo ( they probably think our single target rotation is too easy ? ) I wouldn't mind a change from PE as i have been using Pe in most fights i'm dpsing in tot

2 piece : single target, it should be around 2-3% upgrade?
cleave : useless
target switching (ex: will, horridon, mag) useless
Overall it's an okay 2 piece i guess, they should probably rethink about the number ( 4% seems low, i think?)

4 piece : a lot of people say they like it, i honestly don't. I like when 4 piece have an effect on the way i play and this is just a random proc that is gonna do some dmg and dissapear, i don't know how hard it's gonna hit but i'm a bit dissapointed by our last 4 piece of the xpac, i was looking at some other 4 piece and i'm jealous.

Overall, i hope there's more to it, because otherwise this will be my last tier on a shaman.

Thoughts of a random 11/13H ( 10 man) resto/ele shaman.

[Onclecham]

I just read the resto droods notes...seriously...I don't really know why I am still playing as a resto shamy.

[Lacomus]

As an Enh shaman I feel that our bonuses are too RNG. I don't have any ideas for set bonuses but some ideas that pop to mind are making LL do half the dmg and have half the cooldown and making FN and it spread FlS. Hell maybe having ULE leaving a debuff on the target that makes WF hit secondary targets would be better or have it do that in general. I just feel like they could address our aoe better.

[Deleted]

Resto
I think what ghostcrawler said is really important, those datamined patch notes are not final by any means, and i do not believe that the buff to 10 man resto shaman that they said they were looking into was the riptide mana cost reduction, the buff to riptide glyph and the buff to chain heal glyph. I still think they're gonna buff us with something more concrete ( well i'm hoping...)

Just like it was impossible they would buff Divine Hymn, Revival and Tranquility in 25mans without buffing Healing Tide? Well, guess again!

What those changes show, along with the 4p bonuses, is the absolute lack of understanding the resto shaman and its current flaws. 2 yards on Healing rain give almost nothing (the raid is either stacked or it's not), glyph of chaining might be better for spread fights, but it helps NOTHING the fact that our stacked-AoE rotation is BEHIND other healers now (even druids, especially with the new changes). 15% more from baseline RT. That's 3k folks. Rejoice.

What's most worrying for me, is a hefty lack of ideas how to fix us, too. All the "tweaks" are what people posted and suggested over and over again. There's no big solutions to test as of yet. I'm starting to believe they have no clue what to do about us, apart from another (3rd in a row?) 20% slap across the board, which most likely will not happen. And if Blizzard gave up on us, what's left for us to do?

[Aleksej89]

I dont understand why was the Glyph of FE changed to 50%?

It makes it a very wonky 2 and a half minute cooldown that can't be lined up with EM or Ascendance without delaying something.

Did they want to nerf our damage output, or what was the actual idea behind the glyph change?

[thetom]

I dont understand why was the Glyph of FE changed to 50%?

It makes it a very wonky 2 and a half minute cooldown that can't be lined up with EM or Ascendance without delaying something.

Did they want to nerf our damage output, or what was the actual idea behind the glyph change?

Maybe buff the talent that resets every totem cooldown under 3 min ( Edit: call of the elements)? I'm not sure but that would be quite a big buff to PE.

Just like it was impossible they would buff Divine Hymn, Revival and Tranquility in 25mans without buffing Healing Tide? Well, guess again!

What those changes show, along with the 4p bonuses, is the absolute lack of understanding the resto shaman and its current flaws. 2 yards on Healing rain give almost nothing (the raid is either stacked or it's not), glyph of chaining might be better for spread fights, but it helps NOTHING the fact that our stacked-AoE rotation is BEHIND other healers now (even druids, especially with the new changes). 15% more from baseline RT. That's 3k folks. Rejoice.

What's most worrying for me, is a hefty lack of ideas how to fix us, too. All the "tweaks" are what people posted and suggested over and over again. There's no big solutions to test as of yet. I'm starting to believe they have no clue what to do about us, apart from another (3rd in a row?) 20% slap across the board, which most likely will not happen. And if Blizzard gave up on us, what's left for us to do?

I completly agree with what you said, shamans are getting nothing atm, riptide glyph is a joke, chain heal glyph buff can be nice but no one wants to go back to BC gameplay ( spam chain heal wooo). Honestly i want to believe really hard that they are working on a BIG change to resto shamans at the moment, and that we're gonna see it later, because resto shamans have been the weakest healer in 10 man for most of the expansion and blizzard said they were aware of it.

And btw we only got 1 20% buff, the 2nd one was just tooltip fixes.

[Volitar]

Soon farsight will rest in the nightlands with Sentry Totem, shh my child it will all be over soon.

[Throdin]

The Enhancement 2 piece has the potential to be brilliant depending on the proc chance and should scale excellently with haste, which is perfect for us at the moment. 4 piece also looks brilliant but these changes could fart around with our priority list. It's no lightning elemental though, that is just savage.

It looks like they're trying to tone down Glyphed fire elemental totem's CD synergy with EM while also trying to make UF and EB more attractive. They'd need to do a bit more to make UF viable but perhaps it will be with enhancement 2 piece.

[rodney]

i dont know but resto shaman changes are so far.. boring. lets wait a lil bit longer, maybe they fix our spread healing

[Onclecham]

Just like it was impossible they would buff Divine Hymn, Revival and Tranquility in 25mans without buffing Healing Tide? Well, guess again!

What those changes show, along with the 4p bonuses, is the absolute lack of understanding the resto shaman and its current flaws. 2 yards on Healing rain give almost nothing (the raid is either stacked or it's not), glyph of chaining might be better for spread fights, but it helps NOTHING the fact that our stacked-AoE rotation is BEHIND other healers now (even druids, especially with the new changes). 15% more from baseline RT. That's 3k folks. Rejoice.

What's most worrying for me, is a hefty lack of ideas how to fix us, too. All the "tweaks" are what people posted and suggested over and over again. There's no big solutions to test as of yet. I'm starting to believe they have no clue what to do about us, apart from another (3rd in a row?) 20% slap across the board, which most likely will not happen. And if Blizzard gave up on us, what's left for us to do?

Amen. Nothing else to say.

[Deleted]

i dont know but resto shaman changes are so far.. boring. lets wait a lil bit longer, maybe they fix our spread healing

indeed.

The chain heal glyph change is just.... wierd. of course 2 seconds is better than 4, but meh... i think i never saw a 2 sec cooldown spell. i suppose the spread aoe-intense healing will be CH-RT-CH-RT-CH-RT...
Really hope they found a new solution for 10man shammy.

[rogas]

Guess we won't see many changes for elem in 5.4. I'm fine with that. But i do wish they would clean up some lose ends in our lev90 talents.

-Could be wrong, but isn't PE empowerment just a joke? 5% damage increase, really? That means you need to do like 600k for it to be worthwile, since your PE does 30k on it own. I'm just wondering why anyone would use it atm...
-Can we have our PE/EE being summoned next to our flame shocked target plz? Atm it takes our pe/ee like 5sec to move to our target and start attacking it. That's 5sec damage lost...
-Unleased fury has been worthless for elem. Not sure if this 10% LB increase will be enough to bring it on par with the rest of our lev90 talents.

[Deleted]

-Could be wrong, but isn't PE empowerment just a joke? 5% damage increase, really? That means you need to do like 600k for it to be worthwile, since your PE does 30k on it own. I'm just wondering why anyone would use it atm...

Fire PE empowerment is mainly for resto shaman with the 10% healing. i dont think they are going to change it.

[Teriz]

I'm pretty surprised that Druids got 2 new healing abilities and a talent and Shaman didn't. I didn't know RDruids were doing worse than RShaman.

[Deleted]

The thing is that they shouldn't try to fix our lack of spread healing tools with glyphs. Glyphs comes with trade off, and if you want to force people to take 2 glyph to achieve decent healing then not being able to pick other glyphs is a big enough trade off imo.

2 second CD on Chain Heal could be ok with Riptide glyph. But Riptide glyph is not ok. They should change the trade off so that we can keep the full direct heal. It's already quite small, it becomes insignificant as soon as you reduce it, + you loose the potential AA proc on it. That means, you need to nerf your current spread healing tools to be able to spread heal. The Riptide hot is too weak to be an actual spread healing tool. It's nice as a buffer on tanks, or to heal a long dot. But for most spread damage the first 1 or 2 ticks will heal, the other will be overhealing. And then it's a bet about which raid members will take some random damage in the next 18 seconds. Most damage heavy phases don't even last 18 seconds.

If they want to make Riptide our raid healing tool, it needs a better hps (bigger or faster ticks, at the expense of a shorter duration or increased mana cost). Or further reduce the healing done, reduce Riptide to a CH buffer, and gives us something to spread it on many people (ex : crit ticks have a chance to spread Riptide on a nearby ally)

[Nebria]

Guess we won't see many changes for elem in 5.4. I'm fine with that. But i do wish they would clean up some lose ends in our lev90 talents.

gc mentioned they would like to make lava surge proc from crits so this is something we might see if they still want this change happen

I'm pretty surprised that Druids got 2 new healing abilities and a talent and Shaman didn't. I didn't know RDruids were doing worse than RShaman.

this is the first ptr patch and lot more will come so it is enough time to add new skills what ever.
what this patch provides in useful information is t-set bonus and first view of talent changes. that's it.
it would not be the first time that shaman changes happens late in ptr period and this is not the final patch of ptr^^