Honestly, do we even care anymore about Shaman?

[Nyel]

Title says it all.

After Legion and now after BfAs first months (and more to come), is it even worth bothering with Shaman anymore? This class seems to be the stepchild (we had this feeling in Legion as well but it's just gotten worse) of Blizzard's class design team and - after saying they take a deeper look and major improvements are coming - they totally abandoned all of that and put some band-aids on gigantic bullet holes in class design.

So honest question, do you, fellow Shamans, even care about this class and its development anymore? When the answer is yes, why haven't you given up already?

[Ashetaka]

I'll only speak about Restoration and Elemental because those are what I play. The bottom line is this: if you don't enjoy a class then you shouldn't play it. When someone like you makes absurd, sky-is-falling rhetoric it's pretty clear you've missed that point and likely have never actually explored the objective numbers about class balancing in this game. If you look at just the numbers, you're argument is "your class is less than 5% away from median. Why haven't you just re-rolled!?" The less charitable interpretation of this post is "I don't like the class design so you should all re-roll!" which is far dumber.

So why haven't I re-rolled? Ok, I'll engage with the question. For healing I wanted a healer with reactive healing, low cooldown dependence, strong personal defensives, and a powerful utility kit. None of the other healers meet all of those requirements. Holy Priests have no utility, Discipline is preparatory not reactive while also having crap utility, Holy Paladin is positional with poor AoE control, Mistweaver is heavily limited by cooldowns, and Druids have poor/inefficient reactive heals. If I was going to play another healer, it would probably be Druid, but they just don't have the utility/reactivity of Shaman.

For DPS I wanted a ranged DPS that does fairly consistent and stable output not dependent on frequent burst windows (Fire and Shadow). I wanted a solid, simple AoE rotation not dependent on multi-dotting (Balance, Shadow, Affliction), cooldowns (Frost), or being in melee (Arcane). I wanted low to no ramp up time (Demonology). I don't want to rely on janky cooldown abuse for performance (Affliction, Demonology) or excessive resource management (Beast Master, Marksman). I also wanted a strong utility kit including a ranged interrupt. Elemental is the only ranged with a utility kit as strong as it has, only Balance druid comes close and if you hate multi-dotting like I do you're simply SoL.

So yeah, I haven't given up because I wasn't at risk of giving up. My gameplay isn't "do exactly what I say, how I say it or I'll unsubscribe." I play if I enjoy the design and I'll re-roll if I enjoy the design of other classes more. Honestly, I find these kinds of post to be at best totally misinformed about how "great" the class design of the other ranged DPS classes are, usually from people who have never played anything else. I understand the frustration of people who enjoyed the Legion playstyle, but refusing to switch to a class that caters better to your preferred playstyle just seems dumb to me. I rerolled to Warlock in Legion from Hunter because they ruined Marksman (it still hasn't recovered). This expansion I rerolled to Shaman because I find it fun.

[unbound]

Title says it all.

After Legion and now after BfAs first months (and more to come), is it even worth bothering with Shaman anymore? This class seems to be the stepchild (we had this feeling in Legion as well but it's just gotten worse) of Blizzard's class design team and - after saying they take a deeper look and major improvements are coming - they totally abandoned all of that and put some band-aids on gigantic bullet holes in class design.

So honest question, do you, fellow Shamans, even care about this class and its development anymore? When the answer is yes, why haven't you given up already?

In fairness, Ele Shaman wasn't terrible in Legion...it just wasn't tops anywhere. In BfA, even with 8.1, it is utter garbage with neither a compelling rotation nor compelling damage. My Ele Shaman is being retired due to Blizz incompetence which is too bad because all the turret specs are rather gimped right now.

Resto Shaman looks to be okay now with 8.1 with the improved AoE healing.

Enh Shaman just doesn't look compelling enough to switch to. Why use a gimped melee when there are so many better choices around that are more fun to play and can do decent damage.

[Qnubi]

Shaman uses lightning spells, that is unique and I will continue to play this class until the day I or WoW dies. I always, ALWAYS roll the lightning damage type DPS. Numbers don't matter to me, I am a filthy casual that doesn't raid but plays for fun all day.

[Aleksej89]

Problem with shamans in BFA is that they provide neither the fun gameplay nor the powerful performance.
I could play a weak class if i really liked the playstyle, and i guess i could play a class i did not like if it had some really OP performance.

But blizz has taken such a heavy dump onto shamans in BFA that what was once my favorite class is now an alt that i never play.
And that is saying something considering blizz f*cks over shamans in every expansion but BFA is just on a whole new level of bad.

[LedZeppelin]

pretty sure enhance is still a pvp power house

[Gasparde]

Don't ever bother with hybrid classes in general anymore. You're either lucky and you have a working dps spec or you'll have to spend your time healing/tanking till the end of the expansion.