9.0 Shaman redesign suggestions

[Xorzor]

My vision on Enhancement:

- Make Earth Shield function similar to Marrowrend's Bone Shield.
- Bake Boulderfist into Rockbiter, without the damage increase.
- Bake Searing Assault and Hailstorm into their respective abilities.
- Feral Lunge should be baseline. Enhancement needs a gap closer!
- Stormbringer's proc rate should be increased to at least 10%, maybe even 15%.

[wushootaki]

Make Grounding Totem Baseline

Add in more utility totems based on things we see in game

Example = Rokhan's Totem of Concealment

Bring back Sentry Totem

Sentry Totem
X Mana - Friendly targets within 20 yards of your sentry totem have their stealth detection dramatically increased for 3 seconds.


Overhaul Enhancement Visuals to actually use Totems
Meaning....

Change the names of the attacks to the following
Rockbiter renamed to Strength of Earth Totem

The shaman places an earth totem in thew ground, imbuing their weapons with rockbiter. This totem is purely visual, without health for attacking and have a range of 30 yards. The spell does the exact same damage...the visual replaces itself when the shaman moves 30 yards away from the totem.

Do this for all 3: Rockbiter = Strength of Earth Totem, Flametongue = Searing Totem, Frostbrand = Frostbrand Totem

The idea is to incorporate the racial visuals for totems more than simply via utility cooldowns, and if you take Totemic Mastery.

[melodramocracy]

As far as elemental goes:

LB should be insta-cast when procced

Take FS off the goddamn cd

Buff earth shield a bit when self cast.

Make the entire spec not hit like a wet noodle, especially if you're going to have a slower warlock-esque gameplay style.

Enhancement plays ok, and has a good utility toolkit, but again, just flat out sucks for output.

[kheath812]

As far as elemental goes:

LB should be insta-cast when procced

Take FS off the goddamn cd

Buff earth shield a bit when self cast.

Make the entire spec not hit like a wet noodle, especially if you're going to have a slower warlock-esque gameplay style.

Enhancement plays ok, and has a good utility toolkit, but again, just flat out sucks for output.

elemental has extremely strong single target damage. dunno what youre even saying about hitting like a wet noodle.

[Xorzor]

Earth Shield for Enhancement should be a damage reduction buff. Not unlike a previous iteration of Bone Shield, or Guardian Affinity. Earth Shield for Restoration can stay the same.

LB is already instant cast for Enhancement.

Searing Assault and Hailstorm, I think, should be baked into their respective abilities.

That's just Enhancement. For the class as a whole, Ascendance should be baseline.

[dunkl]

4 specs, one for each main element

each spec is themed after signature element, though can use other elements to a lesser extent through talents or whatever customization

rock, stone, earth for tank. can raise boulders to block damage and commune with the seismic activity to withstand onslaught and sense attacks through grounds reverberations, and become in-tune with the planet's heartbeat to clear mind and build confidence.

fire for melee. we don't have a melee fire spec and would be cool to punch with firey fists or weapons and overwhelming blazes

air, wind for ranged. always wanted a class that can control the wind, whipping up whirlwinds and casting breezes and buffets with gales from afar

water and spirit for healing.

I also like them utilizing weather to strengthen their element such as; sunny daylight strengthens fire, clouds or even snowy winds can make the air-themed shaman more elusive or quick, meteor shower reinforces stone, rainy weather strengthens water and healing.

Perhaps all shaman can use lighting or they can borrow from other spec's elements, while maintain their own signature element for their kit and theme. For instance fire can use pull magma through volcanoes in from the ground to accompnay him/her.

I also want the shaman to become the element for a time where becoming stone to withstand all damage and effects, becoming fire so that anything it touches or touches it will be singed, becoming the wind to either strengthen or speed up their air abilities or float away swiftly, even fade into invisibility as air, or becoming cloud-like, immune to most attacks and affects, and becoming water, deeply strengthening water based attacks or healing. Could have awesome visuals too!

[TheramoreIsTheBomb]

elemental needs to be more than a flame shock > lava burst > ???? > lightning bolt spec.

[Kralljin]

4 specs, one for each main element

That's just dumb, Shamans aren't mages that simply specialize on a single element.
Even Resto has some earth based abilities.

elemental needs to be more than a flame shock > lava burst > ???? > lightning bolt spec.

Pretty much every dps spec is at its bare bones just 3-4 buttons.

[lllBlackSunlll]

Elemental:
Core fantasy:
Strong burst windows.

Signature spells:
Lava Burst
Chain Lightning

Pruning:
Removing Maelstorm. Back to using Mana. The Maelstorm gathering abilities into these unsatisfying Earthquake/Earthshock is not fun.
No more procs reseting the cooldown of Lava Burst. It is supposed to be this strong hitting spell that takes a while to get.

I like the earthshock/earquake dynamic.

Depending how you build earthquake can be better on single-target, or earthshock is better thann EQ if 5> enemies. This gives the player more agency than a predetermined absolute must be played this way.

And if we're looking to have big burst damage, slot machine proccing is going to be a main feature, else it will turn into a lot of abilities with long cds and LB as filler, which is not fun.

I am happy where ele is, compared to the "good ol days" of wotlk/bc/vanilla. Mana never made things more complicated, just an easier way for blizzard to streamline their balancing. If anything they made things harder for themselves.

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My personal suggestions for Shaman revamp

All
• Ascendance should be baseline for all specs.

Elemental
• Lightning Bolt should be instant-cast when moving. For balance, make it do less damage than a stationary cast.
• Elemental Blast should be baseline, and grant all 3 stat increases. For balance, make those increases less than potent than they currently are.
• Storm Elemental should be a separate spell from Fire Elemental. In addition, all 3 Elementals should have separate cooldown times.
• Icefury should be a baseline spell.
• Earthen Rage should be a baseline passive.

1.Isn't that what frost shock is for? An instant cast ability that does a little less damage than a lb? I mean even that if I use my procs right I can stay mobile without a dps drop, I see no reason for this unless you want to proc overload.
2.Maybe I am missing something here, but out of the three t1 talents, that is by far the worst. Unless you want to make that base and have t1 be more competitive, then I guess. But it is not like Shamans are super pruned on abilities, even if you don't run stormkeep and icefury.
3.Well, all 3 elements do have different cooldowns, as in they don't share cds, if that's what you're saying. But with storm what you're asking for is to have 2 pure dps elements, except one is better. Why not add another elemental, give them all a shorter cd but share a cd, so you have to choose what elemental you want in the situation, instead of adding redundant elementals and just burst them all out. No cd management mechanics take away skill and finesse.
4+5. So the real solution is get rid of talents, make them base (and less competitive with your playstyle options) and maybe add more talents? Which do what? What is the point to make things baseline? Is it because it stops playings having to choose and just give it to us all? How is that valuable to the player?

[kosajk]

Good one. Everyone is loving how "evolved" the classes are in BfA. You clearly have not watched the Ion 8.2 speech.

well tbh game have devolved into pathetic state but tbh going even further back is not really best way imo expecially with "clasic" almost here where you can make all your dreams come true

i loved clasic enh pvp with 2h WF although to be honest gamplay centered around stuning ppls while running around them waiting for WF to proc was been not really skill demanding, really funny but not really skillfull Being able to kill 3 ppls ankh up and kill another 2 was been seriously nice for me not that funny for enemies i asume :P Prabobly why Blizz scraped wildcard 2h+wf wiability in first expansion...
After plaing every expansion i would love to get MoP like enhancement, maybe with some extra reliable deffensive CD in current meta.

[Zeek Daniels]

Lets never let the OP redesign shaman. I love my ele the way it is. Its 1000% better than TBC or Vanilla shaman. Please take your bad ideas and throw them away. Or go play vanilla.

[shammypie]

Resto Redesign Ideas

BUBBLES
bubblebeam, bubble shield, slippery bubbles, you name it. I want to see bubble spells

[Ele man]

I want LR. It's a mistake to get rid of this funny talent.
I think ele is fun, but I've been playing for over a year and haven't changed.

Apart from this, I think the ranged specs are alike. There is no obvious reason to play ele.

[tru]

I enjoyed legion ele 100x more than BfA...(go figure). Idc about numbers so much if the shit is fun to play. I'd take end of wod destroyed sv Hunter over 90% of the specs now. And legion enh was the most fun button smashing I've had in a long time. Again don't care about their single target or AOE numbers it WAS fun. You gonna get 2h back just soon as frost dks do... So wishful thinking there. At this point all that can be hoped for is another artifact system that improves specs gameplay more than bandaid fix 8.0 undesign the fun. there already been more major changes to BFAs system than all of legion had to the artifact weapons system and the crucible.

The game took several steps back and going to a time where it was nearly bare bones isn't going to help. Gladiator/2h f/smf/ret/combat so many massive changes or removals (just off the top of my head) and who's on the forums praising the blizzard gods for their design choices.

Rets tv hits harder than arms execute... explain that to me?

[cocomen2]

I enjoyed legion ele 100x more than BfA...(go figure).

Ele with artifact versus Ele with D in hand, ofc you enjoyed not late one.

They removed artifacts, without making traits bound into class....... same as give you tasty candy only to remove it in next second.

[Puzzlesocks]

I've taken a pretty extended break from the game at this point, but if there was something that would bring me back, it would be a re-design to my beloved shaman class. I can't really talk much about current balance, but I spent an absurd amount of time playing restoration at some of the highest levels for many years. From what I understand about the state of resto shaman last I played, is that single target healing is suffering and class utility is a thing of the past. Personally I appreciated class utility quite a bit, so some of the ideas given are going to focus on that idea. Our differences are what make us unique and give us meaning, as much as you don't want to bring 'x' class just for buffs, that idea kills what shaman are. It kills the individuality and feeling of purpose.

Bring back totems as a core utility of the class, and streamline them to the spec so that each spec may use them in a lore/gameplay friendly way. Ideally each of these would be relatively short cooldowns (15 seconds or so), but will complicate how we heal so long as they are kept mana efficient. Along with using totems as spells, you can convert Ascendance to be an off the gcd class ability (15sec cooldown) that unlocks and amplifies the next totem effect for a short time (places totem on burnout preventing it from ascending again for 'x' time). Some examples for Resto, being the spec I knew best:
1-Fire totem as a targeted single target heal through cauterization. (Large initial heal with small DoT cancelled by riptide. Ascendance upgrades to "volcano burst" to heal an area)
2-Earth totem as an applicator for Earth Shield or targeted Earthen Wall. (Ascendance upgrades to Stone Armor, adding massive damage reduction to target/or Aoe earthen wall)
3-Water totem as healing stream. (Ascendance upgrades to focus stronger regen effect placed on a single target.)
4-Air totem as single target shield and move speed increase. (Ascendance upgrades to aoe effect around totem placement.)

Ideally the upgraded version is on a separate cd than the regular version allowing for burst heals or preventing gcd lock from getting in the way of important cooldowns. For instance you could fire totem the tank, ascendance during gcd time and then volcano burst the tank for a second potent heal. Or in the case of the air totem, you could wind rush totem an area with ascendance and then help someone out of position with the single version directly after. Besides upgrades to make totems slightly more interesting. Ascendance itself could be made into a minigame, if all improved totems are on cooldown at once, it transforms into something like "Fury of the ancestors" giving you a buff. Examples might include: Temporarily uncapped number of chain heal jumps and/or healing wave grants a guardian spirit wolf that absorbs partial damage taken by the target (like earthen wall totem but targeted).

Just some ideas, and I am more than happy to let other people run with them or improve upon them. Ideally I would like to see shamans play more interactively, with more tools and fun things to play with instead of praying for good RNG and pumping out as much aoe healing as possible in hopes of being useful. Even smaller things to make healing more of a minigame such as: Healing on targets affected by riptide is improved, or changing healing rain to instead place water shields on targets affected that proc heals or regen effects when target is healed.

In my ideal resto shaman world, you would be able to stack buffs to improve single target healing or burst aoe healing, at the cost of mediocre healing otherwise. Similar to what Blizzard seems to be going for with things like Cloudburst totem and the current version of ascendance, but those are more blasting aoe focused.

[Grimbolt]

One of the biggest changes in my eyes to the shaman class was the removal of totems. Its true that some of them saw no use at all and some were extremely situational, but the ones you used had a big impact on your groups performance.

I started playing wow back in the day after having played EQ1 for years as support classes. Dirge and Illusionist. When I heard about the wow shaman I thought to myself, thats the class I want to play, because I loved being able to see how well my group performed versus other players in a raid.

To this day I still dont understand why wow players are so against support classes in the game. Its a different play style and I am sure there are more than dozen of us around that like to play support characters in other MMO games that would love to do it in wow too. I feel like classes look too much like each other in wow in 2019 and they need to make at least some of the classes more unique than the good old build/spend approach. There is hardly any different mechanically between a lot of the melee classes currently and it sucks.

So my idea is. Bring back totems and make us more support oriented. Am I saying to do a carbon copy of shaman, or paladin, as they were in classic? Absolutely not, they had a lot of issues and a lot of downtime, but bringing back the uniqueness of both of these classes wouldn't hurt anyone and would only make the classes more fun to play.

[Kralljin]

One of the biggest changes in my eyes to the shaman class was the removal of totems.

A big issue of totems were simply how outdated they were as a (buff) mechanic.
The concept of a static object providing a buff simply got worse over time, by the time we reached Wotlk, Totems were generally seen as inferior versions because the Shaman had to constantly re drop them in 5man dungeons or had to place them at a very central location in order for everyone reaching the buff.
Meanwhile, a DK hit Horn of Winter and was done with it.

Simply buffing their range or making them "follow" the shaman kinda takes a key aspect of Totems away.

To this day I still dont understand why wow players are so against support classes in the game.

The problem has many layers.

First off, if the power of these support tools becomes too great, it essentially turns you into a buff bot, which rarely have a lot of engaging gameplay.
If your primary role becomes the application of buffs, rather than actually doing damage or healing, that may not be everybody's cup of tea.

TBC SP are decent example, by the time one hit SWP,their damage was rather abysmal due to scaling issues, now their sole purpose was to supply mana.
Of course, they still had their spot, but realizing that your actual performance doesn't have much of an impact on the groups success also isn't something everybody enjoys.

Also, Balance, yeah some people might hate that argument but WoW has moved away from large group content outside of Mythic, there simply isn't a slot for everybody anymore.
Especially if you tax hybrid dps for it, people would just invite Shaman / Paladin healers and then stack pure classes.
You would then have to give hybrid specs like Enhancement, Elemental,Shadow, Ret, Balance, Feral etc. their own unique support tool in order to keep them competitive.
Stacking those hybrids for those buffs would then come at a disadvantage for any dps that isn't top notch.


Also, this entire idea of having a "support class" died after TBC already, that was over a decade ago.
People moved away from that, some people like the fact that you are compareable to any dps (at least in theory) right now, Blizzard would give those players the middle finger.

Classic really highlights the extreme case here, where people leveled a Hybrid such as Ret, Feral or whatever, then were told to go healer once they hit max. level 60, not an enjoyable experience, the realization that your actual performance doesn't matter as much as hitting some buff button every 60 minutes (or 2 minutes in case of totems) also may not be much of an consolation.


I'm not entirely against the idea of having support tools / buffs on some classes, but going into the extreme of multiple full fledged support classes is a tad too far.

[shammypie]

Ele with artifact versus Ele with D in hand, ofc you enjoyed not late one.

They removed artifacts, without making traits bound into class....... same as give you tasty candy only to remove it in next second.

they have been giving out free legendaries since MOP. legion was Candyfest and we don't talk about wod

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snip.

I would have to argue being a "buff bot" is only really an issue in wow because there is no skill to it and every cd is long and scripted into the fight. I've played other games where buffing was more active. You had people calling out their dps cds or aligning melee/ranged burst windows around short group/solo buffs and I think that's what hybrid roles are really lacking. There is no thought into the buffs, no skill, no complexitiy. It's why hybrids have been a joke since well forever in wow. You gotta bring one period and its usually a healer so as not to tank the other roles.

[tehdef]

Good one. Everyone is loving how "evolved" the classes are in BfA. You clearly have not watched the Ion 8.2 speech.

But dude. You jus suggested basically the vanilla shaman.

And then you act like vanilla shaman was good or something? it wasn't. I could tear down your shit post, but I'll just leave it with the fact that you want an unreasonable amount of totems, which is ... if I'm being blunt, fucking stupid.