Originally Posted by Praetorian
Right, I forgot about frost shock. That too. The problem is just how easy we are to shut down. Imagine playing arena matches in which you do not allow yourself to use the following spells: Renew, Prayer of Mending, Power Word: Shield. That's the world in which we're playing. I'm not so sure that I need more "survivability" -- my complaint isn't that I die too easily. It's that it's too easy to stop me from healing. Though when I have more than one person on me, my ability to heal myself is nil. Against rogue/warlock/healer, if they both go on me, my spriest teammate has to drop shadowform and basically spam his mana pool dry with inefficient heals to keep me alive. Devoured Earth Shield + rogue pushback + kick + stuns + Tongues + Spell Lock means I literally do not heal myself once NS is blown. I get one NS through a wound stack, and that's about it. A LHW would take 3+ seconds to cast with pushback, and it will get me locked out. All I can hope to do is drop poison cleansing, spam cure poison and hope it gets the crippling, and then drop an earthbind to try to get away. But I cannot heal myself in that situation at all. That's what gets frustrating. Again, sorry for just complaining, and I'd certainly welcome advice to the effect of "No, the way you should play that situation is _______."
|
I have to say I've quit the game and this is a big part of it (the other was Hellgate london coming out). I played with a warlock/war in a 3vs3 team, and while we weren't quite as good as your team was (I think we broke 2200 but only for a short time, then stuck around 2100-2150), it was just too frustrating for me since 90% of the time our loss could simply be attributed to me being cced/locked out in some fashion. The real frustration to me wasn't even so much that, but the trivial mistakes I kept seeing the other team doing and us loosing/barely winning in spite of that (not putting CoT on me, barely CCing, etc.). I'm certainly not the best shaman player there ever was or anything but like you I just didn't see what I could do that would have made a qualitative difference in our game and allow us to beat some of those teams.
The biggest shock for me was when we played a feral druid/pally/war team. We beat them 2-3 times, as I barely kept up our warlock vs the feral druid/warrior dps, as they always quickly killed the fellhunter and focused the warlock (who was admittedly UA which is a bad spec vs that composition). But then the feral druid started playing radically differently, rather then just trying to dps he shifted forms, interrupted me with bear charge/stun, rooted our warrior, cycloned me, and basically from that point on we got our asses kicked
.
I think one thing that could help shamans alot would be to lower the GCD from instants for shamans, or maybe make purge/ES none-nature spells and therefore usable while interrupted. There are so many important things I can do with my GCD - ES heals, FS and help someone kite, purge, put down the right totems, earth/water shield etc - but the problem is that this takes as much time as a LHW, and most of the time if I have the time to spare to use them we'll be winning in any case. Not to say that a ES/purge at the right time hasn't helped us win even if someone almost died because of it, but it would make a pretty big difference to my game if I could more easily spam those abilities. And it would also be a change that would reward "better" gameplay (multiple interrupting/purging), rather then just making the class flat out stronger like extra healing would let's say. An alternative solution would be to increase the duration of interrupt/cooldown of ES by 2-3 times.
Another thing that could be done would be increased range on shocks/purge, although this is even less likely. Combined with the GCD issues, most of the time I find it better to try to LOS/outrange the other team's ranged classes to avoid CCs/interrupts/mana burns, rather then to get in range so I can ES them.