Blaise, of course you're right. Consider that one removed.
I'm not impressed with the earth/fire elemental pets. They have very limited utility. Since this is a pie in the sky thread, I'd like to see them fundamentally changed in such a way that their cooldown could be significantly lowered. Perhaps the earth elemental could absorb a percentage of physical damage dealt to the group like stoneskin until it runs out of hitpoints and dies, granting a mini-rockbiter based upon the caster's attack power to all melee, etc. The fire elemental would be the caster equivalent for spell mitigation and +spell damage, based upon the caster's +damage. Of course their taunt/damage would have to be greatly reduced accordingly. The uberpets with 20 min downtime are too situational, can't be used in arenas, and just basically a waste of two expansion spells.
I'm not too focused upon individual DPS, I'm not interested in improving my group/raid's overall viability. If Blizzard thinks we should do less damage than fury wars and cat druids, so be it. But I want enhancement to remain a worthwhile spec, and without competitive DPS we bring too little to the table over resto/elemental.
Blaise, of course you're right. Consider that one removed.
I'm not impressed with the earth/fire elemental pets. They have very limited utility. Since this is a pie in the sky thread, I'd like to see them fundamentally changed in such a way that their cooldown could be significantly lowered. Perhaps the earth elemental could absorb a percentage of physical damage dealt to the group like stoneskin until it runs out of hitpoints and dies, granting a mini-rockbiter based upon the caster's attack power to all melee, etc. The fire elemental would be the caster equivalent for spell mitigation and +spell damage, based upon the caster's +damage. Of course their taunt/damage would have to be greatly reduced accordingly. The uberpets with 20 min downtime are too situational, can't be used in arenas, and just basically a waste of two expansion spells.
I'm not too focused upon individual DPS, I'm not interested in improving my group/raid's overall viability. If Blizzard thinks we should do less damage than fury wars and cat druids, so be it. But I want enhancement to remain a worthwhile spec, and without competitive DPS we bring too little to the table over resto/elemental.
Think that any bonus from the shield should be related to the shield (Water -> mp5, Earth -> hp5) but imo Lightning should be some sort of nature dmg bonus/charge used on hit thing so it doubles for ele/enh.
i like this idea for the passive buff to lightning shield. it'd have nice synergy with stormstrike, as the nature damage would give an enhance shaman something to use up the stormstrike buff other than earthshock.
edit: on that note, you could change rockbiter to add nature damage on hit in some way. of course, it'd have to scale with melee gear somehow and it'd be nice if it was unique in some way to distinguish it from flametongue.
Replace earth elemental and fire elemental. Shaman are not a pet class and don't need long cooldown niche spells. If we must have them, shorter cooldown and more utility please (pet UI control over them, and some kind of buff aura from each pet, might be a good start: make them summoned pets and not attached to the totem, too).
Water Shield and Lightning Shield into passive buffs with charges a la the current Inner Fire.
Bug fixes as mentioned by other posters.
An official dev statement on the role of the shaman in end-game content would be well received.
Resto:
Do the talent combination/synergy job that was done on the druid resto tree. Less points, more synergy. And please remove the restorative totems pre-req for mana tide finally.
Sustainability is also an issue now that we're required to spam high rank healing waves a lot; some kind of mana regen or mana recovery talent or passive would be a benefit.
Enh:
Replace stuff like shield spec and improved lightning shield (and weak talents in other trees for that matter) with potentially useful stuff. It's a constant sore point for shaman that we got "reviewed" but still have things like shield spec, or like 5 points for 5% mana. Slightly buff spirit weapons, since the lag in threat between enh shaman and feral druids is hard to justify. Enh is pretty good on the whole besides threat and a weak lower tree, though.
Ele:
Totem of Wrath either way improved or made an earth totem or both.
Buff lightning overload. For such a deep talent, and 5 points, it should give more.
Either reduce the magnitiude of the elemental focus nerf or make up for it with sustainability elsewhere in the tree or both (a general shaman mana sustainability buff, like a passive regen water shield, is a good idea).
Curse of Elements (the warlock spell) affecting nature spells as well.
Alternate nuke (or way to switch the family of our existing nukes with an efficiency penalty) to get around nature immune mobs.
I was thinking about making a thread like this on here, we should all combine our ideas and make our own balanced patch notes for the devs to steal.
Elemental
-Wrath of air removed
-A 5 point talent beside Lightning Overload 'Improved Wrath of Air totem' which gives your wrath of air +X (50-100 probably ) more damage/healing and the 3% crit and hit. This frees up your fire totems also for searing totem DPS.
-New 41 point talent
'Lightning Capactitance' which is just the Lightning capacitor in a talent, the lightning capacitor can be changed. X amount of crits = free LB
-Tranquil Air changed to an earth totem so it can actually be used.
-Boomkin get an equivilent to curse of elements, probably insect swarm, that increases damage done by nature by 10% and lowers nature resist by 75. damage removed from it, this will give boomkin/ele shammy the synergy of other classes.
-Elixer of major Nature power.
Enhancement
-Stormstrike 2 charge limit removed
-+5% mana changed to +10% int (or whatever is good) so it can take advantage of the 2 other int talents.
-Water/Lightning shield increased to 10 charges
- Shield talents removed
- toughness/anticipation combined into 1 5 point talent.
Resto
-Combine healing grace with something, restorative totems if it only effects healing, or natures guidance and make it effect all threat.
- Totemic Focus changed to a 3 point talent that does 10/20/30% mana reduction
-instead of buffing Spirit Weapons, change Tranquil Air to Tranquil Water.
-since we can't get rid of pet totems (dream on), nerf them to 25% effectiveness with 25% mana cost and 5min cooldown, well, nerf the fire guy, earth can probably stay as-is. Add passive buffs to them (ap/spelldamage/whatever)
-mana tide trainable, earlier suggested "Spirit Link" spell as new 31pt resto: instant cast 10 second duration 30 second cooldown, links the HP of targeted player with 2 closest, dispellable and not castable on self for pvp balance.
Seconding:
-ToW to earth
-Secondary nuke (waterbolt sounds good)
-buff to LO... maybe nerf lightning master to 0.5 sec and add 20% spelldmg boost to LO?
-CoE affecting nature
-Unrelenting Storm to 3/3
-merge or fix Totemic Focus... how about 5/10/15/20/25 yards added to totems along with 25% mana reduction, for 45 yards total?
-fix/remove shield spec and mental quickness
-passive effects on water shield & lightning shield, or give them a chance of discharging on attack/spellcast
-more charges on water/lightning shield 10 or 20... the current efficiency of lightning shield is terrible
The amazing thing about this thread is they could implement virtually every buff we're suggesting and for the most part it would be a mild power increase, with a significant utility/playstyle improvement.
An official dev statement on the role of the shaman in end-game content would be well received.
It's not like many of the other classes have a well defined roll in end-game now (Druids/Paladins/Priests and possibly Warriors)
and please remove the restorative totems pre-req for mana tide finally.
Don't know about you, but I'd take restorative totems even without that requirement.
Sustainability is also an issue now that we're required to spam high rank healing waves a lot; some kind of mana regen or mana recovery talent or passive would be a benefit.
Regen seems to be ok with gear/pots, some more would be nice, but I don't think it's a major problem now.
Curse of Elements (the warlock spell) affecting nature spells as well.
Alternate nuke (or way to switch the family of our existing nukes with an efficiency penalty) to get around nature immune mobs.
Another key point for Elemental Shaman. We can but hope that the devs make these changes (hopefully a frost direct damage spell)
In lieu of either additional passive or active threat reduction,
Tranquil Air Totem
6% of base Mana
Instant cast
Tools: Air Totem
Summons a Tranquil Air Totem with 5 health at the feet of the caster. The totem reduces the threat caused by all party members except for paladins, warriors in defensive stance, and druids in dire bear form within 40 yards by 20%. Lasts 2 min.
-A 5 point talent beside Lightning Overload 'Improved Wrath of Air totem' which gives your wrath of air +X (50-100 probably ) more damage/healing and the 3% crit and hit. This frees up your fire totems also for searing totem DPS.
-New 41 point talent
'Lightning Capactitance' which is just the Lightning capacitor in a talent, the lightning capacitor can be changed. X amount of crits = free LB
or, just basicly replace lightning overload with lightning capacitance functionality.
Originally Posted by Kegsta
-Tranquil Air changed to an earth totem so it can actually be used.
this helps elemental shaman but does nothing for enhancement, who would have to chose between strength of earth and tranquil air.
Maybe an Air shock? A Threat reducer for enhancement? A quick stun? just an idea.
Instead of a stun, make it a small knockback coupled with -threat and nature damage. That'd be sexy as hell... a man can dream, right?
Originally Posted by Skiace
this helps elemental shaman but does nothing for enhancement, who would have to chose between strength of earth and tranquil air.
Agreed, this is why Totem of Wrath should be moved to earth, and Tranquil Air to water. Totem of Wrath displacing fire totems which elemental shamans spend talents on improving is just stupid. Tranquil Water totem would still sacrifice something, but not be such a large blow to your buffing as to make it completely useless. Applying Tranquil Air to a melee group in a raid is always stupid, since just eliminating Windfury will prevent most of the threat problems. Air totems are our dps-buff totems and overlapping with them makes a -threat totem completely undesirable.
- For the love of all that is holy, the global cooldown on buff totems has got to go. Every 2 minutes or every time a fight moves, a shaman spends upwards of 6 seconds or so moving totems. Every shaman can tell you, people die during this time. Frequently. I've long ago lost count of how many tanks have died at the beginning of a fight because of the global cooldown being eaten up by totem dropping, or how many boss wipes have occurred because something ugly happened in the few seconds it took for me to recast totems midfight. Understandably totems such as Grounding, Tremor, and damaging fire totems probably should have a GCD, but for most totems it's just a source of needless grief.
Originally Posted by Binkenstein
Maybe when the fabled Totem UI comes through there will be a one-click totem stomper that drops all selected totems at once.
Either of these two ideas need love, I have died often whilst tanking thanks to the GCD on totem dropping. I didn't see this mentioned, but some kind of reagent using super totem that lasts 10 minutes or something would be fantastic - I don't know that they'd include things like Mana Spring and the like in this but it would be fantastic for your stock buff totems like GoA/WF/SoE.
Whilst I would love to see Hex I think for the most part some small 'common sense' changes to existing abilities and the talent trees would go a long way (specifically with the Elemental tree) to round out some gaps in the class and give Shaman a more complete feel. As has been mentioned above a caster based weapon enchant or a passive shield would be a good start.
Changing ToW to earth/lowering back to a Tier 6 talent and with a non-nature based nuke or the creation of an earth based caster buff (Concentration Aura on a stick?) could also work.
Whilst I would love to see Hex I think for the most part some small 'common sense' changes to existing abilities and the talent trees would go a long way (specifically with the Elemental tree) to round out some gaps in the class and give Shaman a more complete feel.
This would be good, for instance I don't understand why Unrelenting Storm is 5 points, whilst the Druid equivalent (Dreamstate) is 3 points. Not even going to mention Call of Flame beyond what on earth were they thinking.
Small tweaks I'd like:
-Increased passive threat reduction for Enhancement. I'd love if it reduced all threat generated in melee range to cover Lightning Shield and shocks too. You could maybe add a new shock (Air? Wind?) that has negative threat multiplier. Make it less damage than an Earth Shock and we have active threat management!
-Changes to weapon buffs to make weapon speed choice less static. This can be done by delinking the WF cooldowns, removing it entirely, buffing the other weapon buffs and/or fixing the +dmg coefficients on Flametongue/Frostbrand (Flametongue favours fast weapons).
-Totem changes!Removal or reduction of the global cooldown on totems. Or you could have them on a separate cooldown from normal spells. Hide totem names from hostile players (PvP implications). You could change some of the graphics (some of the NPC totem models for example) to let people still work out what to kill, without being able to rely on macros.
-Greater Elementals. The changes outlined in the new patch are a good start. Having the Earth Elemental take a portion of your AC/spellpower/whatever as it AC would be nice too.
Larger changes:
-Improve PvP viability for Enhancement. Some kind of CC/snare immunity applied to Shamanistic Rage would be nice, though that might be overpowered. You can add some kind of downside to it: restrict heals from being cast, reduced healing debuff, higher mana cost or something similar. Maybe just remove CC when first cast, or just be immune to snares for the duration. Letting ghost wolf be instant cast and remove snares would be a start, but that seems a bit too close to Druid territory.
-A new talent in deep Enhancement that applies a percentage of your AP as spellpower. Lets shocks scale with the rest your damage rather than becoming less.
-Cleaning up the talent trees a bit. Most are fairly bloated, lots of posts in here have specific examples.
Pie in the sky stuff:
-Greater totems. How the mechanic works is each shaman can have one Greater Totem up at once. This greater totem is a buff that you apply to another player (a "totem bearer". The greater totem affects all class types of that totem bearer in range in the raid. That player becomes, essentially, a moving totem that applies to class across groups. To total up, each shaman can buff his party with his four normal totems and one class with his great totem.
Example: A druid tank, a fury warrior, an enhancement shaman, a mutilate rogue and an MM hunters is in a group. The shaman can drop GoA, SoE, Mana Spring, and Searing, and have a Greater Totem of Windfury on the warrior. If the warrior dies, all the warriors lose the WF buff and the shaman has to chose a new totem bearer to recast a Greater Totem on Windfury on.The graphics are possible with WSG flags already.
-Deep Elemental needs work to make it more appealing. Lightning Overload is lackluster and Totem of Wrath prevents you from using another fire totem. There are ways that you could fix these (accessability issues mostly), but on the whole, they're not very exciting. Giving elemental Shaman a CC (Hex of some sort) or an AOE (Forked Lightning?) would be nice flavour as well as making elemental Shaman closer to a caster class. Giving Shaman an alternative to a nature nuke would be nice (Water Bolt sounds good to me)
Last edited by panny : 04/17/07 at 12:52 AM.
Reason: corrections
I agree with most of the ideas mentioned here (FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, no GCD on totems please), but one thing I have to speak out again. SR linked to CC protection. Yes, that would bolster our PvP potential as enhancement, but it strikes me as fairly ridiculous because it will either completely break teams in half in 2v2 or destroy us. You're talking about putting anti-CC on a dispellable cooldown that's 2m. What happens if we're fighting a good priest/shaman/mage/etc and they kill/steal our SR. Then we're back to square one because no enhancement shaman will last 2m while being kited. On the other hand, 30 seconds of CC immunity against a class that can't dispel is absurd.
The only way I'd see this change working is a retweak of the cooldown of SR going from 15 second duration, 1m cooldown (or some variant of that) or throwing CC immunity to a different skill/talent (shifting to ghost wolf = CC breaking like travel form?)
Most of the ideas I have are already covered, but an easy solution to the mana problems as restoration would be to move Unrelenting Storm to the place where Restorative Totems currently is. This way giving us a good deal of mp5 without having to sacrifice ES and all the good stuff that we get deep in Restoration.
Enh:
Remove the Tier 1 Enh Shield talent, replace with 8% speed increase (that doesn't stack) and 10% to resist slowing effects. Change the 5% mana increase into a 10% int increase.
Increase the armor and dodge talents % increase.
Remove 2H talent from the game. All Shaman can use 2H weapons. In wow 1.0, this talent needed to be in the game, but nowadays I don't see a use for it.
Ele:
Change Clearcasting to 75% mana redux. Change the 41 talent to buff WoA to give an addition 3% crit and hit.
Resto: Reduce the Tier 2 totem % talent to 2 points, making totems 30% cheaper.
General:
Change Lighting Shield to give 5 mp5 per "charge" on the shield.
Scale the caster weapon buffs more.
Millions of words are written annually purporting to tell how to beat the races, whereas the best possible advice on the subject is found in the three monosyllables: 'Do not try.'
I agree with most of the ideas mentioned here (FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, no GCD on totems please), but one thing I have to speak out again. SR linked to CC protection. Yes, that would bolster our PvP potential as enhancement, but it strikes me as fairly ridiculous because it will either completely break teams in half in 2v2 or destroy us. You're talking about putting anti-CC on a dispellable cooldown that's 2m. What happens if we're fighting a good priest/shaman/mage/etc and they kill/steal our SR. Then we're back to square one because no enhancement shaman will last 2m while being kited. On the other hand, 30 seconds of CC immunity against a class that can't dispel is absurd.
The only way I'd see this change working is a retweak of the cooldown of SR going from 15 second duration, 1m cooldown (or some variant of that) or throwing CC immunity to a different skill/talent (shifting to ghost wolf = CC breaking like travel form?)
Why is The Beast Within overpowered for an Enhancement Shaman, but not for a BM hunter?
Because at that point it's basically Divine Shield without the damage invincibility. A healer immune to CC for 30 seconds is probably the most broken suggestion in the entire thread.
- Totems on a separate 1s totem-only global cooldown.
- Draenei Totems that don't look like space-dildos. Please give us Horde totem graphics!
... I started typing this assuming I'd have a list of stuff I'd like to see change, but honestly, I'm very happy overall with my Shaman. Elemental and Enhancement Shaman definitely need some tweaks and fixes, though.
Edit- Ah, thought of some more!
- Flame / Air Shield just for completeness' sake!
- Change Rockbiter to MP/5 or spell damage/healing. (so caster Shaman have a useful weapon enchant).
- Some caster-friendly Earth totem.
- A non-Lightning nuke (maybe a quick Fire spell a-la Scorch and a snaring Frost nuke).
Divide the trees in a way that a single counterspell doesn't shut down every cast we have (other than astra recall).
Tell this to paladins.
Why all the 20 minute elemental hate? We needed some nice, long cooldown emergency buttons like virtually every other class has. The elementals fit the bill.
Basically, our underlying mechanics and older talent tree items need a solid looking at. Essentially shaman are playing with a predominiately pre2.0 base concept with a shiny thing or two tacked on the edges in TBC. (DW, ES, ToW)
04/16/07, 8:26 PM
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