Floria

I think you're missing a point here. A Feral Druid is optimally specced for (throwing out numbers here) 100% capable tank, 80% capable DPS with a gear swap. On fights where something is off-tanked, they can DPS at maybe 70% capacity of a DPS class in their tanking gear.

What's being proposed is that perhaps an Elemental Shaman, when specced for DPS and just a little healing will be a 100% capable DPS, but also 80% of a healer with a gear swap. On certain fights, I'm thinking Maulgar here, they could wear DPS gear and a healing weapon and shield, heal an off-tank until the add's dead, and then weapon-swap to optimal DPS to finish the fight. No respeccing necessary, and the fight goes faster than if the shaman was resto.

Blizzard could even support this sort of playstyle by requiring more healers for phase 1 of a fight, followed by a DPS race for phase 2. Bringing 4 tanks and 8 healers would be disastrous for such a fight, but 2 MTs and 2 hybrid tanks like DKs or Ferals, plus 6 healers and 2 hybrids like Elemental Shamans and Balance Druids would swing in 4 extra DPS for phase 2. Remember, specs don't exist in a vacuum. The success/failure and fun/boredom of the game has as much to do with encounter design as class design and balance.

 

Lucitron

Personally I've always viewed a dps-geared Feral Druid as a melee dps class with a slight twist of melee support, that could be roughly be compared with Retribution Paladins and Enhancement Shamans. The scaling might skew this, but from my experience of Heroic, T4, T5 and early T6, then I've to say it holds quite true.


Restoration Shamans and Elemental Shamans should use more or less the same armour, considering the proposed WotLK talents. I don't think there is much difference between the overall healing capability of a Balance Druid and an Elemental Shaman. Both talent trees provide talents that reduce the mana cost of heals, and it can even be argued that Balance Druids are better healers thanks to Nature's Grace and because Druids have more regular heals than Shamans. The main strength of Elemental Shamans is that they are not locked in a Moonkin shape or Shadow Form, and thus they will be better panic-healers. This strength is sort of negated if you decide beforehand that a dps-hybrid should help out healing during a tricky encounter.

 

Floria

I don't think Retribution nor Feral really can compare to the raid DPS-boosting power of Enhancement Shamans right now, but Ret paladins bring quite respectable DPS these days so long as they're properly slotted into the Windfury group. I may be wrong on Feral, and I'm sure others with T6 experience can clarify this, but I got the impression that part of the appeal of Feral druids was their tanking ability. Would people be bringing kitties to raid if they couldn't go bear? Of course, player quality may vary, and your raid's feral druid may have been exceptional, eking out every last drop of DPS that was possible.

To get back on topic, I was just suggesting that Elementals would not have to respec for different fights just to heal. They can off-heal quite capably. While an Elemental Shaman is no Resto Shaman, a Cat Druid is no rogue, and if people are fine with the latter in exchange for flexibility, why not the former?

 

Lucitron

Good point, though I feel this is a strength of all Hybrid specs.

TBC and Shadow Priests got Vampiric Touch and Misery, increasing their raid popularity. WotLK and Balance Druids are scheduled to get Nature's Fury, Improved Moonkin Form and buffed version of Improved Faerie Fire talent, plus they will also be able to cast Entangling Roots indoors and have the cooldown removed on Hurricane. I think these changes should make Balance Druids very popular.

I've the opinion that Elemental Shamans, Shadow Priests and Balance Druids are sharing roughly the same characteristics of being ranged dps and healer hybrids, and thus they should also bring roughly the same impact to a raid. This is my reasoning why I feel that Elemental Shamans could use one or two talented raid/party buffs.

 

PSGarak

Lava Burst's effect on Clearcasting doesn't operate in this way, because you can't have two back-to-back Lava Burst crits. For rotation 1, your clearcasting uptime is 100% for Flameshock and Clain Lightning, and then for lightning bolt and lava burst your uptime is that of a normal 30% crit rate. Note also that the benefit of controlled Clearcasting can be moved around to benefit more expensive spells.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Eleven

While I absolutely agree with you on this, if elemental DPS was scaled to warlock/rogue levels, although unlikely, would the 25-man buffs still be necessary?

As far as healing goes, I think that the biggest problem for healing as elemental is mana efficiency, wearing less mp5
and not having the throughput to be able to downrank, EF and the itemization changes are going to help immensely, but with EF being available to resto shamans will healing mana usage be balanced around that assumption? i.e. will resto shamans have amazing efficiency with more crit being on gear, or will it be normalized with us getting the shorter end of the stick

 

tl.

From a average raid standpoint we can say that healing + tanking is more important then dps. While there are cases this is not true, I think most ppl think this way.

The kitties go into their "less important" role (dps) on fights that tanks are not needed since they're there anyway (thrash, other bosses).
Elementals go into their "more important" role on fights the healing is needed.
Therefore if there is no fight with a strict dps race, bringing a resto shamy and making him dps on fights he's not needed for is better in most cases then bringing elementals and making them heal in fights healing is needed.

atm I really fear for our spot, especially if most raids will include encounters with varying number of healers required.

 

Alaina

Wouldn't need to be quite rogue/warlock levels, just relatively close. ToW isn't negligible, just minimal. And we're definitely going up from where we are with the new talents/skills/moonkin buffs, if they stay as they are. But, yeah, if we became an output class instead of a group buffer, that'd be ok. Would just need to buff some other things elsewhere since one of our biggest downfalls is that we don't have any raid debuffs to scale our damage aside from Misery and Stormstrike.


Personally, I think we just need 1 more raid utility talent of some sort to set us apart from a resto shaman in the same group a little bit more. There's no question that enhance is better in the melee group, but you could make an argument the extra mana return from a resto is not that much worse than the 3% hit/crit on some fights.

Could be anything, really - make mana returns from thunder apply to the whole party or tack on an effect to some deep elemental talent to give us extra spell damage or haste or something from Wrath of Air. Something simple like that works - just needs to be something, and I think we're golden for WotLK.



As for the healing part... It seems that with Elemental Focus working on healing spells too now, crit heals can help elemental shamans maintain mana even in elemental gear (which is probably the same thing as resto gear with different gems and some different trinkets/accessories)... and if there's one thing Elemental Shamans have never been short on, it's crit.

Naturally, I wouldn't expect the class to go so some sort of "hybrid" role in raids, but it should help for 5 mans, or those random emergency situations where a tank healer goes down and somebody needs to help keep him up for the last 10% or something.

 

Floria

Blizzard has pretty much stopped making fights that ignore the quality of DPS. An Elemental Shaman is better at healing than a Resto Shaman is at DPSing. Much in the same way that healers get removed for DPS as fights go to farm status and get out-geared, an Elemental Shaman can provide spot-healing for tougher segments of certain encounters and DPS the rest of the time. If a Resto Shaman found itself DPSing more than rarely, I'd imagine most raid leaders would encourage them to spec Elemental for the damage.

The only reason why healing and tanking are considered "more important" is that good healers and tanks are harder to find. If WoW had the same class balance and mechanics, but tanking and healing was a lot "more fun", you'd see many more tanks and healers available, and good DPS players would be considered "more important".

 

Vernichter

In reviewing the elemental tree I see legitimate content-specific roles for 5 and 10-man content, but I am leery about elemental in 25-man content. For 25-man content Elemental Shamans are receiving very few self-buffs to their damage or utility. Unless Lava Bursting the flameshocks of an enhancement shaman will be a large net damage gain, elemental shamans will be doing much the same damage they are doing now. Moonkin will provide an additional 6% nature damage from Nature's Fury, and enhancement will provide extra stormstrike charges, but unless those charges go to the elemental shaman, the net increase in damage output will be inferior to what many other damage dealers are getting. This is particularly problematic because 1) healing classes will already be in short supply, and 2) DPS slots will be tight with the increased effectiveness of other hybrids and the addition of Deathknights. In short, Deep Elemental gets little to no extra raid utility in WotLK, and their damage scaling is almost wholly dependent on new external buffs. Absent those buffs elemental shaman will be hard-pressed to compete for ranged DPS slots in 25-man content.

Would the following changes be a viable work-around for this problem?

1) Change Totem of Wrath to an Earth Totem.
2) Add an additional effect to Storm, Earth, and Fire that increases the range of Searing Totem by 3 yards per talent point.
3) Change Thunder to restore 5% mana to all party members.

#1 and #2 would allow elemental shaman to take advantage of their buffs to Searing Totem without compromising Wrath of Air. That should be worth ~130 DPS on a fully debuffed target. #3 would add a relatively small amount of additional synergy and would give Thunder a bit of raid utility which was previously lacking due to its long cooldown.

 

Rhaegal

Floria is absolutely right. DPS is, if anything, becoming more important. I think Blizzard has finally started to realize that you can get by with terrible DPS in most instances, but you can never get by with a terrible tank, and almost never with terrible healers. Even on the 5-man level, they've started adding DPS checks; the warlock guy in SL is a great example. Secondly, raids are always looking to move faster and get more content cleared. I've never heard of a guild intentionally trying to stack more healers. If anything, the desire is to cut back as much as possible to save time. Hybrids are part of what makes this possible in some instances.

The biggest argument in favor of this, however, is that Blizzard has explicitly stated a desire to include more timed events in the game. You don't get bear mounts by bringing bad DPS, or feral druid OTs who don't understand the importance of maximizing their skill at playing a cat, etc. Fortunately, more and more events are being added to the game that separate DPS who understand their class from those who just push buttons that sound cool and make big numbers. Some of these take the form of timed events, others are less obvious: Princess Delrissa on Heroic is all about the DPS classes being able to control the fight with long-term CC (sheep, banish, freezing trap, etc.), short-term CC (blind, cyclone, etc.), and well-timed interrupts, roots, disorients, and any other tricks they can pull out of their sleeves. It's about as far from a tank-oriented fight as Aran.

Stand back! I'm going to try SCIENCE!

 

Graze

Personally, I'd rather see Tranquil Air as an Earth Totem(Calming Earth?), as all the good totems are basicly air already.
Storm, Earth and Fire should give additional scaling to LB and CL, in my opinion aswell (currently its a craptacular talent)
Thunder could give a 5% damage increase to your party members for 30-60 seconds.

There's plenty of options available, we can throw tons of ideas at Blizzard, we can only hope they take any actions.
Currently looking at all these buffs and debuffs comming and going, it feels like Elementals are gonna be stuck in the same seat at now, pretty high base damage and pretty crappy scaling.

I'm a shaman, a conduit of the ancient forces of nature. A master of the elements, except fire, water or earth really... nor do I have any REAL control of nature. But I do hurl bolts of lightning!

 

Esoth

It seems that I am reading Lava Flow differently from others:
To me this sounds like it adds 5% spellpower coefficient per rank, kind of like empowered fireball.

 

PSGarak

Looking at that talent description again, I might have a hare-brained third interpretation for its effect with Flametongue Weapon. Previously we had been debating whether the talent increases all spell damage while FT is up, or if FT now gives a +dmg effect which this talent buffs. The wording could possibly imply that untalented FT gives a +dmg buff but that the buff does not allow double-dipping by specing DW and using two weapons with FT on them. On the other hand, I don't expect alpha talents to have such tight and subtle wording, so who knows.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Darian_TruBlade

Sort of like a personal Aura. Equipping it once gives the buff, equipping it twice is meaningless. The mechanics for it are certainly there. Sounds quite plausible.

Then again, I'm not sure what the point would be. Even with 71 talent points to work with I can't imagine a DW Ele spec panning out. Blizzard recently changed the few One Hand caster weapons to be Main Hand, killing off one of the main reasons to spec that way. The only effect would be to prevent true Enhancement Shaman from double dipping when they throw on their healing set (I find it extremely unlikely that double FT would outdo double WF unless the FT buff is pretty obscene).

 

Daidalos

Thats actually what I first assumed from their wording and would be the most useful imo.

Restoration Shaman calculations:http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...IWv3sPmcYnEJUg

 

Graze

So let's crunch some numbers on the different possibilities:
Assuming 2000 +dmg and a base coef. of 0.71 (2.5/3.5 - This isn't true because of the bandaid patch.)

a) 15% More total spelldamage
2300 * 0.71 = 1633 additional damage per LB

b) 15% More scaling
2000 * 0.86 = 1720 additional damage per LB (equals 422 additional +dmg @ 2000 base)

c) 15% More +dmg from X +dmg provided by Flametongue
for 1.15X to be greater than the bonus from option A, X has to be greater than 260.
Assuming X is 150 (seems like a reasonable amount)
2172 * 0.71 = 1542 additional damage per LB. Making it 15 additional damage per LB more than untalented.

It's late, I'm tired and math may be flawed. Option B is clearly the better.
Option C feels rather weak, unless they really buff Flametongue Weapon in wotlk, making it give about 300 +dmg, but then other casters will complain about us getting a free super oil.
I feel option A is the most plausible not only in terms of power but also because of the wording.

I'm a shaman, a conduit of the ancient forces of nature. A master of the elements, except fire, water or earth really... nor do I have any REAL control of nature. But I do hurl bolts of lightning!

 

PSGarak

Eh, I can't really object to 250-300 damage too much since warlocks get something like 180 from fel armor at top WLK rank (234 with talents), and that doesn't take the place of a wizard oil. The biggest complaint with that implimentation is that it's non-scaling.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Lucitron

For mana cost reduction then it is of interest in what order you cast your spells, but for Elemental Oath then the only interest is if you are dealing with a damage spell that profit from spell hit or a heal that doesn't profit. This is the reason why I could take the shortcut and just add up all spell crit values and get an average.


______________

I feel that if we enter the wish-list part then we could probably go on forever, and every person has their very own opinion of what needs to be done. While it might not be that constructive, it is probably easier and safer to highlight oddities and problem areas. Afterall, I sort of doubt that we can get a consensus about the different solutions, and it is even quite likely that other classes will feel threatend by talents that "trespass" on their territory. I've already mentioned that I envy Balance Druids and their new Nature's Fury talent, and I wager that if I suggested a similar talent or, god forbid, suggested that it is straight out moved to the Elemental Shaman tree, then there would be loads of angry replies worthy of the wow-forum.

 

tufy

It's scaling. The more +dmg you have, the higher your bonus. At 1000 +dmg, you'll get 150 extra +dmg. At 2000 +dmg, the bonus will be 300. At 3000 +dmg, we're looking at 450 increase. I personally am assuming around 2000 normal in WotLK, so that's still pretty damn decent.

Anyway, let's combine two ideas above: Vernichter stated:

Lucy(tron) added:

What if we combine this with flametongue change? Totem of Wrath to earth school, Flametongue totem functions the same for all party members at, say, 30% value of the personal weapon boost. There, an elemental shaman now gives 3% crit, 3% hit, 201 +dmg and 50 mp5 total or 3% crit, 3% hit and 100 +dmg more than nonelemental shaman. Plus, the change scales with gear and caster shamans get 4 useable caster totems.

I don't really consider this a problem if we can use enhancement's charges. If we can't, though, it will be an issue. What I find lacking is 30 yard Lava Burst range as opposed to 36 yard Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning ranges - This means Storm Reach is effectively useless for us in pve.

Additionally, a few spell details are known:

- Hex lasts 8 seconds (1 min cooldown),
- Lava Burst has a travel time similar to Lightning Bolt
- Spirit Wolf is summoned (targeted ability) and pops up a pet bar.

I'm adding this to the first post now.

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

 

Vernichter

I will conceed to the point that wish-list posting is frowned upon for a very good reason.

However, the point of my previous wish-list was not to make pie-in-the-sky suggestions; rather, I meant to allude to some of the generally recognizable short-comings of the current tree and demonstrate that those short-comings could be readily fixed without making any drastic changes.

Why bring an elemental shaman when you could bring a second resto shaman for the caster DPS group? Currently, the group gains 3% spell hit/spell crit at the cost of significant mana returns and the damage of searing totem. Changing Thunder to a group mana return would essentially negate the first of those concerns (depending on range restrictions, of course). Changing ToW to an earth totem and increasing the range on Searing Totem would negate the second of those concerns. The net result would be that putting an elemental shaman and not a resto shaman with the caster DPS would always be a net gain for the casters, and that seems like a crucial point in preserving the viability of elemental shaman in large raid content. Also note that my suggestion gave raid utility to our top talents which is otherwise lacking.

I cannot argue that these changes are unequivocally correct for us, but I can argue that this proposal addressed the heart of our problems elegantly. The top talents in the tree need to have viability in all play-settings. Elemental shaman also need to provide unique benefits in 25-mans as compared to resto shaman. The current tree does not meet either of these goals, but the goals are definitely quite reachable within the proposed class design.

 

Esoth

Well they're still all better than wizard oil. Assuming wizard oil goes up to something like 60 at 400 enchanting, it would be inferior to all of those options with just a very small amount of spell damage. So in all of these choices we are getting a "free" oil - but enh get a free one too.

Looking at B again makes me curious though... Has there been any talk about a stat like "spell coefficient rating"? That would a very powerful stat to have...

 

Lucitron

As might have been noted on my posts, I'm looking at it a bit pessimistically and thus interpreted that Lava Burst would work like Conflagrate. Sorry for not making that clear.

Now, I decided to make a bit of research on this topic and noticed that Lava Burst's tooltip correspond quite well with the wording for Swiftmend. I.e. I believe I stand corrected and that Lava Burst actually can be used on any Flame Shock on the target.

*EDIT*
Lava Burst works only on your own flame shock, and it will consume it unless you glyph for it.

___________

I favour drastic changes, and I actually started to sketch out my own crazy ideas initially, before I decided to change my post all together.

 

Vernichter

I do not have an objection to drastic changes, per se, but predicting them is fundamentally difficult. It seems like a safer assumption to believe that the spirit of the tree will be preserved through future tweeks rather than assuming that we will acquire change X or Y. Consider the changes to Shadow Priests in the TBC beta. They went from having a 41-point heal in shadow form to having VT. From that point on VT defined the role of the build. No one saw that coming.

Listing the perceived weaknesses as in Post #XXX makes a ton of sense and seems to be the best kind of feedback for the design team. Proposing changes that preserve the current form and function of the current alpha build seems like more of a conversation with other players as to whether the current design approach is viable or if the approach itself needs modification. I would argue that drastic changes are not needed to the intent of the current talents and that the list of shortcomings can be resolved within the current framework of the tree.

 

PSGarak

Sorry for not explaining that more clearly: The Elemental Focus uptime with lava burst will be strictly higher than the average-crit modeling because the guaranteed crits from lava burst are evenly distributed rather than randomly distributed. The first two spells in the cycle have 100% EF uptime, the rest will have that of a 30% critrate.
Eg, For a 6-spell cycle, assuming 5 spells at 30% and one spell at 100%.
Average crit chance of 41.67%, which gives 65.97% uptime predicted.
30% crit gives 51% uptime for 2/3 of the time, averaged with 100% 1/3 of the time gives 67.33% uptime.
So not huge, but measurable and possibly noticeable. The fact that you can shuffle spells around to benefit more expensive ones means that this is really a lower bound on efficiency increase instead of an average-case itself.

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