PVP

My main problem with Shamans is their pvp capabilities. Coming from a death knight, if I see a shaman that doesn't look resto, they are the first one I target. I can bring them down extremely quickly (low health pools and survivability) and their damage output isn't as good as mine either. Coming from a shaman, our damage is very weak compared to other classes. Back in BC, I was more careful against shamans, but now I dont have to worry about them outbursting me.
The worst spec for pvp is enhance. There are many great enhancement pvpers out there, but if you look at the number of enhancement shamans with top arena ratings you aren't going to find very many. My main problem with PVP enhancement is the fact that we have no survivability, much lower damage output than anyone else, and the fact that we rely on totems so much.

So my question is, are there any plans to improve enhancement shamans in pvp?

Thanks :)

PVP QUESTION:

General Question: Will elemental shamans get increased survivability?

Elaborated:

Are there any plans of giving (all specs) shamans a way to distance themselves from their enemy? Tstorm is nice but does not work well in conjunction with EB totem root or FN totem stun. Something more along the lines of mages with their frost nova and blink combo.

OR

Are there plans of giving us some sort of CC break/immunity. Grounding totem & earth shock are good for preemptive play but don't cut it since most CC spells A) aren't affected by grounding totem or B) can be recasted right after they have just been casted (excluding our own brand of CC, hex) and our shocks share CD so they can't always be used for interrupting.

ALSO

Could the GCD on totems be further reduced? Their effects make our class competitive but the partial GCD it makes us waste can often needlessly mean death in fast pace pvp situations.

AND...

Could u make FN totem explode faster plz. TY :D

Any thought on blizz fixing LvB? sure would be nice! Thanks for the hot fix tho on lightning overload.

Itemization for Enhance Spec Shaman

Armor Pen has been forced on to almost all mail gear, despite it being a sub par stat even with changes made to it. Do you plan on adding actual Enh gear or does Blizz just want us to go from Naxx tier7.5-tier8/8.5?

For reference, melee damage only consists of half of Enh DPS as we are a melee/caster hybrid. ArPen is useless for the later.

the lack of weapons in ulduar that are available to enh shamans is disapointing there is one available that isnt hardmode and the compation for it is horibble had one drop and 2 rogues and one prot warrior linked on it thankfully are gm gave it to me but told me that the next one will be going to some one else leaving me to wait for 2 months or so to get another or a hardmode loot and all the gear with armor pen is being tossed at me seeing we have no constant hunter atm leaving me out of the circle for any teir gear seeing we run 3-4 warrior mix of prot fury and arms as well as 3-4 ele and resto shamans you guys messed up on loots in ulduar leaving alot of enh shamans in the same boat as i am allowing us to use one handed swords would be a way to quick fix atleast some of the gearing problems that we are in atm and maybe adding more crit/attack power gear over armor pen would help alot in pve

Hex. Hex. Hex.

In both PvE and PvP right now it is the single most lack-luster form of CC.
In PvE it's essentially a polymorph with a longer CD, meaning if you're fighting giant packs of mobs (read: Vezax trash) and you know you wont get to the hex right away you have to come up with a system for shamans to chain hex one mob while every other class with PvE CCs can stand in a corner and chain CC all they want.

In PvP it blows chunks. Again it's incredibly long CD and the fact that a player can still move around while hexed makes the situations it's useful in minimal at -best-

Any plans for it to ever become a real CC?

Totems. Totems. Totems.

Will the timer ever be buffed on totems? Will the range ever be buffed on totems? Will totems ever receive a real buff?
Totem of Wrath - if you have a demo lock your ele shaman just wasted a talent point.
Imp. Mana Spring - With the buff to blessing of wisdom, resto shamans are once again wasting talent points to get to mana tide.
Imp. Windfury totem - Imp. Icy Talons walks around with the DK and overrides WF totem anyways. Pointless talent points.

To me I'm seeing both spec-specific and CLASS-SPECIFIC talents that should be the DEFINING FACTOR of a class being null and void in the presence of other classes and specs that most raids have anyways. Shamans are that 'backup' incase one of your other guys dies (minus the paladin because his buff stays).
Other than heroism / bloodlust, will shamans ever have hard reasons to be dropping their totems ever again?

Ok, first, I would like to express my great appreciation for this thread and its generally constructive nature. Second, if any of the following questions have been asked please excuse my re-asking of them.

My questions mainly concern PvE resto healing, as this is what I play, and I do not plan on inquiring in other areas as I feel I do not have the necessary experience to get to the important issues. I'll leave said questions to others with more expertise than myself.

This being said, here it goes:

1) My first question involves the fairly poor itemization of the restoration T8 gear. Why, as opposed to T7.5, is there only 1 piece of T8 that is itemized optimally (haste/mp5)?

I feel forced to subsidize this lack of optimized gear with other pieces, specifically the lack of MP5/haste and the over-itemization of crit, arguably the worst of the three stats for a resto shaman. Due to this change I have seen numerous first hand accounts of friends who also play resto shamans switching to an entirely new form of healing, focusing on gearing as an elemental shaman would to boost their HPS while sacrificing longevity. Personally, I prefer the longevity approach and while I use these new pieces as I said before I feel constricted.

2) As has been asked many timed before, is there anything that can be done to improve the way totems work?

Personally I feel that the system is long outdated. In instances and raids during BC they were fine due to the general close proximity of many trash pulls or the time it took to defeat these pulls. To illustrate this I will provide a few examples.

In Karazhan when the group was approaching opera (behind the stage) I could place totems close to the first door, before a pull was made and not need to move them until the group had finished the first room and moved to the side of the stage. In larger raids such as TK and SSC the trash pulls simply took longer to kill and I therefore did not have a problem placing totems.

Now, in Ulduar I feel the trash pulls are too spaced for the current totem system to remain streamline. A good example of this in Ulduar is the trash pulls before Mimiron. While I understand that the space between the pulls is necessary I feel it hurts shamans due to the immobile nature of our totems. Having to place, recall, and replace our totems every pull is clunky and honestly, somewhat annoying.

On boss fights replacing totems not only often uses valuable time but mana as well. An example of this is again on the Mimiron portion of Ulduar. As the raid moves from phase 2 to phase 3 we group up. Usually, depending on where the healers are placed this requires myself or the other resto shaman to replace totems and then again as we spread out at the beginning of phase 4.

More to come later...

can shamans get some fixes on these useless totems?

and was the LvB damage reduction looked into?

stop paying attention to other classes that clearly need no buffing and help out the underdog class that does plox (shamans)

i know we were OP in vanilla wow but those days are long and gone, blizz plz dont keep the mentality of giving us the shaft

if you wanna know what im talking about roll a shaman blizzard then maybe you will open your eyes

Elemental PVE

Scalability

A while back lightning bolt was nerfed for elementals. This now poses an issue with gear. Are we going to start to see mail gear with higher amounts of spellpower than their cloth counterparts? Otherwise we will fall behind. Yes LB is a very affective spell. But now nearly all the caster have some major bottom tier talent that allows for speed increases in thier high coeffecient spells, while not having a "soft" haste cap. Even with Lightning overload going to 33%, we will most likely sill fall behind as we reach higher end gear.

my questions:
1. Are we going to start to see mail gear with higher amounts of spellpower than their cloth counterparts?

2. Are there other plans to help elemental scalability?


Totems:

Are there plans to bring up searing totem damage to be competitive vs that of magma totem on single target mobs?

From my perspective of Resto PvP in 2s, and 3s:

Why do I have the lowest burst healing output of all healers?
Riptide is largely to blame here, takes 15 seconds to heal for the same a holy shock, which nearly never happens. As well as how pathetic the healing done by healing wave when compared to other healing spells with similar cast time and cost.

Why do I have the worst mana efficiency of all the healers?

Why do I have the worst mana regen of all the healers, and why is it that if I am under attack, keeping myself alive generally requires me to earthshield myself, further destroying my mana regen?

Why is it that I have no active defensive spells, outside of a glyph that doesn't scale at all?

Even with toughness, why do I have 1000-4000 HP less then everyone else in similar gear?

When are totems being revamped, as no one can even argue that they are a currently effective mechanic?

Shaman have some serious issues as a class in PvP, in PvE, this is lessened, though elemental DPS is still behind, and resto is overly reliant on chain heal to compete with other healers.

I love playing my shaman, it's easily the most enjoyable class, but it is so severely gimped in arena right now, that it almost isn't fun to PvP. I often find myself simply unable to heal through the damage myself or partners are taking, even when I make no mistakes, am not interrupted, and am just chain casting healing spells. Resto is just so much weaker then every other healer that I have given up on seriously doing 2s, and converted to ele for 3s.

The only thing I would like added to the class (for enhancement) is some decent way of doing AoE. I hate going into a zone in Naxx or even heroics where almost all trash is AoE based and those classes who have good AoE talents just rock . If my wolves are up, and I plant a fire totem, and i get in a couple of chain lightnings its still not even close to something like what a DK, rogue, pali can do with talents.

Its not so much of a complaint, its just something that we should have the option of speccing into.

The rest of the class to me seems okay other than we are hopeless in PVP but i hate PVP so I won't even discuss that :)

Thanks

A Real AOE. Even a channeled chain lightning would be nice. It's kind of goofy running into the pile, tstorming, laying magma, then usually backing out before being owned by a dark touched warrior etc.

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Q u o t e:
As a part of our class Question & Answer series, we are looking for any questions you may have concerning your class and ask that you post in this thread. For more information on our Q&A series, please click here- http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=17223094467&postId=172212650675&sid=1#0

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Thanks for listening!

Here are two for you guys.

1.
Awhile back, it was brought up whether or not to allow ghost wolf to make us immune to polymorph/movement impairing effects, such as druids. After awhile, the decision was made to not allow that to happen because Blizzard did not want to take an existing unique ability of a class and give it to another (ie an iconic ability). Fair enough... HOWEVER...

Things have changed since then. Anything that makes shamans unique are now being handed over to other classes left and right (windfury to DK, strength of earth to DK, flametongue to a caster, mana spring not stacking with paladins,etc...) and we're finding less and less reasons to even use our totems (iconic abillity) now. Not only that, but they all have BETTER versions of it, seeing as theirs are buffs, and ours are totems we have to constantly move around due to range issues. Since Blizzard has clearly changed their mindset about giving unique abilities to other classes, I believe that ghost wolf having the same effect as the druid shapechange should now be re-addressed, as the reason to not allow it to begin with is now obsolete.


2.
It was stated by Blizzard that resto Shamans were at the desired level of mana regen, which is why the mana regen nerf mainly affected all other healers. So, other healers were above par, while shamans were on par.

10 means on par.

Other healers before nerf: 13 (13 seeing that even after the nerf, Blizzard still states that healers still have too much mana regen. You'll understand in a moment)

Shamans before nerf: 10

After the mana regen nerf, all healers except shamans got knocked down a notch

Other healers after nerf: 12
Shamans after nerf: 10

After this, it was decided that paladin wisdom and shaman mana spring would no longer stack. Although the mana spring got a buff, the paladin aura is still superior code-wise. Additionally, nearly any raid is always going to have a paladin that can run wisdom, so mana spring is pretty much out the door. Because of this, EVERYONE across the board lost about 100 mp5.

Other healers after paladin/shaman change: 11
Shamans after paladin/shaman change: 9

As you can see, shamans are clearly now UNDER the mana regen par. Blizzard stated that shamans were ON PAR...then shortly afterwords knocked out an additional 100 mp5 across the board.

What concerns me is although non-shaman healers were nerfed, and then everyone was nerfed with paladin/shaman change, Blizzard is STILL stating that healers still have too much mana regen. If this is their stance, I fear they will nerf everyone across the board again to bring non-shaman healers on par down to 10...but at the same time knock shamans down to 8 instead of increasing up to 10.

That is all from me for now. Thanks! :)

Hi, I play both a shaman and a warrior that 2v2's with a shaman(at 2200-2400, bouncing between 3rd and 1st war/sham in my BG a lot.)


Why is shaman efficiency based around tanking with watershield in PvP? As soon as a shaman takes damage, they have to swap to earthshield and have zero regen. Is there any consideration for merging water and earth shield, or changing this somehow?

Shaman mana regen in PvP is abysmal, and manatide(besides watershield issues above) is a main issue. Manatide is a party centered mana restore ability, is there any changes being planned, such as a glyph to make it restore more mana but be self only? Every other healer regen utility blows this out of the water.


Thanks.

Nice to finally see an active blue on these forums after so long, I had really given up hope that anyone at blizzard was even monitoring shaman issues.

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Q u o t e:
can shamans get some fixes on these useless totems?


if you wanna know what im talking about roll a shaman blizzard then maybe you will open your eyes

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Ditto. Seems like more and more totems are being phased out and replaced by raid wide buffs. Almost anything a shaman, which is supposed to be the ultimate supportive class, can bring to a raid can be replaced by another class's buff, especially paladins.

Elemental oath-Requires a critical hit and does not Stack with Moonkin aura
SoE totem: Horn of winter
Mana spring-Blessing of winter
All of our resistnace totems are completely useless. I have been using nature reistance in Ulduar of late to mitigate lightning damage, but only so the hunter dosent have to give up dragonhawk.

It seems like the only thing Standing between the shaman and obsoletion is bloodlust/heroism, which ALL boss fights CAN be done without.

I do applaud blizzard for the Lightning Overload buff but still it seems that all of our dps is left completely up to chance. Other classes, mages in particular, have ways sure fire ways to snowball their dps consistently, like Arc Blast stacking can consistently do good dps. The only control shaman have over dps is lava burst, other than that its spam lightning bolt and Pray to the gods for Overload procs.