Overall, it was okay, but it seemed like many of these issues are just changes LONG LONG LONG overdue. Totem stomping and our "legacy" health pools are things thhat should have already been changed.

Things I wanted to hear but didnt

1. PURGE- and offensive dispelling becoming better, all I heard was the possble earth shield change. which would help us when someone is trying to dispell it, but hurts when we are trying to dispel. Yet another reason purge is getting weaker

2. MANA REGEN/EFFICIENCY IN PVP - We need a fix to riptide, it kills our mana and is making us lose the mana battle. We heard a comment about using chain heal in PvE, but our real mana problems happen in pvp

3. Shocks- Why are they doing so little damage for a 6 second cooldown. When most melee classes can hit me for 2500 regular instant attacks, my shocks are doing maybe half that and share a cooldown. For an "iconic" ability, they have become pretty weak.

I'm Elemental and don't PVP. I don't see anything in this thread that gives me any hope. I feel the PVE Elemental spec is broken for Ulduar. The major questions about the viability of PVE Elemental shamans have not been answered. The only thing I saw was one mention of “we will look into this” and I find this a very limp response.

For Elemental:
1) Scaling was not addressed
2) Not benefiting raid buffs was not addressed
3) ToW vs dps totems was not address. BTW, GC we are not competitive for dps when we buff the raid with ToW /duh
4) Mobility for totems “might” be addressed /yawn
5) Lack of Elemental items from Ulduar

You should add the 100 mp5 to earthshield and lightning shield as well. So shaman regen isn't so poor when they don't run ws.

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Q u o t e:
Elemental shamans have had a couple of opportunities to shine in Ulduar -- blowing up constructs on Ignis is one example.

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WTF, who does that? You know why I love this example? Because they give us an 'opportunity to shine' on a fight that could be completely skipped for the entirety of Ulduar and there is no hard mode. GG Maybe you should give us another 'opportunity to shine' on the other skipable fight with no hardmode, Razorscale... ...wait, that is a resto shaman time to shine with heal sniping. GG again!

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GC was obviously making a joke. The primary example he could come up with for a Ele Shaman's time to shine = dispatching of adds on a non-hardmode 'optional' boss. It was obviously a joke.

Right?

Honestly, I think we've all heard this before. Being an Elemental shaman who's getting ripped apart in BG's and with the lack of gear in Uld. I've already started to pvp on my DK and lvling my rogue to do DPS simply because I feel elemental has gotten the short end of the stick yet again.

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Q u o t e:
Players sometimes accuse Enhancement of being too much of a one-trick pony. It’s understandable that saying “I bring damage!” when so many classes have multiple forms of crowd-control and crowd-control breaks may not cut it these days. Players often request more anti-CC in the form of the Feral Spirits, but we don’t want to turn that ability into something that is saved only to be used as a PvP trinket. Again, mobility (both offensive and defensive) will help Enhancement. A lot of the spec’s damage come from procs and sustained effects, while PvP is more about front-loading damage at the right moment. We definitely can make some changes to give Enhancement more of that, but it requires a lot of changes to the talent tree and playstyle and not the kind of thing you can just hotfix in. On the other hand, Enhancement can offensively dispel, interrupt, and use Tremor and Cleansing Totems while still being a melee DPS. They do have a lot of utility -- they just need a little help in order to bring it about. They no longer have mana problems in the longer matches.

One of the challenges of designing the shaman class is that we think it is one of the most challenging classes to play in PvP. (Players sometimes call this having a “high skill cap.”) The shaman has to think about defense and offense at the same time, while many classes can worry about one or the other. For example, a Holy paladin can concentrate on keeping his or her group alive while the Restoration shaman has to do that while also keeping totems up, offensively purging buffs from the enemy team, using Wind Shock to interrupt spell casts, etc. The challenge is making it not too difficult for the average player but also not too powerful for the guy who can master all of the shaman’s tools. (Warlocks and hunters have very similar challenges, by the way.)

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There isn’t much to discuss about the overall assessment. The point that I would contend with is “it requires a lot of changes to the talent tree and playstyle and not the kind of thing you can just hotfix in.” I disagree on that point and I think we could easily have a good portion of our issues addressed with just a few relatively simple changes to go along with the reworking of our totems that hopefully is intended to be introduced in 3.2

The things that jumped out at me from this section of the Q&A are;

- Feral Spirits
- A lot of the spec’s damage comes from procs and sustained effects
- Lot of utility in need of help to bring it about
- Using wind shock to interrupt casts

Let’s take those one at a time.

Feral Spirits – the issue with the Feral Spirits is not that we need them to be another PvP trinket. The issue is that with their 3 minute cooldown it is like we are two different classes. Somewhat balanced when they are available and a free kill when they are on cooldown. Also with their current cooldown/duration they feel wasted during trash since they just end up padding along next to us on our way to the next pull most of the time and then despawn right when we pull. Then there is the feeling that we have to pull them out early while PvPing or we won’t get to pull them out at all due to stuns where we end up dead before it breaks.

Simple Fix – Drop them to thirty second duration on a 2 minute cooldown and make them summonable while stunned. Same uptime but able to use it more consistently and no longer have to worry about pulling them out early since we would be able to pull them out during a stun as needed.

Damage comes from procs and sustained effects – Frozen Power was a good start towards dealing with this issue although with the highest rank of Frostbrand being bugged (and it is still bugged btw) with a broken coefficient since the moment the talent was introduced it has not been as much of a help as it should have been. We have 1 main proc in PvP and that is Windfury. Maelstrom Weapon and Frostbrand are more sustained effects. We also have this issue since too much of our utility is tied to our damage but I’ll bring that up in that section.

Simple Fix – Change the Windfury Glyph to give a 20% increased chance for a Windfury proc when you Stormstrike. Over time it should be a similar dps increase (in PvE) to the current glyph, because of the 3 second cooldown and due to all the haste we have in PvE, but in PvP it would give us access to some much needed burst on demand which would fit well with all of our mechanics.

Wind Shock and our Utility – In my mind this is really the big issue. This is the one that really causes both our playability issues and limits us in PvP and frustrates us in PvE and really is what needs addressing as soon as possible. Too much of our offensive utility is tied to our defensive utility. This breaks down to Totems and Wind Shock. Strength of Earth is tied to Tremor and Stoneclaw and Earthbind and Stoneskin just as Wind Shock is tied to Earth Shock and Frost Shock and Flame Shock just as Grounding is tied to Windfury Totem. Wind Shock being tied to the shock cooldown gives us an interrupt that is off the GCD but that deprives us of a large chunk of our burst and utility at the same time.

As for the totems the best examples I can think of to relate these to the other classes would be if Horn of Winter was removed from the DK and everyone the DK had buffed the moment they used Chains of Ice/AMS/AMZ or a Warrior’s Battleshout was removed whenever they hamstrung/spell reflected/intervened someone or a Paladin had all their Blessings removed from them and from everyone they had blessed when they used BoP or Hand of Freedom or Bubbled.

(Not so) Simple Fixes – it sounds like the totem issues are already being discussed although I hope their fix isn’t as far off as it sounds from the language used. Being able to drop 4 totems at once is nice but if you can’t have the buffs at the same time as the defensive totems it doesn’t change that much. Personally I like the concept of either making certain buffs come from those schools of totems no matter which totem in that school is active or through having the totems apply the buffs to people but that the buffs would have a duration independent from the totem.

As for Wind Shock…just get it off the Shock cooldown already. Remove the interrupt from Earth Shock and put Wind Shock on it’s own cooldown. It already has the shortest lockout of any interrupt so just increase the cooldown to 12 seconds with that short lockout and call it a day or make a Wind Shock glyph that unlinks it from the Shock cooldown at the cost of using a major glyph spot.

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Q u o t e:
Q. What is it that makes them unique compared to all other classes?

A: Totems, totems, totems!

Okay, that’s the obvious answer, but it goes deeper than that. The weapon enchants are an unusual part of the shaman class, as are mechanics like the shield spells (Earth Shield, Lightning Shield) and Frost Shock. Shaman buffs and utility spells are quite powerful, including the infamous Heroism / Bloodlust, but also their self-rez ability, Reincarnation. As envisioned from the start, shamans were also the “offensive” hybrid. Things have inevitably blurred a bit since then, but they are still a counterpart and complement to paladins – paladins have cleanse, shamans have purge; paladins will let an ally move freely to escape or catch an opponent, shamans will snare an enemy to let their ally escape or catch him or her; paladins will make sure their allies’ casts aren’t interrupted, shamans will interrupt enemy casts; and so forth.

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I maintain that the specific problem we are having is that we want to care about totems too, but they are so horribly implemented in both effect and mechanics that everyone detests them at this point. I feel like I'm a broken record here, but make us CARE about them.

As for what I've been calling 'turret syndrome' for the past few years, I'm glad you guys understand it. Now surprise us all and do something about it. Ulduar is not the sort of instance where a jump five yards in any direction fixes our problems-it tends to require coordinated running around and completely repositioning totems in relation to where the boss is now for us to start doing our job again after having complete DPS fall off.

It's the same problem we used to ask you guys what the hell you were thinking in AQ20 with Osirrian the Shaman hating boss fight. All totems down at once with a UI element to help us manage it? Great. I seem to recall Kalgan saying back around 1.7-1.9 or so (somewhere in there) that they were designing a totem UI, and I know that a lot of us who play Shaman are deeply offended from how many times we've been pushed out of the way for you guys to fix Paladin issues and utterly ignore us.

The thing that makes me definitively angry is that Shaman is the only class in the game that is fundamentally unchanged since vanilla WoW. The only thing really, truly different is that all the specs are viable.

But as for 'skill' in PvP, I disagree. Shaman may require more situational awareness based on the fact that a good shaman should be playing defense and offense at the same time, but teams just blast Shaman down because we can't stop them from doing it. And when ARE in a position to make those judgments and bring the toolkit to bear, we're fighting cast times, cooldowns on necessary abilities, and the GCD more than any class I have ever played.

As Elemental, we hate Mages in PvP because we are now where they were in vanilla, only we have cooldowns tied to everything, the mage still had more instant casts available, and all the games melee have evolved to deal with Mage escapes.

In comparison... AoE roots and inverted blink are so tame to melee that we get run over anyways.

Thank you for the acknowledgment. After the plethora of threads shamen have started over the years I'm sure that most of us were beginning to feel a bit neglected and ignored.

You have certainly addressed many of the most important issues we currently face ( especially in PVP, because as you say we're all doing fairly well in PVE as it is ).


However:

PLEASE DO NOT FORGET TO GIVE US SOME DISPELL RESIST ON MSW, THIS IS STILL QUITE GAME BREAKING IN ARENA.

Here's a thought I just had after reading the Q&A, regarding the hesitation to allow Shamans to use swords. How about a talent in deep Elemental to allow the use of 1H swords. This would then give a few more caster weapon options for Ele without having to worry about Enh balance with swords. Just an idea....

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C) Fixing the base health is nice, but that's a paltry 500-1000 health to bring us in line with the rest of the classes. Our counterparts in the case of Enhancement are beating us by several times that amount.

More later, gotta go raid.

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Just to throw this out there as it's fairly entertaining to a guy who has a warrior and a shaman: Warriors (and all plate DPS, really) are concerned that there's TOO MUCH stam on their gear and that they can do more damage by wearing leather and even in some cases mail (with "wasted" points in stam and int it still comes out to less "wasted" points than are on plate).

Examples can be easily seen with dps helms having more stam on them than tanking helms...there are, of course, more examples than that, but just look at high item-level plate helms.

Also, warrior's (and dk's base health is almost 1700 more than a shaman's....not 500.

I vote Rogues!

I read the Q&A post and had some responses to it. One of the points brought up was the fact that resto shamans raid healing seem to go oom much faster than other casters raid healing. There is one of two fixes that came to my mind for this First, Clearcasting. Our clearcasting talent in the elemental tree is only proc'd by damaging spells but a druids is proc'd by a healing, damaging, or auto-attack yet they are both located in the third tiers of the trees - druids in restoration, shamans in elemental. Perhaps some change to this is in order.
Another talent I looked at is Improved Water Shield and compared to Illumination from a Holy Paladin. First, Illumination has a 100% chance with any spell crit. IWS has a 100% chance with HW and Riptide. One change I would make is to add chain heal to that mix. Now, for the amount of mana regeneration, I'll compare a paladin's holy light to a shaman's healing wave. For now, lets say they both have 4.4k base mana (that's before gear) So, HL costs 1496 mana and HW costs 1408 mana. Now lets say they both crit. On the HW crit, 200 mana is restored to the shaman. On the HL crit, 898 mana is restored to the paladin. Perhaps also increasing mana restored by the orbs would help.

This made my day

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Q u o t e:

From here, we can start touching on more specifics where we can and do some follow-up. So if you do have additional questions, feel free to ask them. We'll still be watching and answering where we can.

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Any plans or word on Ghost Wolf and it's talent? I'm sure it's probably a question that has been asked frequently for the Q&A, but nothing was mentioned by GC about it.

TLDR Version:

Shaman (General)

May get 4 totems in one GCD someday down the road

Increased health

May get rid of totem stomping (very contradictory language here though)

May delete a few totems altogether

Shaman (Restoration)

Increased health of mana tide totem

Shaman (Elemental)

Will not be seeing better itemized gear

Shaman (Enhancement)

Working as intended

...and of course the game breaker:

Shaman will receive 3-4 bag spaces

Overall, I found this Q&A to contain little to no substance, just really a blue wall of rambling text. Sure, they acknowledged that Shaman are terrible in PvP, and average at best in PvE, but nothing concrete - just a simple "we are looking into it" for everything.

Poor Shaman.

Wow this makes me so happy, finally i know that bliz knows shamans need some help in pvp. Just knowing that they know and are working on fixing it really makes me wanna play my shaman more

" Im so excited and i just cant hide it, i know i know i know and i think i like it !!"

Tight.

Actually why don't you skip the whole 4 totem at once, separate UI just for shaman thing and instead just hit the totems with a simple 2-part K.I.S.S solution to all the issues.

1. Remove Strength of Earth Totem, Windfury Totem, Wrath of Air Totem, Flametongue Totem, Totem of Wrath and Mana Spring. They all become buffs whenever any totem in their respective school is in play.

2. Remove Totems from the GCD and give them a 1 second cooldown with each other.

No more complaining about totems. Heck, it would even finally give Sentry Totem an actual use since that is the cheapest Air totem and it lasts for 5 minutes.

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Elemental shamans have had a couple of opportunities to shine in Ulduar -- blowing up constructs on Ignis is one example.

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WTF, who does that? You know why I love this example? Because they give us an 'opportunity to shine' on a fight that could be completely skipped for the entirety of Ulduar and there is no hard mode. GG Maybe you should give us another 'opportunity to shine' on the other skipable fight with no hardmode, Razorscale... ...wait, that is a resto shaman time to shine with heal sniping. GG again!

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GC was obviously making a joke. The primary example he could come up with for a Ele Shaman's time to shine = dispatching of adds on a non-hardmode 'optional' boss. It was obviously a joke.

Right?

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Last time I checked I wasn't killing constructs... ...and no other dps was either. I am soo glad I am able to shine doing something nobody in my raid does (including me).

That right there shows the content of these three pages of blue text.