Chain Lightnign Change Scrapped? --Blue Dis-

#0 - April 10, 2009, 12:55 a.m.

So, a while back, It was said that chain Lightning will get changed to Hitting 4 targets and not losing the Jump, but normalizing the damage threw all of the targets hit, was this Scrapped or what?

Thats the Big question i had, now I have some issues with Glyphs and other problems with elemental shaman, and Shaman in General....@Â¿@

1. Could we plesae PLEASE get Glyph of Flame shock Merged in with talents....LIke lava flow also has a 33, 66, 100 percent chance to Not consume Flame Shock when cast.....and somehow add the extra ticks of Flame shock to another talent, or just make the learned ability go that long. Why? Cause Shamans have WAY to many glyphs to use, and can't even try out other ones because they cant do there rotations without that. EVERY elemental shaman Must use Flame shock, LB, And glyph of Lava to do max dps. You are adding more Good glyphs to us, and there are a few other really good ones, but we have to use those 3. Examples are the New Glyph of ToW, Glyph of EM, Glyph of Thunderstorm(The Major one) Please help us out there..!!!!!

2. Please could Stoneclaw totem be moved to the WATER Class, and maybe renamed Icytalon Totem. And the glyph also be renamed. Why? With Earthbind totem becoming more and more usefull to all shaman, and Tremor totem already there, Earth is TO CROWDED. And with the Mana spring totem now same buff as BoW, Water is a VERY WEAK class of totems. This would really help in Arena, and Also in BG/ any other PvP.

3. Stamina. I know you all did a really good PvP buff for all shamans, but really, Fully PVP geared, we are far away from most other classes in the health Pool. I don't know HOW you can fix it, but can we at least get an answer that it IS being addressed?

4. I'm not well versed in glyphs for the other specs, but I do believe they are in the same boat. If any resto/enhance shaman can give a little insite, that would be great!

5. ToW. There is a great issue here. Warlocks SP buff will override ToW at 2800 spell power of the Lock........Won't happen in Uld. I belive, but in The last stage of WOTLK, it will. There needs to be some sort of Scaling with the shaman so that they can be more Equal buffs.

6. Scalling El Shaman and Spirt. IF you do not choose to make spirit USEFULL for Ele shamans, we need more Rings/Ammys/shields that have more Hit/sp/crit/haste with no Spirit. That would also go for resto shaman, cause lots of healing ones also have spirit.

7. The mail hit gear. Can we please get OFF SET pieces with HIT/SP/Crit/Haste That are mail. I can understand why you would not want to put them as drops, but PLEASE but some in for trading in badges. I mean, Even Wintergrasp gear has Spell power, and hit on mail.........

Wow, i wrote a lot.......well these are some questions I had and would love to see a response, Thanks for your time

One other thing, Please give us some way to Bring totems back to us....refresh the totems without recasting them all.......Or remove them from the GCD so we can just have a nice Macro, and i shall name that macro TOTEM POLE....One button, all 4 casted....... ya!

Ghostcrawler

#21 - April 10, 2009, 4:53 p.m.

Q u o t e:
So, really, I would at least like an answer to the Chain Lightning question.........

We aren't changing Chain Lightning for 3.1.

Ghostcrawler

#38 - April 10, 2009, 9:25 p.m.

Q u o t e:
GC, do you even read the shaman concerns? .... you always act like you don't care about shamans.

BTW still stuck with the worst buffing mechanic called totems

But of course, you won't answer because you don't care and you don't have any new mechanic to fix them =(

This is QQ. It's a waste of space. We don't want it here. We ban players who don't get that message. Sorry.

Q u o t e:
Seems like quite a short response for a well constructed post.

See, what a response like that does is make me regret even posting at all. I had 5 free minutes. I tried to answer a quick question.

Q u o t e:
Is that because you don't see it being used as much for single target dps anymore, or is it because you just didn't get around to it?

No, we decided not to make the change. We originally wanted to make CL more clearly an AE spell, which meant improving the number of targets. But we think it has a decent niche as is. There are bigger fish to fry.

Ghostcrawler

#41 - April 10, 2009, 9:41 p.m.

Q u o t e:
So when will Shaman casters get true AoE capability? Magma totem was a nice start, but it doesn't even come close to bringing Shamans in line with the other casters, which IIRC, was your original intention. Running in to plop it down just isn't efficient. You did make it less attractive to drop Totem of Wrath with the changes to Warlock Demonic Pact, so at least dropping Magma doesn't cost the raid now, so um... thanks for that... I guess :\

We think it's close enough. You have to run up and plant a totem, but then it is doing damage while you are casting something else. Totem of Wrath is a good buff, but when you're in an AE situation, the contribution of Magma totem is probably going to account for more.

We aren't trying to make sure everyone does the exact same AE damage, because realistically we don't think optimizing your group or raid around maximum AE damage is worth it. We don't think most groups will say "Nah, let's bring the mage, because their AE is so much better." We just don't want you to feel like a liability when the rest of the group is doing AE.

Ghostcrawler

#47 - April 10, 2009, 10:01 p.m.

Q u o t e:
This reads as you simply feeling like it's not worth the time to implement and test right now with more pressing issues to be taken care of first, not because you're actually "fine" with where it's at. If you were "fine" with it, why ever even make any kind of an announcement on what your initial plans were then?

We just changed our mind. It happens. Our design process is very iterative.

CL has a shorter cast time, so it's fun (for some shamans at least) to try and use it to fill in short gaps based on haste, procs, movement, etc. even on single targets. Being able to mix and match LB and CL the right way is one manner in which great Elementals can distinguish themselves from good Elementals.

After doing some more research, confab'ing with some pro shamans, and reading lots of forum posts, we decided this was probably a sufficient niche for CL and trying to push it into a purely AE role would mean a loss of fun for some shamans. The cost didn't seem worth the beneft any longer so we scrapped the plan. You can chalk this up to an example where your feedback counted in making that call.

An alternative is something like encouraging more Flame Shocks after Lava Bursts or whatever to try and make the rotation more interesting. That's not something we're going to mess with for 3.1 but might be something to consider in the future.