[Shaman] Why Use Totems in Cataclysm?

Q u o t e:
Why does a DK not have to choose between horn of winter and desecration?

Because that is pretty much all the DK gets.

The shaman on the other hand gets to choose among Strength of Earth Totem, Windfury Totem, Wrath of Air Totem, Flametongue Totem, Tremor Totem, Healing Stream Totem, resistance Totems and Earthbind Totem, which doesn't even count Bloodlust / Heroism, and things like Unleashed Rage or Elemental Oath. If your buff was as competitive as theirs and you had so much versatility, we fear we'd see raids with many, many shaman in them. As it is, there's still a good chance for 3 shaman in a 25-player raid, while the DKs might get 2 slots if they're lucky.

You should get a slot because you are a good player, not because your buff rules.

Q u o t e:
Little dissapointed in GC's blatant disregard of our well documented arguments. He asks for constructive feedback of which we gave him 28 pages then proceeds to ignore it utterly. Bad Crab.

I didn't ignore it. I just disagree with it. It may be 28 pages, but there is a lot of QQ mixed in there with the intelligent posts (like Strawberry's).

Throughout the history of WoW, the problem has typically been that shaman (and paladin to be fair) bring too much utility and are therefore considered too mandatory. They started out in vanilla as buff classes -- the guys you bring who don't really do much themselves but bring buffs and debuffs that make every other class perform better. You couldn't for example just stack your raid with rogues and mages because their performance would be low without the shaman and paladins -- and before LK you had to bring enough to stick one in every group.

Now, we decided to change that design because we didn't think it felt very satisfying to be the buff bot spec who got brought along as if the player were some kind of scroll or flask to improve the "real players" performance. On the other hand, we knew it would be really brutal to the shaman and paladin to just rip away all of their utility and give them the typical 2 or so raid buffs that most other classes or spec get.

But we've definitely eroded it a little, and I'm not going to apologize much for that because we want to give players flexibility -- and flexibility means you can do a raid, especially a 10-player one, without a shaman or paladin. Nobody should be mandatory, except for a tank and a few healers. Nobody should be left out either, but the specs who got left out in LK did so because of low dps -- Arms, Frost mage and Subtlety rogue. Shaman did fine.

Believe me, I have thought long and hard about scrapping the entire buff / debuff system because players focus on it too much. But I know that if we did that, players would then focus too much on damage per second and healing per second of the best players out there. We also think it would be unfortunate to lose that sense of being so much more powerful in a group than you are solo.

For now, in Cataclysm, we are just sharing even more of the buffs and debuffs across a wide gamut, especially very powerful ones like Bloodlust and Battle Rez, and chilling out the impact of some of the more potent ones, say Sunder and Curse of Elements, while also cutting back on the sheer number of buffs brought by say the Ret paladin and Balance druid.

I am much more interested in discussions about say shaman dps totems and healing totems than I am about buff totems, because we believe the latter have much less to do with either your getting to raid or your raid being succesful.

Q u o t e:
My second char is a Enhanc Shaman, and I worj really hard to be a competitive melee DPS in ICC, but we do have problem in this area.

Enhance does fine on stationary fights like Saurfang and Festergut, but drops behind on heavy movement fights, and unfortunately the fight that counts the most has a lot of movement.

But that's not a totem problem. That's because so much of Enhancement's dps is tied up in getting procs on quick attacks. If a warrior has to move, it may not hurt them as much because their abilities are on longer cooldowns anyway and they can even store up on the rage. For energy classes it's even better because they can just unload when they do get back in range. But Enhancement just lost out on those procs, and they aren't coming back.

We're okay with some specs doing better on some fights than others, but we think Enhancement suffers a little too much when they have to move (and they aren't the only ones - Balance druids and even Elementals are in a similar bucket). We're trying to address this in Cataclysm without removing what it is that players like about Enhance.

But again, this doesn't have a lot to do with totems. They might have to drop their totems again, but that dps loss is arguably neglibile compared to the loss of not being able to deal damage for short times.

Q u o t e:
The core of the argument here is this - if you're looking for a 20% haste buff, you look for the best version of the 20% haste buff when you can get. It doesn't matter to you if that haste buff could be something else - you just wanted the 20% haste buff. So why should one version of the 20% haste buff be weaker because of that?

I don't honestly things this type of scenario occurs half as often as forum posters insist that it occurs, but bear with me for a moment:

Two Frost DKs show up for a raid. The first one says "I bring the melee haste buff. Can I come?" The second one says "I bring the same buff. Can you guys just bring me anyway?"

Two Enhancement shaman show up for a raid. The first one says "I bring the melee haste buff. Can I come?" The second one says "It's cool. I'll just drop Wrath of Air, or maybe Grounding or Nature Resist if the fight calls for it."

Again, probably apocryphal. What more likely happens is the raid leader says "Both those guys are good players. Let's bring them both." Even the pug leader is more likely to look at gear or achievements and not say "Nope, we'd rather bring this random Frost DK whom I don't know because he has a dependable buff rather than this Enhance shaman I don't know."