#0 - Aug. 15, 2010, 12:20 a.m.
Q u o t e:
When will ele not have to run into melee to do aoe?
Q u o t e:
1) Are resto shaman now the only healer being forced to spec into a hit talent to supplement their active mana recovery ability? Paladins now apparently get the hit that was in enlightened judgements for free?
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Personally, I'd like to know the rationale behind the fact that the Elemental Shamans did not recieve any spells that alter their rotation on 'primary' targets. Their level 10 effect was something halfway between a mana restore, an AoE, and a pvp gimmick. Our capstone of the talent tree is an AoE. I can't think of any other dps spec that doesn't get something 'unique' that changes their rotation from the other specs.
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Mana - I've heard mana has recently begun to be an issue for Enhancement in the last few beta builds. Will the ultimate solution just be to tweak Primal Wisdom s'more? Oh, and what about all that discussion about moving Primal Wisdom to being part of Enhancement's lvl 10 skillset? It's going to be hellish on new Enhancers not having their primary mana restoration technique until much later. Also on the table here, and I'm sorry it touches on totems again - a full set of totems or an AoE rotation kills Enhancement's mana very very quickly. It'd be nice if the mana cost got reduced on some of these abilities.
Q u o t e:
This is the kind of thing I'm talking about. Tier 1 of Enhance is one of the bigger culprits. While tier 2 has one talent that's really attractive (nigh on required for Elemental and Enhance), tier 1 is pretty bland. People would prefer to skip over Imp Shields, and Elemental Weapons is a flat spell power buff that scales with level rather than gear.
Q u o t e:
Also, Enhance has 9 "required" points in Elemental - would be 10 if it weren't for Ancestral Swiftness - on top of their own tree being filled up, which highly limits their utility options (well, to be more specific, limits them to 0). Even if an additional point or two were freed up, they may feel obligated to spend those to grab the third point in Acuity (which I don't like as 3 points to start with - it creates a 'floater' point in Elemental specs rather than getting us stuck around tier 4 needing to pick a full utility talent, which I think is a good thing. But I digress), or Improved Shields, even though all three are fairly marginal DPS gains.
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Lightning and Water shield do not seem that useful for Elemental in many ways.
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I consider this line pretty insulting.
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- Nature's Blessing doesn't feel like a bonus when healing earth shielded targets, it feels like a penalty when healing targets without it. If the intent is to make shamans better tank healers, perhaps make it work in some other way. Perhaps change it to Earthliving or Riptide instead of Earth Shield?
Q u o t e:
Honestly GC when our dps is competitive with the other hybrid specs you barely ever see us whine. We just really want to be as good as others. It's when it isn't that we come out in masses to whine about everything. Since our totems are our thing they are what is an easy target for our QQ. I guarantee you that if we do competitive DPS and never fall behind the endless Shaman crying will be puddles instead of rivers.
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I honestly don't see how healing rains AND chain heal are needed. Both are AoE heals fill the same role (heal people grouped together).
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(4) Any chance that the stoneclaw glyph can become baseline or something? I'm mostly fine with the totem utility vs. buff thing, but it seems fairly weird to have this non-scaling bubble as a secondary effect of a totem. If it can't be baseline, is it being compensated for? Hance isn't exactly a survivability powerhouse.
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At this point tho, after getting the current tier hit/spirit cap, I'm pretty much forced to handpick items with no or little crit rating however. Mastery and haste just seem so overwhelmingly better.
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3. Whether it will continue to attack stuff we are not in combat with (especially if it's range is increased).
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But in this case, I'm specifically talking about tier 1 of Enhance for Elemental Shamans. Ancestral Swiftness is a no-brainer talent (and pretty much a core part of our mobile DPS and AoE capability). It's cool when you have to choose a utility talent, but it's not so cool when you have to take a utility talent that doesn't really do much for you because it's the only thing you can put points into in order to get down to the next tier.
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Can we also talk openly about making shaman's fun? I never see those posts. What people don't want is an exact copy of the last expansion, its called a NEW expansion for that reason. Have the developer's discussed anything along these lines?
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Fair enough, but in order to AoE to our max effectiveness, we still need to stand in melee range to drop magma totem. Not only is it passive ticking damage while the earthquake is going, but it also gives us a button to push in that 5 second interim between earthquakes (Fire Nova).
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Doublecheck the question here >.>. It missed the point entirely, in that elemental will play neigh identically as it did in wrath in cata. Nothing new at all for us on single target other then unleashed weapon, which isnt something gamechanging or rotation changing in the least.
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6) Whats the design goals for Feral Spirit pet stat scaling?
7) No parry for Enhance anymore?
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2: The elemental shaman may use a cooldown occasionally that makes his spells slightly faster and heavier.
Elemental shaman do not exist. What does exist are shaman that have specced in the "Improved Shaman" tree. And furthering on this is the valid and undisputed fact that enhancement's abilities take it very, very, VERY far from baseline, and distinguish it immensely from the other two trees in use of abilities and playstyle (hell, until cata, there won't be a single standard shaman melee ability - and don't tell me you're expecting levelling resto and eles to use Primal Strike). Resto, similarly, recieves new tools and new ways to use old ones - if not as drastically.
Q u o t e:
Um GC did you just say two melee specs that use mana are not supposed to be constrained by mana? Why are casters w/ no decent auto-attacks mana constrained (especially pures) while hybrids with decent hitting auto-attacks not constrained?
Q u o t e:
The range on Unleash Weapon forces an elemental shaman to either stand within 20 yd or run in 20 yd to apply. What is the point of having 40yd spells when you have a 20yd one?? Wasn't flame shock range increased for this very reason? Feels like a step backwards.
Q u o t e:
Our job here isn't to effect change in the classes. When you sit down to write a post with that in mind, the likelihood that you will end up disappointed is many orders of magnitude higher than the likelihood that you won't. Your real job here is to tell the devs things you like and things you don't like about the game, and about proposed changes. They then take that feedback and use it to inform their decisions. This is our function here.
You can approach that function in many ways. Personally, I approach things in a very layered approach, stretching from the most detailed to the most abstract. So, my approach is generally like so:
1) Explain things I do/don't like
2) Try to explain why at a low level (e.g., specific mechanical issues)
3) Try to explain at a higher level (e.g., "I'm frustrated with the lack of connection between elem gameplay and the elem name/image/theme/kit.")
4) Try to provide explanations of my feelings that apply to intuition (e.g., the oft-used "Basically, elem feels too much like 'improved shaman', and that makes it very hard to identify with the kit")
5) Lastly, provide suggested fixes to the problems I outline in 1-4. Difference is, I do this not to give the devs ideas (though if that happens, great). Ideas are easy to come by. I provide suggestions because it shows another angle of what the problem exactly is, by saying what I though would ameliorate the problem.
Another style of post I do which is a bit tangential to the above is trying to discuss things with others, so that I may better understand their issues, and then provide the above suite of post styles to help them articulate it. I also try to get it to go the other way, and see if other players have the same issues I do, because that provides me with a sense of what I need to try and explain most fervently.
As a result, I can't really ever feel that my time here is wasted. I provide 31 flavors of feedback and try to facilitate community discussion. If I came here trying to get my pet solutions implemented, I would be extremely disappointed every day, because the list of things I would have on my plate as a dev of this game would be very long indeed. (Not that the current path is so bad, just that different devs have different views)
So tl;dr: Maybe re-think why you post here, and figure out if it's just going to frustrate you forever.