Fires of Heaven Guild Message Board - View Single Post

Samflam · 06-20-2006, 08:33 AM

Totems suck. They simply do not do the job they were designed to.
The biggest problem is that they are stationary buffs. On raids people are constantly moving out of their range, which means recasting certain totems over and over. Decreased mana cost is nice, I'm not convinced increased duration will help at all. Especially in places like ZG, where leaving totems along the road can be suicide. I wonder why they have not given us a way to dismiss our currently active totems? Recasting them to get them out of the way of a pather seems like a pretty lame mechanic.
They have definitely buffed the elemental tree. Which wasn't really needed. Any shaman casting lightning bolt or shocks in a raid will go oom in no time. And this hasn't changed in 1.11, seeing as the shaman mana regen issue wasn't addressed. Meaning, elemental wasn't a viable raid spec before and that hasn't changed.
Enhancement. I simply don't see where we get improvements. I'll have to wait and see if the alternatives to windfury are decent (since they are nerfing the shit out of the attack power bonus that comes with WF), but seeing how useless the other weapon buffs are now, I can't really see how they could be any better. Rockbiter will never be a valid option, due to the aggro generation. I'm not a theorycrafter, but as I understand it it would cost an enhancement shaman 6 extra talent points in this tree to do less melee damage than possible right now. Those 6 talent points will hurt, since it will take away from being able to spec a decent amount in a secondary tree (like getting nature's swiftness)
Resto. Personally I'd never spec beyond nature's swiftness, so none of these improvements are interesting to me at all.
For a hybrid class, these revamps seem to have been implemented with the idea of forcing shaman to specialize in one tree to the point of being gimped in the other two. And with some other classes being given some core abilities for free, this seems kinda like a slap in the face.
I'm not going to try and argue for getting 2 handers or mana tide as trainable skills, because I'm admittedly not an expert in balancing in an MMO, but these changes just seem boring and uninspired. I think they should stick to one class every revamp.

06-20-2006, 08:33 AM	#14 (permalink)
Samflam That must be very tiring Join Date: Jul 2004 Location: Toe-rawn-toe Posts: 1,349	Totems suck. They simply do not do the job they were designed to. The biggest problem is that they are stationary buffs. On raids people are constantly moving out of their range, which means recasting certain totems over and over. Decreased mana cost is nice, I'm not convinced increased duration will help at all. Especially in places like ZG, where leaving totems along the road can be suicide. I wonder why they have not given us a way to dismiss our currently active totems? Recasting them to get them out of the way of a pather seems like a pretty lame mechanic. They have definitely buffed the elemental tree. Which wasn't really needed. Any shaman casting lightning bolt or shocks in a raid will go oom in no time. And this hasn't changed in 1.11, seeing as the shaman mana regen issue wasn't addressed. Meaning, elemental wasn't a viable raid spec before and that hasn't changed. Enhancement. I simply don't see where we get improvements. I'll have to wait and see if the alternatives to windfury are decent (since they are nerfing the shit out of the attack power bonus that comes with WF), but seeing how useless the other weapon buffs are now, I can't really see how they could be any better. Rockbiter will never be a valid option, due to the aggro generation. I'm not a theorycrafter, but as I understand it it would cost an enhancement shaman 6 extra talent points in this tree to do less melee damage than possible right now. Those 6 talent points will hurt, since it will take away from being able to spec a decent amount in a secondary tree (like getting nature's swiftness) Resto. Personally I'd never spec beyond nature's swiftness, so none of these improvements are interesting to me at all. For a hybrid class, these revamps seem to have been implemented with the idea of forcing shaman to specialize in one tree to the point of being gimped in the other two. And with some other classes being given some core abilities for free, this seems kinda like a slap in the face. I'm not going to try and argue for getting 2 handers or mana tide as trainable skills, because I'm admittedly not an expert in balancing in an MMO, but these changes just seem boring and uninspired. I think they should stick to one class every revamp. __________________ Ridiculous