very cool
Just got into shammy healing. Good breakdown. I am excited to make use of these changes, soon. I completely forgot about there being talent loadouts, too, so thanks for reminding me.
I don't think 30s cd on Gust is good enough to pick it.
This Review made my heart burst with Joy.
My cleansing totem! How I've missed you...
Boy am I glad I love shaman. Regardless of what I may think of anything else I'll always have a home here. I never actually played one till about WoD (was a pally then priest instead) but having played one in Classic I would've enjoyed it even back then. Being able to run ahead of the group, throw down totems and /drink so the tank could keep pulling was actually rather enjoyable. That said healing in raids was effective but kind of boring. In fact I'm worried that it's a little to good and a lot of healers may switch lol. Here's to hoping they make priest in particular a little more enticing.I don't see myself picking up gust of wind (regrettably) much unless the encounter really needs it due to point investment. They still have pretty decent mobility even without a gap closer. It's hard to say though. If you do go for Call of the Elements, outside of the utility totems (which is more of a dungeon thing and Windrush will be more encounter specific) you're pretty much only going to be using it for Cloudburst/Mana Spring. But that requires an even steeper point investment unless you pick up Totemic Projection (again useful in high mobility environments) and Surging Shield which is kind of a dead talent when doing group content.Also, under class abilities in the talent calculator you see Fae Transfusion (and primordial wave?) unlocked at 48. I haven't seen anybody clamor for this ability back but I actually really liked it on Enhancement. Wondering if that's a mistake or maybe it's on Blizzards end and they are thinking about bringing this back.
I'd really like to see both Vesper Totem and our current tier set bonus make it into the tree somewhere. Nothing feels better in m+ than slamming down a vesper totem in a large pull, hit cloudburst which fires off a chain heal and gets the healing rolling, throw out a few damage spells to proc the Unity bonus, riptide where needed and by time the pull is done, most of your healing has come from instant casts and you've done a good chunk of DPS to boot.I like Primal Tide Core but I'm not sure it's worth being a capstone talent. YES it was legendary but we mostly chose it because the other healing options were underwhelming and even then we choose a DPS legendary over it most of the time.Primordial wave is a good choice from the covenant abilities but I don't think the upgrades below it really compete well with other talents in the bracket. Most times I'll just pick up the ability for it's spread aoe heal and move on.
My biggest concern with the class tree is that we will lose most of the utility that defines the identity of the class because it will just be too costly to take them. We will often have to face question of "sure XXX utility is great, but is it REAALLY worth 10% dmg on lightning bolt, 20% dr on our defensive or 10% hp ?".For raid, the trade off will always be worth it, as the mecanic will make that utility required, but outside of raid ?Shadowlands has the dungeon with THE most curse out of all the expansion I've played, and it felt really great to have an answer for that. But is that worth a precious talent point for everything but halls?Would you take curse dispell for sanguine dept, knowing the curse mecanics can only happend if a player messes up ? In that case it's great, but is it even worth the talent for 1 trash pull ? Would you take tremor totem for mists to remove a 3 sec fear on ingra maloch, or is 10% dmg just not going to save just more time ?I fear most of the time, taking the boring passive throughput and defensive will just be wayyyyyy better than any utility that is used once per 40 min dungeon will ever be, and that's a bit sad, as using our utility correctly is often the most rewarding part of the spec.
I really loved earthliving in MoP, it was one of my favorite spells and animations... I want it to be good so bad! I hope they tune it up to be viable for an AOE raid healing build.
I'm not in Alpha, but the Wowhead talent calculator shows Echo of the Elements only giving a second charge to Lava Burst, but not Riptide.The reviewer overlooked this seemingly disastrous fact.
If I look at Echo of the Elements on the beta site, it only mentions the Lava Burst charge. However, in contrast to the live site, the beta site has an additional check box for Restoration on the spell page. Ticking that shows the text's change to "Riptide and Lava Burst have an additional charge." Unfortunately the spellmodifier URL parameter isn't picked up, but if you click it or open in a new tab, you'll see it. The talent tree at least refers to the same spell.Similarly we see the same problem for e.g. Deeply Rooted Elements, which only lists Elemental. If you use this version of Deeply Rooted Elements it shows that "Casting Riptide has a 7% chance to activate Ascendance for 6.0 sec." with Ascendance defined as "Transform into a Water Ascendant, duplicating all healing you deal for 15 sec and immediately healing for (876% of Spell power). Ascendant healing is distributed evenly among allies within 20 yds."