Shaman Review
It’s almost like Bliz wants shaman to hate them:
So I was reading through this list of shaman concerns for 2.4, and had some thoughts about how I would revamp the class. The first concern is weapon talents. Windfury is the only real choice for enhancement, and Flametongue and Icebrand are both last ditch uses for the caster types, since they’d rather be casting. None particularly enhance any type of play. Lore-wise, I think of shaman as channeling through their weapon, whether adding magic to a physical attack or adding a physical aspect to a magic attack. To that end, have rockbiter add half your AP to your spell healing and damage, and have flametongue add half your magic damage to your AP.
This works around both silencing, nature immune mobs, and disarming allowing the shaman to switch roles (at least temporarily) just by changing weapon enchants.
And speaking of silencing, I’d add in a trainable skill: Retaliate: instant, costs X mana, range 0-35, Instantly attacks the target from ranged dealing weapon damage and stunning the target for 2 seconds. May only be used while silenced, snared, or immobilized.
For totem issues, IMO just putting them on a separate global cooldown would help a lot. I still don’t like that they’re pretty much useless while soloing, but I hope they’d at least consider scaling totems based on the number of players under their influence. IE dropping a healing totem while solo gives 5x the effect of dropping it in a group with everyone in range.
Lastly there really should be a talent to avoid interruption by X% low in the elemental tree.
