We'd love to hear from you regarding ideas you're batting around, upcoming concepts, and dropped ideas so that we can guide our own discussions. Shaman discussion has pretty much died other than totem complaints lately, so something Shaman-related that doesn't have anything to do with Totems would be grand.

I'd welcome a shaman discussion that wasn't based around totem griping. :)

Lots of questions. I don't have time to answer them all, but I will hit a few.

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Q u o t e:

When will ele not have to run into melee to do aoe?

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When you're casting Earthquake?

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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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Our goal was to not have all of the healer talent trees to be mirror images of each other. So a priest might get one thing for free and have to talent into something else. As long as the end result is pretty similar (e.g. the priest can't get everything for free and just be able to spend talent points on candy) then it should be fine.

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Q u o t e:
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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That's just part of the shaman design though, namely that Enhancement still cares a lot about spells instead of being a 100% melee weapon class. I'd argue that Enhance and Elemental still play fairly differently (such that you do have to adjust when respeccing). I'm not sure the mage design, where there is virtually no overlap among talent trees, is a superior model. It's just a different model.

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Q u o t e:
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.

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It's not the intent that Enhancement has to worry about mana a lot. Generally you should have enough mana to do what you want to do. It's a model we're still adjusting. We haven't quite established a base regen for the casters and healers that we're happy with and every time we tweak that, it affects the Ret paladins and Enhancement shaman, who aren't really supposed to be mana-constrained.

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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.

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The model we're trying to use for all the classes is that you can't just soak up no-brainer talents in the first few tiers. Often there is a dps talent, and then a survival talent and then maybe an efficiency talent. You definitely get the first one, but you often need to get one of the others to progress down. This is what we mean about not being able to cherry pick just throughput-oriented talents and skipping everything else that is utility, etc. It's an evolving process though. I'm not sure I could point to a class yet and say "There. We nailed it."

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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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Yup. This is a challenge. As I mentioned above, Enhancement likes spell damage so it's hard to put anything in Elemental that Elemental wants that Enhancement also doesn't want.

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Q u o t e:

Lightning and Water shield do not seem that useful for Elemental in many ways.

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Agreed. This is something we're discussing. A new shield doesn't have to be the answer though.

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Q u o t e:
I consider this line pretty insulting.

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Long-term forum posters know that busting out the "I'm insulted" is a good way to get me to skip over your posts. If anything about a game insults you, then you're taking it more seriously than I am, and I take it pretty seriously, seeing as how this game pays my yacht slip fees. :)

There are a half-dozen similar threads on totems, and I figured some shaman players felt like their non-totem concerns were getting shouted down.

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Q u o t e:
- 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?

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This is the kind of feedback we struggle with a lot on most classes. As soon as something grants a bonus, it feels like a penalty when it's not up because players are very efficiency-focused. If it was say Riptide, wouldn't it feel like a penalty whenever Riptide wasn't available? Or a penalty because every heal cost that extra GCD for Riptide in order to behave at maximum efficiency?

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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 agree with that. I think a lot of the complaints about "we're the only class" or "are buffs aren't awesome enough" only come to bear when dps is low. As I said recently, we think Enhancement dps was competitive when there wasn't a lot of movement involved and when you weren't competing with guys using orange weapons. We can fix the movement problem. We don't think we need to fix the legendary "problem" because those Shadowmournes will all be banked at level 85.

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Q u o t e:
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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They are different spells with different niches. Chain Heal excels when you have a small number of players injured and Healing Rain is more for those big bursts when everyone takes damage. There are enough occasions when you need to heal say more than just the tank that we think healers can stand to have several different strategies to deal with it.

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Q u o t e:

(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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We are changing a lot of glyphs. It's too early to know which ones we are keeping. If this one dies then we might consider putting in the functionality elsewhere.

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Q u o t e:
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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That's not the intent. Hit / spirit can be capped, but if you start viewing haste, crit or mastery as junk compared to another stat, then we need to change something. It's fine if one stat is slightly better than another. Remember that crit values overall are going to be far lower than the 70%+ that some players can reach in current content. Lava Burst crits, sure, but you cast a lot of spells besides Lava Burst.

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Q u o t e:
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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This is something we are trying to fix. We already have the totem choosing your target. Next we need to make sure it doesn't "helpfully" grab additional mobs.

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Q u o t e:
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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Right. The problem with tier 1 Enhancement is you have Focused Strikes, which clearly is for Enhance and nobody else. Then you're left with Elemental Weapons, a good talent for all 3 specs, and Improved Shields, a good talent for Enhance and Resto. That leaves Elemental with only 3 points they want to spend in tier 1 and a strong desire to get to tier 2. But, as I said above, if Elemental did care about shields, then presumably they could care about Improved Shields.

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Q u o t e:
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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Fun is obviously very important to us, but it's also a really difficult thing to talk about. I read these forums constantly, and it's pretty typical to see the class who had exciting changes a few weeks ago now bored of those and eager for new changes. The grass is greener mindset is huge around here, perhaps understandably since it's hard to stay in touch with the changes going on for all classes at once. When you drill down sometimes on what players are looking for to make their class fun for them, you often get a list of ideas that would be terribly overpowered or just not work in our game, or both. That doesn't mean it's not a goal. It just means that delivering what is fun for one player means something very different than what is fun for another player.

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Q u o t e:
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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We'd like to downplay Fire Nova in lieu of Earthquake (in addition to Chain Lightning of course). We also agree that Fire Nova should be used for true AE situations and not against single targets.

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Q u o t e:
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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We didn't set out with the goal of change for the sake of change though. Most of the new rotational abilities we've added were to fix problems with the class. Prot warriors for example are going to be hitting the same buttons they hit in LK because we think that works. Elemental is getting Unleashed Weapon (and Earthquake), and beyond that we think you have the right number of buttons to hit, so we're hesitant to cram a new button in there. Nor are we excited about giving you "Super Duper Lightning Bolt" that lets you take Lightning Bolt off your bar just for the sake of having a new button. I'd characterize the Elemental playstyle as closer to a mage, who isn't managing a ton of different nukes, but does have to react to what is happening in terms of procs, short cooldowns and movement. Lava Surge, Elemental Mastery and Unleashed Weapon are examples of those respectively.

We'll definitely take the feedback under advisement though.

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Q u o t e:
6) Whats the design goals for Feral Spirit pet stat scaling?
7) No parry for Enhance anymore?

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Feral Spirit should scale like all pets. (It doesn't yet). Losing Parry was a consequence of losing Spirit Weapons, but we'll give it back somewhere.

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Q u o t e:
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.

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I agree that Enhancement's choice at level 10 is transformative. I disagree that Resto similarly plays very differently at level 10. I also think you're downplaying Thunderstorm. Now you can Lightning Bolt and when a target gets closer to you, Thunderstorm them back and then Lightning Bolt them again.

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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?

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Different classes work differently. Hunters and DKs don't use mana at all and are balanced around it. Caster spells do much more damage than melee specials because the latter have autoattacks.

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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.

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Elemental's range talent needs to affect Unleash Weapon too.

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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.

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A very worthwhile read.

Specificity is good. (Brevity generally is too.)

Good: "Lightning Bolt isn't improved by enough talents so as a result, it does too little damage given its cast time."
Less helpful: I'm not sure why, but I don't like Lightning Bolt."
Even less helpful: "I want a new spell because mages just got one."
Not helpful: "I feel neglected."