Wednesday 10 June 2009

Shaman Q&A with Ghostcrawler

Thanks to Windfury for the heads up, the first in a series of Class Q&A has been posted... and its all about Shamans! Ghostcrawler and the development team answer some pretty interesting questions and throw up some interesting ideas.

For example they are looking at some way to "drop four totems on one global cooldown", which I would really like as currently I have a castsequence macro I have to mash to get all 4 down, taking 2 seconds and valuable DPS time.

One odd thing is a longer term change "removing the buff totems (replacing them with normal spells) and making all of the totems do something more active, like the current damage or healing totems." I mostly drop buff totems anyway (SoE, WF, Flametongue, even Mana Stream is logically equivalent to the Paladin mana buff) so more "active totems" would be interesting, although if I was buffing raid members using spells, would I need some mod like Pally Power to make it easier?

It also looks like Shamans should get more health in 3.2, they say "Nobody currently working on classes can remember why that decision (low base health) was initially made, so we plan to revert it for 3.2". I've found that running with Toughness in your build makes a really noticeable difference to the survivability in PvE, of course at the cost of DPS, so some free stamina would be most welcome. Especially for those damn whirlwind mobs!

Restos rejoice, they "think Restoration shamans are at the risk of running out of mana perhaps more than any other healer right now... This is a problem we plan on addressing". Not that I've seen any mana issues in my limited healing in Naxxramas 10, but that is hardly cutting edge stuff.

Lots more - go check it out!

1 comment:

Skraps said...

"Especially for those damn whirlwind mobs!"

I find when it comes to whirlwind mobs, I generally have to let the enhancement shaman die. The damage stacks too fast, and heals don't go off fast enough to to keep both the shammy and tank up.

Then there is much sheepish apologies from both me and the shaman that didn't get out of the whirlwind for the death.

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