Stages of Balance in Tower of Karazhan

[Czasku]

Protection Warrior tree still useless.
Arms full of dead talents
Warr T3.5 bonus is a joke
Slam overnerfed
Thunder Clap and Revenge still deals 40 damage
Counterattack xD

Ask Wallcraft so he can balance things for you.

[Arcanex Ota]

I really tried, but none of the changes ended up being interesting for me. Some seem good, but in the end, the discrepancies that already existed only got bigger. Twow was a great server, the best private server of all time, but now it's just a retail look-alike.

[Dracarusggotham]

How much time you will take for reach the last stage?

[Isvya]

Protection Warrior tree still useless.
Arms full of dead talents
Warr T3.5 bonus is a joke
Slam overnerfed
Thunder Clap and Revenge still deals 40 damage
Counterattack xD

Ask Wallcraft so he can balance things for you.

I second all of that

[Artashir]

My main is Rogue, so, on short new Subtlety is bad . The skills consume alot of energy for minior buff/debuff and none really notice it. When raid combat logs for your guild is post, everybody look at numbers and say " I have X amount of this dmg or healing" nobody say becoouse of this buffs/debuff , so no credit and you are at bottom. I dont have anymore ,cheap, combo point generation spec to cc -burst kill someone and dissapear without a trace. Not fair, some classes still can nuke you out with Smite or 5k Shadowbolt. PvP trinket remove all cc now .
Honorable mention: Mace spec in combat, proc. more from start of the fight and rare from middle this make cheap shot bad and the stun effect feel more like 1.5 sec rather then 3sec.
P.S - "Pride is before fall !". Low dawn the numbers of all with a huge amount. More big numbers make game fall dull. Lower numbers make it challenging. For example, +3 stamina makes a deference.
My expectations are what leads to my disappointment, because of my own blindness to see the world as it is. Instead, i see the promises i give to myself and none other can fulfill. This disappointment leads to my frustration.

[Xudo]

I was wrong here regarding Arcanums. I tested it more throroughly.
First, I just tried to enchant Lesser Arcanum of Constitution on Red Winter hat and got error "That item is not a valid target".
This day I tried to enchant Scruffy Cloth Hat and it worked as usual.

[Grifan]

guys, don't listen to the whiners, the new update is really interesting and makes you look at the game in a new way.

Somewhere they improved something, somewhere they made it worse. Maybe I don’t completely agree, but overall it’s interesting and cool!

[Killermasa]

Nobody can take these forum comments seriously, most players are crying for cryings sake.
PvP concerns are valid but seeing people saying that they gutted pve specs is just blatantly lying.
Vanilla wow had 1 spec, warrior.
The balance was absolutely absurdly shit, and literally some of the specs people say are gutted didn't even exist.
Use your time to find bugs instead of commenting your garbage suggestions here

[Harkus]

Amidst all the QQers coming out of the woodworks (where were you months ago? Why didn't you join the class councils?) I'd like to reaffirm that the class changes for the most part are great and I and lots of others on the server have been enjoying them

[Alsapko]

Hot streak is useless. You can easily spend a bossfight without getting enough stacks.

[Zulkord]

My main is Rogue, so, on short new Subtlety is bad . The skills consume alot of energy for minior buff/debuff and none really notice it. When raid combat logs for your guild is post, everybody look at numbers and say " I have X amount of this dmg or healing" nobody say becoouse of this buffs/debuff , so no credit and you are at bottom.

Sounds like people issue, not spec issue. Noone complains about Nightfall users dropping down in their personal damage done table.

I dont have anymore ,cheap, combo point generation spec to cc -burst kill someone and dissapear without a trace.

That's a good thing. Assuming we're talking pvp here, it is in general a bad design if one side in pvp doesn't have any say in how combat goes and can only stay stunned while waiting their demise. Way, way more frustrating than you losing your favorite one-trick-pony toy.

Not fair, some classes still can nuke you out with Smite or 5k Shadowbolt.

Given holy shock got cut down for the same reason, similar nukers probably will get nerfed as well.
Meanwhile just los both smite and shadowbolt, people didn't have that opportunity when they got instakilled by holy shocks or waited patiently to being slowly withered down by another oh-so-original stunlock rogue without being able to do anything but pour themselves some tea somewhere away from the screen. The pot calling the kettle black, huh?

The overall goal is not achieving class homogenization—however we do want to come closer to parity than vanilla's original brown-blowout raid meta.

Speaking about user feedback to the changes.
I assume Vampiric Embrace cast time was put on to alleviate some similar pvp issues, but with 2 seconds cast time it is very obnoxious to use in most non target-dummy-smacking pve encounters as well, especially dungeons, even 10-mans. By the time you can set up vampiric embrace and start channeling or putting dots, or whatever, brownies already melted through the enemies, of course taking priority on the one with your vampiric embrace on, wasting 2 seconds of your cast time and 10 seconds cooldown on your vampiric embrace. It was like that even before the nerf, but at least you could cast it while moving with the group, and you did lose less time if your target drops dead very fast.
And while cutting down healing percentage while simultaneously raising up spd scaling for shadow damaging spells is fair (more damage with less percentage healed summed up to more or less the same amount of healing), cutting down mana regeneration more than in half with this is uncalled for. Even before the nerf mana regeneration numbers were mediocre at best, and after the nerf even with overall damage raise mana regeneration is pretty negligible.
Combined with essentially raising cooldown on the ability (now you have to wait 10 seconds like before, but with additional 2 seconds cast time to apply another VE, so it is 12 seconds between consecutive VE's, not 10 like before) it makes the whole ability frustrating to use.
Since the whole ability is nerfed overall I'd say it's fair to cut the cooldown significantly or even remove the cooldown altogether so it could be less clunky to apply in pve while not being too easy in pvp. And maybe, just maybe, align the cast time with GCD, meaning 1.5 seconds cast time, not 2.

Brown meta isn't going anywhere, and other classes are suffering for it. At least it's good to see paladins getting fair usage without outright bumping their numbers up even more as if server has not enough paladins already.
Paladins blocking ability (and blocking in general) feels good in levelling, but kinda off in the endgame, particularly in the field of damage reduction. Someone above already described similar issues with tanking shamans damage mitigation.

[Rramage]

Ok, so I don't have to do the melee healing nonsense, but I DO have to live with the new holy tree which is cluttered and top heavy, demanding more than 31 points to pick up the same tools that 31 points used to get.

No worries my friend. I'm here for you! This is the new holy tree with 31 points and all the same tools you once had. If you wish to add more tools, you can always invest more points, but that's up to you. Have fun!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IoHHAN ... F0KYr/view
Unfortunately i don't know how to upload images directly to the forum so i just put it in the drive and shared the url.

I'm sorry, the spec you posted doesn't seem to contain 100% illumination and an offensive holy shock! Please try again.

[Dannyp92]

Honestly, I would've felt more at ease if they simply added TBC spells/talent trees into the game instead. TBC was already a kind of "Vanilla+" with a gameplay very similar to Vanilla, but more balanced and more content in some ways, but keeping that "Classic" feel. It was also designed, generally speaking, by the same game designers that designed Vanilla. What sucked about TBC was flying and moving people away from Azeroth. This patch, however, has made the game move closer to WotLK than Vanilla, and that is not good imo. And by implementing so many changes at once, instead of little by little (under control), it has become a balancing nightmare. And that is on top of other developer work which probably amounts to a significant amount of pressure.

[Xudo]

I assume Vampiric Embrace cast time was put on to alleviate some similar pvp issues, but with 2 seconds cast time it is very obnoxious to use in most non target-dummy-smacking pve encounters as well, especially dungeons, even 10-mans. By the time you can set up vampiric embrace and start channeling or putting dots, or whatever, brownies already melted through the enemies, of course taking priority on the one with your vampiric embrace on, wasting 2 seconds of your cast time and 10 seconds cooldown on your vampiric embrace. It was like that even before the nerf, but at least you could cast it while moving with the group, and you did lose less time if your target drops dead very fast.

It could be improved by removing cast time for vampiric embrace if enemy dies with debuff on.
Though I think even this is unnecessary complication.
I think you should behave differently in short burst fights and in long ones.
In short fights I'd just cast Mind Blast and wand and wouldn't bother with any rotation at all.
Raiding UBRS in t3 for flask recipe will never be fun and challenging.

[Ataika]

Protection Warrior tree still useless.
Arms full of dead talents
Warr T3.5 bonus is a joke
Slam overnerfed
Thunder Clap and Revenge still deals 40 damage
Counterattack xD

Ask Wallcraft so he can balance things for you.

where i can see the t35 bonuses ?

[Czasku]

Protection Warrior tree still useless.
Arms full of dead talents
Warr T3.5 bonus is a joke
Slam overnerfed
Thunder Clap and Revenge still deals 40 damage
Counterattack xD

Ask Wallcraft so he can balance things for you.

where i can see the t35 bonuses ?

Charge generates 25 more Rage
You take 5% reduced damage for 1 minute after entering combat

[Ataika]

Protection Warrior tree still useless.
Arms full of dead talents
Warr T3.5 bonus is a joke
Slam overnerfed
Thunder Clap and Revenge still deals 40 damage
Counterattack xD

Ask Wallcraft so he can balance things for you.

where i can see the t35 bonuses ?

Charge generates 25 more Rage
You take 5% reduced damage for 1 minute after entering combat

I mean where did u get that ?
would like to read lock bonuses

[Drubarrymooer]

Raiding UBRS in t3 for flask recipe will never be fun and challenging.

You haven't 3 manned it then. We're working on a two man attempt too.

[Twinking]

Build diversity.... how many builds did you kill with the changes?

One great example is that you turned sub (pvp) spec into a support tree, while making changes to assasination and its still useless due to poisons not scaling. Great minds!

The mage arcane tree is so well designed that its not even worth putting points into any other tree... straight up just 51pts into arcane. Yet you nerfed ele shaman just to create this monster that can 1 global anyone.

OBD, BoED, Scythe builds all gutted yet they were super expensive and grindy to put together, ppl can just throw all that gear out of the window.

Shockadin? lol Spell ret? nah

Survival tree killed to make a brand new melee hunter spec.

I agree with you, the developers killed a lot of viable builds that were hard to get.
My two builds (BoED and Scythe), which I spent more than 1000 gold on in total, are now destroyed...

[Mac]

Greetings!

With the release of our latest patch Tower of Karazhan and the Class Changes 2 update only a few days ago, players are now able to rediscover their classes and experiment with new skills and talents. Our goals within this update is increasing specialization diversity, allowing build diversity, and decreasing restrictions on Class builds and Class+Race combinations in PvE and PvP. Overall, we believe our changes have been successful in accomplishing this so far. However, we also anticipated that our changes would not be perfect on launch, and would like to lay out our plans clearly. The full balancing and fine-tuning will occur over a few stages, as outlined next.


Stage 0: Release

Upon initial release, the overall goal was for balance to be in a decent spot without clear game-breaking mechanics or heavy outliers. This way we allow the community to have get their hands on the latest changes all at once while making sure we iterate rapidly over things we did not foresee. This has mostly gone well except for a few cases (looking at you AoE Repentance)

---

Stage 1: Bug Fixes & Feedback Collection <-- We are here!

The first stage of the process will take the first week or two, which involves fixing the bugs, exploits, and oversights which come with releasing a massive patch like 1.17.2. While fixing these issues (such as removing deprecated talents — a few snuck past us, and did impact player performance), we're also actively listening to the community's thoughts and feelings towards these changes. Overall, classes perceived as "nerfed" are doing better each passing day, which lends credence to one of our main claims: it's very important for people to experiment with their builds, and play the game. Knee-jerk reactions to the same build not working the same will lead to a belief of classes being flat-nerfed, while they're overall stronger, just using a different power-budget than before.

Feedback such as leveling being too easy, dungeons/progression raids becoming trivial or certain classes not having the right "feel" to their rotation is already on our radar and different solutions are being taken into consideration.

There was a noticeable power creep coming from old deprecated talents that were still active on players, we have since removed these and are actively monitoring the situation.

We would like to reiterate that the main goal of these changes was to increase diversity and viability of Class builds that were underperforming & to strengthen the flavor and identities of some Class builds.

---

Stage 2: Adjustments and Assessment

The next stage, will be the adjustment and assessment stage. We will deploy changes to assist classes we find to be overall underperforming, or tune down classes we find to be massively overperforming the rest. The overall goal is not achieving class homogenization—however we do want to come closer to parity than vanilla's original brown-blowout raid meta. As time passes, the data we can use will grow more and more useful as players experiment and find dominant builds (or the lack of for other classes).

---

Stage 3: "Completion" and Competition

The final stage, will be the completion and competition stage. This stage will be reached once we feel that classes are in a pretty solid place, with no massive outliers and no notable problems in the gameplay loop. This will be the stage at which we open the Tower of Karazhan raid to all and the race for Server First K40 begins.

Of course, in an ever-changing landscape of new content to come out things might still be tweaked over time however as everything settles down and falls into place we anticipate we'll have to do less and less of this.

---

During Stage 2 there will be a mid-patch update coming out alongside our own Turtle Launcher that will allow more rapid iterations of fixing issues that might occur.

You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time.

[Micfild]

I'm sorry, the spec you posted doesn't seem to contain 100% illumination and an offensive holy shock! Please try again.

Well, unless you were a shockadin, like me, you damage got redistributed to Holy Strike and Seal/Judgement of Righteousness (which the new improved version now increases the scaling damage as well as the base one). If you're just a plain old Holy healer, why would you need a damaging Holy Shock?

As for illumination, yes, it doesn't refund 100% anymore, but at least for Holy Shock, you now get 30% increased crit, which even with the 60% refund, gives you more mana than before. As for Holy Light and Flash of Light, you might have to spend some money on MP5s like Mageblood potion and mana Oil. Teas also help a lot.

Granted, its not the same, but its pretty close and you get to pick new toys now too, if you wish.

[Twinking]

Seen lots of complaints about the survival tree for hunters but I must admit i’m really enjoying it. Lots of fun trying to utilise the different traps in different situations. Great work :)

Now it's better than the survival version which had no identity, now the hunter is a universal fighter capable of dealing damage at a distance and at close range.

[Mimiwarmini]

Hi everyone,

I would like to share my experience from lvl 1 to lvl 30 of my destro warlock, I find the new game play very interesting (I can't wait to be lvl 40 to use my last spell), the rotation is quite nice, even if it remains quite simple (Soul fire > Immolate > Conflagrate > Searing pain)

Despite this I find it quite sad that we can really start playing destro from lvl 30, would it be possible to make changes by perhaps adding spell ranks lower lvl (Soul fire lvl 20) or even creates a real mechanic with imp (a bit like on wotlk), because besides the spam of Searing pain and the refresh of Imolate it's pretty much everything we do from lvl 1 to lvl 30 which makes the destro warlock quite boring

[Ataika]

Hi everyone,

I would like to share my experience from lvl 1 to lvl 30 of my destro warlock, I find the new game play very interesting (I can't wait to be lvl 40 to use my last spell), the rotation is quite nice, even if it remains quite simple (Soul fire > Immolate > Conflagrate > Searing pain)

Despite this I find it quite sad that we can really start playing destro from lvl 30, would it be possible to make changes by perhaps adding spell ranks lower lvl (Soul fire lvl 20) or even creates a real mechanic with imp (a bit like on wotlk), because besides the spam of Searing pain and the refresh of Imolate it's pretty much everything we do from lvl 1 to lvl 30 which makes the destro warlock quite boring

whats "new gameplay" ?
destro lock 1-30 ha snot changed exxept the tiny stone proc on wand

[Mimiwarmini]

Hi everyone,

I would like to share my experience from lvl 1 to lvl 30 of my destro warlock, I find the new game play very interesting (I can't wait to be lvl 40 to use my last spell), the rotation is quite nice, even if it remains quite simple (Soul fire > Immolate > Conflagrate > Searing pain)

Despite this I find it quite sad that we can really start playing destro from lvl 30, would it be possible to make changes by perhaps adding spell ranks lower lvl (Soul fire lvl 20) or even creates a real mechanic with imp (a bit like on wotlk), because besides the spam of Searing pain and the refresh of Imolate it's pretty much everything we do from lvl 1 to lvl 30 which makes the destro warlock quite boring

whats "new gameplay" ?
destro lock 1-30 ha snot changed exxept the tiny stone proc on wand

Hi Ataika,

it's not really new gameplay because yes it existed before but was not viable compared to the Ruin\Shadow bolt spec,

When you have changes to Soul fire (reduction of its recharge time), the behavior of Conflagrate (which no longer fully consumes immolate), Immolate which takes a significant damage buff thanks to its application of it on ticks
and Searing pain which no longer generates a monstrous agro making its use viable

It is interesting to see that the destro fire is becoming more viable than the old spec which mainly consisted of spamming the shadow bolt, so for me it is a change in gameplay

[FrankFankledank]

Now it's better than the survival version which had no identity, now the hunter is a universal fighter capable of dealing damage at a distance and at close range.

This is a tired old retail argument made by clueless post-Activision devs. Survival has a perfectly fine class identity focused on trapping, disengagement and defensive tools, and chemical munitions. Beast Mastery is the tree that completely lacks anything besides "pets gooder", it should have been the melee rework tree, and if we really want to shake things up, a tanking spec.

[Elysija88]

As a Frost Mage, i just have to express my disappointment. I am still on T2 content, so right now i am stuck with those bosses, but i can already see the similarity of mechanics in upcoming raids where the exact same things will happen.

Do i do more damage right now, as i did before? Yes
Do i do more damage now compared to the overall increase of all other dps? No, it got worse.

What is the point of having a flat 15% frost damage increase when i fight bosses like Vaelastrasz or Firemaw where the shield gets destroyed within mere seconds and then has a 30 second cool down timer?
Whats the point of trying to wind Frostnova into a caster rotation, when i am constantly forced to jump into melee range to use it and then go back to a range position to avoid boss aoe abilities, not only timing my movement to mechanics, but also losing dps in the process without any instants to cast, while NONE of the other casters are forced to do anything similar?
Using Icicles without a flash freeze procc makes absolutely no sense. There is never a time, where its actually worth using it without a procc.
We are forced to put 3 points into Frostbite, a pvp talent, which i never would skill as a raiding frost mage, only to make icicles useful in a boss fight, while at the same time, icicles is useless in pvp. on top, we have no option to increase the flat 15% chance to make flash freeze procc, which is just a gambling roulette in every single fight, how lucky you are to get a procc, which makes your overall damage fluctuate inbetween tens of thousands of damage. if i have a 5 minute boss fight and i am so unlucky that it only procced 3 times, then did it increase my damage? yes. but was that worth it? no.
it feels like, that right now, you just want us to bring out the brain washing device before every single boss to optimize the best specc against every single encounter, or just straight up play arcane, as its the strongest specc against any boss if the fight lasts below 5 minutes.

if you would have asked us, what we wanted: i dont want to speak for everyone as opinions will always diverge, but i am pretty sure the majority would have said "we do not want water elementals, they have never been fun and never looked like a companion i enjoyed having by our side, but AT LEAST give us frost shards, so we can adjust our rotation based on our critical frost spells and build our character towards the crit stat. instead we just play dps roulette who has more flash freeze proccs PURELY based on rng luck. and it would be amazing if the new talents like arcane rupture and icicles could be included in some tsets like the t2 3 set bonus, as they produce a massive amount of aggro, which leads us to finally having a procc and then only standing around and waiting for the tanks to build up again, basically having wasted that procc.

[Gahnfaustt]

The overall goal is not achieving class homogenization—however we do want to come closer to parity than vanilla's original brown-blowout raid meta.

Speaking about user feedback to the changes.
I assume Vampiric Embrace cast time was put on to alleviate some similar pvp issues, but with 2 seconds cast time it is very obnoxious to use in most non target-dummy-smacking pve encounters as well, especially dungeons, even 10-mans. By the time you can set up vampiric embrace and start channeling or putting dots, or whatever, brownies already melted through the enemies, of course taking priority on the one with your vampiric embrace on, wasting 2 seconds of your cast time and 10 seconds cooldown on your vampiric embrace. It was like that even before the nerf, but at least you could cast it while moving with the group, and you did lose less time if your target drops dead very fast.
And while cutting down healing percentage while simultaneously raising up spd scaling for shadow damaging spells is fair (more damage with less percentage healed summed up to more or less the same amount of healing), cutting down mana regeneration more than in half with this is uncalled for. Even before the nerf mana regeneration numbers were mediocre at best, and after the nerf even with overall damage raise mana regeneration is pretty negligible.
Combined with essentially raising cooldown on the ability (now you have to wait 10 seconds like before, but with additional 2 seconds cast time to apply another VE, so it is 12 seconds between consecutive VE's, not 10 like before) it makes the whole ability frustrating to use.
Since the whole ability is nerfed overall I'd say it's fair to cut the cooldown significantly or even remove the cooldown altogether so it could be less clunky to apply in pve while not being too easy in pvp. And maybe, just maybe, align the cast time with GCD, meaning 1.5 seconds cast time, not 2.

Brown meta isn't going anywhere, and other classes are suffering for it. At least it's good to see paladins getting fair usage without outright bumping their numbers up even more as if server has not enough paladins already.
Paladins blocking ability (and blocking in general) feels good in levelling, but kinda off in the endgame, particularly in the field of damage reduction. Someone above already described similar issues with tanking shamans damage mitigation.

Very well put. Shadow Priest needs a closer look for sure. Aswell as Talents in other trees, there is little synergy for shadow Priest

[Elleshar]

No mention of pvp so I guess that part of the game is still getting rejected? The pvp meta with this patch makes it so burst heavy it removes the skill parts of the game, no point in having healers either there if people are just dying from getting one shot. Gonna be even worse once everyone running around in T3.5 gear.

And thats good, healers should not be immortal like in other expansions.
Ive seen your post demanding 30% dispell resist on druid hots rofl lmao
You are biased little boy who cares for his class only.

Funny you are a playing warlock and are scared of this.

[Ataika]

No mention of pvp so I guess that part of the game is still getting rejected? The pvp meta with this patch makes it so burst heavy it removes the skill parts of the game, no point in having healers either there if people are just dying from getting one shot. Gonna be even worse once everyone running around in T3.5 gear.

And thats good, healers should not be immortal like in other expansions.
Ive seen your post demanding 30% dispell resist on druid hots rofl lmao
You are biased little boy who cares for his class only.

Funny you are a playing warlock and are scared of this.

Iam playing warlock and holy priest in pvp.
And yeah iam not a biased guy lk you who wants to make his character op.

[Grifan12]

I'm a major doofus because I wrote a really long answer here and forgot to send it.
Here we go again.

Besides some general stuff I can mostly evaluate shamans. Didn't have the time to test other characters.

Warden spec:
I am grateful for having a tank shaman but the current iteration is half-baked. The tree is chopped into two builds á la feral druid and as a result, unlike them furry friends, none of them feels complete.
There are some questionable talents here and there. Don't get me wrong, the one I will criticize the most is directly from Vanilla.
So.
Shield specialization. 5% block is good, we need to push off some stuff from the attack table.
Added amount blocked is questionable though. I explain, why.
Prot palas and prot warriors are the other tanks who bear shields. Added blocked amount works as a damage reduction tool for palas since they have a high baseline block and can further raise it via holy shield. Prot warriors can use a block anytime, on demand via shield block (not mentioning new changes which make blocks more reliable). Here added blocked amount is good.
A shaman has meh block, can't raise block chance during fight and can't block on demand.
As a result an added blocked amount for a shaman is not reliable and since blocks proc kinda rarely, it is not really a good mitigation tool.
My suggestion for shield spec is something like this: '5% block chance AND after having a successful dodge increase the armor of your shield by x% for y sec, stackable z times'.
Now, shield's armor value tweaking is something in flavor for the shamans and dodge is our main kind of mitigation. We can combine these two and make the talent interesting and actually good.
Not too strong at the early game since those shields are bad BUT lategame it helps closing the gap between plate-wearers and us even more.

Same problem with enhancing totems.
Stoneskin adding + blocked amount is almost irrelevant because of the same logic. Delete that. Give us instead extra damage reduction or defense or -chance of being crit. Either of those and stoneskin suddenly becomes super interesting.

The problem with WF. I don't have a suggestion here, revamping WF this late wouldn't be a good idea. But just so y'all know. Tanking a dungeon as a shaman always starts with a Gordon Ramsey-esque shoutout when we try to explain the melee DPS that we really like grace of air totem. Gameplay forcing you to have a conflict just because of the way your class is built is weird (at the bottom of my heart, I hate WF but that's another topic).

No defensive CD. I understand that shaman tanking was the experimental result for the 'make LFT great again' problem. But this means that you sacrificed half of a talent tree for a spec which is not viable at the endgame. On a PVE realm where most people end up raiding.
Just give us a defensive.

Mobility. It's not that big of a problem and I don't wanna look like a guy who's complaining until warden shaman is S+ tier. It's a small pain-point but it exists. Warriors can charge around all day to reposition if needed. Bears can do it to a more limited degree. Palas can't but pursuit of justice still helps. I'm totally fine not addressing this issue since it's small but a 'gust of wind'-like ability or a +movement speed totem would make wonders.

Last thing is the fallen prophet set. You made T2,5 a tanking set (among others). It's super cool but if you also reitemized the fallen prophet items from AQ40, it would enable a further defensive tier set bonus besides T2,5. Not a big thing but T2,5 will eat fallen prophet for breakfast now since both can be acquired at Cthunistan.

Ancestral knowledge might be a bit too strong rn since it affects all stats. Maybe 5% is more fair.

PS: Almost forgot: Please give Stoneclaw Totem a big CD and in exchange tweak it so it could be used for good AoE threat every now and then.

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to play a warden shaman.
7/10

___________

Resto

Smooth gameplay, maybe a bit too overpowered but extremely boring.
Devs obviously had the intention to make a rotation for resto (undertow) but chain heal is so strong I kinda misplay if I don't follow my 1 button rotation.
Also, removing totem twisting, while fair and understandable, made the build kinda braindead.
An example ->
I was a twister before. I agree, not many restos did twisting so it's a subjective perspective.
During fights I used to have dilemmas like this:
* Should I twist in a tranquil air so I allow more zugzug for the DPS?
* Should I keep up twisting in agi totem? My mana is getting low.
* Huhuran... Twisting nat rez or twisting agi?

I also had dilemmas like this:
* OT loses life fast. Should I go with the fast heal or do I keep up my chain heal spam?

Nowadays it is simpler.
You are a shaman, you are in a melee group. You put down WF totem, Str totem, FT totem. Only creativity is at water totems and if you expect a fear so you can summon Tremor in time.
Totems are not sources of thinking anymore. Heal is not really a source of thinking anymore. Chain heal is so fast now that the guy's HP should drop REALLY fast so that I'd consider using anything else than chain heal.

Suggestions:
* Nerf improved chain heal and buff undertoe. Make chain heal 2,5 sec but make it so that HW or LHW with undertoe makes the next 2 chain heals 0.5 sec faster. That way you get the fast chain heal but you are still forced to think a bit and to use some kind of rotation.
* Totem radius. On paper it is fine. But in practice you are in a melee group and you play from caster range. Rogue Cocojumbo69 and Fwar Longschwong23 will definitely start rushing around at packs (imagine the movement of bees if you decide to yeet a jackhammer into the hive). So you, the shaman, are expected to run around like it's a Scooby-Doo episode, spamming totems and hoping they are still in range. All I ask for is a visual cue which every party member can see so they see until where the totem effect applies. You still have the responsibility to move with them and to provide totem support but if a fwar has decided to Usain Bolt the f. away from the group and spams 'where WF', you can point to that visual line saying (with a smirk) that you positioned pretty badly, senor warrior.

ö/10

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Other:
Ele was nerfed for PVP reasons. Now okayish at PVP but feels bad at PVE. My suggestion is giving them something which gives them PVE utility without making them better at PVP.
My glorious idea: improved tranquil air totem. Same threat reduction but an added effect which further reduces x% threat from crits. We have a niche there, ele shaman can join big pumper DPS parties and make sure that his totem and salvation together keep the threat on the tank.
But seriously, ele is boring (and worse than it was pre-patch).
Either this or a spell damage totem if it can be properly balanced.

For enh DPS I'd suggest praying for a higher power which might or might not perform a miracle on them.

i am play on vanila+ server. Stoneskin totem just.. add armor for part!) its simple and good idea)

[Zulnam]

Damn bro roadmap has a roadmap now.

In hindsight, the team might fare better with smaller releases.

[Jervy]

I think Improved Shadowbolt should have a higher duration or chance to hit. The current version is a uptime nerf which was frankly unnecessary.
I see your intention was to encourage stacking more shadowbolt-spamming warlocks and shadowpriests in raids by disabling the possibility of "stealing" the stacks. The reality is that warlocks aren't especially keen to be shadowbolt turrets after the changes and shadowpriests completely disappeared from the horizon, no one plays them. Both need to be buffed to compete with the powercreep that's happening in other classes.

[Bigsmerf]

That moment when you realize we could be at step 3 without the backlash and frustration if the team just went about this more safely and thoroughly with the community and testing.


Anyways, I've been having lots of fun despite all the negative things I've had to say so far. Tried a little itty bit of smite priest and also melee hunter. Both are very fun in my brief experience, and boomkin has been much more novel and complex (but healthily so) since I respecced.

I mean this genuinely and sincerely. For the best three years of WoW in my life... Thank you turtle team. YOU HAVE FULL ACCESS TO THE KITCHEN FROM NOW ON. KEEP COOKING.

[Bahamutxd]

I still can't understand why Turtle forced pure dps classes such as Mage/Warlock into having 2 different tiers - half if not more of the bonuses are super generic (and useless too) anyway.

For mage they even made the Arcane tier have mostly Arcane damage, like if they want to stop a fire/frost mage using it.

Well ofcourse he is going to use it if needed- those specs get a good use of the very same stats... spell damage, crit, hit, haste... what a terrible design choice Turtle.

Really hard to understand some of the changes made this patch.