1. Totems are stationary, weak, rotten pieces of wood which collapse if you breathe on them. 3/4 of playing a Shaman is totems. This is fine in groups and shit because the AI is dumber than Frankenstein’s monster after a lobotomy, but other players know this. And well pet/wand macro your totems to death. Or heck, just hit them. It’s like when Native Americans thought their “Ghost Armour” would protect them.
2. Shaman are entirely dependant on Burst damage. Either they stand 20 yards away hoping for a slightly bigger ZAP, or up close begging for Windfury to go off. There are few DAMAGE utility spells, and they’re rubbish.
3. Shaman are entirely dependent on crap burst damage. Warriors can run around hitting for 5k on demand. Mages can hit for 3k a long way away. Shaman have to have a crit windfury, or crit lightning to get this type of damage. Heck, windfury only has 20% chance to even go off – add on the fact you’ll need a crit and forget it. THEN add on resilience. Shaman are no more likely to critical hit in PvP than Picard is to see 5 lights. It might happen… eventually… but they’ll probably already have left.
4. This of course assumes a Shaman is allowed to attack, and not locked down by the multitude of stuns every other class and their grandparents seem to have. Whoever at Blizzard came up with this idea is a complete and fucking idiot. PvP should have less crowd control, not more.
5. Pure Damage classes have this brilliant feature in their trees where they give up a little damage to get more PvP survivability (or even more PvP focused damage!). Shaman have these too. They just have to give up most of their damage to get them. THERE AREN’T ENOUGH TALENT POINTS.
6. Totems take far, far too long to put down. Shaman need them to win… but they’re dead by the time they get them all ready. Other classes just buff themselves up and walk about. Shaman have to prop up some giant logs before every fight.
7. Totems are crap. WOTLK has ensured that other classes all get the same buffs, but without relying on propping up piles of twigs.
8. The interrupts are crap. Earth Shock and Wind Shock silence a spell school for two seconds, but start a 1.5 second global cooldown on most of the other abilities except shitty totems, so you get a .5 second advantage. Big whoop.
9. Shaman actually have the lowest base health as a class. No, I don’t know why either.
10. TOO MANY FUCKING COOLDOWNS, NOT ENOUGH REAL FUCKING ABILITIES!
11. Blizzard like a funny joke.
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1,4,6 and 7 are the ones that I certainly agree with. We receive some fairly immense buffs from our totems (20% haste, 80-100 Str and Agi … Errr) on top of that we as Enhancement get our +10% AP and an instant cast spell every 10-15 seconds.
The problem is, that instant cast in PvP is almost always going to be a heal and with our ultra poor mana effeciency coupled with the suddenly shocking amount of mana drain means in any prolonged fight (which by Shaman standards is about 20 seconds) you’re completely fucked.
Shammy Rage is supposed to not only combat this but provide us with a window through which to engage people with ultra burst attacks and CC lock downs.
the problem arises when it’s only a 15 second dispellable (is it still? I forget) buff which is just long enough for Rogue, Mage, Priest, Warlock and Paladin to stunlock you for the duration and in most cases continue to do DPS and drains while you’re locked.
Our burst is reasonable though, when we’re on a target and getting off some DPS we’re pretty hard to match with the exception of Ret pallies (notably missing from your list), Critilate Rogues (see what I did there) and correctly spec’d Mages.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head with regards to our weak buffing system and the overzealous application of crowd control – But it’s also the sheer number of “Out” clauses that classes have these days.
There are plenty of things related on this topic to be irked about, from a Rogue’s perspective all feral druids get Shadowstep, but only 1 spec of Rogue does. Shadowstep doesn’t even work if you’re snared anymore (i.e. frost nova) and yet blink breaks not only all movement affects but even stuns. Druids can charge, stun, stealth, heal, root, cyclone, poison, gouge, kidney shot and bleed … All with a single spec. Paladins can crit big (bugged DPS aside), get instant heals when they do (they get instant heal on 1 crit, we get instant heal on ~5 hits…), STILL make themselves invulnerable, STILL use Lay on Hands (with a reduced cooldown) and got even better buffs after 3.0.2.
I know i’m running around with only a tiny bit of Resillience and mediocre gear on my Shaman/Rogue … But on my Rogue I feel like I can go toe-to-toe with a moderately geared resillience character purely on the grounds of interrupts and burst critilates but with my Shaman it’s often over before I even got into range.
If Shaman could stealth, could you imagine? Appearing out of nowhere, stomping down earth bind and beating the living shit out of the guy before he even knew what a Stormstrike Debuff was.
*Sigh*
Wow, look how much I wrote and I haven’t even updated NRT in like a week …
Well that’s just it. We’re rogues without the silly amount of escape maneouvres and no stealth or stuns. We’re like rogues with all the action bars missing.
dude all you sayed is true :/ the solution is… TRY WARHAMERONLINE
Think I’d rather stab myself to death. Even if I was still playing Shaman (I’m a Warrior now) I don’t even like Warhammer.
Besides, WoTLK has made the game hundreds of times more fun.