What is a Shaman’s identity? Is it meant to be a caster? In a class that’s based on melee combat?
Shaman was my first character for launch. He is 91 now. Then I tried druid, beastmaster, marksman, forgeguard and got them to empowered rifts. I tried a bunch of stuff, but what seems to work now is Tempest strike, storm crows, storm totem, war cry totem and E.blessing to keep the crows alive. I went cold on everything and am using some low life gear on gloves and boots. Stack intel with the cleaver solution, then I went frozen ire wand. It’s kinda comparable to the frozen crow beastmaster build, but less crows and more totems. It’s not bad at all power level or defense wise, it’s just kinda boring to play.
Got my shaman to 98, refused to use a guide etc, so it was slow and I respecced everything 20+ times.
Im running gathering storm with the maelstrom nodes and the eye of storms amulet.
Crows with friends of the tempest + spell damg on crow hit, warcry for mael stacks + debuffs, and tempest strike with gladiator and everything but the lightning tempest disabled.
It’s the best version ive made so far, and can do corruption 200 but the issues remain the same:
Im waaaay to thinly spread out on stats and passives. I gotta stack attunement sky high, I refuse to do a cleaver solution ward build, so defenses requires a fuckton of affixes (due to shaman having next to no solid defenses) and I still need standard % lightning damg, and a at least 1 tier7 minion health affix so my crows aren’t dead constantly.
The shaman tree needs a major overhaul, its all over the place. And better passive bonuses. Having 2/3 of them being locked behind totems feels punishing if totems arent your jam. Oh yeah, and more actual conversions - Maelstrom to 100% lightning damage etc. Hell, thorn totems to elemental totems if EHG refuses to force shamans to use totems.
Then I lvl’d a falconer and afterwards a paladin. It’s not even funny how much stronger and smoother they are to play
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I gotta join this bandwagon, mostly because Totems (or stationary set and forget skills) are decidedly a playstyle I like in every game. But shaman is also a class I love, even if the identity is all over the place.
What I don’t get about totems is why they are treated as minions. They should scale entirely of Player attributes (like in PoE, basically). It’s a mess to have them be treated as minions, as the scaling for them gets all over the place. Also, what the hell is up with their survival? If they are meant as damaging skills, should they really die to a single hit from anything? 600 health at lvl 100 is a joke, specially when Ballistas have 7500 at 100. Trying to make your totems tankier? Beyond impossible, except for a few particular resistances. (I think namely lightning and physical.) But when the first Crit they receive they drop anyway at 75 or not, does it really matter?
Then we have Tornado and Earthquake with conversions to Fire, for some dark unbeknownst reason. The class has ZERO synergy with fire. The penetration is Phys/Cold/Light, same with the (flat) damage increases.
Then then, we have Gathering Storm and A LOT of skills using Storm Bolts. That’s nice and all, but the Storm Bolts all the other skills use don’t get any scalling from the Gathering Storms tree. Honestly, why not? Not to mention ONE flat damage scalling per Attunement on the Storm Bolts? At least give us also our 4% increased damage.
Honestly, at this point I feel like the only way to save Shaman is to have it split into two classes. One with focus on direct casting, the other with focus on totems. And since this is a farfetched solution right now, I believe Shaman will remain a confusing mess of a class for a while, or be pushed away from one of it’s playstyles. Which considering we already have a dedicated spellcasting class (Mage), Shaman will probably get pushed harder into totems. (At least that’s what would make more sense, if it doesn’t totems might as well just be removed from the game.)
P.S.: Sorry for the tagged reply, I meant to click reply on the thread, not specifically to you.
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This, been thinking about this since I tried Shaman even years ago. And the stormbolts, I wish it scaled of physical/lightning/melee damage too. I kinda realized these when I started playing around the 3LP Stormbreaker I found. Or they could just make a skill tree node to make it scale off player stats and not as minions. Or a passive node at the end of Shaman passive tree that converts some of your physical or spell damage as added damage to stormbolts and totems so stormbolts is a lot meaningful and proprietary for Shaman itself (because Lightning bug druid build. more about it below).
For defenses, I’ve seen shamans that are “too tanky” (but not comparable to the ward “problem” we have now) but still almost getting 1shot and on the verge of dying everytime. But that also feels like using the “chance to cast thorn totem” idols SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO mandatory just to survive for the “per summoned totem” passives and eats through your idol slots so easily leaving you not much space for health stout idols.
Adding Gathering Storm and reworking Tempest Strike is great, I had fun with it on early levels but feels like just a bandaid fix that ain’t even close to being called as “fix”.
Stormbolts are still much better if you’re a Swarmblade Druid “lightning bug” build (not a bug, but literal bug as in insect).
And so much old passives and old skill tree nodes that left untouched.
I really hope to see a total rework of Shaman and Forge Guard. As well as EHG updating the rest of the class’ skill tree. cough* Marrow Shards cough*. I was just really surprised they didn’t even touch it upon Warlock release when it’s literally connected to Ghostflame skill.
Anyways, I ain’t shaman expert, just my thoughts and suggestion.
Seeing as there are multiple posts here about Shaman being too reliant on bonuses that rely on having a totem, I think it would be awesome if Storm Totem had a series of nodes that imbue your weapon and make it like you’re whacking enemies in the face with your totem instead of passively putting them on the ground. Then pressing the Storm Totem skill would activate the Lightning / Cold AoE the totem would normally give off, while giving you the benefits of having a totem for X seconds.
I know it would be similar to Spellblade, as both use the “enchanting weapons” motif, but considering that Shaman has a lot of melee specialization in the passive trees, there should be a way to utilize the exclusive Shaman skill while not being restrained to the totem, as we already have that in Frenzy Totem.
It’d be great to hear what’s actually in the works for Shaman, instead of some half-hearted, “yeah we’re working on it.”
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<3
All I’ve heard Mike say is something like, “I’m uncomfortable calling what we’re doing a rework. We really just need to tweak some numbers”. And I’m just filled with disappointment and dread.
I’m feeling like this is just another developer that creates a “storm” + something else character, and spends all their time on the “something else” part.
The shaman has access to four skills that are storm/natural disaster related (yes, “storm” totem counts) and one skill that it totem related, yet the shaman passive tree has nine totem-related passives. Three(!) of which have “per active totem” in the text.
The shaman, within his mastery, has only one way of procing more totems (Tempest Strike can proc totems, one per element).
The primalist base stat, Attunement, is the only stat that provides no defense. It provides more mana. In a game where most classes have access to a builder.
I’m just hard pressed to say that there is any class that needs a rework more. I can see why Mike would say, “we just need tuning”, for the Forgeguard. It’s an awesome concept, it’s mostly there, it just need to stop sucking. The shaman, on the other hand, … someone needs to figure out just wtf the shaman is. Why would you want it to be about totems, and put affixes in the passive tree for, more totems!, when the shaman has no in-mastery way of summoning more totems?
WTF does thorns have to do with storms?
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I think what Mike said was actually that they don’t like to call it rework because that implies that it isn’t working now. In fact, some time ago I think he said that the older masteries don’t have those shiny passives the new ones have and they’d like to change it.
I’m almost positive that I heard him say ‘we just need to tweak numbers’. I do hope I’m confused/wrong.
It’s possible. There have been many Mike streams and on some issues he has changed his answers a bit.
What I remember most about the stream where he said that is that he was mostly hung on the semantics of the word “rework” because he felt that implied it wasn’t currently working.
Personally, I do hope they do rework the older masteries, no matter what they call it. They can call it revamp, redesign, whatever, but I hope their masteries get changed to have the more interactive and fun passives.
Would be nice to see the primalist passive tree get something like;
Attunement: +1 per point
Threshold: 3 points
20% of damage taken is dealt to current mana
Yes that’s an extremely powerful node. It’s 20% damage reduction as long as you have enough mana. I’m sure it would need to be tweaked, but it would make Attunement powerful for the Primalist. Would create nice tension between the big damage spells/mana spent and defense (via the mana pool) and make max mana and regen more valuable for the primalist (I think class differentiators are interesting).
I think words like rework, revamp, redesign probably raise expectations above the level of changes they are looking at. A rework would mean something like changing its role fundamentally from a melee caster with pet/totem support into something else.
So, because there is something wrong with me, I just spent the last hour trying to figure out how to make Eternal Storm not suck.
tldr; I failed. Any node that requires mob death is not good for boss fights.
Is there a worse passive node than Shaman Eternal Storm. It’s tier 9.
Conditions to trigger;
- When you kill
- frozen enemy
- random totem
Benefit
- totem reset (full health, full duration… storm totem duration is 8 seconds)
- totem gets 25% damage per point (max 4 points).
Catch here is that there is only one totem passive that increases totem duration (100%) and that is the Thunder Totem. So how about we move the Thunder Totem node into the part of the skill tree that converts the totem to cold, lets call it a Whiteout Totem. Something like below.
Whiteout Totem
(basically the same as the Thunder Totem)
Eternal Whiteout node (replaces Eternal Storm):
Conditions to trigger;
- When a frozen enemy dies within the blizzard aoe
Benefits - Blizzard totem has %25 chance to be converted into a Whiteout Totem
- totem reset (full health, full duration)
- Increased +25% damage per point (max 4 points),
or keep it Eternal Storm and change the trigger to be
- When a shocked or frozen enemy dies within the totem aoe
Benefits - totem has %25 chance to be converted into a Thunder Totem
- totem reset (full health, full duration)
- Increased +25% damage per point (max 4 points),
This combined with the experimental affix that moves minions when you use a travel skill seems like an interesting playstyle…
except!, we’ve invested a ton of passive and skill points to something that isn’t terribly useful against bosses. I can’t think of anyway to fix that.
I honestly don’t think totems are terribly interesting. I’d rather they just go all in on the storm/natural disaster aspect of the shaman character fantasy. Primalist as a base has minion playstyle covered with Beastmaster. We don’t need another minion build. Give him the fucking totems. Keep the storm totem, but make it something that the shaman carries on his back (basically make it a buff/debuff, like Sentinel Holy Aura).
Maybe make him a spell or melee class. Or better yet, make him a spell/melee hybrid. I don’t think there (m)any of those. Scepter or Staff should be shaman weapon of choice. Let me dual wield scepters.
wow this got away from me