So yea I’ve played every classes in the game and shaman is the only one where his skills and especially his passivs from the shaman tree are quite lackluster when you compare to any other class.
Way to many of his passivs are bad or useless and only some of them are either good or really good, leading to only a few viable builds.
He is not weak in the way he can totally do damage and do his work on high difficulty like other classes, problem is you can do this with only 3 or 4 viable builds, when other classes can have more than 20 viable builds (and that’s the low end number) to do those difficulties.
So yea please rework the shaman for at least his passiv tree and if you can, why not his skills since some of them are extemely weak/niche.
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Forge Guard is in the same position. Forge Guard and Shaman are only played for their Mastery specific skill and they are both lacking. Every other build for them is done better by one of the other masteries for the class. Building Totems? Druid Spriggan form is better. Going Cold dot? Druid Bear form is better.
Paladin is better at just about everything over FG. Even the Shield Throw/Manifest Armor builds (both Forge Guard skills) are played as Paladin.
Both of these masteries need a serious rework and focus on what they are supposed to be good at.
Shaman, from what it seems, should have some serious focus on Lightning/Cold AoE spells and Totems. Shaman isn’t “bad” at them, it’s just that Druid does it better.
Forge Guard needs to focus in on throwing and forged minions and fire damage. I think Hammer throw should go to Forge Guard and Shield Throw should go to Paladin. It would be nice if they added a Holy damage element so that Paladin didn’t steal so much identity from Forge Guard. The forged weapons need to be a lot better to make it worth it. Maybe even have the sentinel classes be best at weapon styles. VK is 2H, Paladin is 1H+Shield, and FG is Dual Wield (Thinking tongs and hammer during forging).
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for some ungodly reason tornado and earth quake have fire conversions and not cold ones. Like wtf lmao these skills.
Also forge gaurd just needs a different damage type. physical is default and paladin already has fire and lighning.hell maybe give it necro since its a minion mastery
We very much agree that both Shaman and Forge Guard need glow ups.
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I’ve been playing shaman a lot last few months and I have few humble suggestions.
Shaman as an arctype is a master of elements that uses totems and spirit animals. Playing shaman in Last Epoch I’ve felt that I’m forced to go multi totem build direction and pick one or two elements. I’ve tried just the opposite and I liked using everything but the totems but in the end those builds doesn’t seem to work properly without support in passives or they don’t have enough skill combinations.
I’ve enjoyed playing shaman with only one totem or minion and I’ve felt that it should be supported as well with passives like “if you have only one totem or minion you will get… increased area/cast speed/run speed/pull/push/healing rain/combo ability/spirit animal according to its element”.
I have tried playing with all possible totems you can get as shaman and even if it was some kind of fun I still find thorn totem to be unpleasant to use. It feels like it’s luck based damage and to me the ability looks ugly. Spriggan form locks you in certain abilities like Thorn totem and they feel like they are lacking diversity. Maybe update the totem sounds a bit too?
Passives looks like a mess tbh. I would combine lightning and cold damage as elemental damage in passives and leave physical as basic damage type that combines well with beastmaster minions with poison and bleed. This would free slots for more interesting totem based or spirit animal and ability enhancing possibilities.
I’ve liked Storm crows as a shaman like minions but it seems to lose it’s place to druid mastery minion spriggan most of the time because of several points in ability tree. It gives more specific buffs, its heal takes lots of points with long cd and if you take it as traversal skill it still has a longer cd than Fury leap. -6% seems low per point. Lightning damage improving nodes also take too many points. Having just one crow has a function when you want to take Spriggan also but it makes crow’s buffs and damage even worse.
Fury leap doesn’t seem like a fitting shaman traversal ability so I’ve tried to make storm crows work. I have noticed I end up changing it to something like storm totem’s speed but that also is inconsistent because it needs a lightning strike to enemy or haste chance to proc from passive. I was wondering if Fury leap could be changed via passives to Lava flow/Earthly connection that opened up the earth so you could move to another place because of your shamanistic connection to earth?
I just watched a video about shaman with fire tornado and it looked awesome! Last Epoch Fire Tornado Shaman - YouTube . It fulfills the expectation of elemental master that shaman has by changing the element of an ability. Unfortunately it isn’t really good to play as a fire shaman atm. Maybe all shaman abilities could have lightning, fire and cold to choose from? Or maybe totems (air, water, fire, earth) changed the abilities’ element?
Abilities themselves have some interesting nodes but many times they are too hard to get. Best nodes to combine are behind bad ones or they have too many points in them.
Maelstrom and Tornado are quite similar abilities… maybe combine them? New ability could have something to do with water like Tsunami or fire like Wildfire? Tsunami could throw enemies back and blind or open them up for cold damage. Wildfire burning the ground and spreading from enemy to enemy making them burning torches.
Upheaval could be renamed as rockslide and have earth/rock like nodes. In some other thread there was this suggestion about Stone skin that I liked a lot. Maybe stone skin could be implemented in Upheaval/Rockslide/Earthquake/Lava flow/Earthly connection abilities.
Clay minions would be interesting new ability or proc because it would be funny to see small clay dudes or one big one running around throwing rocks and wreaking havoc.
I’m sorry if these suggestions seem a little silly. I’m a silly person. Also I like the game and I wish to help improve it if I can. See you in game 
After playing d4 druid…then going back to last epoch druid…I can definitely say d4 has the smoother experience if you want to be a shape shifter.
I love LE please don’t think I’m hating…a lot of druid players , really really count on having a nice, smooth shape shifting experience.
Seems like many useless passives as well idk…
I have a hybrid build I made for my forge sentential, and his basic attack is hitting for 7-8k damage at lvl 60.
Forge hammer is hitting for around 8-9k dmg
My druid around the same level feels very weak.
Bear form , granted is much stronger than my basic form . Just how my build is…but bear form also is kind of stiff.
Please show some more love to bears 
Bear lives matter!!! 
Lol
Thank you for the wanderful game either way devs 
My problem with Shaman is basically my problem with (nearly) every melee spec / class in the game, and that’s that fighting bosses gets hilariously tedious and fighting enemies is randomly deadly. Unless and until you’re at the point that basically every enemy type melts in a fraction of a second, just the stick-and-move of wearing one or two of them down will cause you to take insane damage in certain situations. And these are situations you encounter often enough that it becomes annoying because the decision in that scenario is either doing no damage and waiting longer to attack, or risking dying almost immediately. There are certain specs that no amount of defense stats mitigates this to where you can deal some damage and start moving again without worrying about getting killed by an AOE or something off-screen you didn’t have the luxury (or ability) to account for.
Games are about making informed decisions as much of the time as possible. If the outcome is random but only in certain instances, then it starts to feel like your decision making isn’t being rewarded in those instances. This is why I think a large number of the melee specs in the game just aren’t viable: They require you to walk directly into danger but then give you too little you can do to mitigate it when that turns out to be a bad idea.
Worse, a lot of melee specs require you to use a spell that causes you to freeze in place or move towards enemies when you use it for a distance or amount of time that you have little to no control over. While that can be interesting, against certain bosses that spells certain doom, so you can only deal damage to them in very specific situations if that is your primary ability. This causes those bosses take much longer and to become extremely tedious. Best example of this is Earthquake for Primalist. The amount of time that ability freezes you in place horrible, and even if you only use it with Bhuldar’s Wrath / Fury Leap, you’re using Fury Leap to move towards danger instead of away and putting it on cooldown. Even with insane cooldown reduction, this is not a great thing to do. Tempest Strike has essentially the same issues but to a lesser degree, except that its cast time cannot be reduced.
All of this needs a lot of retuning in my opinion, and I’m not entirely sure what you would have to do to fix it. Maybe adding more viable defensive stats or options to the early part of passive trees, or revamping the existing ones would go a long way towards resolving these issues. Another thing that could be done is reducing the overall cast time of melee spells across the board by some percentage. At any rate, I really hope this gets another looking over somewhere down the road.
I find it quite funny. The thread is about shaman and you talk about werebear, a druid specific skill. And werebear has some of the best close range build (lightning swipe, cold dot, EQ)
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Forge Guard is absolutely a Minion mastery as far as I am concerned. Just not enough.
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