Shaman Core Spell Changes
At low tiers, Shamans are in a relatively good position. Their buffs are useful, Cannibalize provides them with significantly more mana than other healers, and the limited prevalence of area-of-effect damage allows them to excel as single-target healers. However, as the game progresses, the value of the Shaman’s abilities diminishes. Buffs become less impactful as players reach stat caps, Shaman healing throughput does not scale as well as other healers, and everyone’s mana regeneration scales rapidly. Additionally, the increasing amount of area-of-effect damage reduces the effectiveness of their healing. All of this combined has made Shamans feel inferior to other healers at high tiers. Previous attempts to address these issues focused mainly on buffing Relic: Woundbane, which made it too strong at low tiers without solving the problems at higher tiers. We’re now focusing on addressing these core issues while maintaining the Shaman’s primary role as a consistent tank healer.
High Tier Balance Changes
- New Runic: Spirit Of The Council: Shamans receive a new pet spell at the runic spell level, which triggers a debuff that increases the target’s physical damage taken by 5%. This aims to provide meaningful group/raid-oriented utility and a reason to maintain a pet in raid content. To assuage any fears about keeping the pet alive, it has more than twice the HP of the current pet and significantly higher resistances.
- New Runic: Feast of Flesh: Shamans receive a new Cannibalize spell at the Runic spell level. It converts 241 health to 144 mana and leaves a five-tick buff that further converts 28 hitpoints into 17 mana per tick.
- New Runic: Purge Wounds: A new, powerful heal is available at the runic spell level, providing 2050 base healing with a 3-second cast time.
- Both Relic: Woundbane and the new Runic heal now remove 5 poison and disease counters, adding value against low-counter poison and disease effects.
- Relic: Woundbane: Cast time increased from 3.0 seconds to 3.5 seconds.
- Spiritual Attuning has been redesigned: It no longer slows or snares targets, its mana cost has been reduced to 800, and it now features a reverse splurting heal-over-time effect, starting at 800 health and reducing by 200 per tick. This is a starting point and will be adjusted as needed.
Cold Damage Spells
We are also adjusting the Shaman cold direct damage spells. While the lower-level versions of these spells are effective during leveling, the level 54 and 61 versions were significantly underpowered relative to other available options. We’ve adjusted these spells to make them more viable and replaced Crippling Surge with an upgraded spell.
- New Spell: Winter’s Wrath: Replacing Crippling Surge, this new spell deals 1100 damage, has a 4s cast time, and costs 355 mana.
- Ice Strike: Now deals 675 damage, has a 4.25s cast time, and costs 315 mana.
- Fury of the North: Cast time adjusted to 4.5s, costs 325 mana.
New AA: Winter’s Ire
We’ve replaced the Blood Ritual AA with a new AA called Winter’s Ire. This change addresses several key points:
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Deprecating the Stance System: As we’re deprecating the stance system, the stance provided by Blood Ritual needed to be removed.
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Shifting Healing Throughput: The healing effects previously provided by Blood Ritual are now integrated into the raw throughput of the Runic heal, enhancing its overall effectiveness.
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Incentivizing Cold Damage Spells: Winter’s Ire provides an additional benefit for using high-level cold damage spells, encouraging Shamans to use these spells over poison damage over time spells.
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Winter’s Ire: Dealing cold damage with a high-level cold spell triggers a two-tick cold damage-over-time effect on the target, with a base damage of 225. Each rank increases the damage by an additional 225.
Additional Spell Changes
We’ve also made changes to several other spells to enhance their utility:
- The Insidious Decay spell line now decreases cold resistances in addition to disease resistance.
- Allure of the Basilisk now provides 15 mana regeneration, matching the regeneration provided by mana potions.
- **New Spell: Debilitate ** in the Cripple line is now available for Shamans and Enchanters at level 62.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug that caused the AA Tastes Like Chicken to provide bonus mana from all mana recovery effects rather than just Cannibalize effects.
These changes aim to improve the Shaman’s performance at higher tiers while maintaining their unique strengths, with an eye towards still maintaining balance at lower tiers.