Shaman Q&A Reveals Some Interesting Ideas

After reading all the complains and angry posts that you see in the forums, you might be asking yourself “what are the devs thinking?”. While a lot of points may be just complaints that don’t really have much backing, there are some that are real concerns. That’s why it’s a great idea that Blizzard actually spent some time to share what the devs are really thinking by putting up a new piece in the WoW Community Site, the Q&A.

shaman totems

The first Q&A is all about the Shaman class and based on what Blizzard implies, they intend to do the same thing for all the other classes. It’s a great read especially if you play a Shaman as your main character. basically it shares what Ghostcrawler and the rest of the development team have in store for the shaman class for the future and even ideas they’re working to implement, a lot of them are still just ideas they’re playing around with. Below I want to highlight some of those ideas that they’re thinking of adding to the game somehow. Even if it doesn’t make the cut, at least it gives you a look into their heads to understand the direction of the class.

1. Being able to drop all 4 totems at once in one global cooldown

The dev team is looking to implement on a feature that will allow the shaman to drop the four totems one by one like shamans do right now can cost some valuable time in groups or even PvP and can be a major bummer while leveling. Dropping them at the same time could make using totems more attractive.

2. Totem turn in at low level

The totem that Shamans get at higher levels and place in their ranged slot acts as all four totems so the shaman no longer needs to carry around his totems in his bags. The dev team is looking to allow low level shamans to turn in their 4 totems for 1 generic totem like the ones they get at higher levels. This will allow the shamn to free up some bag space.

3. Consolidate totems

Back in the days of Vanilla WoW I thought that shamans had too many totem spells, some of which aren’t used too often. Looks like it’s something some other players and even the devs feel going into today’s game. Ghostcrawler mentioned that they’re going to evaluate the totems and cut out what they don’t need and merge others that need merging. This is similar to when Warlocks did away with Curse of Shadows and made Curse of Elements work for all spell schools.

4. Long term plan to redesign Totems

The long term plan of the dev team is to change all buff totems into spells and make all totems more active (like the healing and damage totems). I’m not sure what this means exactly but if I were to make a guess, maybe the the buff totems would become actual buff spells like the paladin Blessing of Wisdom or the Death Knight Horn of Winter. If this is what they have in mind then at least people won’t need to stay within the range of a totem to get their buffs since the buffs are stuck to the person. But wouldn’t this make them a lot like paladins in that sense?

5. Do something about “Shamans are like turrets”

One of main problems of shamans especially in PvP is their lack of mobility. Ghostcrawler mentioned something about casting shamans being like turrets where they remain stationary around their totems and just keep casting, turning to follow their target or to heal . They’re already looking into some ideas to fix this problem. The idea drop all totems at once would help solve this problem since the shaman can just move and drop the totems again.

6. Try to remove one weapon restriction in Patch 3.2

There’s a feeling that shamans are way to restricted in their weapon choices, making it hard to find upgrades. This is especially true for Enhancement shamans who are pretty much stuck with just daggers since using a two-handed weapon isn’t that viable given the way the talents are setup. Ghostcrawler gave a hint though that it probably won’t be swords. My feeling is swords would have been perfect but probably not very shaman-ish so I’m thinking fist weapons would do the trick!

Go ahead and read the whole piece though since there are a lot more things that Ghostcrawler and the dev team that I left out of this piece on purpose. You can see it here.