by Brohg » Sat May 10, 2008 5:00 pm
The negativity is astounding. As are the narrow perspectives on "missing" upgrades, and the declaratives regarding Feralisis, Sting, Preincarnation, AI, and percentage-improvements-in-general.
Melee % buffs were not advanced because they would become [ahem, *are*] too powerful. Every facet of melee, tanking & dps, gets direct improvements; piling on proportional modifiers makes numbers spiral out of control, very parallel to the problem slowing had from Kunark through to Luclin.
The "etymology" of Feralisis and Sting place them clearly as evolutions of the cripple and rain lines.
Preincarnation is just bugged, not bad design.
AI is superb, and sharing the spell with druids does nothing to mitigate its power for a shaman. It's arguably more powerful for us because of the shm HoT-based group healing model.
Our better spells have been offensive proc buffs, defensive proc buffs, nectars, group HoTs, sting, death save, AI... That's just going back to DoN. We also get the same steady increases to healing and damage that other classes do.
By my count, that exceeds the number of functional innovations for the other two priest classes pretty significantly. Clerics have two auras to choose from, Eleventh Hour, Promised Renewal, annd... that's it. The rest of their innovations have been on the "and now I'm going to go play a different game" soloing side. Druids got beam root, NBW, shared death save & AI with us... anything else? Five or six redundant nuking upgrades, add ons to the lines of dots they don't cast, incremental debuff advancements, but those are all percentage improvements. I think the shaman spellbook is pretty dense with functional innovations comparatively.