The Spirit Realm

Now that Talisman of the Puma has been renamed can we finally push for our single target version to be added please? I hate using panther for single target melees in group.

Single target maw buffs are a waste of spell slot. You'd be better off with a dot there.

Still would use single for the duration over the group version.

I would like the single as well. It is helpful to have. Where there is only 1 melee being affected by it doing the group is totally overkill

Beside there is also the aggro generated that can help some tanks

Doh

In that group I assume the enchanter is chain pulling. The wizard will KO mobs from about half, maybe 60% if he's a hoss. Down to that point, and in the two-three ticks it takes the wizard to do his business, it's shm+war for dps. I'd be running at least two dots in that group, up to four if the wizard doesn't budget well. I think you're also undercounting the maw targets, if one were really enamored with maws. Shm+pet, warrior, cle+pet, enc pet (not the enc, he's out pulling~). No wizard+pet, he's OOCing. That's 6, and we haven't even added the sixth group member. I maintain my position, no legitimate use for single maw.

Will do how much damage more efficiently in what model? How many targets? Taking how much of the shaman's time? The two dots I start with are 300 and 250dps, respectively, at over 19:1 damage to mana ratio. Between them they average 30k damage over their course. It's not always a given that group maw buffing beats that, let alone single maws.

Soloing Named in T1/T2. DogDog would like a single target maw. I'm using 2 magic and 4 poison dots. I think I get more DPS and more mana efficient DPS in this case. I can also precast the cougar on the named before I pull dogdog. The named do a lot of knockback sometimes.

I use group Cougar in those situations, also. Single target Cougar would be sheer convenience and not really a major necessity, the way I see it. I can think of a couple of occasions when I might use it, but truthfully it's just as easy to mem Panther.

Veril, the precastability a little relevant in single fight scenario, but single maw buffing a single target doesn't play even in the same ballpark as a dot for dps. Your six dots are each double (a couple are close to triple) the dps of the dog's procs.

Single Cougar rk3 would be roughly 615 mana, following the setup for Panther. A dozen 540 procs in the [focus & AA extended] minute duration (number taken from logs of raid-buffed shm pets) gives 6480 damage, 108dps at 10.5dpm.

Single maw on single target? Loses on dps, loses on efficiency by a mile. Two targets? Still loses, but it's closer. Go ahead and debate extrinsic factors like resists & agro. Three targets - switch to group regardless. Single maw buffs are useless.

still would like a single cougar reguardless if you would use it or not as many others do. Everyone has a different spell line up and group make up.

Everyone does have different group compositions, sure... But I just showed that in all of them, single Cougar isn't useful. Unless you have a counterexample to offer?

cheaper than a dot, lasts longer than a dot, can work on more than 1 mob, faster cast, pre apply if your MH, very resistant mobs it works on, good for dogdog when soloing....need more?

And as stated earlier, good if the tank / melee has some trouble keeping agro, it helps at least I use it a lot, casting it before my pulls... Probably more efficient ways to use the slot, but if I do too many dots, gets tougher to keep agro off my shammie..

Tugela is correct. I'd expect the single target version to have the same "full" duration of the single target panther (1 min = 10 ticks). With apropriate extrnsion focus, AA and potions, that would be up at 21-22 ticks I think (aproximate), and I'd be seeing twice as many procs.

Single target would also be very nice for two boxing.

Realizing that a DoT is more damage, I can pre-cast panther when I'm two boxing and concentrate on healing and slowing during the fight.

My biggest concern would be that it would block a potentially useful spell. Apparently the numbers of spells each class receives is fixed. I am sure people would argue that they should drop the cold or spear line or whatever ... but they seem to be dead set to keep them. So single cougar could end up blocking a cool spell.

Source?

was beta for TBS or TSS(cant remember) which i cant search anymore. It was brought up alot and a dev answered. Basically said, there will be no more limits on spells, if a class needs such spell it can be included. We have to make it acceptable and request it. Such is the way with cougar now, we need our single target upgrade to panther put in now that the name has been switched. Having 2 single target pumas was the only reason iirc that we did not get it eariler.

While it is true that the number of spells does not have to be the same across similar classes - the numbers still won't deviate by much. So I feel that my concern is still valid.

We have less spells than other priests.

"Less" but "better" is a trade I'll make every year, given the option.

I solo Rhag 1 from time to time to get spells. The mob's dps is relatively low; it's quite easy for dogdog to tank, with just a HoT, an occasional spot heal, and the splash from epic 2. But, because Rhag 1 flurries so much, it's pretty ragged for me to tank it, because my spells get interrupted at an alarming rate.

It takes a few minutes to chew through Rhag 1's hp, and so I keep single target panther on dogdog instead of group cougar, because single panther costs less mana. But it makes no real difference in the damage he causes. His dps is minimal; if you increase his proc by 100, his dps will still be minimal.

So my conclusion is, we already have a single-target proc spell, costing less mana to maintain than group cougar. So for a situation where you want to keep a proc spell on just one target -- to help hold aggro on the tank, for example -- we already have a spell that does that perfectly well.

Let our next spell be something new and interesting, rather than a single-target cougar.

Brogh, I wouldn't say we got "better" spells. We got upgrades to some of our spell lines, and others were neglected for spells that simply don't work.
Champion Upgrade, where are you?
Dodge Upgrade, where are you?
Cripple Upgrade, where are you? (the feralisis line is not an upgrade to this, and way so much is immune for F.)
AC Upgrade, where are you?
Rain Upgrade, where are you? (sting/brownie is not an upgrade to this, they were a totally new line of spells)

Instead we got:
Self Only: Rune+Hot that is less effective than our HoT (no focus effects work on it) and it fails to fire
A spell that removes beneficlan damage shields. WTF?
Second Life upgrade that never ever gives the group a benefit.
DoT, DD and direct Heals that went up in exactly the same percentage as all the other classes, which leave us further behind in absolute terms - and %'s don't work in EQ.

Ancestral Intervention, well, druids also got it, and it is clearly inferior to the clerics emergency healing abilities. So that can hardly be called "better" than other classes.

Perhaps you can point to these better new spells, because I'm missing them.

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.

So waring would you be ok with tossing the idea out to the devs for us?

I have passed on the request for a single target cougar line on to the devs.

Thanks a bunch.

No, no. Go back and tell them you were just kidding.

Why not ask for a single target version? It's not like by getting this spell we're going to be sacrificing another one.

/rude Prathun's TSS spell setup.