AA input April 2010

[WaringMcMarrin]

Its that time again we have been asked to collect AA input from the community again so please post your AA ideas here for general, priest archetype, and shaman class here.

[Ughbash]

Group timed invis, a number of classes have it, even the beastlrod can AA it onto a single target.

Run 8, we can get it with other benefits using AA. We might as well get it straight up it is PRIMARILY a utility.

Chromatic Slow, changes are AA slow from -30 magic to -30 chromatic.

More crit dots.

More extended Pestilence AND make it PASSIVE, seriously 12 AA for one tick is fine as passive.

More crit heal over time.



EDIT: Added more to Extended Pestilence since I was blind when I bought it and missed that it was an activated AA.

[Survivar]

Hastened Spiritual Channeling, cut it down to 20 mins instead of 36. (Our mana consumption is through the roof, need this down to counter it both group and raids)

Group Invise. Desperately need this.

AA Champion, so we don't have to mem a lvl 70 Spell anymore.

More ranks of Fortified Intervention to reduce recast to 30-45 seconds. (Unless we get a group heal in upcoming expansions, with the AEs going off nowadays we def. need more instant group healing then one spell every minute and a half)

More Later.....

[rildoen]

are we the only class without one aura?, aa champ aura would be cool.
i do alot of soloing, for me means alot of in teh face with the critters. so more ca,cs,sb, aw, would be good for me
as well as dot crit strength.
although i understand my playstyle probably does not reflect that of most shammies. that said for the good of the class
anything increasing healing, or maybe a slow mitigation mitigator? if that makes sense (decreasing the amount of slow mitigation)
not sure how the devs would feel about that one. but dont think ive ever seen anyone suggest it in a forum post so its worth a shot worst they can do is say no way. (maybe 5 ranks, each rank reducing the mitigation by 3 percent for a total of 15 percent mitigation reduction) dont think that would be game breaking even at max rank slows would still be mitigated heavily. but any amount of slow mitigation reduction would be helpful with the heavy hitters of underfoot and beyond. bout all i can think of atm thats not already been mentioned. thanks for your time and consideration.

[Kiiarra]

Recently I posted AA suggestions on EQplayers so I will restate that here. I tried to keep suggestions reasonable and slightly weak (to me) if I was unsure, I hope I succeeded.

My main concern is our healing ability. Any additional healing we could get through AAs would be most welcome. Not having a fast heal (save AI) or a direct group heal (also AI) makes main healing current content rough.



Ways to boost healing:
AA that when active (perhaps 24secs) greatly reduces cast time on our Direct Heal, if it needs a downside it can cost more mana/have cast limit. Reuse time I would say 10 to 15 minutes.


AA that when active grants a fast heal (6kish) to target then procs small heals off mob hits/misses (not tick based), I see this as getting each hit, say 2k first proc/1.5k second/1k third/800hp fourth/500hp fifth. Scale however, I think it would be interesting and provide another in-the-pinch heal as well as cushion to get out of the red. Can call it Spiritual Pact or something. Reuse time 20ish minutes.


AA that when active guarantees all HoT effects crit. I do not know the exact mechanics for doubling HoT/DoT spells like that, if it can only do the entire duration(for say 42 seconds) and not give something shorter, it may be overpowered. If balanced, can call it Fervor/Focus of the Ancestors. Reuse time 20 to 30 minutes.

The ability to heal large ae damage better than "pathetically" would be wonderful. I have an idea for a group heal AA:
When active this AA summons the spirit of an eagle (use raven model and make it ghostly) that would ideally give a big group direct heal (10 to 15k assuming focus and crits do not apply) and then continually send out pulses and heal the group for 2-3k a tick (stacks with our normal HoTs) for 30ish seconds. I base these numbers around not having the ability to be increased. Can call it Wings of the Elder or something. Reuse 20 to 30 minutes.


Even if we could just get a straight up direct group heal via AA it would be extremely helpful. It could cost mana and have whatever reuse time is appropriate. At this point anything is better than nothing.



Additional AAs for Healing:
More ranks to reduce reuse timer on Ancestral Intervention line.

More ranks to reduce reuse timers on Union of Spirits and Ancestral Aid.

AAs to build onto 2nd spire to heal more.

AAs to reduce cast time on single target and group HoT spells.

AA to give Frost Gift 1 or 2 more chances to twinheal from a single application.

[Lenil]

"AA that when active"

Please no more activated AA's. We already have enough to "activate". The activated pet survival AA's are useless - by the time you activate them, there is nothing left to activate them on.

Extended pestilence should be a passive ability.

[Kiiarra]

No suggestions to make besides dismissing mine on the basis of too much clicking, Lenil?

Perhaps something to increase pet's suvivability innately - that takes care of two of your concerns.

I do not think it's unfair to feel we have to many activated AAs...most of my bars are full, but I also feel strongly that our class needs some help in our primary role. If the best way to do that is through more activated AAs, I will find space.

It's really a no win situation because either through activated AAs or spells we are going to be losing valuable space somewhere.


More AA suggestions:

Additional spell gems

Substantial increase to Cannibalize or

AAs to reduce reuse timer on AA Cannibalize

AAs to reduce reuse timer on Inconspicuous Totem*

AAs to provide the option to remove Inconspicuous Totem before it has run full duration*

AAs to increase the duration of Inconspicuous Totem (perhaps 10-15 seconds)*

*I suggest these mostly independent of each other because together it could be taken as having a viable pulling tool. As is the timer could definitely use a reduction but the duration is often too short for mobs to have wandered away. Being able to remove the effect willingly would be lovely but I understand it having a downside is probably intended.

[Ughbash]

[WaringMcMarrin]

[Kumudil]

Group rabid bear AA.
A shaman benefits most from the heal over time of it. But if you have some meele around, I think they could make use of the meeleenhancing part of it likely better than we can by ourself.

AA which allow the healfoci from gear to affect also the heal over time.
With the heal-revamp the direct heals got a big bump. The single hot and the group hot fell far behind by stagnation. We have no significant groupheal apart form the emergency AI. Even in group content, while you cast the single HOT the tank takes more damage than the hot can heal over its whole curse.

Hastened Healovertime AA which allows to set the casttime of the hots down to 0.5 seconds.
The other priest have as their second support-heal the promise line. This can be cast in 0.5 seconds. Our Hots have the capacity to heal around half of those promise-lines per minute at best. So as they are alredy much less than the promise-line I would feel it right, to be atleast able to reapply it as fast.

[Lenil]

[Brohg]

I concur on the complexity issue. I have four hotbars, two of which get keyboard shortcuts, plus multiple shortcut pages full on the first hotbar, the spellbar which I alt+# cast from, plus spellsets, bandolier, potion windows, F-keys for targeting, a whole sack full of functional clickies (not just buffs, functional items). ...and I still have abilities/options that aren't covered by all that. Any new ability has to basically be laser eye beams in order to make the cut. Nothing that's marginal or even "nice" really enhances my play, because the shaman class is already replete with options and mostly just starved for time to use them. That time crunch is made worse by the "utility" of spell canni, since it taxes all our casting by like 15%. In the last ... decade(?), I've added only a couple new AA to my actual play (Cannibalize, Virulent Paralysis, Inconspicuous Totem). Substitution-upgrades work fine, like Turgs AA or Malosinete, since they're replacing existing options and not adding new ones. "Disc" type abilities, though? They're basically buried without keyboard shortcuts. Have to mouse-click em, or page down in the hotbars, or whatever. Even on-paper SUPER abilities, like Spiritual Channeling, don't get used because it'd just be one more thing to keep track of.

Things I do want?

Quick DoT AA like Quick Buff AA.

Group Spirit Walk.

more ranks of Fortified Intervention

I'd like AA canni to share timer with spell canni, and just be ENORMOUS to compensate, or have ranks of Hasten? I want to go down to one canni button instead of spell + AA.

Definitely more ranks of various other things.

[wheel]

I don't disagree with any of the previous posters, and I especially like the aura idea for Champion. I would like to add a few ideas of my own:

HC is seldom resisted even if you don't use the malo line on incoming, but the resist modifiers on our dots seem to be fairly unfavorable. In a good group, by the time you apply HC, then the AA malo, the mobs have taken a fair deal of damage. An AA similiar to Languid Bite, only procing a resist debuff would be very beneficial in applying our dots faster. Call it "Languid Risk"?

Union of Spirits used to be far more usefull in SoD. The instant heal portion actually seemed to make a difference then. In UF its not nearly the utility it once was. Additional ranks would be nice, but they would need to be stepped up. Allowing them to critical would be an improvement as well. The HoT portion criticals (and almost heals for as much as the instant heal portion when it does), it only seems natural that the intial heal should have a chance to critical as well.

Hastened Ancestral Guard...

Hastened Totem...

Our spirit walk AA combo made into a group version would be nice, but please, make the invisibility buff a typical 'invisibility type' icon/graphic. The boot graphic would take some time for most classes to get used too.

I do like the idea of a group version of rabid bear, good thought!

[Kinadorm]

[Retron]

My AA wishes:

* New ranks of Spirit Call with an upgraded proc (they've been using the same 640DD proc since Gates). In addition, the wolves shouls bash and kick as they always used to, rather than us having to chase devs down months after release!
* More pet crit/flurry ranks (free passive DPS). Possible pet DPS AA - adds a proc, increased flurry chance etc for further "fire and forget" DPS.
* Group Rabid Bear (regen / ATK may need to be tweaked down)
* Hastened spiritual channeling - now that necros have death bloom we may have a chance at getting this looked at
* Group fixed invis! I still can't believe druids got that nixed during UF beta, even BSTs have targetable fixed invis now. Group Spirit Walk would be super but I'd imagine other classes would moan again.
* Extra Spires. 3rd sounds good but does next to nothing in reality. Let's have a more noticable DPS boost, something in the order of a 5% boost at least.
* Further melee boosts to Rabid Bear. I'd happily drop the added fluff of disease resists and boosts to already capped stats (namely STR and DEX) in order to gain a proc modifier, a bigger-than-Champion damage table modifier or similar.
* An AE or cone version of Virulent Paralysis. Give it a 1 minute duration and a 1 minute reuse, so you have to be on the ball to use it.

[Survivar]

Make Mastery of the Past extend up to max level so its useful for more then just a cpl spells.

[Maccuul]

Hastened and Quickened Turgurs Swarm
Upgrade to Turgurs Swarm with a better resist.

Group Totem! =) Or at least bestow totem.

[Sordar-Cazic]

-An AA version of our PR/DR debuff line ala Malosinete could be handy.
-Innate twinheal AA (like maybe up to 5% or something?).
-AA allowing for HoTs to be twinhealed (the mechanics are already there, they tick for double the normal amount when twincasted...this was happening in UF beta briefly and resulted in some very nice HoT crits!)
-Innate DoT-only twincast at a slightly higher rate than our current innate twincast (5-10%?)
-An AA to reduce cast time of DoTs
-AA to change slow resist checks to Chromatic, or perhaps to add a greater modifier to all slow resist checks.

[Survivar]

Healing Boon Adept - Increase the effectiveness of HoT's in terms of adding more to the base like Healing Adept does to direct heals.

[Maccuul]

How about an aa that lets healing aa and focuses effect Union of Spirits.... be darn nice if the direct heal would at least crit once in awhile if nothing else

[Brohg]

The ability of focus effects to affect nonplayer spells is not something AA can alter. Besides that, I think the AA you really want is just Union of Spirits with triple healing values, not current healing values + a little focus on top.

[Kumudil]

A Passive aa that allows Twinheal to affect our heal over times.

In SOD druids got an large boost to their group heals. So their group-heal was able to heal about double the hitpoint we can heal with our hots per minute.

With underfoot and the arrival of twinheals the direct-groupheals got a 100% boost, as now every 15 seconds its possible to twinheal same SOD-Groupheal. Shamans group-healing abilites gained 0 with UF letting us fall behind even further.

I feel serveral expansions we got some stagnation now on the dps-side. It was always said, that we are priest as first, and we should be able to mainheal any content.

Even the group-nameds (almost all) throw out now some heavy AE-stuff. We are now down to 1/4 of the healing abilities for group-healing of the other priests.

The ability to twinheal our hots would atleast bring our healing-abilities back to the relative power we had in SOD.

[Ughbash]

Don't get me wrong, I woudl love more stuff for our Heals over Time, but we DID get a big boost in our HoT's in UF. Healing Couterbias is over double our old Heal over time and stacks with it.

[Kumudil]

[Sowslow]

Increase Canni mana regen, or give it a recourse that saps hp and converts to mana.
Wasn't there a mgb buff aa that could be used when ooc on test a while back? If so, please add that one in.

[Survivar]

[Ughbash]

[pagarbuk]

I'd pay 12 for an aa to make gates always be stable.

[Khoun]

extended perstilence make a passive ability
group invise either by itself or group spirit walk

[Dobbs]

If nothing will be done with our grp heal as it stands...I'd like to see some go to Hastened Forceful Rejuv. Or in a better perspective anything that I can get AI to recast faster. The way our grp healing is now, we have to walk a line every event, of do I save the grp or the MT. I knw there was a post about our grp healing and our general healing decline and one of the devs stated something was in the works and then it was sort of wonkered 2 posts later by another dev remind us of the traditional heal methods between druid and shammy. So at this point who knows.

[Khoun]

Increase the effectiveness of Healing Counterbias

1: 3 lvls of an AA to lengthen the effect by one tick each lvl.

2: Increase the heal by 10, 20, 30% etc

Its currently 1674 heal a tick on v2 for4 ticks for only once the heal is cast or 6696 to 13392 with boon...

[Brohg]

I want Extended Ingenuity

And Spell Casting Reinforcement Artistry

It would take 12 more ranks for Hastened Force Rejuv to be worth it, may as well get started.

Union of Spirits and Ancestral Aid have not scaled well. They need to over double in power this time to catch up.

Extended Pestilence needs its own extending AA. Right now, functionally, it only extends one round of dots. A 3 rank tick-per-rank extension would make it work on two rounds, which would be very nice.

Group Spirit Walk

Quick Direct Damage mag/dru/wiz AA - now that our nukes are in a usable form, I want the appropriate supporting AA

Quick Healing AA - 100% parallel to Quick Direct Damage, cle/dru/shm for instant heals.

Druids are carrying the flag on Hastened Intervention, we just have to make sure we're in on that when it happens.

old AA issue: Shm Third Spire of Ancestors needs help, bad

please note: only one thing mentioned is a new button, that's group fixed invis. don't want new buttons.

[fendaann]

AA- increase 2nd life %

[Elidroth]

A few things:

Once a spell or AA has been quickened (cast time) to 50%, it cannot be upgrade any more without an entirely new spell being created.
Gates collapsing/failing is not something I can manipulate. It's hard coded, and has been for 12 years.
Not going to make an innate Preincarnation AA. Sorry.
I'm fine for making Ancestral Guard stronger, but I'm not going to give you defensive or any form of it. You're not a tank.
Just because something is available as a potion or clicky does not justify making it into an AA.
Mounts are not going to be just handed out like candy in AA form.

Basic rule on AA vs Spells. If the recast time is less than 5 minutes, it should probably be a spell and not an AA. There are exceptions to the rule, but they should be VERY rare and necessary exceptions.

[Tordail]

[Sordar-Cazic]

[Brohg]