Spell input April 2010

[WaringMcMarrin]

We have not been asked to collect spell input yet but since I put up an AA thread I figured a spell thread would be good also, so put your shaman spell ideas here.

Spell input is offical.

[Survivar]

Group Heal ( AEs are brutal and AI is not enough)

Quicker Single Target Heal (Our 3 second heal sometimes just is not enough)

Lynx with a longer duration (waste a lot of time casting this, would love a longer duration, 2-5 mins)

[Kiiarra]

I would like to echo Survivar's sentiments that our current heal set up is not enough.

Direct Group Heal of any kind, I would have it permanently memed in a heartbeat.

Fast Direct Heal, the way the game is now even if we do land a crit the cast time from Dannal's makes it nearly impossible to stay ahead. Frost Gift is great but that extra time lost to nuke and wait on refresh (while praying it doesn't get resisted) combined with slow Dannal's makes it extremely risky to use Frost Gift in the first place. Only time I cast it is if I just landed a heal to take tank to full, any other time can not afford to.

Frost Gift - is there any way to have the resist mod on this spell adjusted? I do not know about anyone else, but lately (been working T8 missions and then killing in VH) even with Malosinete I have Frost Gift resisted. Not good.

Cannibalize - this line could stand an increase. Currently its about 2% of my 35k mana pool and the way we eat mana now it would be nice to harvest a larger chunk.

Champion - been suggested many times to make it into an aura, still would love to see it.

New Slow - it was suggested in the AA thread that we get ranks to reduce slow mitigation of our spells, whether that happened via AA or in the form of a new spell, it could be a step towards alleviating our healing woes. Slow-wise it would set us apart from the pack again where nowadays a 50% is about as good as our 75%.

All I can think of at the moment.

[SBBD]

I'm usually the only healer in a dps group and could desperately use a decent group heal.AI is nice but the refresh is just to long.What we need is a group heal that is just about equal to Dannal's mending with at most a 4 second cast time and no refresh.
I can tell you right now if you give us something like this the druids will scream bloody murder,saying you cant it will hurt our class if you do .Well let them whine all they want,we need this just to keep up and its time we got it.

[Kiiarra]

The druids may scream and I could understand it but it needs to happen. When it became apparent that shamans mastered HoTs (group and single) and faster heals/direct group heals were the druids area, the pace of the game was much slower and it worked.

Well the game has changed now and quite frankly it is the shaman hurting. HoTs are too slow and not effective with the all too common heavy ae damage.

Now, I am not saying druid healing is fine but I do think it is a fair bit better than shaman healing. Honestly I think it's time shamans got a group/fast heals and druids got HoTs.

More ranks of Fortified Intervention could go a long way but unless it drops it below 30 seconds I think a secondary group heal spell is still needed (or a quick heal so AI is not blown saving MT, leaving it down for next ae hit).

Only other thing I will add is (I at least) am hesitant to ask for a group heal that is on par or superior to the druid's, because I do believe they should remain ahead of us in that area.

[Kiiarra]

Aside from new ideas and traditional upgrades to lines, here are some tweaks/changes for exisiting spell lines:


Spirit/Talisman of the Resolute (regeneration line)
Increase the hitpoints more than usual as it is a bit weak currently


Severilous' Spear of Venom/Ice Sheet (slow poison/cold nukes)
Both are slow casting, low damage nukes. I would like to see one of them do something more or something different, such as:

Ice Sheet
Decrease hitpoints by 2585
Increase Damage taken by 2% from melee for next 20 strikes

or
Decrease hitpoints by 2585
Decrease movement by 30% for 20 seconds

or
Decrease hitpoints by 2585
Decrease hitpoints by 450 per tick for 30 seconds

Severilous' Spear of Venom
Decrease hitpoints by 2431
Decrease AC by 50


Feralization line
Wish they would just remove this and bring back our Cripple line we lost in OoW. I am not even sure what the requirements are for landing this spell as I quit trying in TSS when it would not hold on 95% of mobs. Even copying Crippling Spasm and tacking on the decreased chance to hit with blunts would be more useful. The last thing I want to see is yet another upgrade to this line as it is now!


Ancestral Obligation (cannibalize line)
Needs a larger than normal increase, it is VERY weak these days.


Pack of Aina
This spell is so awful. The only times I have used it is if I am doing some boring (extremely trivial) grinding or camping as a way to entertain myself. I would not be sad if this did not receive an upgrade, but if it does PLEASE either consider upping the damage of the pets or decreasing the mana drain. 300 mana per tick is a lot stacked on top of our expensive spells - and for a tiny dps increase (assuming you could not have used the mana drained for more dps from nukes/DoTs/lynx, in which case it is actually detrimental). Not to mention the stacking issues with Languid Bite and other classes' abilities, all of which are likely more dps.

[Survivar]

No Champ Aura, plsthx. Don't want to be constricted to having to stay near the meele 100% of the time. Would rather just have them increase the duration of the spell to 30 mins.

[WaringMcMarrin]

[Zama]

Combination Lynx/Hot spell- A large portion of cast time is spent on casting both of these. Even with full mana cost of both combined, it would save a very large portion of time, and increase convenience on saving a spell slot, as well as less casting.

Twin heal- Just a straight up twin heal, no nuke to it. The damage provided by the nuke component is so incredibly small compared to mobs Hp's currently, in addition to the mana cost of a resisted nuke. Also make the twin heal stay on longer then 18 seconds, since often only one person will need the twin heal, causing the second one to get wasted.

Condensed Canni- This was originally done in OOW, shifting spell canni from being up constantly and doing smaller ammounts at once, to an 18 second refresh time doing the equivalent of constantly casting. Bringing it up to 1 or 2 minutes per recast would be a nice upgrade, since often your forced to constantly spam heals, without the time to cast things like spell canni. The devs still include spell canni into our "mana regen" capacities, but often people are hardpressed to hit it everytime its up, especially on healing intensive mobs/events.

A quickheal type spell- When melee get on hot, or start getting hit by an add, often the only thing that's fast enough cast time to heal them is AI, would be nice to have a spell without a ridiculously long recast to be able to save melee from a spike of damage.

An endurance regen or heal- i know this has been suggested almost every expansion, but one can only hope.

Self malis- Kind of like a mix between ania and malis and arcanium line spells, where we can cast the spell on ourselves, and we esssentally get a the bonus of malis added to all of our spells, opposed to having to cast malis on each mob. Obviously the manacost wouldnt be as large as ania is which is 500? a tick or something like that. The benefits on this would be pretty large imo
A- Itd stop us from having to cast malis on every single add/trashmob the second it pops so we can get a slow off on it first.
B- In groups, when your constantly killing mobs with low hp, its often the case that by the time youve finished casting malis on it, then are going to cast a slow the mob is half dead or more
C- would stop us from constantly having to have spell malis loaded in certain situations, where other spells are needed.

Group listlessness- Self explanitory

[Brohg]

upgrade Talis of Might to 10% so Champ is just obsolete forever

Group Listlessness

unlink Bites. compare with brd Venimor's Insult, which can actually be chain cast while mana supports it.

[Finori]

[Brohg]

[Lenil]

[Finori]

[wheel]

First off, I love our class and think its fairly well balanced. We are an excellent utility sort of a "jack of all trades". With that being said, I still think there is room for improvements:

Please add an upgrade to our haste spell. Give it a listlessness or champion type secondary effect. I would even be in favor of it having the unity type spell cast where it adds 2 buffs with one cast, but put both buffs on the same timer and make it last longer then 11 minutes!

The regeneration spell is very weak in today's game and is not worth the mana imho. I agree with a previous poster that this line needs some improvement.

I liked the improvements made by frost gift. It would be nice if we had a similiar effect added to our nuke line, when we are in situations when stacking our dots just isn't feasible.

Could we get a MR based nuke with some sort of happy medium between damage and recast delay? Or any new nuke that has a shorter cast time?

Our class is well known for making melle group dps better, but aside from the malo line, we don't add a bunch to casters. How about a spell that increases the % of damage that casters do. Like our epic clickie does for melle, or the resistable malo spell adds. Just make it a buff (aura?). Rk1, +7% to spell damage; Rk2, +8%, Rk3, 9%?

Our spells are so mana dependent and we are constantly casting, remembering our regular canni when it is up, or having the time to cast it doesn't necessarily allow us to maximize our usage. What if our canni spell was changed to a 3 minute buff that traded hp's for mana (like a lich spell) and had a 2 minute recast , so we did not have to constantly tend to it. Sure it would still require a spell slot, but you can time it with mass canni and you can set up audio triggers for it wearing off...

Just some thoughts!

[Lenil]

For the love of god no more recasts. Recasts only make you lock up a spell gem if the spell is used often (hello short term buffs) or makes you have to remember to memorize the spell with enough time to use it when you need it. Neither is good for our class - we already have more than our share of that.

I was always impressed with the wishka's favor mechanism. It allows you to memorize the spell, generate several casts of the buff and then use the spell gem for something else. How about using that mechanism for single target unity to give us some relief from having to drop a spell everytime someone needs a rebuff? The trinket that gets generated would have to have more than a few charges and no recast for it to be useful. Having the trinket in inventory can be a pain but I'd live with it. It would also shave some time off unity spell cast if you are casting during a fight (would be able to click the trinket immediately after a spellcast.)

[Kinadorm]

[Kiiarra]

[Ughbash]

[Retron]

Spell changes etc I'd like to see:

* Reintroduction of the spell lines we lost in TSS due to the too many spells thing. Druids have regen back, we may therefore have some leverage to get added back to the cripple line. I'd also like to see our AC buff line resurrected, for those times when you have a druid as main healer and no cleric.
* Equality for our pets with ENC/SHD. There's never been any comment from the devs as to why our pets suddenly became much weaker in SoF and as SoD was just "copy n paste" the error was continued. Note that SK and ENC pets hit harder than an EM4-focused BST pet, so we weren't the only class to get nerfed by stagnation.
* Pets with better cloaks. Presently our rank 2 pet has a Spire Servant cloak (10% mods) which fits nicely with the SoD level of group focus effects. The base group focus is now EM4, therefore our Thule pets should come with that cloak as standard IMO. Note that the EM4 cloak has max mod2s.
* Something to replace Champion. Probably won't be an AA as the devs have gone off the idea of spells as AAs (druids excepted). I'd suggest a boost to a 1 hour duration, seeing as Tracker Rk2 has a 140 ATK boost and lasts for an hour before AAs. If rangers can do it, why shouldn't we? The days of Avatar being a "wow" boost for 6 minutes are long gone.
* A beefier upgrade to canni.
* A combined ice/poison nuke with low recast time. See the BST Frozen Venom as an example (side note: thanks to that, BSTs are better nukers than we are!)

and now for the more controversial ones:

* A new version of the Rage line - Voice of the Berserker was the last and it's a nice AC buff. It also doesn't stack with Champion, forcing the choice of offence (ATK, damage mod) or defense (extra AC). AC is worth having these days due to the 1 in 4 overcap returns we now enjoy.
* A new version of Pack of Aina to reflect the increased levels. Up the proc chance, decrease the mana cost a little (set the cost to max worn mana regen + max mental clarity AAs + potions + Knowledge of the Past V - that way it effectively zeros your passive mana regen while in use).

[SBBD]

Unity is a great spell,4 buffs in 1 shot sure is a time saver and champion is a really nice spell as well.How about having all this combined into 1 buff,not only would this save time and mana it would also open up some buff slots,I know I cant be the only one that has trouble with having enough buff slots.Increasing the duration to bring it in line with cleric and druid buffs would be helpful as well.

[Brohg]

[WaringMcMarrin]

[Maccuul]

IMHO a direct heal added to the front of our group hot would be better.
No new spell slot to be used up for one.
I think it would have a better shot of being approved as well since we already have this functionality in aa (UoS).

[Brohg]

is also in BP clicks, that's a nice symmetry

[Kiiarra]

If adding a direct heal in front of the group HoT portion is a better way to go, the recast time needs to be looked at. Currently Shadow of Renewal is 18 second recast while the druid group heal is 12 seconds. Granted it is not a huge difference but the way content is now every second counts.

[Sordar-Cazic]

Better group healing tools are indeed a necessity. Also, i'd like to see a new spell in the PR/DR debuff line, but with a bonus to poison damage (much like modern resistable versions of malo provide a bonus to magic dmg).

[Rolane2]

Having just healed through the BR progression mission in UF for our guild group, I would suggest some stronger heals. The Direct heal + Group heal is an excellent idea as well. I think the cast time of Dranal's needs to be addressed via spell or AA as i was unable to heal through bad damage spikes and if any of the DPS got aggro, so sad for them .

-Ro

[Retron]

[Sowslow]

[shredclaw]

faster cast of unity , faster radiant cure .

Reading these post I see a lot of folks wanting group heals . . AI is great but even with forceful rejuvenate used to re pop AI , this still only gives you 2 shots a normal raid fight in convort. . .maybe a faster re pop AA on force rejuv?