The Spirit Realm

So do you guys all want/expect to be able to be the only healer in the top notch grouping situation? Or is this based upon rashere's post saying we should be able to main heal.

And really how can you ask to main heal and be able to do all the other stuff a shaman can do? when a druid goes into heal mode the mostly heal, when a cleric is there they mostly heal. Why shouldnt a shaman be relegated (as much as it sucks) to soley casting heal spells (with a slow here and there) when they become the main healer.

I agree our healing is not great, and we have a hard time keeping up. But i think aside from it being made feasible to heal. we shouldnt be able to main heal top of the line stuff without losing our functionality.

I base my statements on Rashere's post saying we ARE main healers. Don't know about you, but pretty much all our functionality does go away when we main heal, just like a cleric's and durid's does. But, our loss of the other things we bring to a group starts much more earlier in content than it does for clerics (probably on Tier 2 named). Clerics can do other things besides chain heal through Tier 3 (don't know about Tier 4 and clerics yet, haven't grouped in Crystallos yet, just got my key), whereas, us shaman are completely spam healing by this point. Thus, in Tier 3, all shamans become pretty much a cleric with crappy heals and less types of heals to deal with the content.

People keep talking about our versatility, heck, it's why I like playing a shaman. But, when main healing in anything beyond trivial stuff, our versatility becomes even less than all but the druid class (in which they share the same hole as us). People need to remember that.

You know, this whole issue ultimately comes down to the nerfing of slow, which, if you consider in context, is really ironic. I mean, by Rashere's own words, the reason he doesn't want debuffs to play too large of a role is because then they become required. Okay, fair enough. We have three classes capable of slowing at near max capacity, and one that can't, yet is still able to manage, but fine. Requiring a slower might be too harsh. So why is it okay to require a cleric, instead? How does it make sense to nerf the effectiveness of slow so that slowers aren't required, and at the same time create such a huge discrepancy between healing abilities that only one class can truly be the main healer of a group?

I mean, you're right, traditionally shamans were not the best of healers. No, we were main slowers, and that term - that role - made sense back then. But that role was ultimately nerfed, via progressive mitigation, in the name of not forcing groups to bring a slower. I could agree with that, except that there were more main slowers than there are main healers. If slowing didn't constitute a "core role" that people should be required to have, healing was even less deserving of that title. Yet here we are, driven by the demands of the raid game into the embrace of requiring massive healing for all content.

So it's time for a former main slower to become a present day main healer. I see no contradiction in this, only what is necessary.

I might be breaking NDA by posting this, but, while it's true t4 was tuned using a pally and a shaman betabuff / regeared chars (i know, i was involved in the tuning) what was tuned that way is NOT what went live.

Crystallos was pretty easy in beta. They went and just about trippled the dmg output of npc's in crystallos just before it went live.

I refuse to believe that 18.75% slow is going to reduce 45% of Crystallos mob DPS.

I like the recourse idea.. let's add that into our aa slow.