The Spirit Realm

I'm scared! hehe

I wonder if after death, you'll be able to roam around the zone without aggro. Prolly not since people would kill eachother to scout, but it would be neat.

The time spent casting Canni during battle takes the shaman out of fighting for that time. Canni is not something that happens in the background while we're also throwing buffs, dots, heals, or nukes. It's something we have to spend time on that we'd otherwise be fighting with. About 5 seconds out of every 23 (17% of shm time) is spent on it. Averaged out, it means that if you assume shm have mana from canni, you're really assuming that every spell a shm casts is 17% less effective than it appears, because it comes with the administrative overhead of Cannibalize. Every shaman who actually plays their character through to the level cap has made that bargain, that they accept lower spell power in exchange for superlative staying power.

Other classes have, in varying degrees, more powerful spells in their list of "good stuff" to balance against drawbacks. Wizards and clerics are at the extremes of casting, with the highest spell power in exchange for lack of flexibility, but the case of druids is worth examining. Just like shaman, their powers are evenly split between beneficial and detrimental, with some buffs on the side. Druid spell power is higher, in pretty much even exchange for sustainability. That's the status quo for class balance, anyhow. Clerics can only apply their core strength (healing) when folks are damaged, but a druid's offensive capability is just as strong as their defensive. They can always be nuking or something; their contributions over time are limited much more by mana than any other factor.

With the new system, that balance changes. For them. And for others whose output is limited by their regen capability. Not so much for shaman. Good shaman are already pouring out as much power as they can, with Panthers on everyone, healing debuffing slowing throwing dots and even nukes as fast as they can. A shaman might contribute more by not cannibalizing, but we just went through how Cannibalize is the core of the shaman's bargain with the rest of EQ. No matter how much you don't canni, Ancient WIlslik is less powerful than Ancient Chlorobon.

The new balance to EQ may be better overall, I won't argue for or against that, but don't kid yourselves: it's different, and shaman lose pretty uniquely.

I just don't think it's going to be THAT BIG of a deal. I still see situations where our Canni will prove to be superior.

Though yes I do agree that it is a bit of shitty deal on our end because it does lower the gap on one of our class powers.

Right now this thread is discussing too much about how much of a problem it will or will not be which at this point is nothing but speculation. I admit I could be completely wrong and this will be a huge deal once it goes live and as someone noted earlier it's best to find out any potential problems now and get them addressed before it goes live. We should be discussing ways of suggesting if there's anything we should be pushing for to help Canni still be a tool that gives us a significant advantage.

First, I think there's not much we can do for downtime short of having a Necro style of mana regen (A Static buff that converts HP to Mana every tick) I don't see them doing that though so we may be stuck with Canni Dancing.

The biggest concern most seem to have is Canning during battles. We sometimes don't have time to Canni if we're clicking buttons like crazy. Really it's one spell that takes up most of our clicking. Panther. Depending of course on how many melee/pets we have in group. (And most of us on raids probably have melee heavy groups assigned by raid leaders for this purpose).

Panther's a great spell in terms of utility and power but it's probably one of the most ridiculously designed spells in the game. It's become a necessity to keep this spell up on all who can use it and it needs to be re-applied every min.

Fix that and you leave room open for more Canning. And it could be fixed easily too. Either give us a group version or simply boost the timer from 1 min to 5 mins.

It's a push we could bring up argueing that the new mana regen is closing a gap on one of our core abilities and since we won't have a large advtange during downtime anymore that we'd like to see less (annoying) clicking during battle so we have time to take advantage of Canning.

Shamans have traditionally been the best at mana regeneration - at the expense of higher mana costs and lower damage/healing output for similar spells. This was a tradeoff - less impact and more mana cost in exchange for longer sustained performance. With the new (and publically announced) downtime changes, our benefit in this aspect of class balance will be largely mitigated.

Question: If every class is going to go from 0% mana to 100% mana in just a few minutes, why should Shaman spells continue to cost more and do less than comparable spells of other classes?

The only difference between the old and new regen systems so far as content is concerned is the amount of time needed for "down time" between fights to recover. Because nothing is happening during that period, the effects are minimal other than to reduce the amount of time a group spends cooling its heels. "New" groups will be able to do pretty much the same as what "old" groups could do, just it wont take as long. The advantage shaman allways had over other priests was in combat mana generation, and that hasn't changed.

I find it ironic that that whereas previously the pundits (you know who) were arguing that our mana generation abilities were not that important for balance because zero risk downtime regeneration smoothed everything out, are now saying the exact opposite.