Combat Mechanics and Player Progression - Feedback/Questions

Round peg, square hole.
Shaman are not equipped to solo heal a group. They have only one group cure. They have only one group heal. Yes, they can do it, but it takes work.
On the other hand, try sticking a druid on a tank in place of a shaman. The exact opposite of good happens. Sure, the tank has 30k HP of his own, but when mobs can DA for 25k, having "only" 30k HP isn't enough. You *need* Wards.
Shaman do have some issues, but you've managed not to talk about any of them.

well the point stands. it's dumb for wards to have lower crit multipliers when they are all ready gimped by not having a spread.

using two mechanics to check wards is too much. either add a spread to wards or remove the multiplier. this is a different game and these two mechanics might have been balanced 2 expansions ago but that is no longer the case. you have basically made it so shaman can't improve their character as linearly as cleric/druid.

if i had a cleric, druid and shaman all with the same gear and had to choose what one to play to heal 90% of the content in game. i would choose a shaman last. also of the two shaman defiler is the worse since they offer almost no group utility out side of their heals. lol at debuffs that are trivial for anything other then hard mode raiding.

Davngr1 wrote:

I fully agree, i prefer to solo heal heroic with my warden, it's so much easier to put the group back on his feets, moreover mana is not an issue (mythical clicky covers it but it's always hard to decide if i need to use it or if i should keep it for after).
My warden even have better single target hps (tested in outervault on last named, warden had less issues keeping a gimped 87 tank (in t1-t2 heroic tso) alive. After debuffing it was similar.
The figth just before dartain in palace (elevator and ton of pop) is horrible with a mystic (zillion of detrimental, huge aoe, lot of channeling issues).
Btw i m not really saying that shaman are useless, i m just saying that they should have higher single target hps, and quite higher group heals. Both shaman have almost no trick (like aoe, serenity, infinite mana, raid cure - fury -, double cure ...). Haste dog buf is useless (capped people), str/stamina buf is probably useless. Echo of the ancient and slow may be usefull ( i usually cast them, but in defensive stance it sucks). Stampede reuse time is too large to be accounted, alacrity is not groupwide and not usuable on the shaman, very minor.
In other words:
ward should get the same crit multiplier as any other form of healing.
ancestral channeling recast should be lowered around 1mn (imagine if tunare grace were on 3mn timer ).

I know I'm just repeating what so many people have said, but I'm bored and like to type:
Either druid is going to have quite a bit more healing potential than a shaman. If you sat down and calculated how much each healer was capable of healing, I wouldn't be surprised if druids outdo both clerics and shamans. From a potential standpoint, shamans are near the bottom of the list for healing. Due to how wards work, shamans are the most efficient and waste the least of all priests as far as healing. That's the strength of a shaman. We get less potential, but what potential we have gets fully used for the most part. There's a lot of waste with druid heals, unless the group is constantly taking damage over time.
As has been mentioned, shamans are important for mitigating spike damage, since wards are equivalent to giving the target more health to eat through.
Druids are fantastic healers and capable of quite a bit. Where they struggle is where the damage is so great that it can one shot the group. They can even handle spike damage fine, provided that it's not enough to drain all the health from their group before their regens can do their jobs.

Koinoo@Crushbone wrote:

what happens when that potential isin't enough to prevent the damage?

Davngr1 wrote:

If you're talking about shamans, I haven't run into something I can't solo heal for heroic content and can solo heal any group that a druid can solo heal in a raid situation (on many encounters, much better). But then again, I am fairly well geared.
My main issue with what was said a few replies up was with the idea that a raid doesn't really need shamans. In the current content, that's absolutely untrue and becomes more untrue the harder the content becomes (i.e. as AOE's hit harder and harder). I think shamans have plenty of issues, but they still serve a purpose. I hope that one day shamans will get the full benefit of critical bonus. It would keep us in line with other healers, since wards are starting to fall behind very quickly in relation to other heals. The fact that they are the most efficient is the only thing that keeps them in line with reactives and regens. As we gain more and more critical bonus, they're going to lag further and further behind as content is adjusted to scale up with the power curve and eventually reach a point where the efficiency won't mean much any longer.

Koinoo@Crushbone wrote:

Exactly.

The crit bonus thing for shaman wards does need to be fixed asap.
Start them off at a lower -base- crit, ie, the base crit value for wards be 1.15, but thereafter get full effect of crit bonus. Getting only 50% gain out of your blue stats on wards is stupid.

Honestly, I don't see the need for any adjustment re: Wards except to make them crit with full application of crit bonus. The game has evolved so far since that point that it just doesn't make sense in the current environment.

Koinoo@Crushbone wrote:

I agree we tend to be the most efficient because of how wards work. But, the balance for our efficency is and always has been our cast speed and reuse being so high. Trying to balance it by giving us lower healing potential too is a crock. Before everyone had 100% crits and extra crit bonus, the 15% crits for wards made sense. That was because our wards were static, and I'm sure they did calculations and realized that the average crit bonus for abilities with a spread was about 15%. But that's not true anymore. I'd rather see our base crit bonus be zero for our wards and give us the full value of our crit bonus blue stats if they really think we still need a correction factor on the wards.

Your base cast/re-use on single/group ward are the exact same as cleric reactives, I do think you guys should get the same benefit from crit on your wards and heals as the rest of the healers do on just their heals but using the cast speed reasoning is kinda dumb.
Clerics get cast speed in their KoS aa's and shaman get re-use in their KoS aa's, at this point in time I would rather have the re-use tbh.

Geothe wrote:

I think this is exactly how it should work--we should get the penalty to initial crit bonus (15% instead of 30% to wards), and then gain full benefit from anything added via gear, effects or AA's.

Koinoo@Crushbone wrote:

While selfishly I would like to see the crit bonus issue lifted from my wards, i do have some reservations about how powerful that might make myself and other high end raiding defilers -- especially if they are getting the fury mythical buff. As it is now, when i get fully buffed in raid (Fury buff/CH/etc) i can get my ST ward to hit upwards of 18k (though more commonly 15-17k. This is approx half of the tanks hp (which is commonly between 36-40k). If i were to receive the full effect of my ~115 crit bonus +/- 10% from procs, the amount of warding would start to get ridiculous, i.e., 22k+ wards.
If we take the group ward into account, it gets even more powerful. I can already land a group ward which exceeds the tanks hp (41k is highest i've seen -- obviously not the norm), and while splitting that between 6 members is still a modest group heal, the group ward is ordinarily going to be used up largely by the tank himself. Shamans are the only class that can actually have the full effect of their group heal focused onto one target.
On the other hand, there will be a point at which the amount of crit bonus clerics can achieve on their reactives seemingly becomes overpowered compared with wards. I have no idea what a high end cleric is commonly seeing from their reactives, but i guess the point is that i don't think this whole issue is just as easy as removing the crit bonus cap on ward at this point in time.
To address a few points i recall seeing earlier on. Shaman are NOT meant to be solo group healers. While they CAN do it.. other classes will do it much more effectively, i.e. druids or inquisitors. Removing the crit bonus penalty to make us better solo healers is not a valid reason in my opinion. Our role is in preventing spike damage, which makes us the prime tank group healers.. and very critical in heavy aoe fights for supporting another healer in a dps group if needed.
I honestly feel like wards will have to continue to receive 50% benefit from crit bonus to keep us in line. However, to combat that, a direct healing portion should be added to the ward (i don't think mystics have direct heals on their wards at all.. but i am not 100% sure) via aa's or otherwise in coming expansions. Defilers would need this type of AA less as we already have it through our mythical and the option to add another smaller heal through red adornments. Perhaps give us a reactive type heal as a special ability (akin to templars getting a ward type ability with repent). There are a number of other ways to balance the issues we may begin to see with increasing crit bonus.. i'm just not convinced removing the cap for wards is the right way to go about it.
Thoughts on this are welcome

Slowin wrote:

Here's my take on it:
HPS potential is growing at a faster rate than incoming DPS. It has been this way since at least RoK. The raid content designers kill us with spike damage. Spike damage scales at a rate similar to our effective HP pools. Wards obviously increase effective HP pools, and raid content is designed around the assumption you have wards. Bigger wards lead the designers to create bigger spikes, which ends up making Shaman more and more important.
Ideally, wards will grow at about the same rate as our HP pools, so that their relative importance stays about the same. With how the game has been working the last several years, that's much more important than whether or not wards grow at the same rate as heals. No matter how big heals are, wards will always be important (as long as they at least scale at the same rate as HP pools).
Of course, that's from a raiding perspective.

this type of thinking is going to come back and bite you in the fanny later on. this is the same rhetoric that raid guards used when the first fighter revamp happened. guards got hit hard. of course the raid mt's (like your self) had the gear to mitigate the class deficiencies but that didn't mean that there was no problem. fast forward to this expac after a year or two of neglect and even raid guards are feeling the pinch.
this issue needs to delt with and soon. the more crit bonus enters the game the further behind the shaman class falls.

btw the differences between my warden healing a group and my defiler are pronounced. i wouldn't mind so much if my defiler brought some other type of utility but since he does not then he should not lag behind in healing/warding potential.

Davngr1 wrote:

Imagine your scenario backwards. What if you replaced the MT shaman on, for instance, a HM vaclaz encounter? Your druid would lag behind your shaman severely in effectiveness and i'd wager you would never be able to keep your tank alive for it. Does this mean druid heals are broken? No.
Defilers are not meant for solo healing content. That doesn't mean they can't do it..(in fact solo healing anything but the more difficult HM encounters is pretty easy) but it also means you shouldn't be surprised when a class that is equipped for solo healing more effectively, surpasses your ability to do so. Not every class is supposed to be equal at everything.
The poster before you made an excellent point imo. As long as our wards scale properly with the increasing health pools that all players receive, our necessity as spike damage mitigators remains intact. Other healers can have as strong of direct heals as they want, most of their potential is going to remain wasted.
I admit that this issue with crit bonus has the potential to become a real problem and its why i suggested our wards should come equipped with stronger direct heals.. or that we receive some new reactive type ability which will allow other areas of our healing to scale the same as the other archetypes. The issue is that right now shaman are pretty well balanced and to change this mechanic would overpower us.
In fact, what i would foresee as a more likely scenario is that other healers get some sort of nerf to keep their heals from outscaling player health pools and incoming damage. Its definitely something that will need to be monitored closely when the expansion comes out and brand new and more powerful gear becomes available to us.

Slowin wrote:

Why should we accept that again? Do other healers suck when duo healing groups or something? Of course not, they can still get the job done. So what is the drawback for other healing classes to balance us not being 'meant' to solo heal a group?
Don't try to say its because our wards are so important to prevent spike damage, because we are not the only class with wards. In fact, don't all the healers have a ward now? I know pallies do too and there's plenty of tank gear with wards.

Question - Accuracy increases the chance of hitting a mob, but what is the match behind it?
f.eks is base and what does 2% give me again a lvl 90 mob?
I know it is a really nice stat to have but i would like to know more about it if possible.

muscho wrote:

the "to hit" formula is always changing so dev's have said that they don't want to post it because of this.

accuracy is a good thing but it's importance depends on your class. look at your parses if your auto attack hit rates are bellow 80 percent then you should try to find any accuracy you can(not including blocks/parry/dodge/riposte since these are not governed by accuracy). if your hit rates are in the high 80's/90's then accuracy isin't a big issue for you.

I have a simple question, that I am having a hard time finding the answer on, How do you calculate base stat caps at lower levels? IE where does Sta cap at say 39 or where does Agi cap at 49?