Response from Devs on Defiler Issues in ToV

As our main thread in the forums have been closed, there were a few legitimate concerns we have had that seem to be left unanswered.

In beta, we received more than one class developer response and now that ToV has gone Live, it feels as though we are receiving the silent treatment.

You all have the data, you all know the numbers and where you want them to be. Please throw us a bone on an ETA on our promised adjustment or an update on how YOU all see things right now in regards to a class that has gone from useful to useless. That is not an opinion by the way, we can be out-healed/out-cured/out-dps'd and lack any utility worth putting us on par with any other priest right now.

Thank you for your time.

I would also appreciate a response. I am very discouraged that our concerns have been met with silence.

Also please stop locking them.

We are not going to be silent about these issues so locking the threads will just alienate players who are already frustrated and on the verge of quitting. If we are passionate, it's because things are unbalanced right now and we're miserable with the game we used to enjoy.

It is against the ToS of the forum to make threads about the same topic over and over, so we are going to need to start breaking these threads down based on individual issues or they'll use it as an excuse to lock and delete them. We have used Mystic Balance and Defiler Balance already, so next we should discuss ineffectual AA abilities in its own thread, possibly breaking it down for each ability so we have longer to discuss it before being silenced...

Alternatively, we could get a developer response.

What solutions do Defilers and Mystics have to fixing the heal imbalance, if one agrees there is a problem.

If nothing else its good to see some level headed shamans commenting on the obvious disparities where priest balance is concerned. (Ainaree, Kiry, Kari and others )

However, some of us that have been around long enough should realize that constructive feedback however valid, doesn't always win the day. SAD....but truth nonetheless.


Wish list?

~ UTILITY is my first personally...for Defilers this is far from balanced.

~ A very close second would be ward SCALING, mainly group ward..( the lack of foresight on this issue is confusing )

Obviously the crit multiplier on wards...a NO BRAINER.
Another idea...cut the base casting time of the group ward in our Heroic tree and put it on a similar recast as our primary group ward.


~ Third, particularly for Defilers....AA rehash...or something. Too many of our AA abilities function around a semi- functioning mechanic. Wards/Debuffs.

Yes I said debuffs...they need to matter MUCH more before an AA line is devoted to them. Mechanic changes out stripped their usefulness ages ago. ( again...confused at such an obvious...nvm )


These disparities were easy to overlook or didn't matter in the grand scheme when we were looking good on a heal parse but if the aim is balance....it needs to be done correctly.



P.S
Constructive feedback gets more & more difficult when you feel ignored, disregarded or even neglected .
Just food for thought for somebody who might actually give a ....care.


Mariusx

We all know wards arent balanced, but i dont think asking for CB to be adjusted is the way to go.

Soe wants to break away from wards. A more realistic aproach would be a damage reducing along the lines of death crie.

Channelers are able to maintain a stoneskin that is 50 triggers of 15% damage or less, or one of 30% or greater damage. They can pace these to trivialize any death that would come from wards spiking through, or mobs hitting for 2m+ on the tank. I see plenty of mobs that have effects that say 'this cannot be warded' to further kneecap shaman, but no one is pointing out how overpowered the new stoneskin healer is. :/ My wards got nothing on blocking 15m hits like Channelers can.

It wasn't fair to implement a new class without balancing existing classes. I would very much like for shaman to be deleted and just to be handed a free class change token with a comparable gear trade merchant hanging around. It just feels that skewed and unreasonable.

Anyhow. Just venting frustrations from looking like a waste of space in a pug again despite having twice the gear of anyone around me. Would really, really appreciate a developer response.

Channelers are way underpowered.

Oh, that that stone skin is if some one dies. Aka group is about to wipe.

Some people who play different classes and have played a Shamen and even those that play Shamen currently say everything is balanced.

Matter of opinions.

It's been quite clear across at least 4 threads now that it's the intent of one person to constantly derail, cross post, spam and get threads shut down by reporting others' posts whilst spamming their opinion ad nauseum with no consequence. It's a shame this forum has turned into a place where people feel discouraged from replying even though it's part of the rules of conduct on these very threads to prevent that from happening.

I play all heal classes pretty much exclusively and I guarantee shamAns are not fine, healers are far form balanced. I have plenty of proof as do others, the dev's can contact me if they require more info than I have already provided, I am done posting here, it's a waste of time and energy.

No it's not. I'm simply stating that I would like to GMs to know that Mystics and Defilers are fine, giving anything else would make them overpowerd.

err swap gms with development team

If people are going to say defilers are fine when there are MANY players across the spectrum who fervently disagree, some evidence would be appreciated opposed to personal testimony which means exactly squat when investigating measurable claims.

This ISN'T a matter of just opinions. This is people providing data they clearly shows defilers (and mystics) have fallen hard since the xpac release. This isn't a how classes 'feel' thread, the math, the cold hard facts say shamans are in trouble.. So much so that the devs have already acknowledged that there IS an imbalance. Yet people deny it ad nauseum while providing no new information or insight, just rephrasing their same old position like a bad politician.

EVEN IF shamans weren't as underpowered as these high end, seasoned, shaman main players have brought verifiable data to bare to support their point, it wouldn't matter. the people who play these classes aren't having fun anymore for w/e reason. They were having fun, then they quite suddenly weren't at the release of ToV. This is a video game and if remedying a problem with classes that were once fun and were suddenly made to be MUCH less fun isn't paramount they should pack it up. Denying shamans have no more problems than other healers at this point is delusional.

If someone wants to say their piece about the class being fine while providing no new information or insight it only takes one post.
One.

Thats probably a problem, because a group ward works under certain conditions as a single target ward.

With the current changes to HP pool and remembering how shamans where 5 years ago, one solution could be a n% ward of the targets resp. each group members HP pool. At 25% for example a 700k Tank gets 175k from a group ward and a 290k healer 72.5k. Or something similar. It would require some heavy coding and re-balancing of the wards. Nothing that can be done over night.

In the thread that got closed to someone, occam wrote what follow, and what he wrote was what my warden
felts. I cured, i blocked aoe, i threw death prevent, sand storm and tried to dps ...
but my raid hps was 1/10 of my potential. I could only express it if one of those warder got LD or got killed.
My parses when solo healing in heroic were usually like 10 times higher than what i did in raids, and they were also often higher than the top hps parses in my raid.

So wards were too big, and now shaman are probably a bit weak. When looking at my mystic ward and my HOT ticks i do think there is a problem ( i cannot elaborate more because there is a huge gear difference between both) . But please i don't want to go back the previous situation in which wards never broke.

My main is an inq, and I must say on a completely selfish level, I'm enjoying the changes to shaman.

Now before anyone gets their hackles up, let me explain.

For quite awhile I have not been a healer. Yes, I'm still playing my inq, but since my usual group has a mystic in it, it's been a long time since I've had to actually THINK about healing. Wards have been so dominant that I have essentially been relegated to curing and DPSing. The running joke in my guild is that I am a DPS class, not a healer. I've gone entire zones where the ONLY time I healed was on the final boss! With ToV I finally am required to do the job I signed up for, and I'm really enjoying it.

That said, I do agree that shaman need some adjustment. I think that the idea behind the changes, namely balancing out healing so wards are not so overpowered, was sound. Unfortunately the changes are a bit too drastic. While I can still solo heal a group, my mystic friend is having a hard time with it. That should not be the case.

I'd like to see the devs address this in a way that allows me to continue doing the job I enjoy, but also let's shaman be effective enough to keep a group up without an insane level of effort.

Although it's all I'm playing right now, I'm no expert on channelers (still learning mine) but I do know that that stoneskin also has a duration of 8 seconds with a huge dissonance cost. I can't see maintaining that thing for long.

On the other hand, it seems like their interception would be useful for mitigating the kinds of problems people seem concerned with here. Interception reduces the incoming damage, ward takes it from there. Just a thought.

Grouping with a shaman prior to ToV must have been frustrating if you wanted to heal as a different healing archetype. However, the issue wasn't the shaman. All healing was broken; that is why they implemented the changes to health. That said (and now I'm repeating myself), if you are grouped with a shaman, you should be healing less. The whole point of a ward is to prevent spike damage and offer a reprieve from inconsequential damage so that the shaman, and also any healer in his/her group, may focus on something other than healing.

In addition to the problem these changes make to Ward's Bane, is how this effects Empowered Barrier.

Ancient Shroud has a duration of 30 seconds. In CoE, I would have the duration term, long before the ward depletes. That was a problem then, and now the ward depletes before it is useful. As a defiler, we have a prestige ability called Empowered Barrier. What it does is provides an additional single target ward onto your target, provided that the next four spells cast are not Ancient Shroud or Death Cries/Death Ward. Additionally, for every spell cast over the initial ward that isn't a single target ward it increases the amount of Empowered Barrier by up to 12 times. So the more spells we can cast between our single target ward, the better Empowered Barrier lands for. If Ancient Shroud or Death Cries/Death Ward consistently depletes before we are capable of casting four alternative spells, then Empowered Barrier is a useless ability, and the healing potential of defilers drops significantly. If Ancient Shroud is consistently gone before we're able to recast it, something is wrong.

It has been stated that wards are intended to prevent spike damage. If inconsequential damage is depleting our wards in one or two hits, then the ward will not hold up long enough to prevent spike damage. Again, something is wrong.

If I have to suffer through more misspellings of Shaman, I'm going to put someone on ignore.

I'm seriously going to have to start paying my shaman to remain on their shaman for the level of effort they are putting in now compared to previous xpacs. What Deth said is a very valid concern....due to the need to constantly refresh wards/etc. with current mechanics...this is essentially negating current class abilities case in point being Empowered Barrier in their prestige.

The only extreme hope atm due to the silence on this issue is the promised character revamp part 2 (if it ever gets here in time before all the shamans retire their class). It's slim at best and no realistic guarantee that the issues will be addressed correctly.

The only time I use barrier is in pvp for blocking damage based interrupts on picking up flags/relics. Otherwise, Defiance does the same job with more efficiency. The 1 shell conduit thing is for the pet only. It's there to block a deathtouch via Maximum Protection.

Locking a thread because one person is causing a problem in it..when the rest of the responses have been exceptionally helpful...isn't good, IMO.

I'd like to point out that the current Defiler concerns look very much like the Warden concerns after LU 13. No one answered, not one dev said anything that might indicate if what was happening was a mistake or 'as intended' - no useful information was forthcoming so that Wardens could make a decision about whether to just hang in there or hang it up.

Not meaning to present gloom and doom - just helping us be realistic about this. LU 13 was when I started playing my Defiler and Templar as 'mains', and my very favorite Warden went on the shelf for a good year (maybe a year and a half) when the class became able to heal again. Even then, those of you who also play Wardens see how the class went from necessary to 3rd choice in most farm-style raids, and how we'd sit a lot. (Warden heals were necessary when figuring out content, once it went on farm, Warden sat.)

We never heard from the devs - even though we begged, pleaded, and presented reams of data pointing out exactly where the problems were. It was frustrating in the extreme.

Just my 2