The state of Defilers in ToV

I will preface this by saying I have not had much time to play my Mystic in ToV, so while some issues will correlate between the two Shamans, I will focus this thread on Defilers, and focused largely on game play in the upper scale of raiding.

The game play dynamic of a Defiler has changed. Some Defilers may like it, but personally, I do not.

In CoE, I would generally have time to stack some wards on the tank, and unless the tank is getting wailed on, I would have some time to drop some wards on other group members, and/or cast some debuffs, and/or a nuke. There were some fights where increased healing requirements on the tank, required me to spend more time ward stacking said tank, and slipping in debuffs as able.
- Absent any highly desirable utility, the nature of Defiler heals provided some viability for a MT role. Even though a Mystic could easily substitute (and add DPS), it was still nice to have a Defiler.

ToV changed this. In the time it takes for Carrion Warding to cast, I am genuinely surprised if Ancient Shroud and Wraithwall are still up. I can easily (and often do) get stuck in heal/ward-loops that leave me concerned that the tank will go splat any time I try to sneak in a debuff.

I can make some comparisons from my experiences of playing the 3 healer archtypes in ToV..
- Playing a Shaman feels like playing a fast paced First Person Shooter.
- Playing a Druid feels like a middle ground.
- Playing a Templar feels like an old school, turn-based-RPG.

I encourage Xelgad/Gninja/Kander to pull the logs (server side) from Revelations raiding, from the 18th and 19th of November. That will provide a mix of Easy and Hard content, along with Arena and Contested Avatars. I am confident this information will align with the viewpoints expressed by Ainaree and Kiryalis in the Beta forums regarding Shamans in general, with strong applicable relevance to Defilers.

Should Xelgad/Gninja/Kander desire, I will be happy to email ACT exports directly to them. But server side logs = better.

I supported the changes to HP pools going into ToV. I believe the direction (goal) is good, despite the implications for Defiler (and Mystic) desirability. After some Beta testing, it became evident that Shamans were in a predicament, and going into Live ToV, it is evident that healers will need some serious review. Fortunately, Xelgad has already stated he is not happy with healer balance. Absent the advantage of solid 1 shot preventions that Defilers used to provide, significant functionality/utility should be provided to compensate. The state of debuffs is not cutting it.

Disclaimer: If you are having a great time playing your Defiler in old content, solo content, heroic content, or EasyMode raid content, that is awesome, and I am happy for you. But that is not my primary focus. With Defilers being a defensively focused healer, I believe the class should shine on harder content, which is unfortunately where the shortcomings of the class show up the most.

Well said, and I have to agree. I've played a defiler since head-start, and the current state of Defilers feels akin to how they were at launch. Relying mainly on direct heals because wards aren't cutting it. This was also before they changed all primary priest heals to be basically the same. Shaman, at the time, had the longest casting heals. They healed for a ton, but you could quickly fall behind if you weren't on the ball. I remember the days of debuffing the mobs ON the pull, back when our debuffs were significant and in many cases required. When the first major revamp happened with DoF (When wards were first fixed to include player mit) healing ended up feeling easy. As a result, a lot of shaman ended up looking like gods because we worked SO hard to keep up prior to that, now that our spells worked it was like taking a stroll through the park.

I left the game shortly after the launch of RoK, burned out from raiding 7 nights a week and RL commitments, but when I came back at the beginning of COE i was SHOCKED how easy shaman healing had become. Heroic content was nothing more than stack a group ward, ST ward, maybe a special ward on the tank, and relax. I think wards in COE were severely over-powered, however I also think the current state of wards in ToV are severely under-powered. I'm not sure what the right fix is, but having wards one-shotted off just about every single attack does not give me high hopes that I'll be playing this class in T2 heroics as a solo healer. Looking at other healers in my guild parsing 85-90K HPS with (relative) ease while I feel like my fingers are bleeding to do the same is disheartening on a class I've loved since the beginning, flaws and all.

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.

The problem is so bad that I am being out-healed by druids in overland quested gear. I will have twice the gear of druids, try twice as hard, and accomplish less.

There is nothing I can do. I could press every button until my fingers bleed and it still might not do as much as a group HoT.

But, the posts on shaman issues are probably approaching 30 pages total of feedback. All of which has been ignored. Really, either play a new class or a new game at this point. The developers do not care and I will not believe they care until I see patch notes to that effect.

Sadly my MAIN class(DEFILER) has not logged on since ToV went live. We tried our best in beta to have something adjusted for the class, the most viewed and active thread in beta and all we got was an acknowledgment from the devs.

I have to echo Aina on this one...new class or new game. I've made my choice and won't be coming back to the class until they officially make them viable. Not really in the mood to argue another 30 pages about what's wrong.

Wards should run out and you should also have to use your heals. That's how they want it and that's how it will end up once they have collected enough data to determine how much to boost the wards. Don't worry shamans! They aren't ignoring you. They just weren't comfortable making hasty decisions without any data to back it up.

Just don't have the expectation that you deserve to win the parse over all other healers. It's probably not going to be like it was. It's going to be more of a collaborative effort and I think that's fantastic.

Defilers and Mystics deserve to parse higher than other healers because they bring very little survival utility on the table and are represented in raw numbers. When a Templar parses the same on the heal parse as a Defiler, they're also bringing avoidance lend, stoneskins, damage reductions, and other tools that actually lessen their showing on the parse. Not so for shaman.

I'm fine losing the precious and almighty heal-parse, but shaman will need some utility to compensate. They presently don't have the tools to compete with classes who are both beating them on the parse and bringing far more utility on the table.

I'd make suggestions to add a damage reduction component to wards, or other such tools... but there's no point. It's been proven there's no point.

I just don't feel it's fair that druids are allowed to press one button and top the heal parse while I'm being told it's not fair for my wards to do anything and I need to press secondary heals. They don't, so why should I? The system isn't even or fair at the moment and that is the complaint. I don't want to call for nerfs, but shamans need to be elevated if they're going to have any place this expansion.

The main reason shaman (at least in the past) parsed higher is that the engine counts wards first. All healers need to be less obsessed with the heal parse. It shows very little of what healers should actually be doing (like cure, block, damage resist, stoneskins, etc).

I don't understand all the 'other' healers telling shaman that they shouldn't 'rely' on their wards. Sure their wards shouldn't be the ONLY thing they use, but they should be their primary means of healing. Telling shaman not 'rely' on wards is like telling clerics not to 'ely on their reactives and druids not to rely on their HoTs. The primary heal type for each class can't do the whole job, but they should be doing the bulk of the healing job for their respective healer classes.

Would changing wards into a HoT type be a way to go and fit in with the changes they've done. If wards worked like druid HoT's instead of casting them and seeing them gone instantly and needing to constantly recast they could ward over time which opens up time to cast debuffs and direct heals.

Mystics get wards similar to that (called regenerating wards; Oberon and Torpor). Not sure if Defilers do or not.

Adding a second (or even third) regeneration to all of the wards is something I had thought of that might help level the playing field a bit again. Instead of each ward being gone after a single hit, they'd absorb most of a hit and then come back and absorb most of a second hit.

The same argument every non-shaman has argued since people started looking at the heal parse...thankfully the perfect answer is in this thread already by Mermut.

Especially that last sentence. I'm tempted to put it in my signature. Real utility or fix the primary way shamans heal(wards) will fix whats been broken with the class this expansion.

I'm not trying to make any argument as a non-shaman. I've played every healer class and I enjoy them all. All I was saying is that everything will be OK. Don't be upset that your wards aren't quite where they need to be yet. They will adjust it. I was just making the point that you will have to actually heal in this expansion rather than simply casually refresh your wards. It's supposed to be harder than that...

I agree that the heal parse shouldn't be what you judge healers on. I think we all know good healers vs bad healers and don't need to base it off of a parse.

As far as lack of utility is concerned, isn't your utility value supposed to be the debuffs that have apparently become important in this expansion? I don't really know if this is true, but that's what the devs said. It's not like shamans don't have any utility though:

Mystic: RoA, Stampede, Bolster, trigger chance buff, spirit tap
Defiler: Infinite mana, cure essence thingy. Ok I can't think of much for defiler, but whatever.

Not true, shamens have quiet impressive offensive debuffs compared to Templar's.

Exaclty, I sincerely hope the days just casting wards over and over and expecting to lock down the heal parse from other healers are over.

There is just no debuff in the shaman's arsenal that compares to Templars giving 17.5 percent stoneskin gw w/ cloak. Malicious Spirits is pretty awesome, but it can only be maintained 1/3rd of the time. I'm all for them consolidating debuffs and making the numbers more in line with what swashbucklers and other debuff classes do, if anything. That wouldn't fix the problem of having vastly less heal potential, but it'd at least show they care.

Which they don't. Because this thread existed on beta a month before launch and had oodles of replies and information. If we're saying we have no faith, it's because they made us this way.

The debuffs that have apparently become important in this expansion?

The Devs sang two songs about Shaman Debuffs in ToV beta. Early in the ToV Beta, they told us that Shaman Debuffs will be amazing and make up for the healing issues. Then, when actual discussion evolved, and testing was done, the Devs said Shaman Debuffs do not actually do much, because they do not want Shamans to be required.

So, Shamans were told that Debuffs are their saving grace, but then informed their Debuffs will not actually do much.

Defilers are a class with an out-dated healing mechanic, inferior healing-per-second potential, and debuffs that do very little (outside of 1 that can only be maintained approx 33% of the time). The fact you listed cure essences (crystallized essence) as #2 on the benefits of Defiler utility, speaks for itself.

I went from Mystic to Defiler this expansion and I can't speak for fire/ice dragon but I love it on everything else.
Shaman tears will continue to flow though.

Keep playing the defiler for longer than a week then and come back.

So your argument that I don't know enough about shaman/defiler this expansion is that I've only been playing this class for the entirety of said expansion??!?!

A note to everybody who keeps telling shaman to cast heals instead of wards... wards ARE the shaman primary heals.
Reminds me of a mystic I ran into back when Sentinel's Fate came out who whined that his mystic sucked because he only had 2 heals... 'cause wards weren't heals.