Well, Shade had been giving us problems all week but we finally got him down. Then, we went on to down Prince on our third try...he dropped some tasty loot. Namely, my new 2H axe...Gorehowl. :)

Anyway, lately the shaman forums have rather resembled a war zone. A lot of shamans are complaining about the state of the class. I figured I'd say a few words about how I feel about the situation...

When I quit last May, shamans were decent. We had our issues that weren't helped by a lackluster half-assed class review, but we weren't awful. Our resto tree was by far the weakest of the three. I remember how enhancement shamans were feared by cloth-wearing classes, because windfury with a slow two-hander could really leave a caster hurting, and grounding totem + earth shock were enough to shut them down. Enhancement was considered a PvP spec capable of powerful burst if the shaman was well geared. This was when it was pretty hard to get an enhancement shaman over 500 AP unless he was in raid epics and was in a guild that allowed him to roll on hunter gear - the concept of enhancement shaman gear was unheard of, and level 60 mail gear with +strength was incredibly rare. Dual-wielding wasn't an option. But remember those issues I mentioned? Yeah. Weaknesses in the totem system, being forced to put 31 points into resto for mana tide to raid, and inferiority to the then-alliance-only paladins for raiding were serious concerns that many shamans on the shaman forum posted about with suggestions for resolution. Paladin buffs were overall more valuable to their raid groups, and their healing was far more efficient. There was a good reason why, on most servers, Alliance guilds were farther along than their Horde raiding counterparts. Unfortunately, the growing concerns and rumblings of the shaman community were largely ignored. Our "review" was lackluster; our shaman forum CM, we later found out, was on vacation, and the developers implementing the changes never got any of the feedback that many of us spent a great deal of our time on. For various reasons, I said screw it, and quit. When I did so, I deleted my shaman and disenchanted/sold all of his gear. I split everything with my friends and cancelled my account.

Fast forward to now. I was able to get my deleted shaman restored so I jumped into BC with crappy green items from the auction house. I geared up and leveled to 70 as enhancement spec, first being impressed a great deal by the new dual-wielding DPS my shaman was capable of. But as I progressed it started becoming clear that there were serious problems. In group PvE, my dual-wielding DPS generated a lot of aggro and I had no way of managing it other than literally stopping all DPS occasionally. In PvP, the new higher health pools and resilience made the raw burst damage that enhancement shamans relied on irrelevant. The other classes got strong new abilities that had a significant effect on the way I could approach a fight. Perfect example: ice lance. Spammable, low cost, instant cast, with no cooldown. Grounding totem? Pfft. It's now almost completely useless, only handy for intercepting pyroblasts from mages who don't realize I know they're there. I've tried 1on1s (duels mostly) against most every class at this point, and despite the fact that this time last year, I could beat most people who didn't outgear me with raid epics against my 5 man blue gear, I lost nearly every time against opponents who had too much survivability to burst down but enough damage that I could not keep myself up against them.

Are the shaman forums full of angry whines, moans, and complaints? Yeah. Are some of the "QQers" overdoing it? Sure. But when looking at the history of the shaman class I can certainly understand the anger and frustration. We are once again looking at the prospect of having only one viable path to raid/PvE progression: resto. The nerfs that the soon-to-be-released 2.1.0 patch will bring are questionable as well.

For enhancement, our DPS is being nerfed severely by the invisible 3 second cooldown on windfury. The result of no longer being able to downrank the windfury skill on our offhand has a consequence that I can't think was possibly intended...but it's been proven. With this change, a slow level 40 green (or even gray!) weapon in our offhand combined with a slow main hand weapon has more potent DPS than a fast level 70 epic weapon in our offhand. Why? Because the faster our offhand weapon is, the more likely it'll proc windfury within any given period of time, simply because it hits more often. When it does, it doesn't allow the weapon in our main hand to proc windfury for 3 seconds, and the main hand windfury procs do a lot more damage. The slow crappy weapon is simply "stealing" main hand windfury procs a lot less often, with the result being better DPS overall. That's not how things should work!

Elemental shamans are okay in my opinion, or were anyway. The change to Elemental Focus to proc off crits was a tremendous buff that made elemental DPS sustainable. As ranged caster DPS, elemental shamans had very poor options for mana efficiency and restoral other than mana potions and the pitiful mana regen offered by mana spring totem, when compared to the options the other ranged caster classes had. So the EF buff made elemental viable. Even so, Blizzard still said they agreed to look into elemental mana efficiency. Then, when they looked into it, they nerfed it. Now, elemental shamans are going to be out of mana in 2 minutes in PvE encounters. Where a warlock could life tap (or dark pact), or a mage could simply pop a conjured mana gem or blow an evocation cooldown, that shaman has no option other than to pop a potion that costs money, or sit there twiddling his thumbs waiting for his in-combat mana regen to work. Elemental DPS won't be sustainable, and thus won't be viable in PvE. It can do more controllable and decent damage in PvP, but is vulnerable to being locked out completely with a single kick, counterspell, or spell lock.

Resto's mainly fine. Shamans are still the least efficient healers but chain heal and earth shield are powerful tools, and resto shamans are not going to have problems getting raid spots or groups. I'm not happy about resto having horrid DPS for soloing/farming though; trying to kill anything as resto is flat out painful. :(

Those who think shamans are whining too much really...really need to consider that the crying on the forums now isn't the result of things that have happened in the last few months. It's the ultimate inevitable conclusion to a period of over a year of having our concerns ignored and our class neglected by Blizzard developers. Personally, I still enjoy the game and don't want to quit. I don't want to reroll because I do have a large amount of time invested into my shaman. I still enjoy playing him, but I want him to be the best he can be. Right now, that isn't possible, because of the way Blizzard has (mis)handled the class.