Those 2-dot fire elementals are more like that they cannot really do anything to hayatet and hayatet cannot really do anything to them. Hayatet pet is totally useless against them as they are fire immune. And yes, I could change my UR fire focuses to shield and weapon, but hayatet is supposed to be caster, not some ultra low dps battlemage. Seriously if you have to resort to melee, you might as well make bear or wolf anyway. I made mine because I did not want to breath to tanks neck in every fight like bear and wolf do.
You can kill those fire elementals EASILY even without melee weapon and shield if obstinate, you use hoarfrost and gelid blast. I have... slim spell dmg focus usually and really low int and wis, yet my hoarfrost ticks for 2k on them, winters roar hit them high and gelid smokes them. Anyway you cant really bash DPS when Bear and Wolf use ALL dots. Wolf Tearing claw, hammer of krigus, strike fo nag-suul, throat rip AND Hoarfrost, Kiss of Nag-suul, Gelid Blast and Krigus decaying disease or whats it called, zombie hand icon. You sell yourself short basicly. The strike of nag-suul is a 48 second dot or so. Not like you need to spam it. Plus if you go pure spell dmg, as you said yourself your not breathing down tanks neck or even being in AoE range ergo you dont risk as much as we do to dps. As a matter of fact your spell mit boost and other things also compensate alot. Im a Wolf, yet I Sword and Board alot. I prefer my 2hander, but I am not a melee dps anymore than you are a caster. We are healers. Discarding Club and shield as a Shaman is a sign of inexperience regardless of patron. Your first job is to survive when you [V] that you should be able to [V] healing and then worry about checking DPS. My wolf pet is pretty much useless vs all thing after 55 I just see it as a funny gimick mini dot with a nice buff for me =) Problem is you cant find good medium armor for the birdie, and you should be able to do that.
Of course I know about dots, but use them only sometimes for two simple reasons: Most of them are too slow to cast and energy cost vs. bang is extreme lousy. Also several of them are still half way going when mob dies, so they also waste energy thanks to too long durations. Even in most group situations. You also actually underlined how borked hayatet actually is. Hayatet specific dps is int based yet you cannot get good or really even decent medium gear for it. If I would like to go your way and use melee for damage, I would have to get gear with BOTH melee AND caster stats in order to get results. Wanna talk to devs about making that miracle gear for us? I would also change to shield and weapon immediately if I would get ones with caster stats. So no matter how I choose I get nerfed in one way or another. You can build your gear totally for melee which increases your dps nicely. Your comments also hint that you are wearing gear which is not even close to what average player is using. It is quite different with swamp armor or other less advanced versions. As for your survivability talk... Do you really think I would be stupid enough not to use shield when in serious combat?
I dont know what you group or such, but if dps is needed I throw the dots up. On 2 dot elementals especially its just fun to dot up and see how many you can stack before they crumble. If I cant get more than 4 up sure I can just spam my DD attack. Dude I dont wear caster gear, so why would you wear melee gear for melee dots? The fact is you most likely get more out of the melee dots than I do from the caster ones as I have next to no caster stats at all where as you probably get atleast some melee stats for free. Bird shaman got a focus epic. They can use plenty of awesome caster focis at endgame and epic that. Going focus shield might be viable. You can then just macro a melee club for every melee attack /wear "Turtleshell Crusher" /cast "Skamadiz Strike" then for heals macro your heal stuff and so on. Your a Shaman, energy cost is irrelevant. If a dot is halfway going when the mob dies, the mob dies alot faster due to that dot. Nothing wrong with that. If your dps is so good your dots will own the mob at half time whats your issue? You want DD nukes doing it faster? Yes your armor issue is borked, you have to dress like a bloodmage to DPS. Thats lame you should retain your medium armor and that would compensate for your lesser DPS since your survivability is superior. If you melee and amcro the right stuff in you wont be so dissapointed in the dps. IMO it is about maximizing your character, using all skills as appropriate ( except restoration which sucks ) to dish out the best dps/heals/short dura buffs/ and so on. Im not geared averagely no, but I was and worked my way up. I also dont gear exclusively for melee dmg, Im a healer. I try to cap HF, HE, and VIT first. Then I work on HP and dmg.
I have recently returned to the game around lvl 28 and have since leveled to about 45. I have run VT/DT/Graystone/SunsetPoint as well in a group scenario and have noticed a few issues that fall in line with what others have said. 1) Purge In Graystone and Sunset Point there were a few mobs and maybe a 6 Dot FULL CAPS named that had some Diseases and Poisons that would hit the group and send me SCRAMBLING trying to Purge. There was a Cleric Healer as well with me and between the 2 of us we could barely keep the group topped off while I spammed Life Ward and Purge. It seems a bit over the top that I can have both of these mechanics and still have issues removing certain powerful poisons and diseases still. Not only do I need to individually cast my buff every 15 min on EVERY group member but then I need to spend 1 second cast time and a Global Cooldown and STILL some effects are not removed. So not only can I not tell who gets a poison cast on them unless I am REALLY visually on top of my game (No UI support is my point) but I cannot even depend on my static AND castable buff to remove it the first time. I can't sit there for 5 seconds cleansing one person with a GCD while my group is dropping faster than I can keep up. Conclusion: It feels like Purge needs to come off the GCD. If I need to cast the spell twice I am spending a decent amount of energy single target cleansing for the entire group but the GCD is making it impossible because I can;t do it fast enough at times forcing me to Heal and eventually pull aggro. 2) No +stats to our class defining heals. Simple enough we should have some added bonus. 3) Hayatet - DPS and Tanking It's impossible for me to say where my DPS falls. I know once I have Debuffs and DoTs rolling on a target and start using Fire Claw I can usually take a mob down fast and if I start critting can hit fairly hard. My pet just can't take hits at all. I would like to see a little more utility implemented for Hayatets that would fall in line with other casters. The cast time on Hoarfrost needs to go IMO and Curse of Frailty needs to be brought in line with Lethargy. It takes FOREVER to get these two ESSENTIAL debuffs off on anything more than 2-3 mobs. In place of DPS or Tankyness I would love the ability to AoE Debuff as a Hayatet Shaman. I think it falls in line with the idea of the class and its Ranged form. 4) Finishers I hate that our Melee finishes are tied to our Caster finishers. Why is it that I have to cast a spell and crit to get spell finishers to pop up but if I use a melee attack and crit, get melee finishers (then use Spear of Ancients to start End regen) I lose all my Spell finishers because I got another lucky crit and now have to sacrifice one or the other. I'm very open to opinions on this. My 2 cents so far playing the class.
Just don't loose track of that all 3 of the patrons are healers and most gear should prolly be in relation to that. There should be ample opportunity to get in some caster items for hayatet and some melee etc for wolf and bear.
It is exactly this sort of suggestion that creates serial killers. Don't make me have to hunt you down.
But your ability to be a melee dps is much greater than a hayatet's ability to be a caster, regardless of being a healer.
I use my skills as appropriate, i macro every single one of them. I am very much dissapointed in my dps, even with some of the best caster gear a hayatet can source. Call it what you will, but a hayatet's ability to dps is much lower than a bear or a wolf for reasons i have spelled out previously. Secondly, a little bit of AC is not going to make up for this lack of dps - for fights where you need a lot of healing you wont be wearing caster gear anyway, it will be mostly healing gear. And i'm not sure where you got the survivability from, yes hayatet's get 5% spell mit (if indeed it is actually working correctly now), but bear get 5% mit and i'm not sure what wolves get.
I have to admit I have no idea how far behind hayatet really is. +its so damn hard to get a good meassure of it in a fight that matters. The outcome on a parse in reality is affected by so many factors... Gear build, Attachments, attribute placing, how effective macro's you've been able to dream up, individual player skill.. and last but not least, the amount of dmg your group takes during that period (=time spent healing instead of dps'ing). Personally i find it best to build for bursts and burns when i come to dps.
I'd never go with light gear even if i was a hayatet.. would put you far behind in heal stats and attributes not going for the medium, and there are really great caster items out there to get in most of the other slots.
To give one example - core fight. Caster stance, caster gear, no healing, full dps, all raid and diplo buffed plus every clicky i could use, and even a disciple epic, and i managed to just top 4k dps - and that's at range with no interruptions. I've seen you and Mackster first hand and know that you generate those sorts of numbers quite easily, even when main healing and keeping your group alive.
Is this a gear issue or a class issue? I know you said you have the best hayatet shaman gear but I don't know what that is or if it is viable compared to a wolf shamans. I've already seen signs of MED armor being much more favorable to MDPS as opposed to RDPS.
That is a hayatet issue. I could be mistaken, but GC probably has about every single piece of caster gear he could want/use
Except for a Tharridon ear, but from what i hear i'm going to be included in the next roll for it But to answer Saaldur, it's a class issue - low dps abilities, lack of auto-attack dps, slow cast times, all decrease our dps potential.
I think Shaman pets are in need of a HP boost or something to help them survive difficult encounters.
Yeah, it is way too fragile. Well, hayatet as a whole needs serious tuning, but pet needs that too. Weak dps and it seems to die if mob even glares at its direction.
