Best way to improve the shaman class is to remove the cooldown for switching out the forms. Please make this happen.
Just so I understand... The question is really... "Make it so that we can make Macros to swap forms every time we use a different ability to gain every added bonus? Instead of having a GCD every time we swap to make the Macro be clicked twice making it useless? Seems like they would have given us all the bonuses if this were the case. Why make it so that through a complex set of macroing you could in theory have every spirit bond up when your using its relative ability? Seems like it takes some of the consequence out of choosing what Spirit Bond to use in a fight.
You're wrong obviously. Best way to improve shaman would be to let heal focus, heal effectivness, vitality and evrything else that affects heal have an effect on the very spells that are more than any "the shaman thrademark"... Naturally its the reactive heal spells i have in mind, aegis and life ward.
Yeah this has bugged me to for some time. Cleric HoTS, BM HoTS, Disci HoTs etc all get boosted. Our bread and butter is still missing the turkey in between.
Bread, butter and turkey. Oh holy god gross. What kind of sick sandwich is that? Seriously though, yes vit should affect our HoT heals please.
None. It's completely exploitable with macros. Please confirm it for yourself; if there's one thing I've learned it's that with regard to game mechanics people are very willing to state incorrect assumptions as fact here on the VG forums. And I'm glad to see you understand what the design problem is with the situation. Last time the subject came up I learned that a fair number of players don't feel there's anything wrong with shaman stance choice being meaningless to anyone who can write a macro.
I did check it once I saw your reply and you are right. I never even CHECKED before I read this thread because I thought there is NO WAY they would just let you Macro all the stances into your abilities. Whats the point of even having them then? So the button mashers have more effective mashing? This really makes no sense from a design standpoint... but here we are, and unfortunately my Hayatet could use loving in OTHER areas. Still would like to see a GCD on stances to add some "consequence" to your choice depending on the encounter. Now the question is if I'm in Spell damage stance and cast a DoT and witch out... will the DoT keep the effect of the Spell damage stance through its duration? My guess is going to be yes. Unfortunately that should not be the case either.
For me, the primary function of my Bear Shaman is to heal. The consequence of delaying me from providing an optimum heal would mean that I would just stay in healing stance. The way it is at the moment allows me to change stance to do damage but also to change back when I need to heal.
If I recall correctly, the damage of a DoT is calculated at application time and won't be reduced if you drop out of spell-damage stance later. I know for certain that the healing ticks of Bosrid's Gift are calculated at time of casting. Stack all your heal bonuses and get nice big regen ticks even if you swap to damage stance and damage gear for the rest of your play session. I wonder what short-term bonuses are available out there that could be exploited to get massive healing continuously from Bosrid's Gift...?
That would be a pretty short burst. Seeing as how Bosrids Gift burns Endo every 2 seconds and you would be using Endo like crazy trying to burn a mob down. But I guess for the 10-15 seconds it was active it would be doing a good bit of healing.
Even a Hayatet, with no endurance regen bonuses, can keep Bosrid's Gift up indefinitely. It will certainly slow down anything endurance-based, but you can still heal (which is pretty core to the class) and use energy-based damage stuff freely. Tuurgin and Rakurr have endurance regen bonuses and so can still use endurance stuff sparingly even with Bosrid's Gift running. If you're pretending to be DPS, you wouldn't turn on BG regardless of whether it was boosted or not. That's not the situation I'm talking about.
kind of hard to call something an exploit when the issue was well known and has made it through two separate class balances.