we shamans hate patch 2.1

[sitha]

....and seeing how Blizz still keeps trying to force pure healers totally out of the game by making hybrid healers better than the pure healers.....

TL.

Guess you are talking about holy priests, I understand they need some work atm. But to totally derail this thread and to contradict myself you can say that a resto shaman, resto druid, holy paladin are just as much a pure healer as holy priest. When you spec that far into the respective healing trees you loose the ability to do anything else with any degree of efficiency. In raids today you can't have people doing some healing and some dps. You need to do one of them and be good at it.

The same goes when classes with healing capabilites spec far into other trees like enhancement for shaman, prot for pala, shadow for priest. Then you effectively stop being a healer, at least when it comes to raid.

The only class today that can effectively fill two roles in a raid inside the same spec is druid. Tank and dps i feral.

But, back on track. Found this brilliant thread about shaman nerf on the US forums: https://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=98892232&sid=1

[TeaLeaf]

I think the point was that Blizzard proclaimed the non-shadow priest as the king of healers bar none in the game, but this is not the case.  When you look at the performance of:

a holy paladin who wears plate, can bubble, can heal forever and not lose mana;
a druid who can innervate himself, go bear in an emergency, add DPS when needed and can insta-heal for more HP than you have at the moment;
and a shammie who can rise from the dead, wear mail, totem to hell and back and heal to boot,

and compare it to a cloth wearing squishy priest whose big heal takes 3 seconds to cast, who has no instant cast heal to compare, has little protection from attack, has zero aggro reducing abilities (fade restores full aggro after 10 seconds), cannot innervate, cannot BR, cannot wear plate or mail, cannot add any meaningful DPS, basically cannot everything else too and uses mana faster than the other classes even with a good build and good kit.

Then you see that the acclaimed 'king of healers' has been screwed over.  A pallie and druid (and to a lesser extent the shaman) can be multiuple things with one spec (albeit to not as great an extent as a dedicated talent build might allow), but a priest is stuck with what they got unless they go full shadow and even with their healing build still suck.

Priests are by Blizzard's definition the games top healers.  Except when in the actually game where they are usually beaten in parties and raids by druids, pallies and shamans who also tend to out-survive the priest in battle as the poor priest only gets to wear cloth.  Now *that* sucks. Shaman have it easy relatively speaking.  Know any GMs who play priest.......?    No, thought not.

TL.

.....and yes, that's why my priest is full shadow spec.  A druid can be a pretty good healer with a balanced spec, as can a pallie, as can a shaman.  Try being a good healer by sticking a third of your points in shadow and see where it gets you - the answer is even further down the healing charts and you're off the bottom of the DPS list too!

[sitha]

I can only speak with any sort of insight on shamans, I don't have enough experience as druid/pala in end game raiding. A resto spec shaman is good for absolutely nothing else then healing and putting down totems. Yes, we have some nice group buffs with totems....but they are only for the group. Priests have raid buffs. Wearing mail means nothing when you do Kara and heroics.

As for instant heals, resto shaman have nature swiftness on 3 min cooldown. Priests have shield on 15 sec cooldown per player. Shaman's have not hots either, only earth shield which can only be used on one player and costs a lot of mana.

My point here isn't that priests holy are great, I understand they have problems and should get some buffs. But blizzard is failing miserably with all hybrid classes and should realise that if you choose to spec to the end of any given tree you should be as good as it as the "pure" classes, but in different ways so they compliment each other.

[DarkAngel]

Personally overall with all its talents the holy priest is a awsome class, but the only problem with being is holy is oyu cant solo for anything which is the same for shammys and pallys alike. Im currently full resto when im raiding and while in that i cant solo at all so i wait till raiding is over and respec back for a few days.
 
Personally i think blizzard has completely messed up wow and was first shown with the small amount of areas and instances. They thought we all wanted loads of 5 mans (man were hey wrong). Then they had a good idea with 25 mans but you need to do karazhan to even think of those.
 
And by only putting in 1 10 man instance (which i think is quite hard) especially when you look at how many instances we had before (MC, BWL, AQ20, AQ20, ZG, Naxx) personally they have done a crap job and this job with heroics they are **** fecking lazy (make harder newer instances) nothing worse then getting revered with a area and then having to do the same instances again (but just harder and better loot).
 
They had 2 years to make a aswome expansion and they really have done a awful awful job. Like they hardly made any new item images they are all the same with just different colours. Im currently playing LOTR online until Warhammer online comes out and give that a go. I really have lost interest in WOW atm and instead of nerfing gear they go along nerfing player types, they really are stupid (and it shows from how many people they lost when the expansion came out).
 
Rant over.

[Carr0t]

Personally i think blizzard has completely messed up wow and was first shown with the small amount of areas and instances. They thought we all wanted loads of 5 mans (man were hey wrong).

Speak for yerself I enjoy raiding, but I much prefer blasting right the way through a 5 man in a few hours with some really good mates, rather than doing a 10, 25 or even 40 man with a whole load of people I barely know. I don't really have the time to dedicate to raiding, and i'm the one in the majority there, it's just that those people tend to also be the less vocal ones. The vast majority of the WoW population don't actually raid, which is why Blizz created the heroic instances, to increase the longevity of the game for those people.

If it was purely up to me i'd have Blizz stop creating any raid instances larger than 10 man, with a lot more 5 mans that were harder as well.