My Shaman Journey - I have 99 levels and Damage isn't one.

[DarkFury]

Hey everyone. :)

I've spent quite a few hours behind the wheel of a Shaman now, frankly I like the class and enjoy playing it. It's a change from the twitch fest that are other classes and it forces you to think strategically, this isn't everyone's cup of tea but hey it's mine.

My general build for reference is here:

https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/BZ7ee0lo

Long story short It's quite survivable (surprise), has good control, average damage and no real mobility. As a player when I sacrifice things in a class I expect a return on investment, I've chosen to deliberately play a caster with a melee aspect (as 11HG said that's what the class is) but I didn't get back what I needed to progress quickly; it's been quite a slog.

You can DW a shaman but frankly if you're doing that and want to stomp things you're far better being a Beast Master, the tree will just reward you more than shaman, that and you're squishy as f*&^. If you're dropping 25 points into the BM tree just to survive in Melee you might as well roll one, So I decided to play either a 2H or sword and board, it ended up being a sceptre and board build but there you go.

What I like about Shaman:

So let's start with the good.

Things gets frozen ... A LOT. I'm currently playing at 300 corruption and progressing with no real issues except for bosses I can't freeze well. When things freeze they just explode, if they don't explode with avalanche balls, shockquake blows then up. If it's not CCed in your totem / avalanche cluster frak then it will run into your freezing tempest / shockquake / spriggan form spray of penetrating thorns. Everything really just stops before it gets to you and that CC is a massive form of damage reduction. If they can't hit you they don't do damage.

10 Totems on two separate quick casts is amazing. Thanks to the Summon Thorn Totem skills interaction with Spriggan Forms Spiked Totems node your healing totems come out five at a time and are essentially super totems that both heal and shoot. This interacts with the shaman tree in a few good ways:

1) Protective Circle gives you 150% elemental and Physical resists which means you save a lot of item slots on resistance. It also synergises well with the uncapped resistance trait on frostbite shackles giving solid Ward retention and the uncapped resistance trait in the Tempest Strike node of soaring blows.

2) Ascendant circle gives you +320% spell damage, that's a nice chunk of change right there.

Avalanche as an area suppression skill is top notch. If you don't look at avalanche as your DPS skill and more as a control / melee augmentation skill then it's quite good. It should do more damage though and it definitely needs higher damage multipliers in it's tree but it's ability to freeze almost anything is pretty amazing. Totems aggro mobs, mobs freeze in avalanche = easy mode.

Earthquake with the Storm Quake node as a spell is a stand out. Tripple hitting people with one cast while smashing them with avalanche and tempest strike puts pretty much everything in 300 corruption except a boss into the ground. There is nothing wrong with the earthquake skill per se, it could use a cold conversion for a little more damage but that's a trivial thing to what I want to raise in the shaman problem section below.

The block passive improves the shaman experience to a very high degree. Frozen Ire & Faith of the Frozen are ideal companions for a shaman with T6 block chance on the shield & T7 block chance on the rings, which is cheap and easy to do, you can get over 20% DR average with block which is a solid suitability buff. Blocking incoming fire with high ward in Spriggan form while freezing everything with ice thorns is a pretty fun time.

Spriggan form as a defensive cooldown / firepower tool while regening mana is a great way to play. Remember that the totems you lay down with rage in spriggan form despawn / die for mana in human form which is +60 mana with this build for free.

Good general Damage reduction plus solid ward generation while switching forms has enabled me to go from struggling at empowered monos to mostly walking, yes I walk everywhere, through them. Gaining about 5K ward when shifting into spriggan form with 70% DR from armour is a pretty huge change. Don't get me wrong, this isn't a HH pally build where you an press one button and stand in all the fire but it is night and day different than every other version of shaman I've tried along the way.


What I don't like about Shaman:

Ok here's the bad stuff.

1) Shaman damage is underwhelming compared to other classes particularly it's sibling Beast Master. Don't get me wrong it's not awful and does some work, you just won't get to see 3M+ ticks with your earthquake on Rare / Boss Mobs with similar gear / spec levels as a BM.

Why is this so?

Firstly Shaman lacks a native Armour Shred capacity for spells (it is a caster right?) so it has to rely on items which for a caster mean spell damage items so you're essentially locked into Shred on Neck and gloves. I currently have shred on neck, although it doesn't show up on the Last Epoch Tools and can sustain somwhere between 30-50 stacks of shred on a target. If / when I get it on gloves this will go up to between 60 and a 100. That's not bad but it's nothing compared to my BM. I get capped stacks of 999 on my BM with no issue thanks to Aspect of the shark and high BM tree talents. This has a massive effect on mob damage received.

Secondly there are no real crit bonus / crit multiplier interactions with shaman talents or workable shaman skills. You can use Warcry to get good crit bonuses and stack crit on your items but this leaves you lacking crit multiplier which again you have to stack on items nerfing your attunement which is your primary scaling skill and this is something other classes don't have to do. Even if you used lightning conversion swipe, for your melee and dipped into panther nodes you'd only get 12% per stack instead of 24% per stack of panther buff as you're not dual wielding. FYI DW as a shaman is suicide / BM just does it a LOT better than you so play that mastery. As a case in point aspect of the Lynx in BM does some incredible work in the critical hit / crit multiplier stakes; Shaman has no equivalent.


2) Shaman has a LOT of dead passives, very weak passives or passive that just don't make sense given that Beast Master exists and that Shaman is a Melee / Caster Hybrid.


Eternal Storm is awful. As a shaman your totems are reset all the time and won't hang around / will die too quickly for this talent to make any real sense. If the damage carried over as a personal buff that affected all your totems it would make a LOT more sense.


Sky Armour is woefully weak. +20 Armour per point on the top end of a skill tree for 10 points with no 8 point bonus? Awful. Chance to chill and shock might as well not be there as they are capped debuffs that even lower tier shaman talents do better. An Attunement to Armour% conversion talent with much lower points would make sense here.


Storm blade makes sense if you're doing a melee shaman but is woefully under powered compared to high end BM talents. 320% damage is nothing compared to 1350% damage / 160% melee speed of 10 apsect of the shark stacks.


Ironbark makes my eyes want to bleed, it's just god awful. 10 points to get 200 health and 200 armour to your totems, sounds good right? Compare this to the five points in need to spend in the equivalent talent for, dare I say it, Sentinel Forge Guard which is another minion related class. For five points, 3 and 2 prerequisite points, you get:

+3% block with a shield
+50 Armour with a shield
Increase Damage on block +10%
Chance to cast Ring of Shields when you block 3%
INCREASED MINION HEALTH +150%
INCREASED MINION ARMOUR +150%

Your totems really need protection but ten points gives you almost none and other classes equivalents make me want to cry.

Ascendant Circle is great but needs a glow up, from 48% to 64%. Again compare it to 10 stacks of aspect of the shark.

Conflux is going in the right direction for Shaman protection but needs a tweak upward, probably to 16% and work with chill and shock.

I could cover a lot more here but suffice it to say there's a LOT of dead weight in the high end Shaman tree. I would love to see some better 1H + Shield and 2H related talents to strongly differentiate it from the BM tree.


3) One shaman only skill besides the mastery skill, Avalanche, makes the class feel incomplete.

There are so many ways this could make Shaman better and I would think a spamable spell with modifiable cost to allow a Shaman to move out of melee entirely if the player wants to would be the way to go. This would replace tempest strike in my build and with tweaks to the tree for survivability in the shaman tree would allow shaman to not rely on spriggan form to operate.

For want of a better name name it "Call Lightning" or "Storms Call" that is lightning to start with and allows you to add or convert to cold & fire using separate skill branches with additional branches into damage through penetration and another branch in AoE / cleave.

Having a spammable spell with spriggan works but isn't very Shaman, it's more Druid. Smashing people with Lightning bolts from the sky, impaling them on spears of frost or throwing molten balls of lava rock at them sound much more Shaman than STORM OF ICE SPIKES BORROWED FROM DRUIDZ!

Anyway that was my journey, it was fun but I'm not sure if I can get my shaman from 99 to 100. I'm sort of tired and it goes to slowly.

#JustSaying.

[runy.mmorpg]

Thanks for sharing your experience
A positive post with arguments ! it must be remark !

[senitewolf]

Solid post, if you want to increase the chances of someone from EHG reading it you might wanna drop a condensed version in their Discord

[[NvUs]Demalii]

Didn't they say shaman was an "old" class and needs to be updated to be in line with the newer classes that they've built over the past year or two?

[Inixus]

Originally posted by NvUsDemalii:

Didn't they say shaman was an "old" class and needs to be updated to be in line with the newer classes that they've built over the past year or two?

I really hope this is true and that the the rework is comming soon. As a thorn totem player im getting 1shots left and right its not funny anymore (yes res are over 75, crit avoid is 100, armour is 45%, hp is 2k) i cant even get to corr 250.

[kokane]

Originally posted by Inixus:

As a thorn totem player im getting 1shots left and right its not funny anymore (yes res are over 75, crit avoid is 100, armour is 45%, hp is 2k) i cant even get to corr 250.

Res being capped, crit being capped, high armor (50%+), 2k+ hp, doesnt mean you wont gonna be 1shoted; you also need capped endurance or close to it (60%), higher endurance threshold, other damage reduction passives from your class/mastery, and thats for all classes, not only shamans, unless you abuse ward.

[DarkFury]

Originally posted by kokane:

Originally posted by Inixus:

As a thorn totem player im getting 1shots left and right its not funny anymore (yes res are over 75, crit avoid is 100, armour is 45%, hp is 2k) i cant even get to corr 250.

Res being capped, crit being capped, high armor (50%+), 2k+ hp, doesnt mean you wont gonna be 1shoted; you also need capped endurance or close to it (60%), higher endurance threshold, other damage reduction passives from your class/mastery, and thats for all classes, not only shamans, unless you abuse ward.

I'm pretty much walking through 300 corruption right now and I have the following:

43% Block Chance
49% Block Effectiveness
62% Armour in Human form / 71% Armour Spriggan
Starting and improving 5K+ ward in spriggan form
30% Endurance
Res Capped
2418 Health

Not even close to being one shotted unless I stand in the fire or a one shot boss ability.

[Inixus]

Originally posted by DarkFury:

Originally posted by kokane:

Res being capped, crit being capped, high armor (50%+), 2k+ hp, doesnt mean you wont gonna be 1shoted; you also need capped endurance or close to it (60%), higher endurance threshold, other damage reduction passives from your class/mastery, and thats for all classes, not only shamans, unless you abuse ward.

I'm pretty much walking through 300 corruption right now and I have the following:

43% Block Chance
49% Block Effectiveness
62% Armour in Human form / 71% Armour Spriggan
Starting and improving 5K+ ward in spriggan form
30% Endurance
Res Capped
2418 Health

Not even close to being one shotted unless I stand in the fire or a one shot boss ability.

What is the dmg increase on your minions?, i have + 850% cold dmg increse and i never see that in the nrs, i only do 500 to 1k dmg non crit and 2 to 2.5k crit dmg.

[DarkFury]

Originally posted by Inixus:

Originally posted by DarkFury:

I'm pretty much walking through 300 corruption right now and I have the following:

43% Block Chance
49% Block Effectiveness
62% Armour in Human form / 71% Armour Spriggan
Starting and improving 5K+ ward in spriggan form
30% Endurance
Res Capped
2418 Health

Not even close to being one shotted unless I stand in the fire or a one shot boss ability.

What is the dmg increase on your minions?, i have + 850% cold dmg increse and i never see that in the nrs, i only do 500 to 1k dmg non crit and 2 to 2.5k crit dmg.

I don't rely on my minions to do damage, the 10 totems I deploy are for freezing things and buffing / healing my shaman. My build is in the original post as a guide.