"We are going to go a little bit quicker through the remaining questions in this" - Dratnos as he makes a 48 minute video. (Not complaining. Love the yap)

I like how you read “different eras of the gam” with an almost straight face. That poker face 🕶️

you knew exactly what you were doing to shaman players with that thumbnail

Elemental Shamans have a great potential raid buff in Skyfury Totem. It can be a smaller version of what that ability currently does or make it equal to the crit buff Mark of the Wild was in DF Beta

Speaking on unobtainable things, I remember when some locks were getting very pissed when they changed getting our lock specific mounts doing the long and expensive quest chains, to just giving them to new players. Same thing happened for obtaining green fire quest chain. My personal thought was "they're cool, let them have them".

I would like them to add the following functionality to default enemy bars: If a mob is targeting you with a spell show the player portrait on their HP bar (like target of target) without having to actually target them to make it more easily identifiable in larger pulls for when to press defensives.

Look, i'll be honest, I'm in a heroic raiding guild but I personally play the game mostly on vibes and collecting transmog. I'm one of those people who checks out Icy Veins or Wowhead at the start of a patch, maybe tweak one or two talents to suit my preferences, and then immediately forgets most theorycraft. Seeing someone effortlessly connect all the mechanical dots, deep inside the meta matrix, it's very interesting to watch.

I fully believe that tanks should need consistent healing throughout both raid and M+. As a healer, I hate this meta where every tank is self sufficient, as it pushes encounter design to constantly smack DPS senseless to keep us busy, exacerbating the burst vs. defensive nonsense. Whatever happened to HPally and MW being tank healers in raid? I haven't seen a raid healing talent build that focuses on tanks in years, and fully believe this has led to the recent identity crisis HPally has been going through. The difference between a good and bad tank should not be how much healer attention they need. The difference between a good and bad tank should be whether they live or die.

“Stoneskin aura” -5% physical damage taken. “Anti-magic aura” -5% magic damage taken

I really enjoyed this set of videos. There was a lot of info, so you breaking it down with commentary was a great listen. Keep up the great work my dude.

That's a lot of words for "We're not doing shit about defensives and healing".

For someone with ADD that struggles to read all of this, I absolutely love these videos Dratnos. Listening to you reading it out lout while commenting is absolutely a banger for me

Blizzard and "we are talking about it", the iconic duo.

As a main pres healer this makes me sad in multiple ways. 😔

Can’t wait to face off against Jimmy McThirdBoss

the thing with the heal-evoker range is that it is indeed gamebreaking in many cases. 30y instead of 40y doesn't sound like much, but thats actually 44% less room covered. factor in that Dreambreath, one of your most important healspells only hits 1/3 of that circle and people have to play in roughly 18% of their usual playspace to stay in full healrange. run a high nokhud with more than 1 ranged dd and heal it as pres. granted 1 ranged DD you can fix with your mobility, but 2 make some fights straight up nightmares, if the people don't know to play perfectly around your weakness, which they most likely won't. then progress Fyrakk Mythic prenerf as an pres. good luck on not falling behind in dispells when the raid has to bait frontals. That fight was in terms of healpatterns near perfect for pres and despite that hardly any pres could play the boss. Granted after the nerf from 4 to 3 debuffs you could play 1 pres, since the healers got a bit more slack, but having 10y less on dispells is just such a stupid reason to get benched/switch specc on a mythic endboss. Nyume was also cancer. And no, your mobility does not outweight these problems. Because while in theory you got many mobility options and are among the most mobile classes in the game, you get forced to use a lot of it for throughput or it is straight up suicide to use in hard content. Dreamflight - cast for throughput Verdant Embrace - cast for throughput thanks to call of ysera and lifebind. Also most likely ability to kill you if used on anybody but yourself. Fly with Me - Priests/Hunters best Def-cd Hover - not rly better than monk rolls or druid mobility. Now you might argue that hover lets you cast while moving and you get spatial now... except that does not work on the spells you actually have to stand still for in the first place, because empowered spells for some stupid reason are the only spells in game you cannot cast while moving no matter what. That leaves blizz with 2 options, which are both shit: 1. You overtune Pres in stacked combat, like they did in Season 1 & 2. 2. You accept that Pres is not viable on certain encounters.

as korki said your Ele & resto raid buffs are your nice attitude and caring personality

For the boss parrying a grace period and also being unable to parry while they were casting would solve a lot of the issues. There's really not a lot of the skill expression they're looking for when you get parried because the boss spun around quickly to cast a spell on a random raid member

Pareto efficiency!! From a fellow cal alum, much love dratnos

"We can outweigh preservation evoker range limitation in other ways" Good luck on that. I am guessing preservation is either buffed to meta or falling off the charts in TWW season 1.

Man watching dratnos come to terms that he's old now at the end of the video was a nice cherry on top of this vid

dratnos is a RWF contender for best mind in game design

If Dratnos was the lead in WOW, it would be 100x better. He actually understands what's going on in the game and has a ear to the floor. His takes are measured too.

I agree with basically every point dratnos made except the target cap situation. The higher keys go, the more it penalizes melee. To time big keys you have to double, triple, or even quadruple pull at times. A fury warrior is doing the same damage as if you single pulled, therefore, it can never be meta unless it is colossally gapping every other dps spec at 5 targets and ST. To make a conscious decision to bring melee to keys because they have better kicks to deal with stops feels awful compared to bringing them because they do comparable damage to all present enemies

The responses they give as a whole make sense, the problem lies in them not implementing, nor iterating on, their own stated design goals fast enough, or at all. As an example, on the aoe cap: currently a ret paladin will rough equal an outlaw rogue on most 'regular' pulls in most keys, and then leave them in the dust in an AA pull. Outlaw needs to be very far ahead of them on 8 target pulls but its just not the reality, and in fact in season 1 when outlaw was doing very well in dungeons before people were geared enough to do mega pulls, they got nerfed 3 weeks into the season. I also would have liked wowhead to ask them why some ranged specs have ridiculous amounts of cast-while-moving, e.g. fire mage, while melee are getting their range reduced.

the survival with lack of healing and the grips, especially on fights like tindral and fyrakk were a raid buff in their own for DK this tier, so i feel DK will always be a great tank pick even without a raid buff technically.

calling hunters mark a proper raid buff is laughable. it's not even equal to a warlock healthstone in value and it's not even REMOTELY close to the other classes raid buffs.

Shaman should bring either WF (3% haste aura) or buff Mana Spring to actually be something that makes healers less stressed and can throw out more heals. DK should just have a Leech aura.

Them "talking about it" is the new PR answer. For more than a decade it was "we went too far"

Regarding Morgan Day's response to the possibility of visual updates on hero talent abilities: My immediate counterpoint is: you do have abilities that do the work of identifying the class, and you also have abilities that have their spec fantasy written all over it. When you pop wings, you know it's a paladin. However, when you see a shield flying, you know it's a prot paladin, and when you see a huge mega sword coming out of the ground, you know it's a retribution paladin. So, why not apply this vision to a few of the hero talent abilities? It's not like you have to sacrifice one or the other. A very good example of this done correctly is Frostfire Mage. Although some have complained that the art still looks underwhelming, when you see a frostfire bolt being fired you KNOW it's a frostfire mage. The ability very clearly has the hero talent imbued in its visuals.

As a healer, the healer answer is infuriating... "We're aware of the problem people have been shouting at us for over a year now but we're not going to do anything about it yet but we promise we're talking about how we might do something long-term"

as someone who missed both wrath naxx meta protodrake mounts by 1 or 2 achievements it still annoys me to this day that they're the ONLY glory of the xyz raider mounts that were ever removed... like please bring them back in some way, as someone who played relatively actively since end of vanilla i wish they would make a lot of these temporary cosmetics available again

defensives are the biggest problem with healing

There was rambling, but I liked this rambling. This was fun rambling. =)

Regarding the aoe cap question, I've been playing my shaman alt in S4. both enhance and ele have some uncapped aoe, but so much of their power seems restricted to their cleave via flame shock spreading, it feels pretty bad putting in the work to do that cleave, but still doing way less damage than other specs in big pulls, where you literally can't spread flame shock to everything...

Still have nightmares about Jimmy McThird Boss

The active defensive meta definitely also makes lower-tier play worse because people just don't use them correctly. Healing ~10s is incredibly stressful right now because you're trying to do your job and fix problems but each missed defensive or failed mechanic even in 10s is way too punishing, and if you dont respond to unexpected damage almost instantly, that person is dead before the next global. I just want to help my buddies get their portals, but this defensive problem is creeping down even to 'normie' keys and as a result lower-tier healers are also feeling just awful. I'm not an expert, my top keys for this season have been 11s, but healing in this game since I started in Cata has never felt as bad and frustrating as it does right now. Its not just a top player issue and hearing they have no plans to address the core issue is very disheartening.

it takes blizzard literally 25 years to work out that ice themed bosses can have blue and white as contrasting colours that both fit the theme and fire bosses can have yellow and red. until now apparently it was orange on orange and that was it

Having taget caps, especially hard caps as in enhancement shamans case will only ever be concidered ok as long as the specs with hardcaps by far top the dps in a low-target aoe scenario (4-6 mobs). It feels awful as an enhancement to be slightly above average within our target cap and do half the damage of other classes in bigger aoe, which often is the metagame in m+. If blizzard wont tune it to that level, remove hard caps

Why did they take horn of winter from Dk?

Never failed as many keys due to healers just not being able to heal certain fights as i have in S3 and especially S4. If "normal" people in pugs aren't able to heal a non tyr boss on lower keys then something is wrong.

I feel like anything that is considered legacy (i.e. 2 expansions ago) should be attainable, whether you were there for it at the time or not

They definitely need to add more support specs. If support as a role is viable, there needs to be competition. I think hero talents are a great way to allow existing specs to choose support or pure DPS, without needing to spin up entirely new specs. Blizz really dropped the ball by not adding more support specs via hero talents imo.

Talking about pvp, especially BGs, i love the defensive creep, because i hate when one shots are the pvp meta and be over reliant on healers.

We really ended the video on existential dread.

Dratnos I don't wanna put you on the spot, but since you have a direct link with devs/Ion, I ask you to make a case for Chain Harvest. Shamans have suffered Primordial Wave for too long.

Just give Shamans back their exclusive Bloodlust/Heroism buff. Problem solved. Or give Ele Shamans at least the Arcane Intellect buff in totem form or something.

Dratnos, I never want you to look at how long your videos are. Yap away and hit publish.

I'm struggling to understand the "We don't necessarily want every class to have a raid buff but we'll give one to almost all of them, making the outliers look even worse" philosophy by Blizzard here

"Defensive Creep Addressed." Whoa! I think you guys should discuss it on PoddyC

Defensive bloat is a direct result of the communities negative reaction to WoD pruning. So every expansion they feel the need to add 3-4 abilites. We even get mid expack reworks specifically to prune classes like ret paladin

Completely agree on the tmog elite/mounts etc. And doubly so on new players seeing stuff. Oh didnt play and goblin BFA? Well that huge bronto thats the only AH mount in the game? You'll never have it.

Jimmy McThirdBoss already giving me nightmare of Tyran weeks.

DK doesn't need a Raid Buff. DK is similar to Warlock in we don't have a quote on quote traditional Raid Buff. DK bring Anti Magic Zone like Warlocks bring Health stones DK brings Grips which may not always be useful in every encounter but when it is useful it is down right almost Mandatory like Warlocks Gateway is similar in that aspec. If DKs are crying about not having a Raid Buff just stop you bring unique Raid utility. There is always a spot for a DK just like Warlock. The only class that have no Raid Buff is Elemental and Restoration Shaman. Blizz can easily fix this by giving them Enhancements Windfury just add in a clause that Windfury Totem gives a Caster effect like a % Haste boost like 3% or something to the Shaman that cast the Totem for Elemental and Restoration.

The healing answer is frustrating. They might be able to help with better health and damage tuning, but it’s an uphill battle when some classes have 5 defensives. I’m worried we’re in for another expansion of “will this one shot me” roulette. God forbid a health bar actually convey useful information to a healer.

"Gul'Dan being 8 years ago is... not a good feeling." :D

One thing with the mage tower items from legion. when released you could only use them in there spec. now you can use them as class. for people who played/play one roll alone those that feels super shitty now. but with the rules blizzard set of you can use them as the right spec... if you change who can equip them you need to change how to get them.

Time for Stormlash Totem to come back.

for the aug chapter: i keep hearing the big content creators talk about the disparity between turbo optimized aug stuff and everyone below top 20 guilds. you'll hear "spreadsheets" a lot but do they just not know how many different websites are out there that you just plug in a log, and it breaks down every 30s window of the top 4 people doing damage that then just plugs into the aug's peronsal MRT note to glow their frames at those times? i feel like there are SO many more groups that are doing the exact same thing he's talking about at much much lower levels.

For aoe caps I hope they tune it so a 5 cap aoe will do more dmg then an uncapped on a 5 pull.

Yep they didnt address the healing problems at all, looks like im not healing in TWW

Honestly feels like a bunch of politician speak. Every season they agree the healer situation & defensive situation is rough but then they make it continually worse while promising long term solutions. It's also crazy to see that they think Aug is strong in raids. Outside of the world top 20 guilds, augment is legitimately one of the weakest specs in the game according to logs and has been for two seasons now. The visuals are also the same old story as private auras, they promise to make these things better and each new raid make them substantially worse. They heard people needed dust for visual clarity on fights like Raz and then 2 seasons later we get Nymue

I think are clear outline to swirls would solve a lot auf problems.

The thing i dont like about raid visuals most is boss encounter rooms/areas. They used to be thematic with some cool art work, now they all look like bland / empty platforms. Also I dont think Challange Mode sets & Cutting Edge can be compared. You need to be in a very good guild and good amount of time to commit to it while Challange Modes was just an event and can be doable by any kind of players.

Wow a little adventure into game theory

8:47 so, I assume hero talents are permanent and stay after tww and for future expansions. I find this a bit worrying, they have to balance +1 power creep

If the goal is to want to bring elemental and resto for a reason other than a raid buff what is it? Why haven’t those tuning knobs worked, how do you plan to adjust them? What are the tuning knobs in the first place, for raiding utility ele gives nothing. Same for resto outside of link but the use case for that in the current healing situation severely devalues that ability. Dks have grips and amz (plus they are inherently tanky)which are there that only need to be buffed to make them more valuable. Shaman has nothing, mana spring gives one spell worth of mana per an entire fight, the tuning for it only works with fire side of ele or it would give effectively nothing per fight, so what we talking about here.

The raid buff answer about Shamans is completely unacceptable. Something needs to be done about this, I don't want to reroll, I want to play Ele Shaman

I'm always amazed at the devs to talk so much without saying anything. They're closer to politians pandering and working on an electoral campaign damage control or an official supreme court deposition than game developers collecting and responding to feedback. I'd be a lot less mad if they gave straight answers that concisely conveyed what they think and reduced their word count by ten fold instead of yapping fancy terms trying to mask information

They are just genuinely answering questions in bad faith. I don't think they are stupid and don't understand the question, so when people ask "Oh, we couldn't see swirlies under Rasz" and they answer "you can now see your outline" - that is completely not answering the question, and is just acting in bad faith because the issue wasn't not seeing myself, I can put a WA with a cross in the middle of my screen, it won't matter one bit if the wing is hiding the swirlie. It's fine to avoid questions, it's fine to say no, but they could at least say that instead of just giving BS answers to questions not asked.

so much for keeping videos 20 mins or less

have you ever been to atascadero CA?

I heard Packleader is OP against Jimmy McThirdboss

They are not rebalancing AoE cap at all, Outlaw is gutted on higher keys and it sucks so much to play. I'm done playing Outlaw as Blizzard has consistently shafted this spec.

the fact that wowhead did not ask any info on shaman changes shows they are tied to blizz and they probably said don't ask me about blue people bietch i own you.

Affliction isn’t a good example but I get your meaning either way.

Buffing and nerfing classes because of Mythic plus really screws over people that raid and the forgotten players who do pvp. I've been saying for a while that mythic plus is not good for the game due to the nature of how it works.

In other words, some classes get left out of content due to lack of utility, but they don’t plan to fix it. Got it.

fI don't know why shamans don't have a raid buff. the have had them in the past, and the simply bring them back at a bare minimum say they give 5 percent crit. Better for some, and meh for others. However, 5 free percent crit because you have a shaman in your group is still 5 percent crit. and crits are nice!

I do not thing making healers weaker while keeping defensives where they are is a good decision. Tune the damage to be healed ONLY by healers and remove most defensives and I think we’ll be in a happy place, anything else is delaying the inevitable . Also removing healer CD’s/making it more attrition based is terrible, I want to feel powerful. Some attrition is fun but removing all spiky instances would be boring in my opinion.

"Requires extreme skill" More like "required a bunch of gold".

It feels really bad for tanks to not need healing for healer side of things. this is a trinity game and healers exist they should be responsible for health bars. Which currently they are not.

talking about outlaw rogue in AA.. try arcane mage or enhance shaman. arcane has 5 target cap and enh has 6 targets

so Shaman never going to be better in 5man unless they do enough Damage that they do same damage as Top dps with a buff. So their personal damage has to be so much better to accommodate the buff being missing.

more Support specs please

47:49 welcome to middle age gamer

I d like for shamans maybe to be able to flex a buff. Might be nice, oh you miss a mage no problem! Obviously they dont stack

My general take on exclusive stuff is probably pretty controversial but.... if someone is going to be upset over someone else getting something cool, that person's opinion is NOT worth caring about. If someone's value is derived around the fact that they have an in-game cosmetic other people don't have... that person needs therapy, not catering to.

If parries during boss pull are anything else but irrelevant issue, we can safely say the game is too good :D

Rip shamans you died when evokers came out😂

Now that Microsoft own Blizzard maybe we'll get an Excel tab in game so we don't have to look online

Aug should just be turned into a tank or normal dps spec and Blizz should abandon this support spec idea. It's not Blizz's fault, the community is just too stupid for it to accept it. Everytime Blizz tries to make a spec or talent build that's easier but not as powerful the community's response is exactly the same: " Fuck that, just 'get good'". I anticipate that by Last Titan or possibly even Midnight, Blizz will have correct the mistake that is Aug.

Don't think they put any thought in brewmaster.

shaman raid buff = take away lust from mage, hunter, and Evo

yo dratnos

They need to delete aug or turn it into a new tank. Its either broken OP or not playable.

Blizzard has this mindset of "we can't change anything big in the middle of an expansion" or even a patch sometimes. And I think thats the stupidest thing ever. If its broken, FIX IT.

If they have a class balance philosophy what is driving the same classes every expansion to be S tier? Has there been an expansion where mage wasn’t S tier? Hybrid tax should never be a topic of conversation anymore because all DPS specs bring utility. As a shaman main I just don’t see what I’m getting for my money.

Dratnos depressed himself after thinking about Guldan being 8 Years ago. heads up buddy, age is just a number

They don’t have to remove abilities just need the amount of dr from defensive and the. You can properly tune everything. I don’t think removing buttons a spec or class has always had is the answer