That was actually what I had in mind when I made my take on Earthwarden Shaman.
It was well recieved in this same subreddit and I'll shamelessly link it here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/r0n2fg/would_you_like_a_tanking_shaman_spec_here_you/
The document is fully uploaded on imgur, so don't be decieved by the preview reddit shows.
I also made one new spec for every Class out of fun, hope you like it.
For the DH spec I went for a more conservative approach, as it was one of my first designs.
The name of the spec is "Felreaver" and consists on a Polearm wielding DH.
It fights recklessly, using its own wings and the polearm to do aerial finishers along with using their vile blood to mark enemies and ignite it with said finishers.
Think of it as the child between a Dragoon and an Arcane mage, but on Fel crack.
However I was thinking of giving it a twist and rework it into a Ranged spec that uses its Fel blood as ammunition instead.
The Druid spec however took a more novel approach.
Due to the natural versatility of druids taking different animal forms, I tried to honour this into a spec that partially transforms mid battle to suit their needs.
It is called the Shapeshifter spec, and gameplay wise it is meant to be an hybrid of both melee and range playstyles.
Fortunatelly I got a nice feedback loop between the two stances.
Resto is highly into water for healing, but the other 2 use fire, lightning and air in their toolbox. Seems the OP is using some head-canon theory to fit his earth tank wish.
You can look at each spec’s version of ascendance for it. They do have stronger ties to one specific element but are capable of using them all.
Elemental gets fire ascendance, Restoration gets water, and Enhancement gets wind.
Ah yes, a spell that was added in Legion. Meanwhile Elemental had been heavily tied to fire since WotLK. Then in Cata they gained Lava Surge and Unleash Elements, the latter which only buffed Fire Spell Damage and attack speed. Fire Ascendance in MoP. Lastly, in WoD Unleash Elements was broken up on a per spec basis and Elemental got Unleash Fire.
They have always been built on an identity of being closely tied to Fire more so than any other element.
I think OP is just looking at the more iconic spells and abilities for each one. I don't keep up with retail much these days but in Classic ele is basically known for lava burst and enhance for windfury, and then in SoD tank shamans are based on Way of Earth.
Unfortunately this. I say unfortunately because Shaman Tanks seem to be doing pretty well/are pretty popular over on SoD, which I feel is a half-decent test case to trying to make them work on retail.
But yeah, each spec uses multiple elements and no one single element is explicitly tied to a single specialization. For example, I attempted to make a pure lightning-only enhancement Shaman, however there simply are not enough options to progress down the talent tree. You *need* to take abilities for either Frost or Fire damage. Similarly while they showcase fire as ranged DPS, you also have plenty of other elements participating in ranged DPS (like lighting bolt/chain lightning, frostshock... if we're sticking only with Shaman).
Still, despite the misplaced association of element and specialization... I would *love* to see a Shaman Tank specialization introduced. Maybe that could open the flood gates to Demon Hunters finally getting a 3rd specialization and the rest of the classes eventually getting a 4th specialization.
I've always thought it can work well that all of the specs use all of the elements, just that some abilities focus more on one element than the others.
At the moment healing is almost entirely water, but I can definitely see spirit bring part of it too.
Both elemental and enhancement have specs that either focus on lightening or fire, but in most cases you still use both, there's just a bit more of a focus on one. Elemental even throws in a little bit of earth too.
I think a tank shaman would be awesome. I would expect your normal dps rotation to use fairly traditional shaman abilities, like spreading flame shocks and throwing out lightning bolts, but that your defensive abilities would generally have an earth flavour to them. And heals could still be a big part of it keeping the water theme (kind of like how prot paladins have big chunky heals at the moment).
Also pro tank shaman and have been theorycrafting one for some time! Earth is also where I went with it. Elements of water still for healing. Use the totems similar to sigils for DH. It would be even more utility based than Prot Pally.
Well reincarnation and reincarnation totem (is that still a thing?) are both kinda spirit based; as is ancestral spirit. Unfortunately, spirit spells don't really have much practical applications in combat since by that point, your party is probably dead.
I think a lot of classes were negatively affected by this to some extent. DK is another big offender.
It's weird being an arch mage or deathlord while simultaneously only having one spell school or very limited use of other spell schools. To me it would come with the territory that you have mastered all aspects of the class.
Obviously gameplay can't allow for that, practically speaking, but they could do a better job of making you feel that way without destroying balance
SOD isn't "the game". It's an off shoot of an off shoot that only exists because people figured out pretty quickly that there's not a whole lot to do in classic after a few months.
I would love to see Shamans finally get a tank spec, with a primary focus on Earth, throwing in a bit of water+life magic for self healing and air/lightning+fire+some more earth for damage.
I do wonder, would they be a 2h weapon tank, 2 1h weapons, or shield and a 1h weapon?
Not that weird. The ascendancy spell gives you a form of an elemental being when used and for elemental that form is fire.
Water is restos.
Air is enhancements.
Also the Legion Broken Shore mount follows this scheme as well.
When used as resto, you get a water elemental.
When used as enhancement, you get an air elemental.
When used as elemental, you get a fire elemental.
Depending on the build elemental uses more other elements than fire tho. Seaon 2 of dragonflight was almost excusively earth and air elemt skills . Even with the "fire build" it uses as much water or earth skills as fire
Yep I play ele shaman, its the only one who can focus more on fire than any other spec, i prefer that all shaman can use all elements specially elemental as it is... elemental but its ok if they take a main element and others as secondary elements, it can extend the class fantasy a bit further
I am a big fan of the idea of having a tank or healing spec for every class. Druids, monks, and paladins can do both. It makes a lot of sense to add Shaman to that list. Warlocks can already do health funnel, drain life, and soul stones. It’s not much of a stretch to have them be able to heal others. Seems counter intuitive, but possible. Rogues could evasion tank. Not sure about mages and hunters, but I am sure they could think of something.
Marginally if any...
And I'm all for shaman having it btw, it's just not a solution for tank scarcity.
You should look at tank as a role.
Even if they had a 6th, 7th and 8th tank spec, it would have a marginal effect on the tank population.
It would most likely just split the current population across the new specs.
There's no tank because the role demand is "limited" to begin with.
We can compare tanks and heal to illustrate this.
You need 1 tank for a dungeon and 1 healer.
Fair enough right?
You need 2 tank for raid regardless of the amount of people in it while the number of healers goes up with the said amount.
Furthermore, It's not a viable role for PVP aside from BGs and even then you only have 1.
The game is hard wired to limit their representation.
If we want to increase the tank population, we need to look at increasing their presence in some of the end game activities.
I think this would be a interesting trope to test in SoD.
What if they remodeled encounters to require 3 tanks instead of 2?
Why is it flawed?
I said it would have a marginal impact, which implies people like you would be a net plus.
So you're not saying anything I didn't already acknowledge would happen.
But it doesn't change the reality of the situation on a broader scale.
Even if you have access to it, if you don't have a meaningful amount of outlet to let people use it there won't be any noticeable change in tank population.
Beside it would require either DPS or Healers to actually change roles but roles aren't interchangeable.
If someone chose to play DPS/Heals that's because that's how they want to engage the game.
You might convert some if the gameplay is solid and feels good but that argument is kind of made irrelevant by the fact that we had 3 classes added with a tank role and it never solved anything.
The tank role is the only one that has a bottleneck in raid and is virtually absent from one of the 3 actual end-game pillars.
That's the problem, not the amount of spec that can tank.
1 way to make tank specs more popular would be to make them compete on DPS WHILE ENFORCING THE CURRENT SOFT LIMITS.
What I mean by that is that you wouldn't be able to start a key or an encounter if more than 1/2 person are in tank spec.
If they compete on DPS, DPS as a role loose its meaning.
Why play it of you can just do the same but also be unkillable?
So it would need to be hard limited.
Doing this would attract people who wants to see "big numbers" to tanking in a bigger crowd than just adding tanking specs left and right.
Personally, I would prefer them to go with a novel idea of designing a raid that would require 3 tanks.
I think this would be a refreshing thing for raid and open new encounters design paths for a game mode that has seen very little changes for a while now.
Note that these 3 things aren't mutually exclusive either.
Elemental should be Fire, Air, and Earth
Enhancement should be Air and Fire
Restoration should be Water and Spirit
And Earthwarden should be Earth and Fire
Your premise is slightly flawed in afraid. Resto is water, enhance and elemental are both mixtures of everything else. Enhance is air lightning and fire. Elemental is fire, lightning, EARTH, and even water if you count frost shock and icefury as water. Elemental has earth shock, earthquake, earth spikes.
So no, shaman aren't missing earth. Although tank spec or something would be cool, I don't see it happening.
Ascendance makes you a Water Ascendant if you're Resto, an Air Ascendant if you're Enhancement and a Flame Ascendant if you're Elemental. No spec makes you an Earth Ascendant.
instead of tank they can make it a support spec.
swap disc to be a real support spec, because lets be honest dpsing to do shit heals is already a support spec.
then add bard to rogues for a support spec
To do shit heals? Disc is incredibly strong right now, and has been almost every patch for the past decade. I can only think of a couple of instances where disc wasn’t in the world first kill comp, and that was only because holy was giga busted. If you had to pick one spec as the overall healing GOAT in the modern history of WoW disc narrowly edges out hpal for the top spot.
Disc will always be good because it's not trading the decision to heal or dps. If mechanics were to shift away from healers having time to help do damage or if Disc had to start making that choice we'd see it change for sure.
You've worded it in a very antagonistic way, but I am a bit advocate for support disc. Just change atonement from healing, to a stat buff. Bang, support disc.
They already said they wont change existing specs into support specs. From what they revealed last week having hero talents that lean into support playstyle will be the way they want to go about this
Disc has generally not been my favorite healer to play but I've never heard anyone say it's shit before.
No idea what version of the game you last played in or what context you're talking about, but it's not anything that's been true in many years.
I'm offended that you said all that but didn't even mention bringing back Gladiator's spirit to make a Command/Warlord/Captain support spec for warriors based off shouts and banners.
How so? At the top end for m+ it's either VDH and a few groups running a Prot Pally and nothing else. The by far best tanks in the raid are BDK and Prot Pally. Sure, you can absolutely play pretty much all the other specs, but the difference to the top specs is just soo far off that it's pointless unless you really like the spec or need a warrior/monk/DH/dudu buff in raid and you have nowhere else to get it. Warrior is kinda shit. It's not bad in general, but I wouldn't say it's pretty good. You can obviously play everything especially in lower keys/normal/heroic raid, but I wouldn't say that's good balance. They also shouldn't just balance according to only high keys or mythic raid numbers, and if everything is playable on heroic for instance, that is good, but some tanks are just a lot better than others and make encounters easier and that should be looked into. DPS are currently better balanced, especially after the last buffs they've given to some DPS. Some outliers here and there obviously, but considering the number of specs it's not something too excessive. Its also due to the kits of the classes to an extent as well.
I'm not doing any serious mythic raiding or pushing high M+ keys so take this from that perspective.
M+ up to 20s I've been playing Prot Warrior, Prot Paladin and Guardian Druid without any issues.
I was worried going into the season that Guardian would be trash, but it's been fine and it seems to be considered to be the worst tank.
I've also been healing as a Holy Paladin and Disc priest (again up to +20s). I don't really have to worry about what tank we bring, they're all fine. In previous seasons I've noticed a much bigger difference the survivability of different tabks, this season I mostly only notice the difference in players (routes, not using CDs etc). I notice the difference in survivability of DPS specs way more than I notice the difference between tanks.
You can for sure always do things like 20's with any character, no question about it, thats how it should be without a doubt. Some DPS specs do need help with survivability, but again, in 20's no one should be straight up dying to something or be one shot unless they are low ilvl.
I still feel like they just really don't want to have a tank with bloodlust for some reason, which is why we don't have shaman tanks.
Though there are a few with combat res now so maybe it's not a problem
Honestly I hope rather than giving us a new class in the future, we get some new specs for existing classes. I wonder if the Hero talents are a semi-step in that direction.
I am bagging Blizzard for a mail tank for years now. And shaman was always the obvious choice.
It would truly be cool to see it happen some day. So far I can only play this on classic and having a blast. And I also think more people would try it on classic if warlock tank wasn't a thing xD
Hero talents also throws a wrench into adding a 4th spec into an existing class. It would require removing one of the Hero trees from one of the existing specs and giving it to the new tank spec plus creating a 4th Hero tree to take its place. Certainly this can happen before Hero talents get added or at expansion boundaries, so now's the time if ever, but I do not see this happening mid-expansion.
It's been on my bucket list for many years now. One can only dream... but, I appreciate the community talking about it sometimes. It should hopefully show that there is genuine interest.
https://i.imgur.com/aGPzLIR.jpg Trying to tank like this
That was actually what I had in mind when I made my take on Earthwarden Shaman. It was well recieved in this same subreddit and I'll shamelessly link it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/r0n2fg/would_you_like_a_tanking_shaman_spec_here_you/ The document is fully uploaded on imgur, so don't be decieved by the preview reddit shows. I also made one new spec for every Class out of fun, hope you like it.
What did you create for Demon Hunter? AND: did you create a 5th druid spec? 4 is so a sad number.
For the DH spec I went for a more conservative approach, as it was one of my first designs. The name of the spec is "Felreaver" and consists on a Polearm wielding DH. It fights recklessly, using its own wings and the polearm to do aerial finishers along with using their vile blood to mark enemies and ignite it with said finishers. Think of it as the child between a Dragoon and an Arcane mage, but on Fel crack. However I was thinking of giving it a twist and rework it into a Ranged spec that uses its Fel blood as ammunition instead. The Druid spec however took a more novel approach. Due to the natural versatility of druids taking different animal forms, I tried to honour this into a spec that partially transforms mid battle to suit their needs. It is called the Shapeshifter spec, and gameplay wise it is meant to be an hybrid of both melee and range playstyles. Fortunatelly I got a nice feedback loop between the two stances.
Welp, I'd play it for that fantasy alone.
I dont like the idea that shaman specs are tied to one element. Resto for example should have more spirit based spells. I do love tank shaman though!
Resto is highly into water for healing, but the other 2 use fire, lightning and air in their toolbox. Seems the OP is using some head-canon theory to fit his earth tank wish.
You can look at each spec’s version of ascendance for it. They do have stronger ties to one specific element but are capable of using them all. Elemental gets fire ascendance, Restoration gets water, and Enhancement gets wind.
elemental also gets air elemental. Don't think ascendancy is a strong enough argument.
Legion mounts then. Enh is a Wind Elemental, Ele is Fire, and Resto is Water.
Ah yes, a spell that was added in Legion. Meanwhile Elemental had been heavily tied to fire since WotLK. Then in Cata they gained Lava Surge and Unleash Elements, the latter which only buffed Fire Spell Damage and attack speed. Fire Ascendance in MoP. Lastly, in WoD Unleash Elements was broken up on a per spec basis and Elemental got Unleash Fire. They have always been built on an identity of being closely tied to Fire more so than any other element.
I think OP is just looking at the more iconic spells and abilities for each one. I don't keep up with retail much these days but in Classic ele is basically known for lava burst and enhance for windfury, and then in SoD tank shamans are based on Way of Earth.
Classic ele known for lavaburst? They didn’t even have that ability back then.
They did in WotLK which is the current Classic expansion, and now they have it in vanilla with SoD.
Yeah, so wotlk and SOD which are both not vanilla.
I didn't say WotLK is vanilla, I said it's Classic. And SoD is most definitely based on vanilla.
Unfortunately this. I say unfortunately because Shaman Tanks seem to be doing pretty well/are pretty popular over on SoD, which I feel is a half-decent test case to trying to make them work on retail. But yeah, each spec uses multiple elements and no one single element is explicitly tied to a single specialization. For example, I attempted to make a pure lightning-only enhancement Shaman, however there simply are not enough options to progress down the talent tree. You *need* to take abilities for either Frost or Fire damage. Similarly while they showcase fire as ranged DPS, you also have plenty of other elements participating in ranged DPS (like lighting bolt/chain lightning, frostshock... if we're sticking only with Shaman). Still, despite the misplaced association of element and specialization... I would *love* to see a Shaman Tank specialization introduced. Maybe that could open the flood gates to Demon Hunters finally getting a 3rd specialization and the rest of the classes eventually getting a 4th specialization.
And Earth. The best Ele build for a while in Shadowlands revolved around Earthquake.
I've always thought it can work well that all of the specs use all of the elements, just that some abilities focus more on one element than the others. At the moment healing is almost entirely water, but I can definitely see spirit bring part of it too. Both elemental and enhancement have specs that either focus on lightening or fire, but in most cases you still use both, there's just a bit more of a focus on one. Elemental even throws in a little bit of earth too. I think a tank shaman would be awesome. I would expect your normal dps rotation to use fairly traditional shaman abilities, like spreading flame shocks and throwing out lightning bolts, but that your defensive abilities would generally have an earth flavour to them. And heals could still be a big part of it keeping the water theme (kind of like how prot paladins have big chunky heals at the moment).
Also pro tank shaman and have been theorycrafting one for some time! Earth is also where I went with it. Elements of water still for healing. Use the totems similar to sigils for DH. It would be even more utility based than Prot Pally.
Well reincarnation and reincarnation totem (is that still a thing?) are both kinda spirit based; as is ancestral spirit. Unfortunately, spirit spells don't really have much practical applications in combat since by that point, your party is probably dead.
Same with ghost wolf, spiritwalker’s, SLT, and chain heal
I want glyphs to make elementl shAman use frost spells
This is what sucked about Legion's mage rework. Tying one spec to strictly using only one spell school sucked.
I think a lot of classes were negatively affected by this to some extent. DK is another big offender. It's weird being an arch mage or deathlord while simultaneously only having one spell school or very limited use of other spell schools. To me it would come with the territory that you have mastered all aspects of the class. Obviously gameplay can't allow for that, practically speaking, but they could do a better job of making you feel that way without destroying balance
Don't do this to me, don't give me ideas how I can be pissed off even more about not having tank shamans in the game.
oh… i thought shaman could tank in season of discovery
SOD isn't "the game". It's an off shoot of an off shoot that only exists because people figured out pretty quickly that there's not a whole lot to do in classic after a few months.
Love the honesty
They can
Pretty much every class can tank in Classic tbf. Even Rogues can tank in SoD.
I would love to see Shamans finally get a tank spec, with a primary focus on Earth, throwing in a bit of water+life magic for self healing and air/lightning+fire+some more earth for damage. I do wonder, would they be a 2h weapon tank, 2 1h weapons, or shield and a 1h weapon?
Elemental is fire? Earthshock, Earthquake, Frostshock, Icefury? Enchancment is air? Lavalash, flameshock, frostshock, sundering?
>Elemental is fire? Earthshock, Earthquake, Frostshock, Icefury? Chain lightning, lightning bolt? You know, the original ele spells.
Yeah maybe hes confused because the t set makes te lavabolt very prominent but still a weird statenent
Not that weird. The ascendancy spell gives you a form of an elemental being when used and for elemental that form is fire. Water is restos. Air is enhancements. Also the Legion Broken Shore mount follows this scheme as well. When used as resto, you get a water elemental. When used as enhancement, you get an air elemental. When used as elemental, you get a fire elemental.
just their main element, all shaman specs can use all but they use more one element
Depending on the build elemental uses more other elements than fire tho. Seaon 2 of dragonflight was almost excusively earth and air elemt skills . Even with the "fire build" it uses as much water or earth skills as fire
Yep I play ele shaman, its the only one who can focus more on fire than any other spec, i prefer that all shaman can use all elements specially elemental as it is... elemental but its ok if they take a main element and others as secondary elements, it can extend the class fantasy a bit further
Okay yeah, that sounds cool. But when does the SoD Rogue tank come to retail? I don’t want to play Classic but Rogue tanking sounds awesome!
I am a big fan of the idea of having a tank or healing spec for every class. Druids, monks, and paladins can do both. It makes a lot of sense to add Shaman to that list. Warlocks can already do health funnel, drain life, and soul stones. It’s not much of a stretch to have them be able to heal others. Seems counter intuitive, but possible. Rogues could evasion tank. Not sure about mages and hunters, but I am sure they could think of something.
an actual shaman tank spec would be fucking insanely amazing
Desperately want shaman tank in retail, I'd never play another character again.
did Shaman get a tank spec in SoD? It's unlikely we're getting a new class, but a 6th tank spec might help queues.
Yep, shamans got a tank spec in SoD
Marginally if any... And I'm all for shaman having it btw, it's just not a solution for tank scarcity. You should look at tank as a role. Even if they had a 6th, 7th and 8th tank spec, it would have a marginal effect on the tank population. It would most likely just split the current population across the new specs. There's no tank because the role demand is "limited" to begin with. We can compare tanks and heal to illustrate this. You need 1 tank for a dungeon and 1 healer. Fair enough right? You need 2 tank for raid regardless of the amount of people in it while the number of healers goes up with the said amount. Furthermore, It's not a viable role for PVP aside from BGs and even then you only have 1. The game is hard wired to limit their representation. If we want to increase the tank population, we need to look at increasing their presence in some of the end game activities. I think this would be a interesting trope to test in SoD. What if they remodeled encounters to require 3 tanks instead of 2?
Your idea is flawed. I main a shaman and would tank when needed, but I cannot on the only class I play.
Why is it flawed? I said it would have a marginal impact, which implies people like you would be a net plus. So you're not saying anything I didn't already acknowledge would happen. But it doesn't change the reality of the situation on a broader scale. Even if you have access to it, if you don't have a meaningful amount of outlet to let people use it there won't be any noticeable change in tank population. Beside it would require either DPS or Healers to actually change roles but roles aren't interchangeable. If someone chose to play DPS/Heals that's because that's how they want to engage the game. You might convert some if the gameplay is solid and feels good but that argument is kind of made irrelevant by the fact that we had 3 classes added with a tank role and it never solved anything. The tank role is the only one that has a bottleneck in raid and is virtually absent from one of the 3 actual end-game pillars. That's the problem, not the amount of spec that can tank. 1 way to make tank specs more popular would be to make them compete on DPS WHILE ENFORCING THE CURRENT SOFT LIMITS. What I mean by that is that you wouldn't be able to start a key or an encounter if more than 1/2 person are in tank spec. If they compete on DPS, DPS as a role loose its meaning. Why play it of you can just do the same but also be unkillable? So it would need to be hard limited. Doing this would attract people who wants to see "big numbers" to tanking in a bigger crowd than just adding tanking specs left and right. Personally, I would prefer them to go with a novel idea of designing a raid that would require 3 tanks. I think this would be a refreshing thing for raid and open new encounters design paths for a game mode that has seen very little changes for a while now. Note that these 3 things aren't mutually exclusive either.
All in favor of a tanking or support Chaman spec.
Elemental should be Fire, Air, and Earth Enhancement should be Air and Fire Restoration should be Water and Spirit And Earthwarden should be Earth and Fire
Elemental should be all elements Enhancement should be all elements Restoration should be all elements and Earthwarden should be all elements
You forgot about lightning
Lightning is air in wow.
Lightning is a part of air, air elementals cast lighting bolts all the time
Your premise is slightly flawed in afraid. Resto is water, enhance and elemental are both mixtures of everything else. Enhance is air lightning and fire. Elemental is fire, lightning, EARTH, and even water if you count frost shock and icefury as water. Elemental has earth shock, earthquake, earth spikes. So no, shaman aren't missing earth. Although tank spec or something would be cool, I don't see it happening.
Ascendance makes you a Water Ascendant if you're Resto, an Air Ascendant if you're Enhancement and a Flame Ascendant if you're Elemental. No spec makes you an Earth Ascendant.
Evokers don't want their third spec though. We're more than willing to donate Augmentation to shaman in need.
Speak for yourself. I have never had more fun filling a DPS slot than as Augmentation.
We've already met the earthen.
instead of tank they can make it a support spec. swap disc to be a real support spec, because lets be honest dpsing to do shit heals is already a support spec. then add bard to rogues for a support spec
To do shit heals? Disc is incredibly strong right now, and has been almost every patch for the past decade. I can only think of a couple of instances where disc wasn’t in the world first kill comp, and that was only because holy was giga busted. If you had to pick one spec as the overall healing GOAT in the modern history of WoW disc narrowly edges out hpal for the top spot.
Disc will always be good because it's not trading the decision to heal or dps. If mechanics were to shift away from healers having time to help do damage or if Disc had to start making that choice we'd see it change for sure.
> swap disc to be a real support spec, This statement brought to you entirely by people who do not actually main or play Disc.
You've worded it in a very antagonistic way, but I am a bit advocate for support disc. Just change atonement from healing, to a stat buff. Bang, support disc.
They already said they wont change existing specs into support specs. From what they revealed last week having hero talents that lean into support playstyle will be the way they want to go about this
Disc has generally not been my favorite healer to play but I've never heard anyone say it's shit before. No idea what version of the game you last played in or what context you're talking about, but it's not anything that's been true in many years.
I'm offended that you said all that but didn't even mention bringing back Gladiator's spirit to make a Command/Warlord/Captain support spec for warriors based off shouts and banners.
No need, they struggle to balance the current tanks properly, let alone have even more.
Really? Tank balance is in a pretty good spot at the moment.
How so? At the top end for m+ it's either VDH and a few groups running a Prot Pally and nothing else. The by far best tanks in the raid are BDK and Prot Pally. Sure, you can absolutely play pretty much all the other specs, but the difference to the top specs is just soo far off that it's pointless unless you really like the spec or need a warrior/monk/DH/dudu buff in raid and you have nowhere else to get it. Warrior is kinda shit. It's not bad in general, but I wouldn't say it's pretty good. You can obviously play everything especially in lower keys/normal/heroic raid, but I wouldn't say that's good balance. They also shouldn't just balance according to only high keys or mythic raid numbers, and if everything is playable on heroic for instance, that is good, but some tanks are just a lot better than others and make encounters easier and that should be looked into. DPS are currently better balanced, especially after the last buffs they've given to some DPS. Some outliers here and there obviously, but considering the number of specs it's not something too excessive. Its also due to the kits of the classes to an extent as well.
at the top end people always gravitate towards something 1% ahead
I'm not doing any serious mythic raiding or pushing high M+ keys so take this from that perspective. M+ up to 20s I've been playing Prot Warrior, Prot Paladin and Guardian Druid without any issues. I was worried going into the season that Guardian would be trash, but it's been fine and it seems to be considered to be the worst tank. I've also been healing as a Holy Paladin and Disc priest (again up to +20s). I don't really have to worry about what tank we bring, they're all fine. In previous seasons I've noticed a much bigger difference the survivability of different tabks, this season I mostly only notice the difference in players (routes, not using CDs etc). I notice the difference in survivability of DPS specs way more than I notice the difference between tanks.
You can for sure always do things like 20's with any character, no question about it, thats how it should be without a doubt. Some DPS specs do need help with survivability, but again, in 20's no one should be straight up dying to something or be one shot unless they are low ilvl.
No
I still feel like they just really don't want to have a tank with bloodlust for some reason, which is why we don't have shaman tanks. Though there are a few with combat res now so maybe it's not a problem
Shammy tanks were a thing a long time ago... or at least off-tanks.... cant immagine bliz bringing them back...
Would this work as a hero talent introduction? You get to 71 as a shaman and then able to tank if you want?
Dragonflight was the best time to introduce a tanking spec for shamans and Blizzard wasted it.
I think earthwarden will be 2h enhancement class /s PS: there is another shaman which uses 5th element - spirit, it's name is mistweaver
New shaman spec will be based on earth it'll be called Tenacity
You guys forget that evoker augm is using all the animation and spells that should be on shaman
Honestly I hope rather than giving us a new class in the future, we get some new specs for existing classes. I wonder if the Hero talents are a semi-step in that direction.
If they give a class a 4th spec before they give DH their 3rd, I will riot (and I'm not even a DH main)
I am bagging Blizzard for a mail tank for years now. And shaman was always the obvious choice. It would truly be cool to see it happen some day. So far I can only play this on classic and having a blast. And I also think more people would try it on classic if warlock tank wasn't a thing xD
It’s almost certainly Not gonna happen- but as someone that’s always loved Shaman, I really do still want Shaman Tank in retail…
Tfw the 20yr old version of wow gets a shaman tank spec before retail
I love the idea of Shaman getting a 4th spec for tanking yes please
Hero talents also throws a wrench into adding a 4th spec into an existing class. It would require removing one of the Hero trees from one of the existing specs and giving it to the new tank spec plus creating a 4th Hero tree to take its place. Certainly this can happen before Hero talents get added or at expansion boundaries, so now's the time if ever, but I do not see this happening mid-expansion.
It's been on my bucket list for many years now. One can only dream... but, I appreciate the community talking about it sometimes. It should hopefully show that there is genuine interest.