Healers Rejoice! but wheres the love for the Chosen?

There's a thread over here on WHA that's trying to garner some player feedback about some possible major changes to the Shaman/Archmage careers, it's a lot to read but there's some pretty interesting ideas on there. Obviously the fist thing these healers will notice is that the SH/AM base damage is being increased by about 25% in the next patch! While I know from my limited experience it takes a long time to kill PvE mobs as a Shaman so the extra damage will be a nice change, I'm not quite sure what the fallout will be RvR wise.

Now the major plan for these classes is a complete overhaul of the class mechanic. For those that didn't read all the post on WA, it will be changing from the current system where casting a spell of one type will add a point to the other types charge, with a maximum of 5 points of one type. They are thinkinig of moving to a scale from 3 to -3. Casting, say, a healing spell will add one to the scale. Damage spells will move it towards -3, and buff/debuff spells will move it closer to 0.

At +3 the healer will recieve a bonus to healing spells and make damage spells less effective, -3 will give a bonus to damage and make healing less effective and 0 will give a bonus to buff/debuffs but the damage & healing spells wil be at normal power.

I think this is a great move, it will allow healer that focus purely on healing to put out some great healing at the expense of not being able to quickly switch to high damage output. This is a much better mechanic compared to an average healing output, with every 5th spell being a fairly powerful quick fire damage dealer. In oRVR and scenarios most of your time (in my experiance) is spent looking at the boxes on squared and healing party members. It's very rare that I would switch to damage spells unless we outnumbered the opposition, so it's not often that I have any points in the one that buffs healing spells making the healing output pretty mediocre.

Adam (at least I think it was him) mentioned possibly having some sort of ability that has a long cool down but allows a quick switch between healing and DD'ing. I personally believe that a better option would be to have an ability with a slightly shorter cooldown that reset your points to zero. Instead of having a 60 s cooldown on a spell that instantly inverts where you are on the scale (eg. -3 would become 3, 2 would become -2) there would be one on a 20s cooldown that just put it to 0. This would still enable a faser switch to damage dealing but would still require a small time to build up to max, but would also be good for a pure healer or DD as they could use the ability to put some quick buffs/debuffs on people and then go back into what they were doing before (again, with some build up).

I dont know if anyone on WHA has already posted something like that, I may have to put it up just in case, I didnt comment on the new top level morale ability they may be adding as I only played the lower levels as a Shaman but its nice to know that they are having a real good look at the classes and trying to address players concerns about them. +1 to Mythic!

Now wheres the Chosen love eh??


In other news Thulf over at Stunty Stomper has discoved a stange new part of the world, but what could it be? New area under development, a testing area for new content, a hangout spot for the GM's? apparently it includes Troglagobs as well. Go check it out now!