Overview

Shamans draw their power from the spirit realm: ancestors, old forces, and ghosts of the past. They listen to that power rather than command it, and this update shifts their abilities to match the spiritual theme.

We also wanted to focus on their role as enhancers and debilitators. They make everyone around them better at their job and break down opponents to limit their danger, all while keeping their party topped up with health.

Heals

Pact of Renewal

• Form a pact of renewal with your target, restoring Health every few seconds. (This is your main healing tool. It works best when cast ahead of the damage, rather than after it. The line dropped its old “spores" theme, and receives upgrades at more regular intervals.)

Rite of Mending

• Perform a rite of mending on your group, restoring Health every few seconds. (This is a party-wide version of Pact of Renewal on a long cooldown. Save it for a fight you expect to go badly.)

Communion of Regeneration

• Regenerate your group, increasing their Health Regeneration. (This party-wide regenerate is obtained through research.)

Spirit Mending

• Mend your target, restoring Health. (This is your standard heal with a short cast time. It now has an additional rank at higher levels.)

Damage

Shamans aren’t known for their DPS, but they can bring real damage to longer fights. They have two DoT lines with different durations, plus a single direct damage line. Using their resistance debuffs (see below), they can make all of these land harder. Furthermore, their DoTs now stack with those from other Shamans, making multiple Shamans more viable in groups.

Ghostly Blight

• Engulf your target in ghostly blight, dealing Magic Damage plus additional damage every few seconds. (This is your main DoT line, rebuilt from the old poison line.)

Malady

• Infect your target with a malady, dealing Disease Damage every few seconds. (This line was retained, gaining two new ranks.)

Spirit Bane

• Rend the spirit of your target, dealing Magic Damage. (This is your only direct damage line, rebuilt from the old frost spells.)

Debuffs

Debuffs are as critical to the Shaman's role as healing. There are three lines: one slows an enemy's attacks, one drains its physical stats, and one strips its resistances.

Omen of Lethargy

• Afflict your target with lethargy, decreasing their Attack Speed. (This is your signature slow, and often the most useful thing you'll do in a hard fight.)

Omen of Enfeeblement

• Enfeeble your target, decreasing their Strength, Dexterity, and Agility. (This is a great companion spell to Omen of Lethargy, making enemies weaker, less accurate, and less evasive.)

Omen of Susceptibility

• Make your target more susceptible to harm, decreasing their Disease, Holy, and Magic Resistance. (This line opens a target up to everything that follows -- your own spirit and disease magic included. One further change is that it now weakens Holy Resistance where it used to weaken Poison.)

Buffs and Utility

No other class buffs physical power the way a Shaman does. Between the berserker lines, hastes, and resistance wards, Shamans simply make their group hit harder and take hits better.

Tribal Spirit

• Make your group go berserk, increasing their Strength, Stamina, Dexterity, and Agility.
  This spell requires a Ritual Talisman. (This is a group version of the Berserker Spirit line. It’s obtained through spell research rather than a merchant, and each cast consumes a Ritual Talisman reagent.)

Ancestral Wisdom

• Invoke ancestral wisdom, increasing your Wisdom and Health Regeneration, and granting you the ability to see invisible entities and magical effects when considering targets. (This is a self-buff.)

Ancestor's Eye

• Bestow your target ancestral sight, granting them the ability to see invisible entities and magical effects when considering targets. (This provides both See Invisibility and Sense Magic in a single buff.)

Aspect of the Bear

• Shapeshift into a bear, increasing your Wisdom and Health Regeneration, and granting you the ability to see invisible entities and magical effects when considering targets. (This provides the same stats and benefits as Ancestral Wisdom, but with added bonus of looking like a bear. It will be rewarded from a Shaman quest during Early Access.)

Consume

• Consume an offering of your own flesh, restoring Mana at the cost of Health. (Trading health for mana is a defining trait of the class. This spell line remains a valuable source of mana regeneration; however, after seeing how powerful it was, we've added a 45 second cooldown in order to balance it a little.)

Curing Ritual

• Cure your group, removing one Disease effect from each member.

Ritual of Escape

• Cross your group over into the spirit realm, clearing all Threat from aggressive targets and preventing new aggression, rendering them unseen by both the living and undead, granting them the ability to see invisible entities, and restoring Health and Mana every few seconds. (This allows your party to slip away from an encounter to recover. It has a longer cooldown, but can save the day when things go wrong.)

Retained Spell Lines

Healing

• Regeneration

Buffs

• Berserker Spirit

• Disease, Magic, and Holy Protection

• Haste (now called Pact of Haste)

Utility

• Cure Disease, Poison

• Dispel Magic

• Enduring Breath

• Gate

• Polar Alignment: North

• Purge

• Shrink

• Soulbind

• Speed of the Predator

• Speed of the Wild and Speed of the Pack

• Summon Food and Summon Drink

Stealth

• Invisibility (which now grants See Invisible as well)

• Invisibility versus Undead

Crowd Control

• Blind

• Lurching Impairment

• Root

Removed Spell Lines

• Cure Blindness - We're removing this from every class as we work through them. Blind effects are short and rarely dangerous enough to earn a spell slot.

• Electric Protection and Poison Protection - These have been replaced with Holy Protection and Magic Protection.

• Flameburst - Fire spells never really suited Shamans, and they fit even less now that everything else you cast involves spirits and sickness.

• Invisibility versus Beasts - This seemed redundant with Invisibility available.

• Spirit Wolf and Summon Companion - As we mentioned in an earlier update, combat pets are leaving the classes that aren't built around them. Spreading pets across so many classes blurred the differences between them, and the Shaman has plenty of identity without one.

• Spiritual Armor - This seemed fairly useless with the Berserker Spirit line available.

Research and Quest Spells

As you may have noticed in some of the spell footnotes, not everything will be available on a spell merchant.

• Communion of Regeneration and the higher Tribal Spirit tiers come from spell research.

• The Aspect of the Bear line arrives as a Shaman quest during Early Access.

Keep this in mind when testing out the update. As always, thank you for reading and for your participation in our ongoing Beta. We look forward to hearing your feedback after you try it out!