Shaman Totems vs Paladin Blessings

[MongoJerry]

A guildmate linked to this incredible comparison of how shaman and paladins buff their raid parties in raid encounters, written by Halipusi of the Refusion guild. It is honest and fair and needs to be linked far and wide, because many people who have never raided as a Horde player don't understand the issues with the shaman totem system. As more people understand these issues, they will also come to understand why Horde raiders are up in arms about the latest nerf to Windfury. I'm reprinting the post here in its entirety (with minor formating edits):


Is The Alliance really easier than The Horde?

While I have seen many topics about this, I think most of them don't explain the situation well enough, at least not to the people who don't already know.

You will see many raiders on these forums who don't know. You might want to think that people are just trolling, but big portion of them simply don't know. Some are Horde raiders who don't know what Paladins can do, and some are Alliance raiders who are completely off with their estimates of what Shamans can do. Not all people know, and even people who have played from day one and are in respectable guilds can be unaware. They raid, collect epix, and believe what they want to believe. They read some random things about the matter, see all the whines but don't understand. They know that players will whine about almost anything. Sometimes they have valid reasons, many times not, why would their whines be right this time?

Horde most definately has it harder than the Alliance. I will mostly address only buffs now, because I'm not writing a book.:)

What Horde should know about the Paladin buffing system:

Paladin buffs his raid by giving a blessing of choice to all people. Paladin targets class, and the all members of that class gets blessing for 15 minutes. Other Paladins do rest of the blessings, because a player can have one blessing from one Paladin. BOK = 10% all stats BOS = 30% less threat BOW = more mana than manaspring, BOM = 185 attack power. You can have these all at the same time. Only need 4 Paladins. Fifth Paladin for Blessing of light. Paladins can also judge an enemy, including raid mobs, the most famous is the judgement of wisdom which gives attackers mana back. Paladins also have auras, and using an aura doesn't interfere with blessings. That's it, Alliance is ready to go.

What Alliance should know about totems:

Shaman can buff his group of 4 plus himself, which makes 5, but many times the buffs the group needs don't help the Shaman. Elements are fire, earth air and water. Only one totem of each element can be placed at a time.

• Fire: Frost resistance totem. (also searing totem, pew pew, it's not a really a buff, but ok on paper, the range is just sad in raid encounters). Other random useless totems. <>
  
• Earth: Either Strength of earth for 77 str, or tremor totem. There is also stoneskin, and some other funny totems that don't get used in raids. Earthbind is here too. <>
  
• Air: Grace of air for 77 agi, windfury 20% chance to proc 1 extra attack with some extra attack power, nature resistance 60 (doesnt stack with hunters aspect), tranquil air 20% less threat. <>
  
• Water: Mana spring, healing spring, fire resistance, poison cleansing, disease cleansing. Oh, and manatide too, for those who specced it! It's like a tide of mana!!<>
  [st]Only one of each! Totems cost mana, combat time (global cooldown for each) and don't move and have limited range.
  
  Myth: 5 Shamans can buff 25 people.
  
  Well, it's not really 25 who gets buffs, read on. Let's look at a typical raid, my guild uses 5 Shamans, sometimes less, rarely more, it's not worth it to bring more. 5 Paladins fully buff their raid of 40. 5 Shamans can only buff their groups, which is 25, inlcuding the shamans. That's what people think, 40 vs 25. Sounds bad right?
  
  This is not the whole truth. It's actually much worse than that. These "25" people are never fully buffed, and it's not just because of some elements holding many useful totems that can't be used at the same time. Remember that only one of each can be down at a time. Sadly, Air holds most of the good stuff: Windfury, GOA TA, and also nature resist totem. You must choose only one.
  
  Problems with buffing power:
  
  1. Air totem. Horde DPS warriors can have windfury but they do not get any threat reduction. At the same time alliance warriors have 30% less threat, 10% more of ALL stats and blessing of might for more attackpower. DPS warriors, while nice dps, are very high on aggro even without windfury. Horde rogues get either GOA or WF, and again no threat reduction.
     
     Also, you cannot use poisons, sharpening stones or any other buffs (like the nice ones in Naxx) on the weapon same time with windfury, if you do you do not get windfury.
     <>
     
  2. Basic group makeup leads to lack of buffs on these "25" people. In every raid there will be groups who will have a Shaman in them, but the people inside groups would need different buffs.
     
     Shamans: They are buffing other people, and mostly don't benefit from the totems themselves much. You can give yourself manaspring, but none of the melee need that. Shaman does nothing with the buff from windfury totem example, because they buff their own weapon with different version. Most of the times only buffs shamans benefit from are mana spring and tranquil air, but many times don't have these. Shaman isn't always buffing a group of 5, he is buffing a group of 4 if he doesn't need the buffs.
     
     The guys with the imp: This warlock doesnt get Tranquil air because he is buffing melee usually, and has to take whatever the shaman gives to the tanks, in other words nothing or possibly mana spring.
     
     Now if you have read and understood points 1 and 2, the real amount of people who are getting the buffs that fit their class is around 20. Also, these 20 aren't getting all the buffs shamans have in theory, only some of them.
     
     20 partially buffed people.
     
     And this under optimal conditions. I'll try to explain in more detail a comparison what Horde gets versus Alliance.
     
     Alliance gets:
     Everyone gets 10% more stats (it scales), 30% less threat for everyone except for the tanks of course, blessing of might for melee, blessing of wisdom for casters. Judgement of wisdom if they feel like it. I almost forgot, they have auras too, especially the one with armor is nice.
     
     Horde gets:
     Rogues: WF or 77 agi, 77 str, some don't get any
     Warriors: WF or 77 agi, 77 str, some will be without
     Mages: No buffs
     Locks: No buffs
     Hunters: 77 agi, mana spring (sometimes hunters get none and mages or locks get buffs!)
     Healers: mana spring for almost everyone! Possibly Tranquil air, but it's not a problem that needed for healers honestly.
     Also, if we don't have enough Mages and Warlocks in the raid not getting buffs, some others from random classes won't get any because they don't fit into the groups.
     
     Do you notice that even Horde spellcasters don't get TA? It's not that it's bad thing to have 20% less aggro, it's that Horde can't spare any. While all Alliance players has 30% less aggro. Sometimes we can give mages and locks TA, but then healers can forget mana spring.
     
     This sounds worse. So is this the whole truth yet? No of course not, like I said optimal conditions.
     <>
     
  3. Group makeup in certain bosses. When I say certain, it actually happens all the time.
     Some bosses require or encourage different group setups and positions, and these kind of fights almost nobody gets what they want or need from the shaman. If it's an Alliance raid you can move people around and not lose anything. You do that in Horde raid and there is almost nothing left.<>
     [st]Myth: Horde has more powerful buffs
     
     So wait, in Shaman friendly encounters Horde has half of the raid without buffs, and the other half only partially buffed. Surely to balance this, Horde should have more powerful buffs? But Horde doesn't. Mana spring is weaker than Blessing of wisdom. TA is weaker than BOS. For meleegroups, WF+SOE, and GOA+SOE are weaker combos than BOK+BOS+BOM.
     
     Myth: Tremor totem owns against fear.
     
     It doesn't. It breaks fear in pulses, it doesn't prevent them. Fearward is better. But it's okay, it's not Paladin ability anyway.
     
     Myth: Grouding totem, the totem that absorbs spells must be awesome!
     
     Grounding totem doesn't work on anything major. In other words, it doesn't work usually on raid mobs. This awesome PvP totem does nothing for raids. Yes, the time when it worked in Huhuran must have been unintentional because it doesn't work on other boss abilities anywhere either, never has. Horde doesn't have any crazy tricks like bubble pulling, or shielding a caster so they can aoe without any danger.
     
     Some questions you might have about all this, with my answers:
     
     Q: Why didn't you talk about this Blessing, and that totem?
     
     Because either blessing of crap or totem of poo are not relevant to this. I'm trying to keep this (relatively) short.
     
     Q: Well if Shaman fail at buffing, how about other areas, Shaman must have clear advantages somewhere else, right?
     
     That would make sense, but it is not so. Many consider Paladin to be the superior raid healer. Shaman is supposed to be the burst healer, and Paladin the mana efficent one. With current basic raiding gear, the paladin also burst heals pretty well and cheap. Flash of light with right gear is no joke, and like the shamans LHW it is fast cast 1.5 sec heal. There is really no need or space for here to go in full detail about this. Paladin has superior and cheap multipurpose cleanse, Shaman can only cure poison and disease with higher manacost than cleanse, and also purge enemies which is very rare in raids. There is one boss where Shaman is better cleanser, this is Viscidus.
     
     I could try to think about some cool tricks shaman can try to pull with self res or totems, but then I should also include what paladins can do with 6 second stun with HOJ, shields, lay on hands. Again, Shamans have really nothing major over Paladins here, and Paladins have some great stuff. Shamans can't self res first and then start ressing other people anymore either.
     
     Q: Come on, BOK BOS BOM BOW aren't that good anyway, right?
     
     Blessing of kings is simply awesome. Better than the old blasted lands buff for tanks, but this buff is nice for everyclass, and they all get it. More int than AI for example, am I right? Blessing of salvation doesn't just make aggro management easier, it ables your raid to do much more dps. Horde can't l2p or outplay that, they just have to do less dps. If you have read above how horde raid works, you'll see that tranquil air is a joke. It is not just 20% vs 30%. Tranquil air just fails. BOM is fine, BOW is better than mana spring, and all of these move with alliance all the time.
     
     Q: Judgement of Wisdom, what's that?
     
     I guess I should mention what it does since It's mentioned couple of times. After Paladins judge a mob, players attacking it will gain some of their mana back. I can't back this up with numbers, and I have seen some figures of 59/70 mana per 5, depending on class and spells/attacks used, and it's quite a big deal but I can't tell how correct those numbers are. According to thottbot, it's 50% chance to gain 59 mana back when attacking.
     
     Paladin needs to get close to refresh this because it doesn't last very long, so obviously there are some encounters where it can't be used.
     
     Q: Are you being fair by using 5 Shamans in your example? Why not 8 or some other number Shamans?
     
     Yes I am. 5 is sadly better than 8, while those 3 extra shamans would be giving some more buffs to people who don't have any, they would be taking spots from more able classes. Besides, if you wanted to get all buffs from Shamans you'd need much more than 8:)
     
     Q: So you want easymode too or something?
     
     No, nobody should have easymode. I just want things to be fair. Shamans and Paladins should be different. Different but equal. I'd settle less than equal actually, but Horde needs buffs or Alliance nerfs, and I think buffing Horde would be easier and fair. It's not hard to buff PVE without it having impact on PVP.
     
     Q: Shamans had their review, didn't that help?
     
     In Horde vs Alliance raid balance, almost no change. If you asked Blizzard they will say that they lowered totem costs and increased duration and are monitoring the changes, but if you have read this wall of text so far you see that's not even close to fixing this imbalance. What is really scary is that it looks like "we are monitoring this" is just hot air.
     
     Q: But this is insane, surely Blizzard wouldn't let this be like this? They must be aware?
     
     We (or atleast me and most others) honestly don't know how aware they are. Atleast the ones responsible of our talent review didn't bother to fix our problems, at least not yet. It is entirely possible that their smartest guys are working on something else, like burning crusade or other projects, I don't know. It could be a horrible oversight, or intentional, but sounds kinda evil, would create more friction thought. Who knows? But when they "buffed" our totems last patch, it doesn't look good at all.
     
     Q: Wait, are you saying it's possible that Blizzard doesn't understand the problems?
     
     Sounds nuts, but it's possible. Few points you should consider:
     • Lot's of people work on this game, and while we don't know details, we can safely assume that people working on dungeons aren't necessearly doing balancing of classes. <>
       
     • Tranquil air. The way this was, and still is handled should make you think. This totem was introduced after release of BWL, when there was lot of discussion how alliance outclasses horde in raids, and especially how horde had nothing like BOS, they gave us TA. The beauty of TA is that by just looking at the stats and ignoring everything else, it SEEMS almost as good as BOS, but if look at how it can used in raids, and have paid attention, you now know that BOS is a raidwide passive aggro reduction of 30%, and tranquil air is extremely situnational and will leave your dps classses without buffs. TA is not adressing the problems it was supposed to. While I can't stress enough how bad TA is compared to BOS, I admit we use it in Vael, and Ouro. <>
       
     • Last patch. The changes didn't address our problems, and Blizzards response.
       When players said that the totem duration increase and mana reduction were a lackbuster, we were told
       "they would be keeping an eye out on how the changes work out". Can you imagine anyway they could be
       monitoring this?<>
       [st]Q:horde PVP, alliance PVE QQ more n00b shut ur mouth crybaby!
       
       That is a bad argument, and also a myth. Alliance, and the Paladin is very strong in PvP. So is Shaman. Also, even if for some wierd reason somebody thought palas arent good in pvp, it still has nothing to do with raid balance. Raid and pvp are unrelated, for some this is hard to understand, but it's the truth. Should they have made Paladins worse in PvP when they got greater blessings and thus even better in PVE? Of course not.
       
       Q: Why are you undermining Alliances accomplishments?
       
       I'm not. Some alliance guilds are doing well because they have good players. I don't think many chose easy mode by purpose, it doesn't say easymode anywhere in the faction description. This is not meant as an insult.
       
       Q: So if it's not working as intented, where is the outrage?
       
       It is spread out over time. When a new boss gets introduced, and if it's broken you can see million whinethreads, and Blizzard usually fixes it unless his name is Cthun or Ragnaros. Even those got fixed, but it took time. This faction imbalance is not something people see right away. Some people figured it out before the launch of the game. Some people figured it when they were introduced to raiding. I didn't know what alliance has in their arsenal before I was raiding bwl. Every day more and more people know, but it's not an outburst, it's not obvious unless you have extensive knowledge of the game.
       
       Conclusion
       • Alliance has better manaregen, offensive power, mobility and defensive power in raids. <>
         
       • Even under optimal conditions, around half of the Horde raid is unbuffed. Alliance has stronger buffs, and everyone has buffs. This means that the difference in buffing effectiveness is more than double! <>
         
       • In mobile encounters totems either lose effectiviness, or are useless. <>
         
       • In Bosses which require something else than standard group composition, generally less than 10 people get meaningful buffs, if the shaman bothers at all because it is frustrating to buff one person in a group with totems that still cost mana afterall. <>
         
       • Shamans, or Horde have no perks over paladins to make up for this. <>
         
       • This has been broken for more than a year now. Recently released 1.11 was shaman talent review. If that was not time for fix, is Blizzard ever going to do it? <>
         
       • Blizzard has not made honest stance on this of yet. Everytime we get sort of a reply regarding the issue, the real issues get dodged, and we get served with somesort response along the lines of "well you don't maybe have this, but you have this and that". The problem is, these generalizing answers always point to a Shaman perks that, honestly don't exist. Just an example, it's been like this for a year <a href="http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general&t=8840551&tmp=1#post8840551" target="_blank">http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.a...p=1#post8840551</a>
         No offence to him, he is probably a CM, not developer, but this is what we get. <>
         
       • We have heard few vague noises of possible changes to Shamans in 1.12. I can't describe it better than that. We have not seen or heard anything about that since. There is no reason to even think this is probable. People were expecting things in 1.11 too. <>
         
       • This is getting old. Really old. Players are getting apathetic. Is Blizzard really oblivious to this all, or is this part of a strategy? We know Blizzard doesn't have a raid team, they need guilds to do the testing of new instances. Scary, isn't it? <>
         
       • Eyonix became "the enemy of the shamans" on US forums, because instead of giving Shamans more info about their conserns, he responded to people making personal insults on him, but what info was he supposed to give the Shamans if the devs have nothing to give to him?<>
         [st]Alliance is fed up of getting called easymode, and Horde doesn't enjoy all those extra consumables, and the knowledge their raid wouldn't be dead if they had had BOK or BOS, or had the raid had more DPS.
         
         What can we expect from new exciting and challenging raid encounters when even the gimpy Horde has to be able to do them? Naxx is already insane moneysink with pots, mats for parts and repairs, and Horde needs to pot more than ever just to have mana.
         
         It's not that it would really hard or impossible to fix these problems. There are lots things that could be done, ranging from changing the totem system to just tweaking it and adding some small stuff, either would work fine. Still nothing is happening... Maybe we will get revenge of Tranquil air, something that seems to fix stuff but does nothing, true essence of Truthiness.
         
         
         UPDATE time!
         
         Something I didn't mention is population imbalance and how this all promotes it. People are already more likely to go Alliance in the worlds most popular game of it's kind. So by having weaker faction at end game, it promotes population imbalance even further.
         
         Now, of course a fresh new player to WOW and mmorpgs isn't thinking about raiding, and we can't know if that player will even end up raiding but when the perception is there that by choosing Horde you are gimping yourself later on, why take the chance? So what I should do is shut up so nobody knows?;)Well, everyone knew already. If you are likely to even see this thread, you already knew about the issue, and whether you knew if it's true or not is beside the point. As long as the perception is there, people will keep talking about it, and it's not fine when "hi i'm newb shaman, any advice" threads get answered with "Get away, don't take Shaman or you'll regret it". Do people really need more reasons to not to choose Horde?
         
         Next, you seen this stuff going on? Perfect example of not understanding the problems. That thread is made after this one, and while is not only wrong, it's implying the wrong things. Nothing wrong with theorycraft, but it needs to be done right.
         
         Browsing through US forums, I have also found some wierd discussion how Horde has advantage on Grand Widow Faerlina. Some other odd bosses are mentioned too, like Maexxna. Both are incorrect. If you have read this thread, you might already understand why. I might explain in detail later if it becomes an issue. Gluth was also mentioned, but having no experience on him I'm not going to comment.