Spirit of the Leopard

[skittzy]

I know there may be some questions already around the power of this spell, so before I make a suggestion/request, I want to state that Spirit of the Leopard is a relatively crucial aspect to having enough dps to win some elemental fights right now. Without it, there's a good chance that we would end up dying due to not being able to kill a mob before we run out of health and mana. This becomes extremely noticeable on the fights where I can only throw out Spirit of the Leopard on one or two people, and only a few times throughout the duration of a fight because the fight requires so much attention to healing, curing, slowing etc.

That being said, even against bosses where I am able to reliably keep spirit of the leopard up throughout the duration of the fight, my god is it a chore. And maybe that's a fair trade-off for what it add's in terms of dps, but it really just takes so much away from the class. Rather than doing anything else in the Shaman's toolkit (Healing, Curing, Dots, Nukes, Pet stuff etc.), I just cycle targets and constantly cast Leopard.

So, a massive QoL suggestion for Shamans (imo anyway): Could we give some thought and consideration to lowering the level requirement on "Talisman of the Panther", or maybe create a new spell based on the Talisman version, named "Talisman of the Leopard"? This is the group version of the shaman damage proc line spell, and it becomes attainable at level 71. Obviously, with this being a higher level spell, some changes would have to be made. The mana cost and the amount of damage that the proc does would need to be lowered. With the group version, this proc would have a much better uptime on your group, so you might even make the damage proc a lower amount of damage versus the single target "Spirit of the Leopard" spell (which is currently 300 dmg per proc). Lowering the damage on the group spell would be a trade-off for the utility/benefit of being able to cast Leopard on everyone in your group in one go. 

Personally, I would be more than happy to use a "Talisman of the Leopard" spell, that I can hit everyone in my group with at once, even if it is only doing 200-250dmg per proc, rather than having to cast a single spell over and over on multiple people that does 300 dmg per proc, as the single target version does now. It would make my life easier, and give the shaman class a lot more utility to be able to assist in healing, curing, throwing out dots etc. These things would all go a long way when the boss fight can take anywhere from 3-10 minutes to finish.

You could even throw the spell on a vendor and make me pay an obscene amount of plat for it, or give me some crazy quest to do to obtain it, if you didn't want to just give it to people. Doesn't matter to me, as long as I don't have to cycle targets and just spam 1 spell anymore

[cringe]

I'm of the opinion that the game would overall be better without the puma line at all (it is out of era for PoP anyway), but then yes, hp across the board on raid targets would need to be significantly reduced, probably at least 30%. Do your parses show what percentage of the damage comes from it on our targets?

[Chuckles]

The puma line of spells is on the list of things we need to address. Being an out of era spell, it is quite OP as we can all agree. It adds ~120-150DPS on each player/pet.

As a fan of the Shaman class, I can agree that its a pretty nice spell but very tedious to cast (by design). As it stands, it makes having a shaman in your group almost a mandatory thing, which isn't necessarily a good thing. Maybe a group of players would prefer not play a Shaman. In which case, they miss out on a huge bump of DPS which no other class can provide.

I'm not really sure what path we're taking at this time, we've discussed a lot of things, including taking the line of spells out (which I don't really want to do). More likely, we'd reduce the proc rate (or maybe the damage). A normal weapon procs with a modifier of around 50. Puma procs with a modifier of 400 for some reason.

As for the group version of the spell, its not something we've really considered. It would further emphasize the requirement for all groups to have a Shaman. Creating a custom lower level version of the spell would also be doing the same thing. We're trying to stay as close to "normal EQ" as we can.

If the elementals are nearly impossible without Puma, then the elementals most likely need to be addressed as well.

[skittzy]

I'm completely open for any solution that means I don't have to cycle spam puma the entire fight, even if that's removing the spell line entirely or making a major change to it. That said, it is important to keep in mind, regardless of what happens to puma, that puma does currently play a critical role in dps. Whatever changes are made to puma, will likely have a direct impact on the difficulty of content, so we will want to keep a close eye on PoP/VT raid mobs in particular post-puma change. I mention VT just because of the sheer amount of HP that some of those mobs have.. I'm sure it would still be doable without it, but we might be back to the point where we were before mob HP in there was originally nerfed and fights were taking 10-15 minutes each at minimum (w/ puma).

[Grandfather/Cuppah]

I believe the main issue with modifications on fights is that we only have one (maybe two?) group(s) of folks who can do the higher ones, and they work pretty damned well together.
Whatever mods are done would still need to be re-evaluated once some of us lower skills get up there.

[Deleted]

Good God man, seriously?

1. Puma is around 75-100 DPS. I've got thousands and thousands of log lines to demonstrate this. It's not really fair to consider spell criticals on procs either, since that has nothing to do with the shaman.
2. Puma is not game changing. You can't keep 4 targets puma'd without going OOM. If you're healing, it's much faster.
3. Monks with elemental weapons are probably at 500-600 DPS while disc'ing. Shamans going OOM to get 350-500 is probably fair.
4. If you remove this spell, or make it worthless by gutting it, every shaman will just reroll beastlord, and instead of having a 10% gain on slow, gets a raid tank and perma 500 DPS. Oh, but beastlords can't off heal! Yes, they can actually. Manastone is better than all the cannibalize spells combined.
5. Clerics and warriors ARE mandatory. You can't use that justification here. Literally nothing about shamans are mandatory. Slow is obtained from 3 classes. A much higher DPS group can be obtained by other means.
6. There are other ways of getting the DPS. It might be time to use something other than bitching on the forums to get through content. For example: not every combo needs to be melee/healer, or gee, maybe consider getting more players.

[Poar]

Yeah Puma is nice because if you wanna play a tank it actually allows you to kill things at a decent pace but its not fun to use at all. Maybe if you reduced the proc rate and increased its duration it would be less mandatory and less of an annoyance allowing shaman to use their mana for other things rather than maintaining that buff.