Shaman Starfall Weapon

M

moghedancarns

Dalayan Beginner
I just got this yesterday, and I am a little suprised that the graphic is a dagger. I do not recall any other daggers that are shaman useable. I was under the impression that all shaman piercers are spears, but I could be wrong.

Even so, the graphic is still rusty dagger.

Is it possible to change it to something a little more impressive?
 
In addition to the graphic...


To aquire this weapon...

I had to kill 3 level 29ish goblins together at the same time.
Kill a level 35 rare spawn ghost in Kaladin.
Aquire a rare drop from the tamers in Paw, with an upper 30s group.

At 4/12, it was openly mocked as a weapon last night in guild chat. I should just use it as a range item.
http://www.shardsofdalaya.com/wanelo/items.php?id=3769&charid=1227789

Now, compare it to this...
http://www.angrygamer.net/sodwiki/index.php?title=Guidance_of_Althuna

Heal2 for killing a single level 25 mob and walking 40 feet back to the quest giver.



So, for an item about 10 levels harder to get, the upgrade is 6 wisdom and 20 hp, minus the +2 damage reduction. What is Damage Reduction, BTW? Is it a good thing or a bad thing?

5 str and 5 dex are fairly useless to a shaman, we have buffs for those things. 20 hp is nice. 6 wis is a little more mana pool, but not as important to a shaman as it would be to a cleric or druid. With Canni, we are likely to value HP and Stamina more than wis.

I am having a bit of trouble reconciling this item as worthy of it's difficulty for what is effectively a minor upgrade. Should it not be at least heal3? (and a spear)
 
damage reduction reduces the damage on all htis and spells by the number of reduction in this case 2.

mob hits for 10 normally now it hits for 8.
mob nukes for 4000 now it nukes for 3998.

As for this item it does seem like somethings worng if the lower lvl quest is easier and produces a similar result. however the other starfall is very powerful for shaman and thusly makes up the difference at least in my opinion
 
I agree the earring is very nice.

However, do you feel that it is ok to use a crappy shield if your sword is pretty good?
 
That isn't a reason the shaman dagger is bad, it's more of a reason the torch is ridiculously good, which isn't really a secret. I agree that the poker should trump the torch in focus effect out of principle, but whether that's accomplished by a nerf to the torch (a bad idea, in my opinion--it gives newbie healers some sugar without doing anything bad to the economy because it's nodrop and isn't useful forver) or a boost to the poker is anyone's guess.
 
As one of the people who got the Spiritist's Athame early on, I can say initially it was VERY gimp. That one you're looking at now IS the upgrade. A better graphic would have been great, such as a spear of some sort (the dagger is pretty lame), but other than that I'd say it's pretty spiffy.

The earring was upgraded as well. And that earring is possibly one of THE BEST Starfall items. 1 sec cast 35% mana-free slow?

I'm damn glad to have that one. I think the shaman rewards are darn nice. I'm not sure I'll do the rogue ones however. Maybe the bowl...dunno. Cloak isn't all that special from what I can see though.

The SK stuff was pretty decent too. Got both of those. The staff is nice. BP is decent, but is a tad low on the AC side. Has nice stats though. Would have been better if the proc on BP was a right click though. All in all good stuff :)
 
Stats on the Athame are great as they are. I'd say they're above average for a starfall, and they're far superior to the torch, unless you're tanking and getting hit by a lot of level 20 or so mobs. Your statement that hp and sta are more important than wisdom is definitely not true. Hp:mana is far less than a 1:1 ratio with cannibalize. While I don't know the exact numbers, what it comes down to is that hp means a lot less than mana; and 6 wisdom works out to between 36 and 60 mana--10 mana per wis until 200, 6 mana after. 60 mana and 20 hp is damn nice, and generally superior to something that'll reduce the damage that you should almost never be taking by just a couple percent.

Suppose you're getting hit for an average of 50 a pop. The DR 2 will reduce that by 4%. Given that you have about 800hp, that's around 16 hits, or 32 hp saved. Two ticks of regen tops, and probably less than one tick once you get chloroplast. That's assuming you're taken down to pretty much zero.

I suppose if you had a crappy tank who couldn't hold aggro the torch might be worth using for a while, since you'd probably get beat on a bit each fight until the warrior got aggro back after the slow. But assuming your tank doesn't suck (that is to say, assuming it's a pally or sk ;) ) the Athame is the way to go.

Of course, given the difficulties of the two quests, the rewards are probably a little too similar. But hey, whatcha gonna do.

I'd say that the Athame is pretty well balanced, but if an upgrade is needed, something along the lines of Recovery I (II would probably be overpowered) would likely be the way to go.
 
It's not so much that the knife isn't better than the torch, it's that the knife isn't better enough than the torch. Getting the torch is damn near a freebie. This isn't a problem with the knife, it's a problem with the torch, but a lot of people would become very sad if there was a nerf to it.

Also I think I speak for every enchanter that's had an add be made unmezzable by that goddamn sk bp proc when i say eat a butt luciferblack :p

Starfalls aren't perfect, everyone has differing views of whose is good and not good, which quests are easy and which are hard, et cetera. I still think the enchanter bracer quest is way hard for the expiration-date-cursed, low-stat-havin' reward it has (2 agi, 2 dex, 20 hp/mana and a focus effect that basically is "here save the 200 pp you'd spend on a royal crown", which is very nearly outclassed by a miela bracer you can get in fifteen minutes? and the quest is hugenormous? yiiiiish). The shammy starfalls are fine, in my opnion.

Thinkmeats said:
(a bad idea, in my opinion--it gives newbie healers some sugar without doing anything bad to the economy because it's nodrop and isn't useful forver)
Click to expand...

I've changed my mind on this. The torch is way, way too good for how easy it is to get and deserves a good thumpin' with the nerf bat, either by making the quest longer or the item weaker.
 
Wisdom provides the immeadiate effect. Its really good stuff for a Druid, and Clerics will seek out all they can get. With a shaman... a shaman isn't going to be kicking wisdom out of the bed in the morning, but it ain't his first love, either.

Shaman are about TIME. Slow the Mob, stretch the time. Regen yourself, stretch the time. Our damage is DoTs, because our DDs are envied only by hybrids. Time.

Mana and HP are resources in the way that coal and wood are resources.

We burn coal because the effect is greater, per pound, than burning wood, per pound. Similiarily, Wisdom provides more up front mana than does HP through conversion. However, just like coal, mana is a very finite resource and is created at a very finite pace. It is desired that this be this way.

HP, however, is like wood. Wood is an effective fuel, less so that coal, but very cheap to burn, considering. It can be brought back much more quickly can can coal. Given all the options shaman have for replacing the HP in a fairly rapid manner, the shaman can afford to burn the wood.

Still, without the proper perspective, you will not see this in the proper light. Wisdom provides so much mana... in the course of a fight, the HP conversion really only provides the shaman with an equivilent amount of mana as a druid would have in the same fight with the added bonus of having to actively do something to achieve that equality.

Now progress to the next fight.

The druid is constrained to the slow coal recovery process. Over the course of the second and susequent fights, the coal is being depleted. The time between fights must increase.

The shaman, however, mixes he coal with wood. He has the same coal recovery as the druid, and can add to that the wood recovery. This is the cruxis of the issue... after the first fight, pool is no longer as important as recovery.

Now back to the build of the shaman, the shaman is about time. The druid will blow their mana and will either win or lose at that point. The Shaman will stretch time. Using the longer fight, asnd using the HP conversions availibler to them , as well as the HP recovery tools availble, over the course of the now longer fight, the shaman will have a far greater total mana pool than the druid.

The only fear is running out of wood... thus the desire for the largest HP pool availble. This also allows the shaman to stand toe to toe with powerful monsters when the requirement is there, as it often is... our spells have a lot of taunt and need to be cast as earliy as possible. Be it the pot luck nature or just bad luck on occasion, the abilities of a tank to hold aggro are usually found wanting, at least up to the levels I have experienced.


I am not disputing the greatness of the earring. I question the dagger, mostly because it is a dagger. The whole of it seems slightly out of kilter. If it is as it should be, so be it. If it is not, then... it seemed remiss to not at least ask.

However, the largest question still remains, is it really supposed to be a dagger (base level 1 graphic dagger at that) and not a spear?
 
An athame is a ritual dagger, so the only thing you could change is to give it a little fancier graphic, which is pointless, since just about everyone is going to use this as a range. I've found that the newbie rusty dagger model is used a lot even for fairly decent daggers such as the Reznolaw Fang, when on live the "Dragoon Dirk" model was used more often, and it's not seen much here for some reason. I was also happy to see some kind of high-end dagger was using the dagger model that the barbarian rogues used on EQLive with the ring on the hilt, those things were badass and I never did see an attainable weapon that used that model on live.

Also... I played a shaman on live for 4 years, and I know this game is not live, but the basic concept of each class is the same, and wisdom is absolutely useless for a shaman. The best part of the class is the fact we get the best mana regen in the game with the canni line. Combine this with our ability to tank somewhat and slow (albeit 25% lesser than live, unfortunately), and HP is by far the most important stat a shaman could ever get. It doesn't matter how much total mana a shaman has because if you play a high-end shaman right, he should never run out of mana in the first place. This fact renders the whole concept of a manapool void.

Personally I'd use the torch over the starfall, the 2 damage reduction is pretty nice. I don't think the torch should be nerfed, but I think the quest should be a little more complicated. Healing Increment 3 would be nice (necromancers get Affliction 3), but the athame isn't exactly a bad item. The earring is pure sex for a few levels after you get it.
 
Hey Thinkmeats...read my post again. I said it woulda been nice if the BP was right clicky instead of a proc...yes...I've been annoyed that the proc has gone off on a few occasions. :( I like the effect, but it would have been much nicer as a clickable effect...too much of a liability if there's to be any CC I guess. But since I don't always have a chanter around, I'll suffer through it. ;)

So I did the rogue bowl quest...and um....wtf? I equipped the item and I didn't see much increase in overall damage at ALL. Poison Dmg 1 .... weak. Right click cure poison? Oh okay, that could be handy...oh...it's self only...yeah. Weak. I'd go so far as to say that that rogue quest may be the most gimp of all Starfall rewards... Generally I think they're all useful, but that one is pretty sucky. I thought at first that the one extra dmg would bump up my dmg a bit. I didn't notice anything exciting. You would think that especially backstab damage would be noticable. It wasn't. Can anyone confirm that this thing actually works?
 
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