Shaman seems discordant and messy.

I thought about going earthquake single target and upheaval clear. Not my first pick of power fantasy, but I thought earth powered shaman kind of worked.

I saw that earthquake cost a lot of mana, and upheaval wasn't free so I checked the passive tree for solutions to mana. Didn't see much, but more importantly there was barely any physical support at all. Alright, so let's do some conversion shenanigans, except upheaval doesn't have a lightning spec.

Ok, let's check out the new gathering storm. It had a decent amount of mana support and there are ton of lightning passives, cool, let's pull the trigger.

I've now run into a huge gearing debacle, and at literally every step of trying to solve these issues I run into another problem. Earthquake lightning conversion turned it into a spell, but gathering storm's lightning bolts scales with spell damage, so I can try to work with it.

Started making staves for spell and melee damage. Gathering storm is hitting slow and not generating fast stacks, and then I realize staves can't f*cking roll attack speed. Ok, breathe, I'll make do with other sources and I'll just get another damage affix.

So I add melee lightning damage instead, hoping to make it hit slow and hard like earthquake (which is another issue, but I decided against building cast speed and adding more gear pressure). Gathering storm isn't hitting hard enough and the melee lightning damage isn't affecting the storm bolts that I'm barely generating anyway.

So I start looking elsewhere for buffs. The passive tree has lightning melee here, spell there, spell with minion damage. Only one node that has melee and spell damage.

I bust out storm crows for buffs and hopefully extra damage, but they die constantly. I spec into their dodge nodes at the expense of damage, and I might have to add minion life to my build. Or just not use them, or stand still for 5 seconds every few packs to rez them.

Ok times are tough, let's try crit. But oh wait, earthquake is a spell now so I can't use melee base crit on my weapon and it has no crit scaling in it's tree.

Gathering storm can be turned into self-casted lightning bolts while wielding a staff, so let's go full spell? That clear is a joke and I'm not generating mana for earthquake, not to mention half the staff implicit (melee damage) is dead now. WHY does that passive require a staff?

I can admit when I'm defeated, but I can't find a way to salvage my shaman. A new element? A bunch of skills are missing conversions. Totems? I don't want my totem having all the fun (also want to mention the shaman passive, 50 all elemental resist, would be nice to clear up affix space if it wasn't reliant on having an active totem. Miss it dying in high corruption and goodbye). Minions? Don't want them having all the fun either, and should have gone Primalist then.

I really don't want to go through the campaign again, this guy isn't getting to T4 Julra. I'm just gonna reroll into Falconer when I get home

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