Shattered Kingdoms

Personally, I like voodoo as it is. It's quite easy to live through if you know what sanctuary is.. If someone voodoo's you, they can be gated to for about a minute while at the same time they can't do a single thing to defend themselves. You get voodoo'd, have your friends gate to and gank the offending shaman.. very simple.

now IFsome change MUST be made, I'd say maybe give the targeted party a warning when the voodoo cast begins (EG "Angry spirits begin to coalesce around you!") time enough to "get sanctuary/spirit-aura backpack;quaff sanctuary/spirit-aura".

Voodoo, just like everything else in the game CAN be a win button IF your target is not prepared for it. EG Don't have ironguard, you get ganked by iron wielding undead; don't have stone skin, get 1 shotted by a rogue; don't have resistance you drop in 2 hits to bolt of glory; so on and so forth.

[Rant]Since everyone is talking about scrying, i'm going to throw in my two cents there as well. I do not believe the abyssal tower should have been shut down. It SHOULD have been left in place, but with the ability to scry PLAYERS removed. It was an invaluable tool for learning where things were that you couldn't find. I felt it quite reasonable to die in order to track down some hard to find thing that I'd been locating for months but could never bloody find. If chair one showing a single room peek wasn't enough, I'd have to die if I wanted to figure it out. Not to mention the PiTA it was to get in there.. I would like to see something like this put back in the game. I do feel that this would be a fair trade to shamans, but at the same time do not feel it should be required to roll a shaman to figure something out that I can't find any other IC method for, not to mention that the IC knowledge wouldn't be transferred back to the character who actually wants the damn info in the first place. I know someone is going to say "just ask a shaman to do it for you", to that I say "how many people would really be willing to kill themselves to help someone else find a NPC/item" it would suck always having to deal with people wanting you to go off and die so they could find a piece of gear.. I'd get annoyed pretty quickly methinks.[/Rant]

I agree with Nokuro. I love how casters are expected to be completely and totally prepared with all spells/skills up, armor enchanted, vials, wands, staves, and scrolls galore ready at the belt (all of which are available to most melee classes as well) - but still aren't allowed to have an "I win" spell. Have you ever seen what berserk does to a caster? Let's just get rid of that as well. It's too much of an "I win" skill.

I like all of the scrying ideas. Other games have a self-rez for shamans which I think is pretty cool.

A corpse required ressurect with no xp loss, I think would be one of the better replacements for voodoo if removed.

Why is scrying even on the table? I would think the ability is limited to a few methods for a reason.

Only problem with scry is that its what... a million times better than voodoo is now? Firstly, for voodoo to be any good now you need to be a sick jew like algon and roll a gnome, and then get a full set of mana eq. The eq being by far the most important part. How many people are actually out there dropping 900 damage voodoos on ppl without dolls? None. Most shamans aren't gnomes, they aren't gm, and they don't have mana eq. 99% of the voodoos I see do like 30% damage. Second any sort of scry, especially one that you can't see, it's absurdly useful. Knowing where people are obviously pays massive dividends, almost as much as having a twinked out shaman on your side. So your turning an ability that only 1% of shamans ever use at an imbalanced level to an ability that 100% of shamans can use no matter how [REDACTED] they are. I mean shamans are already a sick class. Basically you'd be taking away an ability that most of them don't even use, and giving them a mad useful ability that will just make them even better.

As much as I hate to say it - this is kind of a good point.

Seems like an easy way to balance? Let it paralyze the shaman like voodoo does now, and give a vision to the one scried so there can be a counterattack.

If voodoo is removed then the class will be just fine. They don't even need an ability to replace it.

Give them Magneto's MvC3 Gravity Squeeze, make it cost a load of mana and disable a random opponent's limb and require a re-casting of Spirit Aura afterwards. Done.