OMeffigy Yeah, Shaman buttons generally feel good! It's a fun support class. With the agility changes, slow also becomes impactful earlier, where before it was often not worth casting even into the 30s if your group had good DPS. I'm not a fan of the low duration of slow now, but lower mana cost / lower duration offset is definitely better for all leveling content in this game.
I hope a proper tuning pass takes place in the first few months of EA to rebalance / rethink cannibalize options and the 80% healing reduction debuff. I don't think a designer thinking through all the impacts would build the class from the ground up to give the player a button that causes a very high uptime and massive healing reduction. I think it was a bandaid while they focused on other areas for getting the game ready.
Comparing Consume 3 and Consuming Pact up until the late lvl 40s while self-buffed, you will wind up with roughly 28% more mana regen while using Consuming Pact in an ideal way, so essentially trading 28% more mana regen for 80% reduced healing received most of the time. That gap increases fairly substantially if you have a bard in group, versus just being self-buffed. That tradeoff between mana regen in exchange for not being able to receive meaningful healing is an incredibly odd design choice for a class though. I don't think designers or armchair devs would come up with that type of tradeoff if this was not already in the game.
