Perspective is everything

Delat is now close to level 20. He's a badass caster melee hybrid with some of the cooler abilities I've seen in the game. He has a wolf pet that deals enough damage to pull aggro for a bit. He gets a wolf form that is faster than horses at that level. In wolf form with his pet out, he looks awesome, like D'ivers from Malazan Book of the Fallen.

When I'm out leveling with Delat, I pull one mob with a nuke, hit my instant cast 4 second root, and start nuke spamming. Between pet hate and the root, I can usually get 3-4 casts off before its in melee range. Once in range, I throw a melee dot up, blow my endurance on my better hits, then hit my instant cast root to back out for more nukes. Pretty awesome gameplay. If I pull too much, I can run way at speed because I'm in wolf form.

I played like this for a couple of days, doing the URT quest line. Everything was going pretty good with little to no problems till one of the quests sent me into a cave filled with spiders. Every other pull was a multi pull, which I couldn't handle. I died three or four times clearing the cave to get to the back, one pull from the last group. Once again I pulled and got three mobs. Burned two down before I dropped. When I went back to the cave to grab my tombstone and finish up the quest, ALL of the spiders had respawned. Not feeling another 30 minutes of pulling and death, I was about to leave to go summon my corpse when a sorcerer showed up on the same quest I was on, so we grouped up.

What I saw happen next blew my mind.

This sorc would let me pull, then would one or two shot the spider. Literally took us 3 minutes to get to where my tombstone was. We finished the quest in the time it took me to kill one mob solo. On our way to turn in, we aggroed a group of at level 2-dots, and the sorc aoe'd them down, with THREE hits. After he left the group, I killed maybe 3-4 more mobs before I gave up. My amazing gameplay was ruined.

I know shaman is a healer, but I had thought that a geared, skilled shaman could put out damage close to what a dps class could. Well, now I know better. I figured I could join a group as dps if I wanted, so I could learn the raid mechanics as a class of less responsibility, but no, that isn't possible.

So, after learning all of this, I now have to roll a new class. I was having fun in the shaman, but after seeing how the mobs COULD be killed, combat suddenly feels crazy slow. Once I figure out what I want to play, we'll start this back up.