Quote (Confessions. @ Sun, Aug 9 2009, 11:12pm)
i'd like to try it out some time
substituting oak for a skill, have you tried this?
thats my only real concern for making a shaman I'd rather have less fire damage rather than less life
is the damage loss significantly noticeable?
You should not even be using oak in the first place, much less putting more than one point into it.
A shaman's active sage is Heart of Wolverine.
For one, a shaman doesn't have close to enough skill points to spare.
But mostly, oak sage is hideously overrated
Thing is, oak sage doesn't really do much in PvP. Almost every single attack in duels will kill your oak sage before it hits you. And since your +% hp bonus vanishes the same frame it dies, you take damage from those attacks as if you never had it. What good is 6000 hp, if its only 3000 HP while you're getting hit? Your HP doesn't matter until you get attacked, and when you get attacked, oak sage dies 95% of the time.
For example, any splash attack, like fireball, will hit you both, and invariably kill it. Single target things like hammers/guided arrows will kill it first since its a minion stack, and then hit you
Theres almost nothing that can hit you in pvp without taking out your oak. Even whirlwind will hit it as often as you, so even if the first hit is on you, its likely it will die and the next few will strike you
Really, heart of wolverine is the spirit you should have out. In those 95% of cases, it gives you as much +HP as oak would; it absorbs a single hit. On the other hand, wolverine tends to die *AFTER* your grizzly hits someone, not before, and thus you get to benefit fully from its effect. And hell, the entire point is moot, because
if you're tanking with a shaman you're doing something wrong. If you need to play something like a hammerdin or bvc that can tank a million hits, a shaman is not the character to make