Jesus Christ was a Shaman!

The biggest thing we have in common: We both have the power to blow yo' mind!

Please don't get offended at me for the comparison. There is no disrespect intended towards anyone or anyone's beliefs. I just get a smile on my face when I think about stuff like this. What would George Bush be if he were in WoW? A ret paladin if you ask me (and probably a Belf, too). Barack Obama? A warrior tank. How about Julia Roberts? I think she'd roll a Night Elf Hunter--a little exotic, but still just a hunter. 

But what about the big man, JC himself? 

A shaman. Totally. Just like me and William Shatner.

Let's do the list!

• Cure Disease?               Check
• Drive out evil spirits?   Check
• Walk on water?             Check*
• A spiritual leader of the people?         Check
• Cause people to rise from the dead?   Check
• Cause oneself to rise from the dead?  You know it, baby!

*Levitate is not the same thing, so priests can go levitate off a cliff if they want to raise that point. Death knights, don't even get started that Path of Frost makes you Christ-like.


The one weakness with this theory is that I can't quite imagine Jesus' fighting style. I don't recall any scriptures describing him shooting lightning from his fingertips.  There was that incident in the temple when he threw out the merchants and money-lenders that could support an enhancement style. But I always had the picture that he just overturned some tables there.

(actually when I heard that story of Jesus with the money-lenders when I was growing up, I pictured Jesus walking up to a table full of stuff for sale, grabbing the table cloth and yanking it out so forcefully that he's left holding the tablecloth and all the stuff on the table hasn't moved.  There's an awkward silence and then somebody, probably an apostle, shouts, "Ta-da!!")

So, a resto shaman. Totally. Just like me.

Now that we have our role model in mind, it's time to think about what modifications should be made to the class to bring the Shaman closer to that of JC. I know that writing a laundry list of what Ghostcrawler should do to your class isn't really productive. But then productivity should not be a fixation of anyone in World of Warcraft. This is all just fun and besides, some of these really are good ideas.

Breaking of the Bread - It would require a piece of food as a reagent, but could enable the feeding of a small army. Mages have stolen our Heroism/Bloodlust, so they owe us

Water into Wine. Perhaps similar to the effect of Breaking of the Bread but more importantly, it would augment the "nutrition" of your mana food.  This is actually pretty important in these game days when the best mana food around restores about 21,000 mana over 30 secs, and yet your char has 32,000 mana. This is why we need to have a spell like this.

(Total side note: right now, there's a bug on mana drinks on the upper level that lets them restore 127,000 mana over 30 seconds. I'd love it if they just missed that one.)

Cast Out Spirits - this would be a refinement of the Tremor Totem, making those effects more hands on and controllable.  You'd think the developers would go for the hands-on approach.  But this should drive off mind-control, fear, and just because it makes logical sense, it should dispel DoTs caused by "spirits." (Haunt, I'm looking at you.)

Cure Disease, Cure Poisons -  this is getting into a funny discussion, but one that has been nagging the back of my head a long time.  These are two abilities the shaman have long practiced.  However, they are now being removed in Cataclysm and replaced by a remove magic ability. I just want to ask, "Why?"  I know that they are futzing around  with all dispellables for the healing classes and a goal was to give everybody a remove magic option. But... Why? Why did that need to be done?

JC was definitely a cure disease man (though I don't recall him encountering anything with poisons).  But even within the WoW canon, the shaman deals with nature magic. I can't find any logic that a shaman would have an inherent ability to banish arcane magic. I'm sure some explanation can be cooked up, but it's still drifting away from the nature of shamanism (and away from JC. Boooooo).

All that said, having a dispel magic and dispel curse going forward may be just what we need. I honestly wouldn't feel sorry if they skipped the various plague and slime wings that made our nature spells so handy all through Lich King. I think green oozy things that move are a little played out right now. So, six months from now,, there could be no real problem at all.  Other than that this change makes us a little bit less Christlike.