What does this have to do with Brute Force, which is a 2h melee skill, i.e. a shield can’t be used.
That’s the point of adding a transmuter that makes it work with shields…
Considering that the whole point to the Shaman mastery is a focus on two-handed weapons. I doubt that’s going to happen. None of the skills in the Shaman mastery do anything with shields - that would be the Soldier class.
Edit: This also doesn’t address the OPs concern with the skill.
the whole point to the Shaman mastery is a focus on two-handed weapons
That’s what it’s supposed to be, but what actually supports 2 handers in the tree? A crappy passive ( Feral Hunger is good though), a bad skill and a transmuter. The soldier tree currently provides better support for 2-handers than shaman.
None of the skills in the Shaman mastery do anything with shields - that would be the Soldier class.
There’s already a bunch of tank items for shamans though and I thought adding some actual synergy with shields to the mastery would make Brute Force useful at least for tank builds ( instead of being useless for all builds ).
Which again doesn’t address the OPs concerns, since they want to use it as a two-handed skill.
Also, if there’s a bunch of tank skills for the Shaman, why do they need a shield?
Seems like the best approach is to enhance the current skill to make two-handed builds better, not make one-handed builds better.
The two shouldn’t be mutually exclusive though, and I think that’d contribute making the mastery more desirable for a bunch of builds.
Maybe so, but 1-hand already has enough support and there exists almost no reason to pick two handed weapons (melee or ranged or caster)
Only a few 2h builds are actually as good as 1h builds with minimum gear support (emphasis on this)
2h builds already are gimped in terms of components and augments. Traditionally the only point of 2h build is to deal massive damage but we can see dual-wield builds wreak equal amounts of havoc on the battlefield.
Since Shaman has always been 2h focus, it should remain that way and do a better job at supporting 2h builds
Would adding bonus crit damage be too much? Or a small increase to crit chance, to help out Upheaval.
Bonus crit damage already exists in Stormcaller Pact, as for bonus OA the best thing they can do is make Tenacity of the Boar a temp buff this helps out Druid casters a lot as well
Can confirm, there is some rebalancing in base masteries, but these changes were deliberately excluded from the data currently used in the calc.