Mage Vs Shaman

I'd recommend shaman since it's very dynamic with positioning you and your totem. It also boasts a lot of ranged area damage while also being able to dance around up close.

However, mage also has its strengths in its reliability and safety with heal and teleport, as well as a very consistent melee attack.

 

insanely tanky? how tanky? shaman has 3x less ehp than warrior, 2.5x less than assassin, 2x less than mage, and 1.5x less than archer.

 

Shaman is really good for CC (Crowd Control)
Mage also has that capability, but less so.
Overall endgame-wise, mage is much better. I think most people would agree they'd prefer a mage to do a raid with than a shaman.
I'd say stick with mage for now, since mage is always a class that is needed/viable.

For fun factor tho... I think I prefer shaman. Hearing all the kill noises as you use aura is epic. While your movement completely stinks, you can still get around and dodge combat relatively well.

So for effectiveness, go mage.
for fun, go shaman.

(one last thing to note, your ability to grind with shaman is super op. If someone slaps a mob totem down you can easily wipe out everything constantly. Mage on the other hand, is generally the preferred lootrunning class since tp is op and heal negates the need for pots)

 

Shaman until endgame is pretty cool due to how it can incapitate mobs if Aura is spammed enough, and also has more dmg than Mage. But due to something called CCI, endgame Shaman is horrible (Aura doesn't push back and it is pretty glassy so yeah). Mage is pretty damn tanky and is cool for support but probably has the worst damage of all classes, though it would be better than Shaman at endgame since it is not hit as hard from CCI

Have you tried endgame challenges with 1.20 Shaman? Shaman was probably the best class in 1.19 but with CCI it's just not. Also 1k heals has to be an ultratank or Abso (or both) due to how Shaman was nerfed. Also it suffers the most in EHP.

 

*Laughs in CCI*

 

As Drajenail explained, you're just reducing the extra cost of spells that occurs when you spam them. There are some builds where the extra intelligence skill points via armor/wands bring mana cost pretty low (currently using one where meteor is 3-cost, other 3 are 2-cost) and mana-regen is nicely high.

Yeah, you have to wait for the meteor to land or else you waste it, but you're essentially moving, healing, or slowing in that same process, and by then, your mana is back to 19-20, without it even lowering past 14 at times.