Am I the only one who thinks this is getting out of hand? The low ranks are riddled with rank sitting shamans who can utterly most anyone without even needing to be empowered. Since the mark was raised to 21, an unempowered shaman has everything except:

Skills: slice, light armor use, enhanced damage.
Supplications: turn undead, fervor, sanc, cancellation, redemption, locate object, word of recall, holy word, identify, demonfire, aristaea, wither, rot.

Which means they have poison, plague, haven, fatigue, energy drain, protective shield, weaken, earthquake, protection, and so on which, at least in my opinion is largely unbalanced when compared to the skillset of an unempowered druid or paladin.

Are both plenty deadly. Maybe when my ranksitting shaman is dead I'll make one of those next.

I had a storm giant shaman that I messed around with for a few days at level 20.

They're pretty solid in melee. They can take/defend damage decently if they're a giant. But if they're out damaging you it means they geared for dam and have marginal hp/mp. The better ones in melee are giants/minotaurs (due to giant resist) but again, they have terrible mana at the low ranks.

Mana is king for a shaman.

Conversely, the higher int/wis builds are more fragile. They'll have the mana to outlast you and maledict you but if you catch them with protective shield or flight down then a few solid rounds as a warrior/assassin/berserker should be the end of that shaman.

Also keep in mind that a lowbie shaman is going to fail communing supplications a lot. That's a lot of wasted time for you to be doing other things.

None of my shamans got empowered until I was around lvl 20, but I always felt I could have gone to town if they had been.

That said, I don't agree that druids are underpowered. Lowbie druid was easy.

Yeah, they're strong. But probably still not even close to being as deadly as a giant basher at those ranks.

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