JBB, is it really that good?
 

I am high enough level to use a JBB but I would need to sell some of the stuff I am wearing to get one. Is this a good course of action or should I really not worry about it?

Yes and no.

If your Shaman is your first character here, should you stop XPing and focus on earning plat until you can afford a JBB? Absolutely not: it will be faster to level without the JBB, and then earn the plat for it (much faster) at higher levels.

But if your options are "keep some stat gear" (that just gives higher maximums ... which basically won't help you level at all) ... or "sell that gear and buy the JBB" (which adds tons of mana-free DPS, and has a noticeable effect on leveling speed), it's no question: get the JBB.

It's good, even at 60. You should save up for JBB while leveling if you solo a lot. A JBB will help you more than your stat gear, so it is definitely worth selling the stat gear for it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umuVBewCNgY - At 60 doing Cliff Golems I can get 5326 damage from it, which equates to 1/6 of the Cliff Golem's HP. Mana-wise that is saving you at least 1200 mana from casting Pox, not including potential resists and casting insidious decay.

Thanks guys, I appreciate it.

Echoing what they said, it's definitely worth having. If you don't have epic, it's a good item to help you level. Once you have epic, then sell it to fund torpor or a fungi. Then at 60 you can camp it as it'll still have it's uses. I wouldn't buy it if you have epic though.

Recently got my first JBB ever. Using it together with a Fungi and been using JBB since 46. It's good, I can kill non-stop. Without fungi I'd probably need medbreaks every once in a while but maybe wouldn't be an issue if u were troll.

JBB frequently breaks root so once I got epic if I decide to do multi-rootrotting it may not be used as much.

The thing is, so many camps don't allow for non-stop murder and most 6-12min camps are easy to hold down as a non-JBB shaman. I.e. JBB provides no value in these cases.

Thus I say it's not mandatory, it's powerful but not necessary at all.

You need to change your tactics when fighting with a JBB. You don't root/rot, you face tank with slow, and you have your pet up for extra DPS. It ends up working out to being around as fast as root rotting. If you are engaging multiple enemies just root them away from you and face tank the mob you are JBBing down.

I could get at least 1 blue bubble an hour at level 59 in PoM Rat Maze without root/rotting and using JBB face tanking.

EDIT: It has been a while since I did this tactic. I believe I also had the pet tank the mob at times to reduce the amount of damage taken personally. This works well since pets have fast regeneration.

I had epic and JBB with me in Bear Pits at 59, and can definitely say I got lots of use out of the JBB there. Yes it tends to break root, but there would be situations where I'd have gotten 3 bears on accident, and have 3 rooted with epic DoT's going. While that does lend more to the power of the epic, having a JBB allowed me to burn one bear down at a time while saving all of my mana for roots and emergency heals. Without JBB a situation like that would have been much harder to pull out of.

So even if you're not slow-tanking with JBB as your DPS, that thing still slaps.

Oh yeah, if you have both JBB and Epic while leveling you can mix and match tactics better. When I was leveling I didn't have Epic, so my strategy was completely focused on saving mana via JBB.

I wouldn't go out of the way for it, but I don't play shaman. I can only share a similar druid experience since they have pretty much same clickies, just different name.

I played a druid to 60. I had 2 dps clickies, epic clicky eventually, and the bracer (druid version of JBB). I literally stopped using the bracer early on because the damage is too low for farming or leveling, and cast time is too long. It was cool mana free damage for a few levels for rare situations, but it just became easier to use normal spells and not waste time on this slow casting bracer.

Not sure if it's same for shaman, but seems similar.