Shaman NPCs are nasty. They'll slow you, dot you, and nuke you and - if you do happen to seriously hurt them - they'll just heal themselves. It's actually a lot better now that they have realistic mana pools, but you're still at a big disadvantage.
Outdoors, as a low-level Shaman, it's even worse. There are no walls/corners for you to hide behind. Sometimes you can get lucky and use hills/rocks to break LOS (i.e., root them and hide behind a rock). But at low levels, your root doesn't last long at all (if it even goes to full duration), which means it's hard to keep them out of casting range. Not to mention that your dots are still quite weak.
At higher levels, it's actually not so bad. I started carrying some basic resist gear when I started facing undead oblations in HS North. I went from having to use basically a full bar of mana to burn down one mob before it killed me, to being able to stand toe-to-toe to the same mob if I chose, resisting nearly every spell. Of course, there were usually places to park the mob behind a wall or corner, but the resists did help while applying dots and refreshing root.
Ice comet-casting wizards are, I'm sure, a different story.
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