2 charges for SS and shocks via talent or baseline
SS generates 1 stack of MSW baseline (MSW proc chance adjusted if necessary, elemental assault functionality changed/replaced - echo of elements for 2 charges of SS and shocks?)
Sundering baseline
Some version of Doom Winds baseline w/FFW either baked in baseline or removed
Single target damage/functionality for crash lightning improved significantly
LL damage increased
MSW spender damage increased (e.g., reduce aura from -50% to -25%?)
TL:DR - Use Thrall from HotS as a base for how Enhancement should mechanically work
Separate functionality of Maelstrom Weapons for self-healing, off-healing, and damage dealing
Examples:
Maelstrom Weapons no longer increase damage and healing or reduce cast time. Instead they are a resource for a new ability Eye of the Storm – This uses Thrall’s Frostwolf Resilience idea as a base for how Maelstrom Weapons should work: a self-sustain defensive ability. Maelstrom Weapons still stacks to 10, with the new active ability Eye of the Storm essentially replacing Healing Surge as a self-only heal using Maelstrom Weapons (consuming up to 5 stacks).
Eye of the Storm - Active Ability - No Cooldown
Consume up to 5 stacks of Maelstrom Weapon to heal yourself for X% per stack and replenish X mana per stack
Healing Surge and Chain Hail are now casted heals that can be used on ourselves or allies. Because they are no longer instant, their healing is no longer reduced allowing them to be fully effective at the risk of being interupted.
Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, and Elemental Blast are now instant cast for enhancement and do full damage (rather than being nerfed baseline). To offset this, they all now have a cooldown that is the average of how long it normally took to reach 5 stack MW on the old system.
This does a few things
Separates enh self-healing from off-healing
Allows enh to still bank 10 stacks for self-healing
Allows for strong off-healing but not instant, being susceptible to interupts that allow for counterplay to rein in Enh’s ability to be a powerful off-healer
Gives Enhance more instant ranged damage that no longer is at the expense of self-healing
Offsets this new instant ranged damage with cooldowns that emulate the time spent gaining stacks in the current Maelstrom Weapons System
Edit:
Remove Flametongue and Lava Lash entirely from the Enhancement toolkit.
Rework Flametongue to be Elemental’s weapon imbue of choice, giving them extra spellpower or spell crit %.
For Enhancement, rework the spec to be the first dps that uses only a 1hand weapon, rather than 2h or dual-wielding.
Offer a new passive ability called Elemental Blessing that doubles the stats of our main-hand weapon to compensate for the loss of the second weapon’s stats
Reintroduce a version of flurry ( weapon attack speed) that allows for Enhance’s 1h playstyle to hit nearly as fast as if it were Dual-wielding to play into the thematics of using wind to enhance ourselves
Take the damage lost from flametongue weapon, lava lash, and two-weapon Stormstrikes and spread them into our remaining abilities.
Alot to unpack here, but this proposal is interesting in that it addresses at least 3 issues w/current enhance design:
shared resource/instant cast for self and off-heals
shared resource for healing and damage
casting animations as a dual-wielder that is constantly putting away their weapons to cast.
Sharing MSW between self-heals, off-heals and damage has a couple problematic effects.
Makes balancing off-heals hard because they can be made instant.
Complicates spending MSW on damage abilities because their throughput is small in comparison to the heals and spending MSW on attacks compromises survivability.
So, I think it’s an interesting idea to separate self heals (and possibly mana regen) and make MSW about that and then deal with off heals and damage separately.
For damage, I guess the question is how to balance the CD exactly if you can’t spend MSW on it, as right now usage scales with MSW production so can ramp up in AOE environments. Maybe crash could shorten the CD of CL based on number of targets hit or something in the same manner as CL reduces to CD of crash to create an AOE loop that scales based on target count.
For off-heals, making them exclusively hard cast seems kinda tough as a melee so maybe there would need to be some ability to instant cast on the fly like a nature’s swiftness ability for some emergency off (or self) healing so you could maybe do one instant cast targetable heal every 30 seconds or something.
For the dual wield/casting issue, I personally like dual wield. So I’d rather see them address it through making our casting animations work with our weapons. Like having spells fire through our extended weapons. Rather than re-working us into a one-hand DPS that hits with one hand and casts with the other.
For this, we can look back to the previous scuffed talent Overload that gives us an idea of what the cooldown could be. Perhaps Stormbringer resets are expanded to also reset LB/CL, or perhaps Echo adds charges there as well.
For something like this, Nature’s Swiftness could definitely see a return. Or spiritwalker’s grace added to Enhancement’s kit.
This is definitely controversial and I honestly don’t expect many to get behind it. I enjoy Dual-Wielding as well — However, I only ever feel like flametongue and lava lash hold the other abilities back — and whenever lava lash is in a position to be really hard hitting, they nerf it into the ground.
I was really just thinking about CL as I think LB as a periodic CD for single target would be fine. For CL, we currently have a CL/crash cycle that scales in frequency with target count, but I think you could retain that by giving CL the same CD as crash and then giving the same CD reduction per target hit by crash up to the same cap (3 targets) so you create a scaling reduced CD loop on crash/CL based on target count.
I really like the idea of just making lightning bolt/CL instant cast CD abilities as, right now, it feels awkward to spend MSW on them at the cost of survivability which means they see less usage then they should, particularly in PvP.
Nature’s swiftness strikes me as the more likely candidate. While I’d love to have spiritwalker’s grace back, seems a bit strange to bring it back if our only casts would be heals and hex. Would make more sense to bring it back for enhance if our lightning spells were also baseline casted. But that seems like more the direction of keeping the lightning spells as benefiting from MSW.
I’d love to see Earth Shock and Shamanistic Rage make a comeback.
Shamanistic Rage filled a defensive gap in our kit. Shams have (to my knowledge; I’m mostly speaking from TBC/WotLK) historically been weak to rogues and stun chains. Sham Rage gave Enh a way to soften the blow of being focused instead of just collapsing under pressure like they do now.
Earth Shock is just a fun, hard-hitting ability. Enhancement is all about juicing up brutal strikes and smacking the crap out of targets over and over, and ES is about as much oomph as you can get in a spell.
If there’s anything Blizzard is aware of, it’s that DPS shaman’s universally would love to get sham rage back. But so far, that’s not the direction they want to go with the spec. They’d rather it rely on self-healing and that it be one of the classes that is vulnerable in stuns.
Earth shock or rockbiter seems like a possibility as something that could be returned. Although we have alot of buttons already. So I’d rather see them fix our existing buttons (better crash lightning and lava lash damage vs single target, 2 charges of existing shocks and stormstrike, better MSW spender damage) before giving us another button to press.
I love everyone’s suggestions , but I’m just throwing in my tiny request of Lightning Bolt to have no CD and Instant cast (like how it use to be), as a quality of life to clear older content quickly and makes things a lot easier to tag…
Ohh ohhhh and feral lunge baseline please, literally the only class that has to talent into a gap closer isn’t to good
To have it be instant cast and no cooldown would result in lowering it’s dmg to be negligible. I can understand this view…however, my goal is to decouple maelstrom weapons from dmg and offhealing, which is why I think LB should be instant but with a cooldown.
This allows it to be instant and do max damage. If we combine this with removing frost shock and flame shock from the same cooldown, and having CL be instant…that is 4 instants that can be cycled, effectively hitting 7 targets.
Yeah, Enhance is at a weird spot right now. The fusion of pre-Legion and post-Legion gameplay left it… a bit of a mess.
Without any modifiers, Windfury hits for slightly more than a single autoattack which doesn’t feel too good to use.
Bake Forceful Winds into the kit. If Blizzard doesn’t want to have Windfury hit like a truck out the gate, it could even keep the build-up part of Forceful Winds.
Stormstrike is still based around the Stormbringer mechanic, so its damage alone is pitiful.
Redesign Stormbringer to, instead of resetting Stormstrike, having any Maelstrom spent buff the next Stormstrike. This would allow Enhance to be either offensive or defensive when using Maelstrom and making Stormstrike our big hitter.
For a less drastic change, make Stormstrike’s off-hand portion deal Nature damage. Considering the bonus to Nature damage was moved to a talent (Earthen Spike), I find it strange that our main melee ability whose tooltip starts with “Energizes both your weapons with lightning” deals no lightning damage. Blizzard was experimenting with Stormstrike doing pure Nature damage in one of the expansion betas, and while extremely funny, I knew wouldn’t make it to live. This would meet in the middle, and make Mastery more useful to our main ability.
Crash Lightning was useful as a damage tool when Stormstrike was more accessible and Lava Lash didn’t have a cooldown, and now it’s really only useful to fish for more Windfury hits and Maelstrom Weapon stacks.
Crash Lightning could consume Maelstrom charges to increase its damage.
The current Chain Lightning bonus (20% damage per target hit) could apply to ALL Crash Lightning damage, not just the first hit.
Flame Shock is back, but it has the same problem Flametongue had when it was an attack - it doesn’t DO anything aside from give us maintenance.
Give Lava Surge to Enhancement. Flame Shock damage has a chance to reset Lava Lash. This gives Flame Shock some baseline functionality.
Have Lava Lash extend Flame Shock on the target. This would lessen the maintenance problem.
As far as defensives go, people mainly want the ability to use something while stunned.
Make Astral Shift usable while stunned. Simple as that.
Give Shamanistic Rage back so we have a second defensive cooldown. Usable while stunned and all.
Give back Shamanistic Rage for 30% DR and make Astral Shift a passive that triggers when we are affected by a loss of control effect for 30% DR for the duration of the effect, just as it was for Elemental Shaman in WotLK.
1- Yep, very frustrating to reset SS when there’s 1 or 2 sec on cooldown.
2- Yeah, and give that talent slot some thing to actually have fun.
3- I dont think so. Having 2 AoE stuns baseline seems pretty weird and I dont know if any other class has something like that.
4- I think that we all agree that since Legion, Enhancement just dont work without Doom Winds because it has no burst and lack of procs and sustain damage.
5- Yeah, With the longer cd on Lava Lash, Crash Lightning it’s just a meme to proc stormstrike or reset Chain Lightning.
6- Anyone knows why this spell is in the toolkit? It does nothing besides trash damage. Incorporate a functionality that makes spear flame shock from the target to 2 other enemies and it could be cool to build multitarget pressure.
7- For sure. The MSW attacks are good only for the instant part but the actual damage is very weak, specially for Chain Lightning that only hits 3 targets.
Sundering is a 2 second incapacitate. And it’s actually half of the equation to get off our single stun - cap totem - reliably. You need sundering to cover cap. And it’s basically mandatory for PvP because of that.
So giving us sundering baseline is basically just giving us ONE aoe stun (cap) that actually works and requires two GCDs and 1600 mana.
We’re the only melee spec that has to talent into a second ability to be able to reliably use our baseline AOE stun. That’s the weird part.
These are some great points and I would love to see some combination of these be implemented. I feel like Crash Lighting is a core ability thematically for us and yet, its more of a modifier for our other abilities rather than a compelling skill (aside from graphically being amazing) in its own right. Lava Lash is a limp noodle and completely underwhelming. I tried the Hot Hand spec right out the gate last night in Sanctum and that didn’t turn out so well. Too inconsistent, too awkward - but trying a new spec like that without adequate practice is a recipe for mediocrity.
I need way more reps in content to really give an informed opinion on any of this. I feel pretty strong and also feel like a moron for completely shifting to a new set up literally 5 min before the raid.
, but I’m just throwing in my tiny request of Lightning Bolt to have no CD and Instant cast (like how it use to be), as a quality of life to clear older content quickly and makes things a lot easier to tag…