Beta first impressions

Classes Shaman
1

Got into beta and have been playing around a bit today with enhance.

Level 52 right now - 22k health, 28% haste

Some first impressions:

MSW:

Maelstrom weapon is presumably glitched right now, because it gives +200% damage/healing at 10 stacks. So you get the most bang for your buck if you save 10 stacks and only use MSW when at 10 stacks for 300% damage/heal power spells. Then rebuild from 5 to 10.

Stormkeeper requires but doesn’t fully benefit from this type of play, unless you race your 15 second stormkeeper buff timer to build back stacks, because it eats 5 stacks but then relies on stacks to boost the pathetic base damage of lighting bolt (400 damage for my 22k health shaman).

Single vs Multi-target:

Multi-target feels ok. More procs, MSW stacks build faster, and you can get into the crash lightning, chain lightning, hailstorm loop.

Single-target not so much. Rotation seems empty. You just hit everything on CD (including crash lightning single target) and then sit around waiting for something to come off CD. Not very engaging and kind of jarring coming from BFA. Feels more brain-dead than BFA, not less.

Healing:

Base healing surge is 1k. On 22k health. So healing w/o MSW is less than 5% of my health bar. But due to MSW currently giving you 300% powered heals if you wait until 10 MSW stacks you can pop off 3k heals w/another 1.5k if you talent into swelling waves for warmode. With crits in warmode pve you can pop off single heals for like almost half your health bar.

Again, this is partly due to the crazy way that MSW works right now where you get 300% heal/damage at 10 stacks. Since this really impacts the whole way the spec feels to play, I hope they fix this soon so MSW is capped at 200% so it doesn’t feel like you should wait for 10 stacks to use it and so there aren’t these crazy swings in how powerful your spells are.

Particularly since you lose all stacks at once if you don’t add one for 30 seconds. So if you are at like 8 stacks and are moving between mobs/quests you can lose your stacks. I’ve had cases where I started hitting a new mob with a bunch of stacks and several seconds left on the MSW buff and didn’t proc a new one and they all dropped off. Would be nice if it was like pally holy power where the stacks drop off one at a time. Or if they only dropped off when out of combat.

Graphics:

Shocks look like pretty much nothing. This also applies to hailstorm. You also don’t use your weapons as others have noted. Hopefully they have something in the works to juice up the graphics because it feels pretty underwhelming right now. Particularly coming from BFA with all the stormstrikes and crash lightning. Waiving your hands in the air and seeing a little puff of flame or frost feels pretty weak. And seems like you are doing it every 4-5 seconds because you either have nothing else to do (single target) or its a core part of your AOE rotation (hailstorm).

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I agree with you on the CD stuff…I feel like there is nothing going once my buttons are press and just dead air for what feels like forever. The SS procs are so low now i feel like im just doing auto attack dmg to kill stuff. coming from BFA this is a very slow play style. Even in mist it wasn’t this slow.

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Sooooo, if you are actually in the Beta why are you posting this feedback here and not in the Shaman feedback thread where it will actually get seen and possibly do some good?

I figured that perhaps you posted in both the Beta thread and then here but after searching the Beta thread I noticed you had not posted in it even once.

Not saying that it can’t be seen here but those beta forums exist for a reason and your feedback is more likely to be seen there than here.

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Thanks. I planned to post there once I’ve had a bit more time to try things out. Just got it today and was posting here for the benefit of the folks that aren’t in beta.

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5

As if I don’t have the Shaman Feedback thread as a permanent resident on my phone’s set of Chrome tabs.

Sham, please.

Also keep the good feedback coming. Every time I see someone give incredibly superficial feedback at a potentially integral time like this, I rue the fact that I don’t have beta access yet that much harder.

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1k heal with no maelstrom on a 22k health pool. I guess we’re still suffering from the ‘hybrid tax’ and this is why we’re not getting any new defensive abilities.

This is bad.

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They tied survivability and defensive to conduits unfortunately

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Which will just gimp us in the damage department if we choose to include healing conduits. They’re not addressing the core problem with the class/spec, it’s more bandaid fixes that’ll hide the problem till 10.0 when eventually the next ‘new’ system gets removed.

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My issue with enhance healing is that it’s scaled to attack power. At the start it can be strong especially with the 30% self heal conduit, but as patches come out stam scaling out paces attack power scaling so it barely makes a dent in our HP pool. And that it’s tied to MSW now

10

Agreed and we run out of mana in 4 casts, healing for less then 20% of our health pool outside crits. It’s terribly tuned and I’ve given up hope they’ll change much now.

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I tried to post on beta forums but don’t seem to have access yet.

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I have heard of a lot of people having that issue, even in /2 in the Beta. Try logging out of the forums entirely then logging back in, that fixed it for me in the Alpha. If that does not work try switching to a different browser.

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Thanks. I tried logging in and out yesterday and it didn’t work but today it did and I posted this morning on beta forums. Just focused on MSW design for now.

14

You mention that the rotation feels “empty” and that you’re waiting around for the next thing to come off CD. Do the individual attacks and button presses at least feel a little rewarding? If so, do you think that the emptiness will eventually work it self out with stats and gear over time?

I only ask cause the game is always going to be slow at the start of an expac and without end-game gear. If the button presses at least feel some what rewarding, then I’d think as haste and stats increase to speed up the game, it’ll fix it self. You are the one with beta though so I ask you since you are the only one that could make that call! :slight_smile:

15

Well, aside from stormstrike, the rest of the abilities don’t hit very hard. Setting aside MSW casts, the rest of the rotation is frost shock, lava lash, and crash lightning… and I don’t think lava lash and crash lightning hit any harder than on live.

So basically, imagine playing on live except you just stormstrike alot less and instead of having rockbiter, flametongue and frostbrand, you just have a shock on a 5 sec CD that hits for 45% spell power and lava lash has a 10 sec CD but hits the same as on live and crash lightning, which isn’t worth casting single target on live, still does the same damage as on live, but now you hit it on CD regardless because there is nothing else to hit.

I’m running a details damage meter and maybe I haven’t adjusted to the new play style yet, but my beta ret pally is doing noticeably better/more consistent damage while leveling than my shaman.

Also, keep in mind, I’m playing a 478 ilvl character with high end of xpac gear. So it’s not like alpha where those folks were wearing greens. I started the beta with 34% haste at level 50. Single target still felt strangely empty.

Also feels weird when you can engage a mob at 40 yards but then have nothing to do until you get to melee range. Seems like for grinding, enhance will play more like ret where you ride around to gather up mobs and then immediately engage in melee.

But if enhance is just going to be a melee spec with no real ranged kit or ability to do anything outside of melee, then why play one instead of a ret pally or havoc DH? Love of class fantasy above all else I guess? You like the looks of chain lighting better than divine storm or blade dance?

At that point, I’d rather play a spec that has better tools for taking all the punishment that comes with being exclusively a melee spec.

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