Blizzard happy with Enhance?!

Wow. how delusional are they if they think Enhance in an acceptable state right now. 5 lines of changes… This spec will be left in the dust even more than it already is.

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I’m thoroughly miffed by how much clutter there still is in enhancement. So many things that should be baseline are stuck in the tree. Stormstrike and windfury at least should be baseline. Probably crash lightning too. It should at least be moved. It’s crazy how far down the tree it is. These are basic, core abilities for the spec! Molten Assault shouldn’t exist, let alone be two points. As if anyone is going to take Lava Lash and not make it do the rest of its job. It should just be baked into Lava Lash as standard. Hailstorm/Fire Nova shouldn’t be a choice node. Ice Strike should path to Hailstorm and Lava Lash should path to Fire Nova. It’s ridiculous that if you want IS and HS you have to also put three points into the Lava Lash gang.

It’s such a frustrating spec. Like sure, it works once you’ve put all your points into it. But it feels like they only had about 5 ideas, so they took every functional ability and split its component parts across different nodes to fill the space. Other classes like mages and warriors get a full starter kit of abilities baseline and their talents are there to build on top of them. I just don’t get why there is just this enduring reluctance to simply give enhancement shamans what they need to do their job.

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I’m trying to figure out what the thought process of nerfing Elemental blast is about… are they afraid we will choose it over casting tempest?.. or that we won’t use 3 free charges of chain lightning? What’s so important that they felt EB needed to be deleted?

According to shaman discord, EB was very OP in ST

There was a degenerate build on beta for EB and wolf stacking…

Makes sense in true shaman fashion. Have nothing good for all situations. —I’m still just clearing my head. I’ve been die-hard shaman since Panda. I see the paladins rework and I see the WW rework which immediately makes those classes look like they’re taking High levels of anabolic steroids. Then it’s our time to get an honest look over and I DO believe the core of the shaman-lottery-slot machine style is good fun but we’re getting absolutely blasted in M+ despite having such a complicated rotation. I look at shaman to be THE battle mage but our melee range his always felt abysmal and while we’re watching whichever ability to light up// watching for max stacks of maelstrom // making sure we ice strike into a max hailstorm; we catch a cleave or a brown on brown ground swirl. Ascendence is not enough. The CD is trash for what should be the core feel of the class. I understand this was just a forecast to give us our legendary “raid buff” while reworking elemental. But to say “enhance is great!!”, nope… nope nope nope. Enhance is the Alpha wolf talent pick of the corresponding melee classes.

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The current tier set gives the shaman an entire pack of wolves and each wolf boosts EB considerably. So in typical Blizzard fashion they nerf the class instead of the tier set and then we all have to act surprised when enhancement falls off a cliff in season two.

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So I am really hoping what they meant to say was they are happy with the general playstyle of the spec and don’t want to change that up too much. Because you do see a lot of players happy with it and personally I agree that this is the best the spec has played since WoD.

I hope what they didn’t mean was that the enhance talent tree was mostly fine to leave as is. Because it would be really weird to leave just one spec out of the whole game with tons of two point talent nodes and poor pathing.

I wasn’t aware of what was going on with the beta interactions. I appreciate the food for thought. I still have a difficulty believing that whatever amps are applied by wolves wouldn’t just be exploited by the next best spell, whether it just be a primo wave LB

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Would it be unruly to say << I dunno<< let maelstrom stack to 40 but continue to only spend in quantity of 10s? That would give me a LOT of opportunity to step back, raise hell and come back in when I need to top up. Or is that TOO much freedom?

The issue is that we have two builds that have to be preserved for some stupid reason so I honestly think they have us have two point nodes so we literally cannot grab everything. Let’s say they made Hot Hands, Improved Maelstrom Weapon, Elemental Assault, and Elemental Weapons all 1-point nodes giving you 4 talent. Elementalist could play DRE, Static, and Thorims while still grabbing all Pwave Talents. Or you could 2 points in Legacy, Crash, and Crashing Storms. That’s just with 4 extra talent points. I believe we’re going to be stuck with a good number of two-point nodes because we have pretty much just a bunch of legendary effects.

It wouldn’t because Elemental Blast scales every type of Wolf due to being Elemental damage. For the Pwave Primed Lightning Bolt to have the same multiplicative scaling Elemental Blast would have with 8 wolves, all 8 of them would one of them would need to be Lightning Wolf.

Jesus, we’re pulling out EIGHT wolves? Yikes. I figured we’d be at 6 at best

Did you not go on the beta or see raid testing? Enhance was getting carried by that tier set. Our best single-target build during raid testing was playing a build that has no interaction with Tempest (Pwave primed Lighting Bolts have weird interactions with Temptest) and was doing cranking damage on single-target boss fights. And this is with Hero Talents not working correctly at all.

And ofc they do the classic thing of finding the worst way to fix it. We’re gonna carry that Elemental Blast nerf to Midnight and it will be great.

That degenerative build that required multiple Feral Spirit summons and a huge ramp time, still didn’t even get close to a Warrior popping Spear>Avatar>Colossus Smash>Demolish. Just the Demolish itself did more than ELE Blast>PWave>ELE Blast with as many wolves up as you could stack. But of course, nerf Shamans. Clueless.

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This is a major weakness of tree-style talents, that any time the devs don’t want us to have the ability to pick up certain things simultaneously they keep having to add new knots to the tree to create artificial barriers to having both at the same time. It’s why we have talent tiers, it’s why we have rigid pathing, it’s why we have multi-point nodes.

Whereas in the MoP system they could have just put competing options in the same mutually exclusive talent row and moved on.

Sheeet, I was hoping DRE would get scrapped.

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This is why they should have scrapped Storm build and made Elementalist the skeleton. Season 1 was quite literally the best version of the spec since you could talent whichever way you wanted and was setup in a way that allowed you to do so because they left Storm in the dumpster where it should have stayed.

The one that doesn’t like Windfury, the most iconic shaman ability? Hard disagree. Make Doomwinds great again.

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I like that you say “PwAvE sToCkHoLm SyNdrOmE” then simp for something that requires roughly 10 nodes to make it worth anything so it’s useful on Patchwork fights where you just train the boss.

Sure it does, it likes Windfury Totem. Enhance gain a benefit running Windfury Totem given our interactions with autos. We had options to grab it in a lot of cases by dropping the weapon imbue until they made it mandatory to grab it due to changing Elemental Weapons to be based on the number of weapon imbues you have because people have quite literally have Stockholm Syndrome with it.

The future is now old man, we’re playing builds that if you do bad damage playing it is your fault but viable as hell for about 80% of all encounter types.

Windfury Totem no longer exists. Stormstrike and Windfury are core to Enhancement, without them being so, it is no longer Enhancement. What you want is Ele Shaman but melee and you hate the melee parts.

Each Shaman spec has its own identity, and quite strong ones at that. Why do you want to completely scrap what people who have played this spec for nearly 20 years have come to expect from it? Why not remove Chaos Bolt from Destruction Warlock while you are at it? Just scrap years of class fantasy development all to appease you.

Also,

…what?

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