For those of you just tuning in, there are several posts now buried in the forum discussing a few of Enhancement’s remaining issues with lots of great discussions. I’ve compiled a list of the ones that tend to get repeated often below.
For the most part, the major issues are just the usual survivability. Tuning hasn’t happened and there are a few pain points with the fire talents/abilities or the feeling of feast or famine regarding Maelstrom Weapon in single target situations, but the new ‘rotation’ is mostly a matter of adjustment and filling gaps with talented abilities and Maelstrom Weapon casts (think of them as flexible filler rather than finishers).
Active Defense Suggestions:
Not all of these are expected to be implemented, but a combination of a few would go a long ways towards addressing Enhancement's defense issues.
Primal Earth Elemental
Made baseline including Harden Skin and Pulverize. Cooldown reduced to 2.5 minutes
Astral Shift and Ethereal Form
Usable while stunned or replaced with Shamanistic Rage
Feral Spirits
Overall damage increased to respectable levels
Your Feral Spirits deal an additional attack whenever you strike with Storm Strike or Lava Lash
Your wolves heal you for a portion of the damage they deal
Spirit Wolf
Damage reduction ramp up removed (constant 20% while in Ghost Wolf form)
Movement speed bonuses persist for 4 seconds after leaving Ghost Wolf form and are refreshed upon entering.
Capacitor Totem
Instantly begins channeling a three second AoE stun
Stone Bulwark Totem
A previously pruned totem granting a stacking damage absorb shield that has potential interaction with suggested change to overall totem health allowing it to double as a totem protection cooldown.
Semi-Passive Defense Suggestions:
Most of these or some variation could be implemented concurrently to give Shaman's a bit more durability and substitute one of the active defensive suggestions
Nature’s Guardian
Baseline for Enhancement and Elemental
Replaced with Earthgrab Totem or Frozen Power
Healing Surge
Enhancement
50% less healing modifier reduced to 20% less
Maelstrom Weapon
Maelstrom Weapon now also reduces mana cost of spells by 15-20% per stack.
Cast time reduction component now affects hex
Spending Maelstrom Weapon on Healing Surge also applies a heal over time that recovers 3% of your health every 2 seconds per Maelstrom Weapon spent
Elemental Shields
Earth Shield
Added passive resource regeneration (100 mana / 1 Maelstrom Weapon / 10 Maelstrom per 10 seconds).
Enhancement
Spending Maelstrom Weapon to enhance lightning bolt while the shield is active fuses the earth into a hardened surface granting 20% damage reduction for 2 seconds per Maelstrom Weapon spent.
Elemental
Triggering an elemental overload with elemental spells have a 25% chance to fuse the earth into a hardened surface granting 20% damage reduction for 10 seconds.
Lightning Shield
On melee hit taken resource recovery effect removed
Added passive resource regeneration (100 mana / 1 Maelstrom Weapon / 10 Maelstrom per 10 seconds).
Enhancement
Spending Maelstrom Weapon to enhance lightning bolt while the shield is active supercharges the lightning field causing it to subtly deflect most attacks. Grants 10% dodge for 2 seconds per Maelstrom Weapon spent.
10% per Maelstrom Weapon spent on Lightning Bolt or Chain Lightning to refund 1 Maelstrom Weapon.
Elemental
Elemental overloads triggered by lightning spells while the shield is active have a 25% chance to supercharge the lightning field causing it to subtly deflect most attacks. Grants 10% dodge for 10 seconds.
Elemental overloads triggered by lightning spells generate an additional 5 Maelstrom. Cannot occur more often than once every 3 seconds.
Water Shield
On melee hit taken mana recovery changed to trigger on any hit taken
The swirling currents blur the form of the shaman passively granting 10% dodge while the shield remains.
Unaddressed Issues:
Flametongue Weapon
Grants additional spellpower or attack power (comparable to weapon oils or made compatible with oils)
Ride the Lightning
No longer targets crowd-controlled or out of combat enemies
Stormkeeper / Maelstrom Weapon interaction
No longer requires 10 stacks of Maelstrom Weapon to achieve full potential by either allowing the consumed Maelstrom Weapon stacks to modify the damage bonus of Stormkeeper or taking a snapshot of Maelstrom Weapon stacks when Stormkeeper is cast to modify the next to lightning spells (each unaffected by Maelstrom Weapon as they are instant cast)
Increased totem life
Redesign totem health based on several protective shells which are depleted on every hit in order to prevent inflation via player health
Capacitor, Tremor, and Grounding totem retain 1 shot potential
Quality of Life / Nice-to-Haves:
Stormstrike / Stormbringer
Add a second charge to Stormstrike or Stormbringer grants Stormstrike a dynamic charge rather than resetting the cooldown
Feral Lunge
Cooldown reduced to 20 seconds
Movement speed increased by 30% for 4 seconds after use
Adds an additional shared charge to Flame Shock and Frost Shock
Now additionally roots the target for 4 seconds if they are already snared
New Frozen Power Honor Talent
Alternative to suggested Ice Strike root effect
Causes Frost Shock to root the target for 4 seconds but doubles the cooldown of your shocks
Frostbrand
Slows the target by 30% for 6 seconds when cast and imbues your weapon with frost. Striking a target with a Frostbrand imbued weapons refreshes the snare effect.
Abilities Lacking Competitive or Interesting Synergy:
Lashing Flames
Lava Lash instead increases the tick frequency of Flame Shock by 100% for 18 seconds
Hot Hand
Swapped with Primal Lava Actuators (damage bonus reduced to 5% per tick of Flame Shock and capped at 200% increased damage. Lava Lash cooldown triggers capped to 2 triggers per 2 seconds effectively reducing Lava Lash’s cooldown to Rockbiter levels with Lashing Flames or 2 targets with Flame Shock)
Hot Hand now also triggers off Flame Shock ticks (trigger rate from auto attacks reduced and Flame Shock triggers normalized by number of targets with Flame Shock)
Lava Lash
20 yard range
Striking a target with Flame Shock causes two enemies within 8 yards of your target to be affected by Flame Shock for 4 seconds or extends the duration of Flame Shocks on up to two nearby enemies by 4 seconds
Flame Shock
Alternatives to Lava Lash spreading
Casting Flame Shock on a target with Flame Shock active also spreads the Flame Shock DoT effect to 2 additional targets with an 8 second duration OR Fire Nova acts as a cooldown to make the next Flame Shock AoE
Fire Nova
Flame Shock sources for novas limited to 5
Damage tuned to match Hailstorm at 3 targets with Flame Shock active rather than the current 5 targets required to match
Crashing Storm
Ground effect removed
Now causes your Crash Lightning to increase the next nature damage spell by 10% per enemy hit. Stacks up to 6.
Elemental Spirits (tuning promised)
Damage increased to respectable levels if not addressed through Feral Spirits
Replaced with a 20 yard range and 40 second cooldown active ability. Strike 3 times with your main hand at 50% attack power each time. Strikes against targets above 80% health have 200% increased chance of generating a stack of Maelstrom Weapon. Strikes against targets under 20% health take 200% more damage. Windfury triggers reduce the cooldown by 2 seconds.
Enhanced Totem
A 2 minute cooldown that causes you to shoulder your next totem making it untargetable and move with you for its duration
Wind Wall
Calls forth a wall of wind around a location reducing visibility (e.g. mind sooth) and causing enemies or players to be untargetable past the barrier. Any damage taken by enemies or players within the area will cause the wall to dissipate after a second. 2 minute cooldown.
Area Denial Totem
High damage, untargetable, random single target sustained damage totem that prefers targets with Flame Shock. Long cooldown for a moderate duration used to encourage enemy players to disengage from an area.
Fae Transfusion
Changed from channeled to a cast with time reduced by Maelstrom Weapon stacks
Additionally, energizes the caster when releasing the healing transfusion generating 30 Maelstrom, 2 Maelstrom Weapon, or 5% mana over 3 seconds for every second spent damaging an enemy
There are a lot of good ideas in there. I really like the defensive/healing/mana regen baked into maelstrom consumption. Giving us the ability to heal percentage based damage back while consuming maelstrom on lightning bolt or healing surge would be an excellent step.
Bliz, go through this list and pick a few of these.
Ironically, I felt Rockbiter was really only interesting as a 20 yard range attack to maintain pressure at range if kiting or being kited. One of the suggestions above actually encourages that sort of playstyle for shamans by embracing their hybrid nature (kite melee like a mage and chase down ranged like a warrior). Lava Lash (Lava Whip?) with a 20 yard range in combination with the talented Primal Lava Actuators per another suggestion has the potential to offer a mid range option on a roughly 7 second CD before haste if talented into it which is very similar to Rockbiter. The downside it that this would come at the cost of main hand Maelstrom Weapon generation.
You can still get both Hot Hand and Primal Lava Actuators end game, but personally, I feel Primal Lava Actuators has more potential to be build-enabling than Hot Hand and should be available earlier even if it requires some tuning to limit how high or fast the damage bonus and cooldown reduction can stack.
To be honest, instead of totem HP scaling I would rather them just get a “shell” buff that prevents all damage but gets removed on damage.
This way totems could have say… 2 instances of shell meaning it would take 3 hits to kill.
It would be easier to maintain and balance through out the expansions and levels rather than HP scaling. Since people will generally have more damage near the end of the expansion, totems balanced around 2-3 hits in HP at the start would then get 1-2 shot at the end.
with 2 shells it would mean totems would be up for at least 3 seconds to 5 roughly vs a solo target.
I’d agree with that, but probably try to limit it to non-auto attacks or try to balance around something like a combination of 3 white hits, 2 actives, or 2 white hits + 1 active, or something like that.
can’t be non-white hits only since that will completely negate pets or dual wield classes. As part of balance and class design, some classes should have an advantage when dealing with stuff while other classes don’t.
So like 4 shells (5 hits total) means pet classes can counter totems a lot faster if they both focus the totem vs a 2hander class like arms or a mage who needs to cast 5 spells to destroy it.
That’s a good point and my initial reaction was probably overly focused on the two shell limit which would basically just mean GCD+auto attack or effectively 1 shot. Even if they have to make it (yet a another to be macroed) button on a cooldown for protecting important totems, a reasonable hit count with advantages to certain classes would be a lot easier to balance when the inevitable health explosion comes mid to late expansion as you pointed out as well.
Totems should just be untargetable “Placed in the astral plane”. And if they are targetable then there needs to be some consequences. Like for every totem that you kill, the shaman becomes enraged and does 10% more damage to you for 10 seconds and takes 10% less damage from you. That way when ppl decide to right click a 45 SECOND CD THEY’LL THINK TWICE. Hell, make the buff OP the stronger it is the more interesting the counterplay. Do you kill it and fight a buffed shaman? do you kite the shaman ? do you not kill the totem and deal with its effects?
I think some counterplay is okay as long as it is not trivial to right click a high value totem (20% of my life dealt to my totem is 20% damage not dealt to me). Healing Stream, of all things, has an okay amount of health (about 10% player health I think which is still just 1 decent GCD), but a charge system would probably work better.
They could very well return something like Stone Bulwark as a low cooldown ‘defensive’ with a decent number of charges / life to also protect totems.
I liked the suggestion for a cooldown that makes your next totem an aura (by shouldering it or something). It might need some limitations (mostly tremor totem) but with something like a 2 minute cooldown I could see it being used in a pinch or simply to address things like mobile Windfury totem or melee uptime with Earthbind as a replacement to Frostbrand.
but my goodness please remove something from the gcd, like shamanism or something
you’ve got windfury, you’ve got wolves, you’ve got a possible thundercharge and heroism, and flame shock all to really start with before you get into going. you’re already dead by that point cause you can’t live anything lol.
bfa had its share of ramping issues too, not sure how this didn’t get addressed when basically every other class in the game had multiple cooldowns taken off GCD and we got… AG.
Man I would even take something like attacking in ghost wolf while spirit wolves are up to let the three of us get much higher windfury proc or something to pounce on some damage. It would break our rotation but giving us something like an execute phase would be neat.
I’m not even slightly surprised by this to be honest; they’ve already delayed release so I doubt they have time to correct such things at the moment. It’s going to be a loooong pre-patch for enhancment lol.
It sounds pretty similar to Counter Strike Totem except usable while stunned and not as easily countered. Granted those are issues and CST is really only reliable in messy battlegrounds rather than as a personal deterrent.
The single greatest issue I see (in PvP) is running out of mana too quickly when using Maelstrom Weapon for Healing Surge.
With a return to this more traditional class design, restoring Shamanistic Rage would be the obvious fix in my opinion. It would allow us to prolong our uptime without the game developers having to implement new defensive cooldowns. This approach would mirror the spec reversions and stay true to enhancement’s lineage.
Outside of that, a tune up with our damage seems to be in order. I think we’ll need to wait until level 60 to know for sure, though. Maybe the folks that played beta can weigh in more on that.
As a final observation, there are a few PvP talents I think should be made baseline. Namely Ride the Lightning and Grounding Totem. This would give the class a slightly stronger baseline kit and make PvP talents a little more interesting and diverse - depending on the situation.
I also like the idea of making Nature’s Guardian baseline, or potentially swapping it with Spirit Wolf to make both of those talent tiers a little more competitive.
We do need buffs, the issue is buffing purely for prepatch tends to ignore that class performance shouldn’t be balanced around 10 levels lower than cap.
I hope to see buffs to non-Stormstrike areas for Enhancement, mostly. Especially on Lava Lash- The damage it provides is really, really bad currently, and I think it is only carried by Lashing Flames.
The chances Grounding makes it back to baseline are so close to zero they might as well be non-existent.
They’ve literally said as much by telling everyone back during WoD they were too lazy or too incompetent to remember to tag boss spells as ungroundable. That’s why it got removed in the first place.
I know a lot of people want it back and I don’t really blame em but it’s a waste of effort and care.
I’m probably gonna be in the minority here, but I think Lava Lash, or something lower-priority than Stormstrike should be the resetting skill. I’m not a fan of Stormbringer’s resets and slamming them over and over.
I think the WoD version was better, in that you still wanted to get your charges used up, but you didn’t end up repeating the same button for significant amounts of time as often. Rarely so, in fact.
I wouldn’t mind having instant-cast Healing Rain back for Enhancement. It didn’t do too much. But, it was fun. Standing in the rain with a Healing Stream Totem down with Shamanstic Rage active. I would enjoy that.