I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case. Unfortunately I’m inclined to agree with you on the chances of such a change happening. Still, it doesn’t hurt to outline what the benefits could be. All we can really do here is express what we’d like to see and why.
Maybe a short term buff on you/your target depending on what spell uses your maelstrom stacks…
Say, cast a five-stack heal and the target gets a damage reduction buff for a few seconds
Cast a five stack single target spell like lightning bolt and get a haste buff
Cast a five stack chain Lightning and get a passive cleave on storm strike, or have lava lash Spread flame shock like it used to…
Enhancement Surge of Power Talent Idea
Surge of Power (Enhancement) Talent - Consuming a 5 stack of Maelstrom grants you a surge of power enabling your next Attack/Spell used within 5 seconds
- Hailstorm - your next Frost shock damage is increased and hits up to 5 targets
- Searing Flames - your next Lava Lash resets your Flame Shock on your current target, and spreads it to 2 additional targets within 8 yards
- Tempest Fury - Your next Stormstrike procs Windfury
- Fire Nova - Your next flame shock causes the target to erupt dealing Fire Damage to up to 6 targets within 8 yards
This allows Surge of Power to provide augmentation to your abilities and synergy with Maelstrom Weapons - It also opens up talent trees by baking Hailstorm AND Fire Nova into the Surge of Power talent — allowing for some talents to be moved around/better talents to be developed.
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I do like the feel of Hailstorm so more abilities like this are welcome.
The only thing I see being tricky about having a lot of abilities trigger off Maelstrom Weapon spenders is that the cooldowns of the desired followup abilities may not be ready immediately causing you to press nothing while you wait or settle for a non-optimal effect (e.g. stormstrike comes up before flame shock but you really want to trigger a fire nova).
Splitting the triggers by Lightning Bolt / Chain Lightning for Stormstrike / Shocks respectively could alleviate some of those issues; you’d just kind of have to hope Lava Lash lines up well in your rotation to pull that one off though.
Maybe just 3 effects in that case with the Searing Flames triggering off an enhanced Flame Shock while Hailstorm does increased damage if affected by Frost Shock in the last 15 seconds. You could choose Chain Lightning > Flame Shock > Lava Lash each time to spread Flame Shocks for multi target throughput, or Chain Lightning > Frost Shock each time for alternating high damage bursts or targets saturated with Flame Shock.
Could simply work off the shocks — putting Fire Nova and Hailstorm into the same talent, with nothing else.
Some thoughts of mine to address specific annoyances. I really do just keep throwing things at the wall, hoping something will stick eventually. heh.
MSW, Survivability
- Reduce damage taken by 2% for each stack of Maelstrom Weapon on you. 10 stacks is a 20% reduction to damage taken.
- We’ll rarely sit at 20%, but we might sit close to 10% except when we want to fling a big burst out. This provides a significant boost to survivability in the form of simple damage reduction.
- Alternatively - Remove LB/CL instant cast from MSW and just put them on a cooldown with 2 stacks. Change the above from 2% per stack to 1% per stack.
- This removes the harshness of choosing between keeping halfway respectable damage or living, provides some protection. It provides 10% reduction most of the time but ditches the reduction right after a pair of heals goes off.
QOL
- Adjust Flame Shock so casting it a second time on the same target spreads the Flame Shock DoT effect to 2 additional targets with an 8 second duration (so Flame Shock will need to be kept up every 6-8 seconds to keep it running reliably) - it will also only ever be on 5 targets at a time, at most, and maximum overlap is 2 seconds there.
- This would synergize well with Fire Nova, and removes the constant target switching to keep DoTs up. Frost Shock remains better single target, and frost can be talented with Hailstorm still.
- Combine the buffs between weapons and shields into a single “Imbue” buff on the character that lasts 60 minutes. This provides the effects of Windfury Weapon and Flametongue Weapon as well as providing a shield orb that changes each time the character is hit and provides a different effect for each orb. Earth (heals the Shaman when shattered), Lightning (damage to attacker when grounded). Earth orbs can only be up every 1.5 seconds. Remove regular MSW generation from this effect. Grant a full 10 stacks of MSW when dispelled (or grants 2 immediate charges of LB/CL using the LB/CL change above).
- Replace the Earth Shield talent with “Wild Elements” which adds Fire (DoT to attacker when struck) and Water (provides mana when burst) orbs and automatically switches elements every 2 seconds when in combat triggering the effect of the active orb. Water orbs can only be up every 1.5 seconds.
- Maelstrom generation that was part of shields is now a passive: Maelstrom Winds - When taking damage generate 1 Maelstrom every 3 seconds for 10 seconds.
- Gets rid of the annoyance of renewing 3 buffs every 30 minutes for no good reason. Protects the new buff by making the Shaman a force to be reckoned with when it is removed. Shields now provide multiple effects, and creates a storm of orbs around you instead of just one every so often.
PVP
- Allow Shocks to be cast from Ghost Wolf.
- this would mean you can run after someone while also snaring them or refreshing a DoT.
- Spirit Wolves adjustment: Wolves move at 200% run speed and cannot be rooted or slowed. Spirit Wolf damage is increased by 10% for every meter beyond 5 they are away from the caster up to a maximum of 300%.
- This turns running away into a punishment instead of a saving grace. It’s not particularly useful in PVE.
Survivability (PVP and PVE)
- New Talent/Spell - Vortex Barrier - Summons an elemental vortex that protects the caster, reducing the chance the any friendly characters within the barrier will be hit by spells and abilities by 90% for 6 seconds.
- This would work just as well thematically for Survival Hunters, since we’ve seen it from the snakes in the Temple of Sethraliss. This provides a 6 second protection from all attacks, and can help protect yourself and your team while you dish. Of course, all they have to do is move away until it wears off.
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Enhancement really feels like its lacking another baseline defensive CD.
It also has too many GCDs. When I first started playing enhancement shaman they could go out to someone and kill them in one hit. Now enhance has to use like 4 or 5 GCDs before they even get into their rotation…thats way too drastic of a change from what it originally was.
That feels like it would just leave Maelstrom Weapons as a passive defensive and Healing Surge enabler (usually instant cast abilities are not boosted by Maelstrom Weapons such as after using Stormkeeper or the shocks, but I guess they could make exceptions).
I suppose it might open up Elemental Blast to hit much harder if left as the only damaging ability boosted by Maelstrom Weapons, but it would also interfere with a lot of things like the Storm Witch Legendary or Stormkeeper depending on the recharge rate of Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning.
That’s actually pretty good implementation. One of the drawbacks of using Lava Lash with something like Primal Laval Actuators in play is that it has the potential for a positive feedback loop that has to be carefully regulated in very large target encounters (more shocks = more Lava Lashes = more shocks). Separating the two both addresses this loop and puts a little more power into Ice Strike for quickly getting started with Fire Nova.
This could definitely address some of the mana and Maelstrom Weapon generation issues especially going by the more deterministic auto trigger cycle; works for Elemental too. Only downsides are not having earth shield on a party member (that’s what Resto is for), possible loss of healing boost from earth shield and its associated legendary, and Spirit Wolf falling way behind again.
The dispel protection is interesting as well though it might need some tuning such as a dispel inducing a 15 cooldown on the shield or spreading the Maelstrom generation out over several seconds. They could also include something like a silence/disarm similar to Unstable Affliction / Vampiric Touch.
I wonder if the Spirit Wolf talent, which competes with Wild Elements / Earth Shield, would benefit from something like “In addition, your movement speed and damage reduction persists for 4 seconds after leaving Ghost Wolf form. Stacking effects are refreshed upon entering Ghost Wolf form.” You have to keep shifting out to deal damage, but it’s easier to maintain the movement speed and competitive defensive aspects with respect to Wild Elements. Hopefully that wouldn’t produce some degenerate gameplay by feeling obligated to spend 2 GCDs every 4 seconds to maintain a passive buff. If the damage reduction was constant at 20%, I could see this being less of an issue, but still tricky to balance. Shocks in Ghost Wolf form would be easiest for sure.
Go play a warrior. Enh being a battle mage is not an issue.
3 Likes
We are a caster class that can spec into melee. Please don’t misinterpret what shaman is.
Outside legion/bfa, enh has 10+ years of this playstyle. It uses Mana.
Shaman is a caster class that can spec melee. It starts with lightning bolt. It had no actually melee attack abilities until TBC ( original stormstrike just reset swing timers).
Primal strike didn’t exist until Cataclysm.
Enh does more spell dmg than actual physical damage.
Enh used spells for 10+ years.
We are a caster class with a melee spec.
We cast our range dps, we cast our heals, we cast our CC, we cast our totems (unusable while silenced).
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It’s cause we are. This old style was heavily complimented by a defensive called Shamanistic rage.
It was a cooldown that gave us both damage reduction and mana regeneration. So popping it after we spent all our mana to heal would then restore our mana back up to full while lowering the damage we are taking so we don’t have to heal back to full as fast.
It really needs to return.
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This is kind of where I was going - as it stands, I rarely have enough Maelstrom to heal when I need it (it went into a chain lightning just before I took a ton of damage), and our current heals are worthless unless they’re boosted. There would need to be other adjustments as well, such as changing Maelstrom so it no longer works off of spent Maelstrom stacks to a different mechanism, so it’s probably the worse of the two options up there, honestly. Moving to a 0-20% damage reduction based on stacks, and trying to ensure you always have 8-10 stacks for damage reduction purposes would mean we’d be more careful about using Maelstrom when appropriate rather than when available. Honestly, I could probably figure out how to make my own concerns work better by just using addons, but I try to minimize addon use to avoid clutter, load, and maintenance.
Doing some bench gaming earlier today, I realized how bad Flame Shock + Nova really is compared to Frost Shock with Hailstorm, and realized I don’t think this is actually sufficient. The duration of the spread shocks should be somewhere between 10 and 12 seconds, rather than 8. In order for it to be really viable, the Shaman would need to switch between targets regularly anyway, and aim for 2 primary targets for the FlSh DoT and spreading the effect to a total of 6. Since flame Shock has an 18 second duration, the default spread would only be able to be done twice, and with a 12 second duration on the spread, it would be exactly 2 spreads active at a time. Haste can certainly effect this, but even with haste, it’s quite a bit of work to get it up on more than 6, maybe 7 targets consistently. Even then, Nova needs to move from a 15 second cooldown to a less than 10 sec cooldown in order to catch up with Hailstorm.
Still. I think this overall design could work. It would need some tweaking to balance.
They could honestly go two completely different directions at this point. They could introduce a Flame Shock spread mechanic (fun), or reduce Fire Nova to a single nova around your target with Flame Shock to do 4x damage (boring). The longer it takes to see some movement in terms of tuning the more I fear the corner-cutting latter option may be a reality.