Enh Buff and Changes Suggestions

We all can agree Enh is suffering from a case of wet noodle syndrome outside of doomwinds procs. SO I have a few Ideas for us to discuss that could help and also make the class a bit more interesting.

NOTE: all damage numbers are just suggested starting point that can be fine tuned from.

Maelstrom weapon - Good idea, poor execution. out side of Doomwinds this buff stacks really randomly so lets add a 1 per 3 sec stack timer. This is an easy change that will help smooth out the stack rate.

Lightening bolt / Chain lightning - Honestly even with 5 stacks of MW they hit like wet noodles, so lets just keep this simple and double their base damage.

Earthen Spike / sundering - lets just merge these 2 and have earthen spike trigger the sundering effect on the 20 sec CD. keep this on hold as we will come back to it in the talents section.

Lava lash / hot hands - LL honestly is a bit weak so lets just roll this talent into LL and put an ICD on the proc to keep that in check.

Talents
lvl 15 - over all this row is fine and our time can be spent else ware.

lvl 25 - Hot Hands -time to replace Hot hands. lets keep the name but now make it so that LL on targets with FS have a chance to trigger a new effect called Hot Hands allowing melee attacks from all attackers to deal an additional 20% ATP fire damage to the target for 5 seconds. I think this is a fun way to add both an competitive ST damage source that also keeps with the theme of enhancing the shaman and their party.

lvl 35 - Fire Nova - lets first make this spread flame shock to 6 targets in 8 yards if cast on a target with FS then the damage part will trigger 2 seconds later.
" spreads flame shock from your current target to 6 targets with in 8 yards, after 2 seconds all targets with flame shock erupt in a fiery burst dealing X damage "
this is an easy way to fix this talent and add a bit of strategy to its use timing.

lvl 45 - Sundering/Earthen Spire - lets move Earthen Spire here.

lvl 50 - Fire Storm totem - 30 sec CD - Summon a fire storm totem that causes all party members to burst into flames dealing 20% of the shamans attack power per second for 10 seconds divided evenly among all targets with in 8 yards of each player.
This plays into the enhancing your party, adding a totem, and having an ability that is good for single target or AOE.

Keep in mind this is all just a collection of concept ideas so please discuss what you like, don’t like and what you would change.

3 Likes

So, maelstrom generation is wonky running with Doomwinds, but isn’t a problem with Wolf Bones or Frost Witch. Giving enh a passive maelstrom generation would probably make those leggos overtuned.

Lightning bolt/chain lightning could maybe use a small buff… but too much of a buff on LB would mean Elemental Blast would be devalued (more than it already is). We don’t really struggle to put up numbers in AoE, so I don’t know that Blizz would want to buff CL much either.

Earthen Spike/Sundering: This is just personal preference, but those are my two favourite abilities to press, so I’d be disappointed if they were merged.

Lava Lash (and all the talents that play into our fire damage) is clearly undertuned. Making Hot Hand baseline might fix that, although, when I take Hot Hand in Torghast (because of the Stormflurry anima power), I just find that it’s really awkward to work those procs into the rotation in any meaningful way. I’d maybe fix LL by making Hot Hand baseline, but removing the proc entirely so that it just always does 100% increased damage with a shorter CD. Currently, my LL hits for about 600. With the 100% buff from Flametongue, that increases to 1200. Yay. Increasing that to 2400 would in no way be game-breaking ha ha. Anyway, I’d then take LL off of the Crash Lightning buff, so it’s just a ST increase, but replace Hot Hand with a talent that lets LL spread Flame Shock so that Fire Nova can be a valid talent again.

1 Like

Lava Lash just needs a 150%+ buff baseline to fix it. It’s the longest CD we have in our rotational abilities. It should be our single hardest hitting ability after sundering.

That’s all that really needed. As haste goes up so will MSW generation. Our Mana is the biggest issue next to a second defensive.

4 Likes

LL is just one issue, but a flat 150% buff is a valid option for helping shore up our damage a bit.

1 Like

Doom Winds isn’t the only legendary; balance has to come around all legendaries not just Doom Winds. Try Legacy of the Frost Witch and combine that with Elemental Assault and MW procs are much more common (though there are still some frustrating droughts).

Also re: hot hands…is this even working right now? I got the anima power in Torghast the other day that let me pick another talent in this row so I picked up Hot Hands and I didn’t see it proc once. I have seen it proc in the past so I know what it looks like, but this past week it didn’t.

3 Likes

it’s working but can suffer from the same issue as MW in that you can get long bouts of no procs, That said it might have a glitch when switching to it Torgast.

Frost shock shouldn’t share a cooldown with flame shock.

2 Likes

A lot of people come out with huge ideas for how to buff a class. It’s a boring suggestion but Lava Lash is our only (on use) ability that should get a significant damage increase. And another boring suggestion, FLAMETONGUE! Buff that by 100-200%. Boring as hell but our dps will be increased.(if anything make that a pvp talent, not sure if its needed in pve)

Weird idea I had the other day, what if Lightning Bolt casted with MSW doesn’t trigger the GCD?

I think this is the simplest way to boost our damage output. In keys my damage is fine; I have plenty of cleave to regularly out-DPS other classes. It’s single targets that my damage is suffering, and some Lava Lash/Flametongue buffs could address that without making our cleave OP.

1 Like

The current state of enhancement is a result of a few issues that came up in the past:

  • no control over windfury
  • too much uncontrollable/passive damage
  • too much dmg on the back end of lightning bolt
  • clunkiness of aoe
  • too much stormbringer procs
  • off-healing is too strong

So where we are now is a middling ground of MWx5 and stormstrike spam. Lightning bolt is also no longer the finisher it once was in an effort to make our dmg less tied to our finisher. But flametongue and windfury are kept lowish due to now be able to control when we windfury (doom winds) and wanting less emphasis on passive damage.

Our Aoe is no longer tied to lava lash spreading flame shock (which is great) but lava lash dmg is left in the gutter AND it’s utility tied to a talent that underperforms.

Our heals are kept strong but our ability to battery Mana or any type of Mana compensation/regen is gone to avoid us being an op off-healer while we gain maelstrom.

All in all, Enh is much better than it was in BFA but it still feels clunky at times.

Doom Winds is great but I miss Ascendance baseline with storm last. Astral Shift isn’t enough of a defense in the high pace high burst meta, especially considering enh wasn’t considered a meta pick when it had 3 defensives in MoP. Astral shift needs to be usable while stunned OR we need sham rage/stone bulwark back.

Enh going on in their dps rotation is ridiculous. Battery Mana needs to come back with our off healing limited by aura buffs rather than Mana costs and slow regen. Give an aura to shaman that increases self healing, then bring down healing surge baseline for others.

Lava lash needs to feel good to hit. It currently doesn’t no matter what you have selected (primal lava actuators, hot hands. Lashing flame). All of it feels bad because the base ability feels bad. It no longer spreads flameshock which kills fire Nova viability. Increase it’s damage or bring back it’s flame shock cleave.

Lightning bolt no longer hits like a truck but ultimately feels bad. Maelstrom stacks are now pretty exclusively used for healing with many going chain harvest venthyr to get an actual 5 stack nuke. While this does make us feel less tied to MWx5 for damage, it also makes lb feel bad, especially when other abilities we have (lava lash) also do miserable damage.

So did we really travel that far away from bfa after all? Outside of doom winds and ascendance, stormstrike and tormbringer resets are our biggest dmg. The difference being instead of spamming filler in-between them, we do a priority cooldown and pray for proc rates.

It often feels better than bfa, but then I log onto my fury warrior who runs smooth as silk and feels great too and I’m left wondering what would have happened if they just ironed out the kinks from bfa.

Ultimately I am glad we are back to MWx5, but it also feels like we middle due to a lack of direction not only about where our damage should be coming from…but what the spec should be about fundamentally.

1 Like

I agree with your analysis almost entirely except…

From reading your posts in other threads, I gather you arena a lot and maybe this comment is mostly about arenas? Which, fair enough, that’s a substantial consideration that Blizz uses when balancing classes. I run with Frost Witch and Night Fae, which is non-meta, but probably number 1 on my balancing list would be to bring some of the other leggos more in line with Doomwinds. Which strikes me as a leggo that’s built for PvP and maybe some fights with specific burst windows (Sludgefist), as opposed to the more generalist leggo that it currently is. Anyway. Running Frost Witch, I’m spending my maelstrom on Elemental Blast in single target and chain lightning in AoE. Definitely agree that our maelstrom spenders could use a slight buff to make them feel more like something you get for investing all that built up power as opposed to (in my case) something I push just to reset Stormstrike.

I feel like this is a problem with WoW generally since the fan response to the battle for Azeroth part of BFA was a big “nope.” It feels to me like Blizz doesn’t really have a grand vision of what they want WoW to be anymore (except as a money-printing machine for Activision…). But it’s also clearly a problem with enh shamans in particular.

I miss the days when Ghostcrawler would randomly show up and explain some of the developer theory behind the way classes played. I might not like the direction the developers were taking, but at least I could understand what they were going for and judge for myself how well it was succeeding.

1 Like

Yes this was a statement about pvp. Though I did address that lightning bolt lacks the oomph it once had — which again was a response to players saying they didn’t want all the damage tied up into our 5 pt finisher.

QFT

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making hot hands a talent that spreads flame shock means u always have to pick that talent if u want to play fire nova, not the way Blizzard likes to approach things nor would most people appreciate that. Also hot hands spreading flameshock is absolutely useless on single target and so is fire nova so that’s 2 talents useless on ST and just pure AOE. people would rather run storm flurry and hailstorm or elemental assault since both contribute to AOE and ST

They dont care about talent rows being viable for aoe and st at the same time or we would have a better first tier.

Instead we have a single target, a single target/aoe, and another single target.

Agreed. Stormbringer is really clunky and funnels the spec into a spammy playstyle. I think the class would be better with it gone and just make Stormstrike give Nature spells crit chance again.

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Must say sofar i’m not impressed with the Enh changes on the PTR.

why don’t our MSW stacks reduce the mana cost of spells as well? Seems like that would solve the issue with OOM’ing in PvP, I mean it’s not like you can spam heals, you still have to earn the MSW stacks…

Let Ele blast’s cd be reduced by haste for Enhancement its by far the strongest MSW dump we can take, and having more opportunities to pump with during Elemental Wolves/Earthen Spike would be a huge boon to the ability.

yes let’s make turbo even stronger!