Enhance 11.0.5 Changes 09/11/2024

In Development The War Within Patch 11.0.5 PTR
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Below will be my comments on the new enhance changes for the 20th anniversary event build.

Voltaic Blaze is a very cool talent and a welcome aoe flame shock provider for storm builds where you can refresh or reapply flame shocks with some aoe value and instantly fire nova. Subverts the need to hit lash which is low prio beyond flame shock refresh (storm build).

Unrelenting storm is a great talent for single target fights to give crash value where it previously felt fairly useless. Absolutely love this talent and great to have a choice node with gathering storms.

This is an absolutely loved change and something people have been asking for years. Great that Stormstrike was disjoined from Deeply Rooted Elements allowing for really smooth feeling gameplay between Stormstrike and spenders, and giving Ascendance an even bigger oomph factor of consistent windstrike presses (which is needed now that windstrike cdr has been removed). 10/10 talent change

Welcome change for Arc Lightning, seemed kind of weird to have LB not interact with maelstrom after tempest. Not sure if both lightning bolts will deal damage as if they spent maelstrom but happy change regardless.

Original functionally returned, seems like a good change.

Very happy with this. I liked that thorims gave more value to lightning bolt outside of Ascendance as ele blast can easily feel like the default spender when that extra LB damage isn’t there.

Great change and have wanted this for all of DF. Stormstrike spam is fairly degen and this brings the storm build to new heights.

This makes sense, no gripe here.

This feels like an awful change. Gutting the haste capstone for Primordial Wave already felt bad and now the entire Primordial wave tree is dead outside Pwave itself. Completely ruins your opening rotation as you’re now trying to feed maelstrom weapon stacks after casting Pwave and spreading flame shocks with lash. Seems like a really weird left field change and should be reverted IMO. Primordial Wave could also use a choice node capstone as the haste node alone doesn’t feel like enough.

More choice is always good to me. I like that I can have the melee version on demand instead of waiting for procs and have more control over damage windows.

My two cents on the new models is that they don’t feel shamanistic at all. If you told me to make a list of guesses on what they were, masters of the elements would never be anywhere on that. I think these need redesigns and could draw more inspiration from Dragonflight models like we saw in Vault of the Incarnates.

All in all good talent changes for enhance and can’t wait for 11.0.5.

Cheers, Sha

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On a trip currently, so i can’t test, so this is feedback on notes alone. Everything sounds decent except a few things.

Deeply rooted elements change is potentially bad. While some would see spamming stormstrike as bad, others enjoyed that playstyle. It now gives a bit of worth for elementalist build, which is good, but it also hurts storm builds that use it. We use tempest, lb,cl, a lot less than stormstrike making Dre now activate even less, further reducing it’s value. Ascendance was already the main pick except in single target, so further devaluing it isn’t great.

I struggle to find a reason anyone would go storm build over elementalist. It comes down to voltaic blazes damage and more importantly msw. Swirling maelstrom is just too powerful for msw generation and we have to give that up to get fire nova. Storm flurry is also hard to pickup now. You can take ice strike but it’s lackluster without hailstorm, you can go sunder but now you lose swirling maelstrom. We basically need to go fire nova, swirling, stormflurry but give up flurry. Elementalist gets all there talents on one side where storm needs to branch out.

Primordial wave sub talents are still dead. So we have no choice in capstones. Primordial wave is good for one talent point and that’s it.

Storm isn’t viable with totemic, which is fine if elementalist is not viable with stormbringer. That’s not the case so we can only assume all builds should be viable with both hero talents. That is not the case since the removal of stormstrike in totemic.

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You can get over a minute of uptime on dre on ptr which is kind of insane. You use LB a lot as storm and that’s not even with the refund node in stormbringer tree. You’re also hitting stormstrike far more than you could before.

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Does stormstrike still proc dre? Cause otherwise it sounds like things aren’t working as written, at least on wowhead. Should be A 7% chance on temp, lb,cl. So roughly every 14 casts. So being able to get 1min of uptime seems insane as you would need 1 proc every 6s. Even chain casting lb you should maybe get a proc every 20s on average. Maybe there was a proc rate increase? Or stormstrike is still procing it?

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I suspect that it’s currently bugged to have a 7% chance to proc from each hit of chain Lightning. There is no way the uptime I’ve seen people getting on the dummies makes any sense with just a 7% on finishers.

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i tried to proc it is using stormstrike only with the PvP talent Ride of Lightning on cleave totems , and it never proced.

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Remove 2 talent nodes, fit the new talents in

Make tempest always refund 3 msw.

Make supercharge and awakening storm interact with elemental blast, and revert it to 3 msw not 2, frankly speaking this talent isn’t super strong, for elementalist, but it’s getting in the crossfire due to strom build, even though the problem is static accumulation and thorim invocation interactions, 3 msw proc refund is fine. Instead change static accumulation as other people suggested, not even a nerf, just a change so it doesn’t interact too strongly with talents such as these.

Make voltaic blaze interact with ele blast as well as soft cap it instead of hard cap.

Unnerf both bones and pwave, in fact, pwave probably needs a buff even after you unnerf it.

The 4 % msw proc rate from bones is baseline, bones is 2 sec cdr per msw generated, and then you have the other option.

Revert crash cdr to 1 sec per target struck by chain.

Make chain buff the entire duration of crash and not just the first hit.

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DRE lasts 8s now and the duplicate lb casts after tempests might count towards it. Also possible there’s something wonky going on as voltaic blaze is proccing dre. But you can literally SS every global of dre which is 6-7 casts per proc (or more with the extra cast from arc discharge)

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  • Stormblast has been updated – Stormstrike has an additional charge. Stormsurge now also causes your next Stormstrike to deal 25% additional damage as Nature damage, stacking up to 2 times.

Great to see enhance getting some love in 11.0.5. and the return of 2 charges of stormstrike is a long sought and welcome change.

In conjunction with this, I would love to see some of enhance shaman’s damage redistributed to it’s melee abilities to make them feel more impactful.

Right now, lighting casts are such a huge portion of enhance’s damage profile and the damage done by stormstrike and other melee abilities is so tiny in comparison.

Would be great if some of the damage from the casts was shifted over to melee to make our melee abilities feel like they contribute more meaningfully to our overall damage profile. We’re a melee spec after all and I think it would feel better if our melee attacks hit like we were a melee spec.

It also makes using healing too punishing since use of msw stacks on healing means no damage since msw spenders are such an enormous % of our total damage.

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On the general tree, could we also get buffs to chain heal and healing stream totem?

Their output is really low these days.

Alternatively/in addition, could we get another way to path to earth shield that doesn’t path through chain heal and lava burst both of which are never cast by storm build enhance? Feels bad having a mandatory dead talent node.

Like maybe make chain heal baseline if it’s gonna be so weak and put earth shield as first row or replace chain heal w/something useful?

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They could probably make the caster talents actually useful for us as well. They dropped flurry because the casters couldn’t make use of but left the caster talents we can’t make use of. Would also be nice if mana spring worked with lava lash for the elementalist builds.

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New to Shaman so bear with me, but with the upcoming changes I’m definitely interested in making it my Main.

I like the idea of Voltaic Blaze giving Storm a better way to spread FS without taking Lash and adding button bloat. However, I wouldn’t mind seeing a different style of AoE-DoT for the more lightning themed vs Elemental theme. Perhaps, Static Discharge or something along those lines that does a nature DoT and your Off-hand enchant can be something lightning based that functions with the Static-Discharge.

P-Wave is interesting and maybe it can be used instead of Voltaic Blaze to Spread Flame Shock and Damage Amp at the same time. Instead of making a new ability.

Legacy of the Frost-Witch Talent. Should maybe be moved or changed to a 1pt talent as every build I’ve found that uses it only puts 1 point into for the reset.

DRE seems to have pretty high uptime on stationary targets and the amount of Spirit Wolfs I can get out is Nutty sometimes, but super fun. I think I’d prefer a talent of having just 1 or 2 wolves out all the time vs 5-6 randomly, might be easier to balance around as well.

From a PvP perspective and the amount of roots/snares in the game now, maybe adding some sort of PvP talent or adding to our snare/root break talent a immunity for 2-3 seconds after use. Nothing is worse then using my root/snare break to be instantly rooted and snared again from the amount of Fire and Forget it spells and Random AoE. Ret, DK, Hunter, all have built in Immunity on top of multiple Gap-Closers and Speed increases on very short CD’s 1min or less. We have GW on a 20sec CD if talented but can be immediately rooted/snared again with no 2-3 immunity for up time on targets. Would be a nice QoL change as our mid-range gameplay is tied to MS-stacks which requires at least a few GCD’s of uptime.

Just as a example from Ret. Hallowed Ground PvP talent clears and suppresses all snare effects on allies and can be talented to snare enemies by 50%. This ability is now tied to Judgement which is a 12 second CD which can be talented for 2 cast. This same class has a 8 second immunity on a 25 CD and 2 charges of Steed. DK mobility is even more impressive now

Just some random thoughts I’ve had after playing the class for about a week and things I think could use some improvements vs other Classes I’m currently playing.

Loving it so far. Really can’t wait for 11.5!!

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Stopping by to note that the new Ascendance models have really stiff animations, partly because the lower half of the body below the waste does not move at all. It feels like you have a torso on a stick with hands moving, but the legs just stay in the same position as you cast and attack. Not good.

This leads to not feeling the impact and connection of hits.

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Anyone having issues with totemic earth mote not working? It gives me the buff to use, but it’s not applying or consuming the buff when I use flameshock. I was only on for a bit before work to see if it would apply to voltaic but I couldn’t even get it to work for regular flameshock. Possibly a bug with voltaic talented

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Report it then. That’s what the ptr is for

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I did. Just wondering if anyone else was experiencing it or I just had a weird bug myself

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Speaking of which…

I’m trying to understand how this effect relates to this being an Earth enhancement… It really makes no sense, as this feels like a Whirling Fire effect.

Totemic’s unique connection with Sundering spell should be preserved, especially that this is the only real Earth spell Enhancement Shaman has, and it sets it thematically apart from Stormbringer.

How about this instead?

Whirling Earth: Up to 5 enemies hit by your next Sundering are also affected by Flame Shock.

It provides same AoE Flame Shock application while keeping it under an Earth spell.

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Here’s another thing they need to do.

Improve arc discharge, right now im pretty sure when you use tempest back to back which is not a rare occasion at all, it casts a second tempest on the target, this is very nice, but i have a feeling it’s not intended.

Personally i would kinda like to keep it.

But if not possible they should instead at least make it so using tempest back to back either launches a lightning bolt or chain based on the last spender you used, like thorim, or make it stack to 2. But i would prefer the first option, then you should also add this to elemental blast, or at least increase the duration of the buff so you don’t have to choose between wasting a stack of ele blast or risk losing arc discharge.

Also, standardize the proc rate for voltaic blaze, you get this quite a lot in aoe, which feels good, but in st it’s basically non existent.

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I get your point, but it may be intentional, given how he point seems to be to offer another way to deal AoE damage and apply the DoT. In ST you can just apply your regular FS and spend your GCDs on other meaningful ST damaging abilities.

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Here’s the thing though, voltaic blaze feels WAY better than standard flame shock.

Also, usually flame shock is up anyway, you’re not gonna get this on pull 99.9 % of the time because your opener has flame shock in it. It’s one of your first few gcds

This ability is not really here to replace flame shock in st it’s here to provide a cool proc and give a way for storm to spread shock without having to use lava lash. That’s what it’s here for.