We have dps now. But ou also had to wait to do your dps in legion because you had to fill the blue rage bar. WE ARE NOT WARRIORS we should not have a rage bar to fill to start dps. Personally I am glad the legion/bfa version of enhancement is gone. And hope it never returns.
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If they get around to a bit of redesigning then either replace shocks or add something to make them interact with the rest of the kit. Lightning bolt is iconic and all but MSW could just amplify the shocks. Lashing Flames could just be the effect of an amplified Flame Shock and Hailstorm for Frost Shock. Maybe bring back Earth Shock as well. Also if they did go down this route then the amplified shocks should come with an amplified visual effect, you know, something fun.
Maybe we could get a Surge of Power-like talent that makes the amped shock give a buff to our next SS or LL depending on which shock you cast. Frost damage and root from Frost Shock and Flame Shock spread from Flame Shock.
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Better damage on MSW lightning spells (lower the negative aura from -50% to -25%?)
Chain heal made competitive with healing surge for group healing
2 charges for stormstrike
Better damage to target from crash lightning/lava lash
Sundering baseline
Some version of Doom Winds baseline as 1 min burst CD
Grounding totem off GCD
Shamanism mana cost removed
Ride the lightning always hits your current target + 1/2 more
Unleash shield earth/lightning shield effects made stronger (e.g., AOE root, stronger knock)
Natureās swiftness baseline - 5 instant MSW stacks, NS cast is OFF GCD, 1 or 2 min CD
Windfury Totem mana cost changed from 12% to 5% and/or ability to be repositioned mana free/GCD free via recast similar to Vesper totem while itās active
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I donāt actually want more baseline buttons, if anything I would like to free up a few but adding more would be a real pain.
I REALLY donāt want Doom Winds to become the standard. Enh stands out because it isnāt reliant on heavy CD windows and Iād rather they just improve its performance rather than shifting it toward the rest of the crowd.
They could make it so that Crash Lightning still gives the SS/LL nature damage even when hitting a single target and maybe deals greater damage to your primary target.
Agreed that Chain Heal needs some better functionality. I donāt know about anyone else but itās not even on my bars.
I would like to see the return of Stormkeeper being buffed by MSW for some really nice burst because just choosing Sundering all the time sucks. Though this may not be worth it as I still find it really odd that they gave us another specās artifact ability as a talent. Feels weird, bad weird.
It is a little telling about design problems when we see the percentages our abilities get buffed by(the few times they do) and we still canāt keep up. Like a reverse version of 8.3 hotfix notes for corruptions.
We had something like that. SS used to apply a debuff to what ever we hit with it that would increase nature damage by x%. It worked with earthshock to make it hit like a truck. But you could also use it with lighting bolt and chainlighting. But that was not returned and neither was Earthshock.
As I have said they returned part of our core abilities and mechanics but not the full thing. if we had gotten the full return then it would have made Enhancement bettter.
If PvP stays bursty like this, then enhance needs some kind of burst more frequently than once every 3 minutes via a talent. They could just bake doom winds passively into WF totem like it is now.
Well as of the latest Mythic SoD dps charts, weāre second last nowā¦ so atleast thatās something, we beat Frost Mages.
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Almost no one of the ideas in the recent post rub me in the right way. Zezu has good ones.
I think that Earth Shock in the current Enhancement it totally and absolutely unnecesary. It would be just a huge dump of damage at range. Yeah, so basically a Lighting Bolt? Or a Frost Shock but without the slow? Not gonna work.
Doom Winds should be baseline and with no global cooldown or mana cost. Thatās it. Classes which has a large proportion of their damage depending on procs NEEDS a failsafe in case the procs dont come. And Enhancement needs 3 proc to do damage: Maelstrom Weapon, Windfury and Stormbringer.
The current Enhancement is bad because itās all over the place. Itās a spec that builds MW stacks but when it tries to spend them the damage is a meme. The Mastery stat is practically useless (except in Wolf Bones build ONLY for single target) because for AoE you go Doomwinds and your main souce of damage is Windfury which is unaffected by this stat, but still Crash/Chain Lightning is in the rotation. I dont know if any other spec has this huge problem. Right now in AoE Iām only using Chain Lightning to reset Crash Lightning to actually do damage with Windfury as a passive, which is a proc.
In my opinion both MW stack spenders should hit at least 100% harder and Chain Lightning should be capped at 5 or 6 targets like most other AoE abilities like Bladestorm or Spinning Crane Kick. Dropping 5 stacks on an ability should feel like hitting with the fury of a thousand storm.
I think it would be cool that Elemental uses the abilities to build resource to dump on ES/EQ while Enhancement builds stacks to actually drop huge lighting and thunder on the enemies. I think that while thereās space for a more passive build around Windfury, there should be a better build about electrocuting enemies.
In a build around lighting, Mastery could be a lot more valuable since more of our damage would be elemental and nature. Windfury could be helpful to get more overall hits and stacks, like a builder help. Also, a rework of Stormkeeper to cause overloads on targets could be a lot more fun for a cooldown every 1 minute. That way you could choose between Sundering and itās incapacitate/interrupt advantage and Windfury potential or more raw damage with Stormkeeper. You could also bring back Lighting Rod from Legion which was a great proc to electrocute people like crazy. I remember playing BGās and when a healer has the Rod on him, drop some fat Chain Lightings with Stormkeeper and watch the guy electrocuted to death. This kind of gameplay could be used to funnel damage like a crazy person in encounters like the Overseers in SD, the Necromancer in NW, Bosses with many adds and people in BG.
Aside that, thereās a lot of small changes that could be done easily to improve the pace and damage of the spec, like:
- Stromstrike a 2 charge ability. Always gives 1 stack.
- Lava Lash always crits on targets with Flame Shock. Or it spead Flame Shock to 2 other targets. Make the ability fun. Remove cooldown so you can spam it and Fire Nova. Tune the damage down if needed.
- Shocks with no cooldown or at least not a shared one.
- Hailstorm renamed. Now can spread both Shocks and doesnt cap at 5 but at 10. Increase damage bonus Frost Shock and duration for Flame Shock.
- Elemental Spirits always summon one wolf of each element. Include the Alpha Wolf trait to make them attack AoE.
- Shamanism dont cost mana. Or MW stacks spent restore a small portion of mana, like 1% per stack.
- More imbues like DKās have. Talked about this in another post.
- Improve Ghost Wolf. More speed, immune to polymorph, passive resource generation. Something. Itās too bad.
Well, those are some of my ideas. To be honest I think the Wolf Bones build needs to dissapear. Being so dependant on having the right Fire Wolf during the Hot Hand small window is not fun gameplay. Better things could be done with similar concepts.
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I have read a lot of contradictory things regarding elemental shaman and did some personal analysis. It seems all the top performing shaman had significantly more haste than mine, doing tons of lava burst damage - literally casting it 4x as often in a fight and having 3-4x as much haste. So went through all my gear, enchants, etc, and changed my haste from 533 to 853 and picked up 1k dps.
So my advice is compare to other Enhancement and come up with your own solution for why youāre not on par with them.
And my advice to blizzard is - quit making it so hard to figure out what stat is going to help me. I want to be an elemental shaman. I donāt want to have to level a Theoretical Mathematician or an Accountant in order to figure out how to do that.
And quit making Mental Shamans low on the list on purpose.
Blizzard used to do this iirc the ui when you brought up the paperdoll would tell you what stat you should be shooting for to help with dps. But how it is now, they will say but you want player agency to be able to customize your class/spec the way you want to. So we do not suggest anything let you build your char how you want. I can see this being used as as to why they donāt suggest what you could do to make your dps better.
I hope they remove forcefull winds. Please blizzard. It is most boring talent in game and it killed windfury proc satisfaction.
The ideas in this post are sound but I think we need to start with the most basic of questions: What is an Enhancement shaman, and how is it different from an Elemental shaman?
Iām going to assume weāre shooting for two distinct things; otherwise weāre just talking about a melee v. ranged spec of the same basic idea. To explain what I mean, there are people that play Enhancement that want the Flame Shock ā Lava Lash ā Fire Nova spread mechanic back (Iām in this group). But others say that makes us a Fire mage. And others point out that Elemental is currently tuned in large part around Lava Surge procs.
Then there are the ones who want to see Enhancement be a lightning-based build. But then some people point out that Elementalās other focal-point build is Stormbringer ā Chain Lightning.
And then thereās the third option, that Enhancement is supposed to be about imbues on the actual weapons (i.e., enhancing them) and our core identity is related to Windfury and massive, periodic amplification to our attack speed. (And if you have the shaman class mount, when youāre in Enh spec, your mount becomes wind-oriented.)
Let me address the third possibility first: If thatās going to be our identity, weāre going to have to tune damage around both attack speed and raw weapon damage, and our AoE is going to have to have a tie back to that (maybe Windfury procs on the weapon become the spread mechanic for a flame and/or lightning DOT). This will make the spec very fast-playing but also very proc-heavy and early in xpacs, weāll be trash because we wonāt have the weapon drops we need. So Blizzard will have to be mindful of that when thinking of its Blacksmithing profession (i.e., crafters will always have to be allowed to make decent-to-good weapons, no questions asked).
If our core identity is one of the other two, then weāve got to get some differentiation between Enh and Ele beyond just the delivery method of the damage. But if weāre going to let both specs have access to major fire and lightning spells, they have to actually be meaningful. Getting rid of the AoE cap will help Enh greatly there (right now I hate pushing the Chain Lightning button at any time).
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I get what you said, but I think itās better that in some point Elemental and Enhancement need to have common ground.
Sadly thereās so much specs right now that is almost inevitable that some of them have similar mechanics around some DoT or school of magic. To me this is not a problem.
To me the problem with Enhancement regarding the damage is that you cant really feel good about it, despite the numbers on the screen. Maybe during Doom Winds you can. I dont really like having a passive doing most of the spec damage while the spenders are used to reset Crash Lighting to do more passive damage.
Enhancement as a spec around spending stacks to do huge damage with lightning could be a lot more interesting and add options for talents and passives a lot cooler like I said before. Letās be honest: whatās the good side of Stormkeeper? Chain Lightning is useless anyway.
Windfury is okay to do damage, but it shouldnt be the main source. Specially in a spec that has a breakdown that overall is 50% physical and 50% elemental, making Mastery a weird stat to have. Imbues in general should be something that gives small advantages or synergies to the autoattacks combined to the spells you are planning to use more often. For example, Frostbrand with a slow for PvP; or a Nature imbue that puts debuffs on the enemies with Crash Lightning and makes them vulnerable to future Ligntning Damage, so the more the fight goes on, the higher the debuff goes. And Windfury passive for both weapons.
I think Enhancement as a spec has so much wasted potential in his construction and fantasy that is sad.
You can shake it man! I believe! Jkjk
I used to be like that but I havenāt enjoyed enhance since wod. Took a few expansions but I think Iāve finally given up on enhance barring some kind of major rework. So many other specs feel so much more complete right now. Current fav is spriest.
I agree that classes that rely on boosts to passive damage donāt feel good to play.
My favorite part of the Flame Shock ā Lava Lash ā Fire Nova build from back in MoP/WoD was the graphics. When you lit off a big Fire Nova, you felt it. And not just because you immediately got all the attention from every mob in the room; you literally lit up the room and no one had to guess where it came from.
Meanwhile, I drop Windfury Totem sometimes and then spend time worrying I didnāt drop it close enough, because I canāt really see the benefits on my screen. Anything that grants an extra swing/attack, regardless of the class, is problematic because the game doesnāt communicate it back to the player very well.
If weāre going to spread lighting, I want to see a nature dot on people. And by that I mean I want to see it on their nameplate, and I want to see yellow numbers periodically going up from their heads. So when I do drop whatever AoE (Crash Lightning, etc.), it hits everyone with that dot.
I still like to spec Fire Nova even now sometimes, just for nostalgiaās sake, and go run a Torghast and get Flame Shock on 5-10 mobs and light one off. That feels like a shaman to me. It would feel just as good if suddenly they all got electrocuted rather than set on fire. Just give me something with some payoff.
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To be honest, I dont really like that idea of Fire Nova to do AoE. Mainly for the thing that I already said abour MW stacks being totally useless.
I would like that Lava Lash would do something fun to begin with and that Hailstorm could spread both Shocks.
I would like Lighting build to do AoE (and also ST) because the stacks works for that. If not, why would we have those stacks to begin with? I wanna make them useful. Also I think that Lighting is a lot more Shaman than fire. Lets leave the fire to Mages and Warlocks and we can have thunder.
I love doing Torghast and get some powers to increase my Nature damage and the other one to increase the effect of Maelstrom Weapon stacks and drop fulminating Chain Lighting on my enemies.
I want my stacks matter to do damage and my Chains to actually be the main source of damage. If not, MW stacks could be retired because now thay are pretty useless besides Healing Surge and Chain Harvest if you are Venthyr.
Right now if you are fighting 6 targets and use Crash Lightning, itās pretty much certain that casting a Stormstrike would do MORE DAMAGE than casting a Chain Lighting. How is this possible? How can a single target ability do more damage than an ability that is created around doing damage to more targets?
That is bad math for designing an ability.
Also, with the recent anouncement about removing the AoE cap, Enhancement will go even deeper into the abyss of super bad specs. Many abilities can do more damage for a lot of already good specs and our Chain Lighting is still in the worst cap thereās in the game: 3 targets.
What an absolute joke.
So far it seems that I wont be playing 9.1.5 if thereās no serious buff to Enhancement, Chain Lighting and a lot more things.
Just cant stand this.
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Lava LASH needs to be a frontal aoe ability.
Make it a huge lash that hits up to 5 or more targets with damage split evenly.
Targets with flame shock will take 50-100% more damage from lava lash.
Lava lash damage increased by 10% per target hit, up to 50% more damage.
I feel like that would be fun.
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This has been answered we are a Battle Mage. We are a mix of melee and ranged.
Welcome to another tier of being Worthless.
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It is a sad state of affairs for enhancement.
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