Enhancement Shaman Wishes for TWW

Classes Shaman
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Proposed changes I would like to see for Enhancement Shaman in TWW

My credentials are that I suck and I’m a masochist, so I play a class that isn’t mage

Following the Dragonflight update, the Enhancement specialization underwent significant revisions, addressing many existing issues. However, despite these improvements, the class still lacks a sense of completeness. The following ideas aim to address these remaining concerns, offering suggestions for potential QoL and changes to the class.

Storm Vs. Elementalist

One of the main issues faced by us is the choice between two different damage profiles: Storm and Elementalist. This decision, often driven by the desire to optimize damage output, significantly restricts talent tree diversity and personal preference. Moreover, the choice between single-target (ST) and area-of-effect (AoE) lacks substantial differentiation, limiting individual customization. (bring back 2h windfury)

To mitigate this issue, I think a fundamental restructuring of the talent tree is needed, starting with the introduction of a pivotal choice early on at the level 1 capstone. This choice, represented by the selection of either Lava Lash or Stormstrike, would dictate the subsequent progression of the talent tree, branching into distinct paths tailored to each playstyle. Furthermore, incorporating neutral nodes accessible to both specializations, such as Crash Lightning, could enhance versatility without overly complicating decision-making for newer players. An example would be a final capstone of the talent tree are two ascendance choices one being designed for windfury and one being designed for lava lash. I chose lava lash and now the windfury ascendance is now grayed out for me to pick and I must go forward with picking the lava lash ascendance if I decide to choose it.

Reevaluation of Mastery

The current Mastery, “Enhanced Elements,” might not come across as an issue for most Enhancement players, as it attempts to accommodate both Storm and Elementalist profiles within a single framework. While this approach theoretically benefits both playstyles, it results in a sense of disconnection for players who find themselves unable to fully leverage their Mastery’s potential.

To address this, I suggest exploring the concept of Mastery specialization, wherein players can align their Mastery bonuses more closely with their preferred playstyle. This could be achieved through a mechanism tied to the selection of the level 1 capstone node, allowing players to tailor their Mastery bonuses to their chosen profile.

Modernizing Cooldowns

The cooldowns available to Shamans, while functional, suffer from a lack of impact and relevance in contemporary gameplay scenarios. Ascendance doesn’t feel as impactful as it is for resto, and for elemental spec and storm profile you’re choosing DRE over the actual cooldown because the button itself is lackluster, and Earth Elemental fails to provide significant utility or damage output, particularly in high-end content such as Mythic+ dungeons. anyone can just pick up a Diurna’s and get the same effect for a longer uptime

To address this disparity, a comprehensive reassessment of cooldown abilities is warranted. This may involve reimagining existing abilities to better align with the demands of modern raid encounters and Mythic+ dungeons, ensuring that each cooldown serves a meaningful purpose and contributes to the overall effectiveness of its own toolkit. an additional change reinventing spells like “The Spirit of Earth” and adding the additional elements and you gain x elemental benefit pertaining to it, similar to Blessing of Summer. An idea changing the ability to:
Spirit of Earth or Way of the Earth:
Envelops you with Earthen’s Might: Increasing x Health/Decreasing x% damage taken and your attacks have a chance to deal x Nature damage .and so fourth with each element. also scaling with mastery and wolves. while this may provide seeing people to use it for DPS its intention is to be more thematic and flavor.
another idea is moving earthen harmony to the class tree and curating it to all shields. while this solution caters more towards a defensive issue rather than a cooldown issue i figured i’d add it to the topic of defensives while we’re on it

EDIT: From Wordup (enhance writer for wowhead): Ascendance’s problem is that it’s not strong enough to justify a 3 minute cooldown and the offset DRE random sporadic uptime is far far too strong relatively to ever justify it - and it blockades a couple of v.powerful passive talents that it requires to be worth it, so a 4-point investment for a cooldown weaker than most everything else isn’t good. The cooldown isn’t even fundamentally bad for Elementalist, but that’s also telling as to just how much the followup talents carry the incredibly weak intro one that gets too little support in terms of frequency. Simple point - 3 minute cooldowns are outdated unless they’re grotesquely overpowered, it’s anti-our other gameplay loop and the passive proc overrides the rotation too much. (also what side of the tree it’s on kind of makes no difference since our pathing is super flexible, I get the aesthetics but from a gameplay pov kinda doesn’t matter at all)

Personal Nitpicks

At the bottom of the class talent tree, Enhancement Shamans face no significant choices. Rarely would we find value in selecting Stoneskin Totem. Reworking the bottom end of the tree seems a bit past overdue as it feels more tailored towards Resto and Elemental. Another notable change would be an increase in attack range, addressing the challenge posed by bosses and mobs with damaging abilities that restrict melee access. This adjustment is crucial for maintaining the consistent uptime needed to produce Maelstrom, in comparison to other melee classes unaffected by such limitations. Additionally, the functionality of Molten Assault appears to be inconsistent, with instances of bugginess or failure to activate properly, especially evident when attempting to spread Lashing Flames to spawned adds, as observed in encounters like those with the first boss in Nokud or the final boss in Dawn of the Infinite. Furthermore, maximizing haste from Splintered Elements, the application of Flame Shock to an additional target beyond the initial five, introducing unnecessary complexity and hindering gameplay fluidity. Lastly, the reliance on tank assistance to properly position Lashing Flames can lead to frustration and inefficiency, particularly in situations where a tank, such as a demon hunter, is unavailable. Adjusting this mechanic to consider player position over enemy position would alleviate these issues and streamline gameplay mechanics.

Legendaries. Throughout of WoW there hasnt been a legendary that an enhancement shaman could make use out of. although its a niche thing to fill that many people may not be happy with, I would love to see a one handed legendary into the game that enhance shamans can wield.

Thanks for reading.

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I personally favor the Storm playstyle just because of aesthetics, but I definitely see your point about the two choices and how you could make it clear right out of the gate. Hopefully they look into that.

Stormbringer awaits!

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Less 2 talent point investments, especially molten assault, which should spread to 5 targets directly and be 1 point.

6 target chain lightning cap baseline, and 40% buff to crash. Chain lightning buff applies to the whole duration of crash, not just the first hit.

P wave 10 msw gen baseline, in place of primal maelstrom add the current tier set, but works on msw generation, not wolves.

Static accumulation integrated into ascension, dre proc based on msw consumption, not stormstrike, in place of static accumulation put a node that increases the chance to proc deeply rooted elements, or if you have ascension, it reduces the cd based on msw generation.

Windfury totem removed, windfury becomes a normal raid buff, and no longer relies on a totem.

Wolves off gcd.

And that’s about all.

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Would you be against turning Earth Ele into an actual proper defensive?, like if it’s a 5 min cd hell it should feel impactful.

All through DF Earth Ele realistically has been used solely as a defensive for that extra life increase, let’s double down on it being a proper defensive.

15% maximum health alone isn’t enough, it needs more if it’s going to be 5 minutes.

Earth Elemental should maybe give also a flat 10-20% DR to the Shaman.

Or

Earth Elemental channels an Earthen Ward for its duration giving you a 5-10% Shield of your maximum HP every few seconds (helps a lot with Rot style damage).

Or

Earth Elemental shields you and your group for a shield of 20% of their max hp just when cast. (Group survival baked in).

It simply needs more to justify a 5 minute cooldown, 15% max hp isn’t enough.

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I also am bad but occasionally dabble in enh for fun. My problem with enh is that you have in my opinion super high rotational button bloat. I think there is a world that you could reduce some rotational buttons by 1 or 2 and it would make the spec massively more accessible to people.

I don’t want to ruin the spec for those that like it either just make it more accessible to most people. Apologies if my thoughts are not what you want

I think shaman as a class could even develop a niche for prio damage if they combined lightning and chain lightning in one spell I think that would make shaman extremely desirable in dungeons such as the returning mists of tirna scythe

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I’m not against giving shaman better defensiveness, it’s one of the weak areas for shaman.

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They could bake every single SS talent we have into SS itself and do something with DRE. I prefer they delete DRE from the game because all Shaman specs hate DRE. We are better off without DRE in the game. Storm’s viability needs elementalists to be actively bad to give storm an edge but elementalists are good. The only way to do something with storm is to delete it from the game, the design-wise of storm is a very bottom rock because there’s no skill expression, nothing to learn and you can play the entire build with a mousewheel. Storm looked at all the jokes about BM hunters facerolling the keyboard and said “Yeah we can beat that”. Stormbringer wouldn’t even save storm and it’s probably better to let that go.

Converging Storms is useless, it doesn’t do anything in AoE and ST. Just rework it into Tomb of Sargaras tier set. Storm’s Wrath is futile and increases by 0.1% DPS, but the storm needs to take it anyway. Stormblast is a good talent in theory but it’s a bad talent due to being gated by Storm’s Wrath. Crashing Storm should be the baseline and Chain Lightning should hit 6 targets. Doomwind needs a more impactful cooldown because 8 seconds of 1.5 minutes is not a good cooldown.

Molten Assault should be 1 point because it’s the only way to spread Flame Shock. Fire Nova needs to be reworked. Fire Nova is a dead talent because Hailstorm is 10x better than Fire Nova in everything.

WIndfury probably should become raid buff and Feral Lunge should be baseline.

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Umm Elementalist Build literally plays the same in Raid or M+, same talents essentially but 2, drop Crash Lightning + Crashing Storms for Windfury Totem + Swirling Maelstrom and I’m now Raid ready…

I know you are very against the Storm Build but you definitely cannot say Skill Expression in the same sentence as Elementalist build when both builds literally have zero skill expression.

Both have their own style, both used opposite sides of the tree, even if they killed the Storm Build say it didn’t exist, you wouldn’t even still touch many other talents regardless how much they changed. Elementalist Build requires Lava Lash and all its talents to function. Thats already a 8 point investment regardless. So I trade off spamming Stormstrike for Lava Lash, as it’s procs and usage take priority aswell.

It’s easy to say ohh this is bad, this I don’t like, this is better, but really is there skill expression at all on both builds?.

Personally I like DRE, but it does need more, I’m not saying the Storm build was perfect far from it, but the Elementalist build is essentially the same, spam Lava Lash, primordial wave for haste boost, rinse and repeat. It’s the same piano style gameplay just spread over more keysbinds.

While Storm build has just about the same piano style but more concentrated on fewer skills as Doomwinds and Sundering had longer CDs and doesn’t reset. Elementalist build spreads the piano style into an additional skill Lava Lash thanks to Hot Hands and Ashen Catalyst.

Both builds Stormstrike, both Crash Lightning, Both Chain Lightning to help the cd on Crash, both spend maelstrom, both generally get Elemental Blast, both flame/frost Shock, both ice strike and feral wolves, one build gets 2 additional CDs with Doomwinds and Sundering and gets DRE, the other further invests into lava lash and primordial wave.

I don’t see such hate when you break it down, it’s really more of the same. Unlike yourself I think both builds should be viable and let the player decide how they enjoy to play, most specs now have 2 styles of play why can’t Enhance?.

And yes I’m praying for Stormbringer to revive both Ele’s forgotten Lightning Build and Enhances Storm Build.

For the record I do 100% agree with this.

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A bunch of talents are useless because they coexist with storm build.

Like I said, you can play the storm build with a mousewheel. Everyone made a jokes about BM hunters and this is a next level.

LL spam isn’t like SS where you can mash the keyboard. You can’t spam LL every GCD even with lust + pwave. At 100% haste, LL CD is 1.5s and GCD is 0.75s. Then Ashen removed 0.5s every 1 second, that doesn’t line up and you would clip GCD. Losing around 1/3 of a GCD isn’t worth to spamming LL.

That’s too bad. Storm can’t use tempest (MMO champ datamine) from Stormbringer hero tree because that would require them to press lightning bolt when storm only wants to spam SS.

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How’d you do little dropdowns like that? That’s neat.

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all feedback is good feedback! As far as damage profile i think its in an amazing spot, i do understand the button bloat feeling as heard from my guildies/players ive ran across they felt the gameplay was button mashy and felt like playing a piano, so it can def feel like a bit much when picking up this class as a new player. Would like to see a target cap increase, from 5/6 up to 8 for elementalist, and storm is stuck at 5.

wanted to add a bit more stuff of would be cool for my personal opinion, this may not align with all enhance players

in my fantasy land it would be cool to see an ability added that changed lava lash (ex. Lava Sweep, go to ascension database and check it out its a private server) that became a frontal and applied flame shock to all targets hit. or possibly making crash lightning a choice node and adding this.

As far as rotational bloat I think its in a good place, would like to see hailstorm baked somewhere and fire nova be a useful choice, currently its very underwhelming with the damage output it does, as its still does less damage than hailstorm/ice strike with all the MSW it generates (chain lightning does lackluster aoe damage) and ill do 2 10 Uldamans to compare and add later in this thread. and seeing the datamined totemic youll be summoning a searing totem to reduce its cooldown.

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All they need to do to make fire nova a viable choice is to uncap flame shock. As far as I’m aware, we’re the only class with a dot that has a target cap except ones that are specifically single target.

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Wow these are really great changes, keep up the great work

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Really like these Ideas! although personally I am okay with wind fury being a totem i understand the frustration having to pick it as a talent. Love the cdr ideas and can really see that happening with how they’ve been designing enhance (t31), its such great gameplay style that feels super rewarding. would also like to see static shock come back to make Lightning shield be usable in any way.

It does feel really sluggish and a bit lazy with the talent system to enable our 2 cooldowns at the bottom of our tree to soak up 4 talent nodes to be useful. also doomwinds being a 1 minute on gcd cd that provides very underwhelming power in itself

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Ohh I haven’t seen new datamine I only can find the old one with Totemic?, link please?, although sounds great Lightning Bolt is our 2nd most cast ability in ST!. More Lightning!

Edit: I found it! Tank you for mentioning will post, very excited, love how it actually turns Lightning Bolt into the skill tempest!.

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Neat! Looks great :slight_smile:

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5 minute CDs should be powerful, especially with defensives. I feel like some of your ideas (extra DR) are good, while the rest aren’t or are overpowered (like 10-20% DR for 60 seconds max).

Something like:

Earth Elemental
5 minute Cooldown
Calls forth a Greater Earth Elemental to protect you and your allies for 1 min.

Harness the power of the earth, increasing your maximum health by 15% and instantly healing you for 15% of max health, granting immunity to Stun effects for 3 seconds, and reducing all damage by 50% for 3 seconds and then 25% for 5 seconds after.

While this elemental is active, your maximum health is increased by 15%.

Would be a very strong but pretty balanced defensive for a class that has 1 real decent defensive.

It would essentially be:

  • 30% Maximum HP for 3 seconds
  • 15% Maximum HP heal on cast
  • Stun immunity
  • 50% DR that drops to 25%

But I 100% agree that if Earth Elemental stays in its current form it should be a powerhouse of a defensive like Divine Shield, especially since it’s one of, if not the only, true 5m minute defensive CD left in the game.

Or they could just gut everyone else’s defensives to be similar to Shaman’s and fix the healing problem. I’d be fine with either choice at this point.

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-put us on par with other melee defensively
-smooth it out a little and streamline some of the clunkiness
-remove the target caps OR make us dominant within our target caps

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Like this idea of giving the on press defensiveness much more weight. All shaman pray for some stun relief at this point. The DR’s after seem high but I can’t say it’s not warranted because of the 5 min cd.

Our defensiveness has been so weak for so long (but not always) that I’m hoping, if it’s going to continue like this, that blizzard would come out and say why its warranted. Is our healing that good?

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