Okay so 1st off, I admit that I absolutely can not stand my enhancement shaman now.
I LOVED it in BFA.
Now I may not play it.
The difference is that jarring.
That being said, that is only MY opinion.
I have read that some people really like the new enhancement design.
So I am not here to complain about it.
What I want to know is this - WHY do the 2 shocks share a cooldown???
Who thought this was a good idea?
What is the point of this?
Breaking these into 2 separate cooldowns would go a LONG way to making me feel like enhancement is still playable.
But this isn’t all about me.
I want to hear from other players, or even Bliz about why there is a shared CD?
What is the ADVANTAGE?
Because honestly, it feels like a PENALTY. Like, artificial complication to try to make the rotation interesting.
I call that bad game design.
When I’m playing a game, I should not feel frustrated. I should feel happy.
So again, I’m seriously asking, WHY do Frost Shock and Flame Shock have a shared cooldown???
2 Likes
I agree. I hate it so much. Feels very bad.
If ice strike did any damage I might consider it just to get around this but thats a dead talent.
There is literally zero advantage, and it is a penalty. The design of shared cooldown shocks goes all the way back to vanilla.
We originally had a shock for each element: Earth, Fire, and Frost. Each of these had a different benefit, and the idea was that you had to choose which benefit you wanted at the moment. Earth Shock provided high damage, an interrupt, and massive threat. Fire Shock applied a DoT, which could keep players from staying in stealth and dealt more damage for less mana. Frost shock was medium damage, but applied a slow, which was helpful to prevent runners, and to slow targets in PVP.
Later, they split the damage and interrupt component of Earth Shock into Earth Shock (high damage + threat) and Wind Shear (interrupt). Wind Shear was placed on a separate cooldown when this was done.
Shaman, originally, was all about choices. Which thing do you want to do right now, because it will lock out the other options for the next 6 seconds.
The upside was that our cooldown on Earth Shock was, without question, the shortest cooldown on all interrupts in the game. 10 interrupts per minute. Nobody else got close to that. If you were stupid enough to tank on your Shaman (which I absolutely was; I had a blast) this was also one of your higher threat generators. Holding threat between Earth Shock and Stormstrike with Rockbiter was the way to do it.
As long as we’ve had shocks, they’ve been linked. While I don’t think it necessarily makes sense at this juncture, I doubt it’s going to change.
1 Like
It is a holdover from the oldest version of Enhancement Shaman, basiscally. Shocks sharing cooldowns is kinda dumb and adds little to the gameplay at this point beyond making the rotation more punishing on screw ups. I don’t think it’ll free up your rotation/priority system much making them have different CDs, and you’ll probably still struggle with downtime if you already are, but it should really just not share a CD at this point.
If keeping old play style is so important, then why do Elemental shamans and Resto shamans have shocks on different CDs. In addition, their frost shock is spammable as it has no CD, but the shaman of old had their frost shock on a 6 second CD. Clearly, the game has changed and every other class has new tools to kite and gain distance or snare and close the gap.
Enhance shamans however relies heavily on slowing the target down to do damage, and ironically the Elemental shaman can do damage to the target regardless of them being slowed or not. It makes more sense for the Enhance shaman to have spammable frost shocks and not the Elemental shaman. It’s already quite hard these days for Enhance to stick on their target. At the very least, it makes more sense for Enhance shamans to have shocks on separate CDs.
2 Likes
They should take frost shock off the CD. And add earthshock to our toolkit as another high dps shock that shares a CD with flameshock.
For instance if frost shock is spammable doing 300 damage per shock, earth shock is on the cd with flame shock doing 1000 damage or so.
1 Like
It is horrid glad we got to see how bad it was before we chose mains. Sad the transmogs for the artifacts are so on point but the entire spec is flop and they don’t care because that staff has left the building.
Separating the shock cooldowns is my biggest wish for enhancement gameplay. An extra button (that doesn’t contribute to ability bloat) will really help the people who are finding they have downtime.
Also a way to spread flame shock with lava lash for fire nova.
It’s from back in vanilla. It would have been very devastating in that iteration of PvP to frost shock, flame shock, stormstrike, earth shock, frost shock, flame shock, etc. It doesn’t make sense now, but the devs are clueless about what to do with enh. The most “enhancement shaman” I’ve felt in a while is the guardian in BDO, especially after the awakening.