Feedback: Enhancement shaman and class tree (10.0.7)

First, I’d like to start off by saying that I’m enjoying this expansion quite a lot. Probably my favorite so far. I main enhancement shaman (Raid and Mythic +) and play a lot of alts (generally mythic plus). This post specifically pertains to the PVE side. This also relates to gameplay, not necessarily balance.

I’d like to start a discussion around the shaman class tree and the enhancement tree. I do generally like how it turned out and the flexibility of the talents I can choose.
The class tree has some power and defensives in it that every specialization takes, which is fine. The issue, however, are the capstones. They are fairly lackluster and/or extremely niche. While, some do fulfill class fantasy, I don’t believe that warrants their return and/or position in the class tree.

Looking at the 10.0.7 class tree, as an enhancement shaman, I will rarely (closer to never) take any of the capstones.
Totemic recall is only good if you need to reset windrush totem or capacitor totem. For restoration, it’s only really used for stoneskin totem in raid settings in niche situations.
Nature’s swiftness will never be used as an enhancement shaman in its current state.
Stoneskin totem is extremely niche and tranquil air totem won’t ever be used.
Additionally, Maelstrom weapon and flurry are only used by enhancement shaman. While this is not in the way for any of the other specs, I don’t believe this fits in the design philosophy of the class tree.

Now onto the enhancement class tree. Generally, the class tree is good. There are a few issues:

Windfury Totem. Biggest issue in my eyes.
This fits the class fantasy of enhancement shaman; however, I don’t think it is healthy for the shaman class as a whole (specifically the dps roles). If you’re the only dps shaman, you’re heavily incentivized to go enhancement for the group. While I do appreciate the raid spot, I feel there are other options to make shaman more compelling to bring, regardless of spec. Giving elemental shaman a specific totem that benefits ranged is also not compelling as this would cause more problems. I don’t want to be in a position, though, where dps shaman are not brought to a raid group as they do not provide anything to the raid.

It’s also not a fun button to press every 2 minutes as a maintenance button, even if it works with totemic projection for when you have to move ouf of the 30 yard range(and this is often). Melee not in the windfury group are also left out.

As the enhancement shaman having to spend a point in windfury totem, boy does it not feel great knowing that your damage output was just decreased. This is similar to beam for balance druids (albiet not as drastic).

Feral Lunge
This talent is used only as a last resort. This is quite unfortunate, as I love this ability. Not only that, to get this ability, you generally get rid of windfury weapon (which is another issue) and this hurts my soul. This talent needs to be made more accessible. Why must I feel awful about taking this amazing talent? Please send help.

Windfury weapon
Why is this a talent? This is THE class fantasy spell for enhancement shaman. This is what you think about when you play enhancement shaman.

Refreshing waters/Focused Insight
IF this was even a viable option to take, you would almost certainly choose focused insight as it allows you to triage other members. Currently, you would never take this talent.

Fire Nova
You would never take this talent. Probably a tuning issue.

Converging storms
This talent is never taken. Sounds cool, but not competitive enough or useful enough in any situation. Elemental build for enhancement does a better job at funneling.

Elemental Assault/Legacy of the frostwitch
These two talents only see play in the single target physical build – and you put two points into elemental assault and one into legacy of the frostwitch. Not much choice involved in these talents. Not useful to the Elemental build or the AoE physical build.

Deeply Rooted Elements / Ascendance
Deeply Rooted Elements is the new Hot Hands of shadowlands. Fun when you get procs, depressing when you do not. Ascendance never gets picked over Deeply Rooted Elements unless you absolutely need burst for a specific phase. Even so, I dread the day of having to pick ascendance. A 3 minute cooldown with a 15 second duration hoping for windstrike resets. These two talents are also only used for the physical doomwinds build. Right now, it clashes too much with the elemental build rotation.

In regards to playstyle, I’m glad the current hot hands playstyle has less of a variance and is very fun especially in aoe situations. Unfortunately, doomwinds with the deeply rooted elements became the extremely variant build we knew in shadowlands. Enhancement shaman’s damage is also extremely reliant on uptime on the boss compared to other classes. It would be nice to have something to mitigate this.

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I agree, except Fire Nova is great for AoE. I always use it in dungeons. It’d be nice to consolidate some of that row though. We used to have an earth option, rockbiter, boulderfist etc. Something like that might be a physical build option.

Flurry, maelstrom weapon, and chain heal should be baseline for enhance, resto. There are plenty of different totems and talents to replace them, totem mastery from legion was decent. Windfury Totem should be baseline and a raid buff.

Ascendance is terrible for every spec, needs a buff or rework. I haven’t ever liked it really, and the visual isn’t good either. I’m a cow, don’t turn me into a chicken.

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Needs to be removed off the spec tree, changed into like Mana Spring, passive aura around the Shaman of 30 yds or when placing Windfury Totem the group and yourself gets a 60 minute buff lost on death, literally like every other class in game. I’d argue it also needs to be buffed. No class should have to press their buff every 20 seconds or have a weak aura to scream at you once out of range.

Should be baseline, in its place on the spec tree is a talent called “ Rapid Lunges” giving Feral Lunge 2 charges.

Baseline like I mentioned above, move Elemental Assault in its place as a 1 talent node, changed to only give 10% Stormstrike damage but 100% to generate 1 MSW on use.

Make it 30% and uncapped, let Stormstrike actually do damage.

Like I mentioned Elemental Assault should be moved to Windfury Totems position, Legacy of the Frost Witch duration needs to be longer, Elemental build has way better synergy in talent choices, Physical only has a rare few and severely undertuned. I can’t imagine why they thought a 5 second buff is great, seriously.

This firstly needs to be switched in the spec tree position with Primordial Wave, Elemental Build has no use for it, why it’s on the right side makes no sense.

Ascendence should have DRE baked into it, and cd reduced to at minimum 2 minutes, this way we have a solid and reliable cd outside of rare rng procs, think of how Wings are for Paladins, they get a solid 2 min cd with rng procs, why can’t we have something similar. It’s a capstone talent they should feel useful not determine if we do good or not purely on rng, bad design.

Doomwinds is severely undertuned, it needs its nerf reverted back to 1 min, I’d even go as far as 45 seconds so it lines up perfectly with Sunder, lasting 8 seconds is also ridiculous compared to every other melee cd at 1.5 min or less. Doomwinds needs to feel impactful when pressed. You usually don’t go Primordial Wave with Doomwinds yet Primordial wave is 45 seconds gives insane haste in AoE and further 10 MSW stacks. Not to mention the haste buff lasts 12 seconds while Doomwinds is on double the cd, lasts 8 seconds. Also while Doomwinds is active your Windfury attacks should cleave to 3 targets, vastly helping the physical build for AoE.

My issue is the Elemental Build seems fleshed out, outside minor tuning like you’ve mentioned on Fire Nova, Physical build seems like an after thought in comparison.

Look at Alpha Wolf, literally never picked in any situation. It needs to be buffed. Elemental Blasts hits like a truck with Elemental Spirits, yet physical build has no ST spender to take advantage of LotFW and Alpha Wolf.

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So here are my two cents take out of it what you will

There are some people that do not like wf weapon they would like to be able to run double flame tongue. But I do agree and this is going to be my hot take I personally think fire should be removed from enhancement. So remove LL and flame tongue and fs. Return earth shock and Frostbrand weapon so we have our wf and our auto attacks slow when hit with frost brand.

I think this just should be part of Crash lighting. Just like I think that the talent unruly winds should be baked into Wind Fury at max stacks.

I hate to say it but no. In my experience hot hands proced more tha DRE. Ascendance should be baseline with lower maybe 1.5-2 min and DRE should be the talent that modifies it.

So here is my thoughts with doomwinds. Doom winds should be baseline have them remove the nerf off of it.

I like the idea of it being a passive buff. Either that or blizzard needs do to a complete overhaul of the totem systems. As they are right now they are out dated. I want my totems just like I want the old SS debuff/earthshock combo.

Here is a few things that I think you missed. Gust of Wind/Spirit Walk one of these two need to be baseline. As it is we either get a blink or we get a way to remove roots.

Natures guardian needs to be baseline and restore 40%-45% hp.

And we need Shamanistic rage back and it needs to be baseline not a talent.

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While I do agree that there should be a playstyle where Enh shamans would not need to use lavalash/flametongue/flameshock in their rotation, it would mean that we would ignore part of our toolkit. I’m not sure if that is healthy. The idea of having the ability to choose to replace flametongue with say Frostbrand or Rockbiter could be fun, but keep in mind, doing so may put us in a position where you have to choose between single target or aoe. Right now, we are able to go into single target with some AoE/Cleave without much sacrifice.

This would probably give too much power to crash lightning as a 1 pointer. Unruly winds is fine as a talent as it would not benefit the elemental playstyle too much and is not very strong without forceful winds or doomwinds.

Right, it was not meant to be a 1:1 comparison in respect to proc chance, but rather how volatile your damage was when it did or did not proc. I do like the idea of having DRE as either an option under ascendance or baked in to it. Maybe instead of DRE being a proc chance, have some control like Balance druids do.

I don’t agree with this; doomwinds is a certain playstyle that you can opt into, and I would prefer it stay that way. Hitting the button, though, should be like ascendance and hit all targets around you, though.

While I do like the fantasy of windfury totem, I do believe it needs to be removed or be more generic so that elemental shamans can run it, too. I understand that multistrike was bad as a secondary stat, but maybe this would be a healthy way to bring it back as the only source? It would fit the shaman class thematically. I do understand, though, that there will be discussions around “Why spec into melee when you can be ranged?”. I do believe that the raid bosses have become more lenient in this regard, but I also wouldn’t mind speccing between the two depending on the fight or dungeon or affix.

That’s a lot of baseline. Let’s reign that back a bit as there would be more button bloat. Ghost wolf serves as a good movement ability and it is baseline. Gust of Wind/Spirit Walk are fantastic choices and are deserving of a talent choice.

Nature’s Guardian also a great talent choice, though I do believe it does need to be more accessible, though wind rush is always nice. Maybe add DR to it instead of additional healing (or remove a 2nd point from it and have a modifying talent to it that adds DR on proc).

Shamanistic rage, I think Astral Shift does a better job. Astral shift is a starter talent point, so I think it’s fine as is.

Keep in mind, I’m not asking to be the best spec there is in the game. I also want to avoid excessive button bloat. Sure, there could be more playstyles utilizing earth (Rockbiter and Earthen Spike/Earth Shock as a spender for the more physical build), but I’m more interested in giving us the ability to spec into our utility without compromising our own damage (IE Feral Lunge for WFW or speccing into WF Totem at a damage loss) as well as removing annoyances like dropping WF Totem every time we outrange it or every 2 minutes. AFAIK, we are the only class that has to spec into our raid/party buff in our Specialization tree. WF totem is also the only buff that pretty much locks us into playing 1 spec in a raid setting. I would love to play elemental, but the raid loses too much to justify it.

If anything, maelstrom weapons should be baseline for selecting enhancement spec. The spec just doesn’t work without it. It is the core mechanic.

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I just want totems off the gcd :frowning:

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Well we already have that at least in physical build we have st and aoe build.

I some what agree. Ascendance is a dps cd and should be baseline. I like your idea with DRE but I still think ascendance should be baseline with a low cd just like wings.

Yes is it but it should be we should not have had our abilities removed and made talent its a lazy cop out that blizzard did doing this garbage. Instead of using their brains and coming up with talents that modify abilities they just stole our abilities and made them talents. Why the hell should we have to talent our interrupt its a needed part of our kit. But purge I might understand that but its still lazy. Now abilities like Lava blast that has been elemental only and Elemental Blast yes I understand them being talents but core abilities no its pure laziness and very pathetic.

I agree

I just want our totems back baseline like they used to be but I also want them updated with the modern game.

Unless we get the MoP Ascendance glyph back or they update the model, and I mean not just higher res but a whole new totally different model, then no thanks.

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This is impossible, because the old style of totems cannot be updated into the modern version of the game. They would become auras, but in general, the idea of a buff class has gone bye-bye — despite FF14 showing its perfectly capable of having a buff class that is a viable end game raider.

Furthermore, if they returned them, they would have to homogenize again because otherwise we’d be taken solely over other classes because of all the buffs we provide.

That said, I do think we should get the following back:

All following totems stay at 5 hp but

  • Earthbind now has no cooldown, and is not combined with Earthgrasp (what a dumb change they are making)
  • Tremor Totem now has no cooldown
  • Grounding Totem is now baseline, absorbs a single spell, with a 12 second cooldown (with pvp talent remaining as is)
  • Healing Spring now has no cooldown

By going back to this, you no longer need to worry about 5 hp because you can simply place them again immediately. Then it truly becomes a choice for the enemy: do they keep totem stomping as we continuously place them, or do they ignore and just focus us?

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Why not just put things like windfury totem as capstones for the class tree? Or just throw all the totems on the class tree as choice options. Imagine if you had to pick windfury or skyfury totem as capstone?