Yes, they are going to update them next Tuesday. There is a blue post a bit further up here about it.
2 Likes
Except it is. It is no longer another button in the rotation. Logic isn’t hard you know.
Earth wall totem need new animation for sure nobody can see that in the floor
8 Likes
A removal is the talent or ability is removed from the game. This was a rotational change, not an ability removal.
Not going to argue with ya babes 
No reason to be hostile. Missy
It’s almost like if you read my post and use context clues, you can see I’m referring to button bloat, which the change did in fact remove.
1 Like
Dont like the new change for resto shaman on surging totem. Now in pvp you need people to stand in Earthen wall AND surging totem.
An ideal compromise would be that totem casts healing rains under it but if its not hitting anyone it casts on closest ally.
Big thanks for the update! Just to keep things in one place since it’s been extremely buried in the thread I’m going to repost our large feedback points here for posterity as condensed as possible, ideally so they don’t get lost, and an updated Bug List to save having to search around the thread.
Most of this once again is from an Enhancement perspective, but where appropriate we’re trying to steer things that would be beneficial for all specs without stepping on toes.
Class Tree
Intro & Main Points of Concern
When announced, the Shaman class tree was met with equal parts confusion and excitement - confusion in that its format didn’t match other classes along with excitement for what looked like an exclusively utility-first approach that seemed to match the intended design goals for Dragonflight. This closely mirrors our specialization trees with tighter and more directed pathing along with real tradeoffs and opportunity costs awaiting your choices. However, as the DF beta continued on and into launch much of this excitement faded away due to a lack of iteration leading to lackluster choices and areas of the tree. Over time this has turned into dread and resentment for our class tree as an entire expansion’s worth of retrospection has shown it to be shallow, weak and unimpactful.
Much like the spec tree, there’s some key points we’ll be going into below. The core thrust of the feedback is as follows:
- Lack of choice - while the tree feels open, nothing that we pick up really matters
- Defensive design - currently we feel at odds with the game systems and lack the tools to deal with very commonly asked questions in encounters
- Tree Power & Point Economy - we have an extreme lack of power both in terms of throughput and meaningful tools. This links back to the choice issue - there’s no friction or excitement to be found on the tree.
- Totems - they take up an overwhelming amount of the tree without being exciting, if they’re going to take up that much space lean into it and make them impactful.
- Sub 20/Capstone Area - the area of the tree that’s intended to hold the most powerful tools currently houses some of the least impactful talents on the tree.
Lack of Choice
For a talent tree with very few performance nodes in it, the claim of a lack of choice is bold - if there’s so much freedom then how can there be so little choice? The problem here is that wide swathes of the class tree are full of filler, and is typically (depending on the DPS or Restoration perspective) completely irrelevant to your chosen role. We’ll go into more detail about which nodes apply here, but the reality is it is most of them. Simply as a thought experiment, a DPS Shaman could limit themselves to 8-10 points in the class tree and it wouldn’t impact their play experience in the slightest. When the tree is lacking useful, interesting or even just situationally powerful utility, there’s no friction pushing you to make meaningful choices - the only reason you actually take 31 points is because the game requires you to in order to save your loadout.
Having a class tree filled with these kinds of irrelevant nodes is technically the Swiss Army Knife it looks like - sure, it has a blade or two that you’re always going to need, but the rest is just 20 toothpicks. You might get food stuck in your teeth once in a while and it’s great to have one but you can live without it, you certainly don’t need 20, and it would be really nice to have a can opener or a corkscrew right now instead.
Defensive Design
For many expansions now the stated design goal for Shamans is to be heavy on self healing with some party supportive healing. This partially worked in the past but is now a severe weakness without much payoff since the introduction of Mythic+. With the introduction of infinite scaling systems the primary concern Shamans have to deal with is actually surviving incoming damage without relying on party members. It doesn’t matter how much we’re able to heal if we are not able to reliably live through damage patterns other classes have the tools to handle.
Evidence of this is shown on various M+ aggregation ranking sites and noting a pattern of DPS Shaman exclusion in top level keys. The official Blizzard Mythic Dungeon International is another source - the inclusion of Elemental and especially Enhancement Shamans is exceptionally low - never seeing widespread adoption in any season. This isn’t for a lack of offensive utility as Shamans do have a variety of tools to control enemy packs, instead historically resting on that same lack of survivability. This is a stark departure from our MoP/WoD days where the class had a lot of passive and active defensive tools along with a suite of self healing (at a cost).
To top it all off, mid-Dragonflight reworks that resulted in re-scaling healing against player health pools in an attempt to curb off-healing potential hit DPS shamans harder than everyone else. While every other hybrid healer shares their primary healing spells with their healing counterpart, Shamans do not and were left out of compensatory buffs to those baseline effects. Enhancement can at least rely on Maelstrom Weapon to get a burst of healing (at the cost of an incredibly high amount of damage relative to other hybrids), Elemental Shamans are not so lucky, being left to spam weak Healing Surges.
As a result, this design of lower active/passive defense paired with mostly active self-healing potential is simply outdated. In the current landscape this feels like an overwhelming power creep with Shamans left out, leaving us in a bad place. Barring a sweeping, universal redesign to endgame systems, as it stands Shaman will always have the looming threat of being pushed out of competitive group content due to this achilles heel.
Tree Power / Point Efficiency
Overall, Shaman class talents can be described as “thematic, but weak, too specific or non-applicable”. The weak talents can be further lumped into 2 categories, those that are inefficient for point cost in relation to other specializations, and talent designs that were never very effective to begin with.
This is where the bulk of the comparisons to other specializations in this feedback will be made and just like in our Enhancement feedback we dislike making “whataboutisms” but the disparity is far too blatant to not bring up here. Nearly every single one of our stat based or passive defensive / offensive talents can be directly compared to a talent node in another class tree that is simply better or more point efficient. To note, these are obviously not 1:1 situations and some classes have a reason for their node economy, but the frequency of these comparisons is alarming. Using a few of our nodes as specific examples:
CD based Healing utility
- Healing Stream
- 451% sp baseline to allies, talentable to up to 810%, 30s CD
- Slow trickle healing, no guarantee it even heals the caster, no DPS kickback
- 451% sp baseline to allies, talentable to up to 810%, 30s CD
- Emerald Blossom (Evoker)
- 450% sp baseline to 3 allies, talentable up to 1000% sp, 30s CD
- Burst healing, 400% sp self heal, can talent into Living Flame DPS increase
- 450% sp baseline to 3 allies, talentable up to 1000% sp, 30s CD
Passive Crit %
- Nature’s Fury
- 2% critical strike chance to Nature abilities only (2 points)
- Keen Eyesight (Hunter)
- 2% critical strike chance (2 points)
- Lycara’s Teachings (Feral Druid)
- 3% critical strike chance (2 points)
- Holy Aegis (Paladin)
- 2% critical strike chance and 2% armor (2 points)
Passive Defensives
- Elemental Warding
- 3% magic damage reduction (2 points)
- Thick Hide (Druid)
- 4% all damage reduction (1 point)
- Illidari Knowledge (Demon Hunter)
- 5% magic damage reduction (1 point)
These examples just go on and on - the more you look at other class trees in the game, it’s deflating that the Shaman tree tends to contain weaker, less efficient and more restrictive versions of talents that other classes have.
On the other side of our weak talents are those that have suffered from their design falling out of favor, or never really hitting the mark to begin with. Some of these include Spirit Wolf (which ought to reverse its buff patterns - giving high defense up front tapering off into high speed over time), Chain Heal (for DPS shaman this doesn’t provide impactful off-healing relative to some hybrid specs passive healing without significant GCD/resource investment) and the vast majority of totem nodes in the talent tree.
Totems
Very few people have problems with the fantasy or theming of totems in general, us included; instead, we have issues with the viability of the totems available to us. By default, Totems are nearly always a weaker delivery system than just simple targeted spell casts as they often have delays, health pools and (at least in the past) have commonly run into mechanical or very old game-technical limitations. To compensate for an unwieldy cast type, Totems should provide impactful and interesting moments when cast, especially given the amount of talent nodes in the tree dedicated to them. Roughly 25% of the talent tree is made up of totems or totem related passives along with 50% (!) of the points below the 20 point line.
Some of our totems are fine and require no real changes - like Capacitor/Wind Rush (despite being weaker versions of other class stuns or AoE sprints) while other totems remain situational but strong when used such as Tremor/Poison Cleansing. These aren’t really problematic due to the variety, but they could really do with some dual functionality and flexibility to make them more enticing without relying on the encounter team enabling them. The remaining totems are far too situational or weak - Healing Stream, Earthgrab, Stoneskin and worst of all, Tranquil Air. These totems are rarely taken and even rarer still used as they provide effects that barely justify the GCD cost. To cap it off there’s 7 talent nodes spanning 10 total points related to lightly supporting totems. These include effects like a radius increase, duration increase, CDR, and a cooldown reset. In case it comes up too, with the current design of Totemic, Surging Totem does little to nothing to make these any more desirable than they currently are.
This is where this feedback diverges a bit - Restoration Shamans may actually care about some of these totem passives due to Cloudburst/Healing Stream Totem being a core tool - but that begs the question that if Restoration is the only one with such a focus, why is this a shared design space? The Restoration spec tree contains 6 unique cooldown based totems each with viable use cases that actually have powerful and impactful effects while Elemental has 1 (Liquid Magma) with Enhancement containing zero (Windfury Totem only interacts with the radius increase). Considering this disparity, why is so much of the tree dedicated to supporting something two specs care little for rather than shared themes such as Shields, Weapon Imbues and Shocks?
What hurts the most is that there are some interesting utility totems, they’re just on the PvP tree. Static Field and Grounding Totem would both see consistent raid and dungeon usage if placed in the PvE class tree instead. The lowest possible hanging fruit includes replacing Tranquil Air with Static Field and giving Stoneskin meaningful power as a capstone talent rather than the niche space it exists in.
“Dead” Areas and Sub-20/Capstones
Unlike many hybrid role spec trees (aside from Druids), several sections of our class tree are functionally limited to one spec only. Examples include Maelstrom Weapon and Flurry which are never useful for Ele/Restoration, the Spiritwalker’s Grace to Nature’s Swiftness section never being useful to Enhancement and the Totemic Recall related talents also never being useful for Enhancement. Talents like this really ought to be baselined for those specs or broaden their impact to other specs. Nature’s Swiftness, for example, could instead grant 5 (or more) stacks of Maelstrom Weapon which Restoration and Elemental would benefit from while making the ability at least useful to Enhancement. Spiritwalker’s Grace could also increase melee attack range while active or grant periodic maelstrom weapon stack generation for its duration. The Maelstrom Weapon and Flurry nodes really ought to be Enhancement baseline due to their conflict with Resto/Ele gameplay goals.
Our sub-20 and capstone nodes are extremely underwhelming and need a lot of work. As mentioned before, totem related talents represent 50% of the total points below the 20 line that Enhancement and Elemental are not enticed by. The capstones themselves are especially uninspiring when compared to powerful effects granted to other classes in their trees. Totemic Recall is incredibly situational (and using it more often doesn’t help that), Stoneskin/Tranquil Air totems are exceedingly weak and Nature’s Swiftness does nothing for Enhancement. Simply put, there’s absolutely nothing on the bottom row that we’re excited about picking up.
It’s not uncommon to see DPS talent builds that put 2 or less points below the 20 line with a majority of points landing in pathing nodes, mandatory utility or defensive abilities generally granted to other specializations baseline. The entire bottom section of the tree needs a comprehensive and major overhaul - with the Totem specific effects lumped together to make the point cost seem more reasonable. We want to have a reason to get to the bottom of the tree where “the good stuff” is, but right now, we can’t find that there, nor can we really find it elsewhere on the tree either.
Missed Opportunities
With how bloated and yet at the same time empty as our class tree is, it is reasonable to ask what alternatives could replace the weaker sections of the tree. Some possible thematic areas left unexplored include focusing on abilities that all specializations actively utilize, notably Elemental Shields, Weapon Imbues, Shocks, Bloodlust/Heroism or previous expansion raid abilities like Stormlash.
While we believe that the active and passive defensive ability of Shamans should increase, we do also recognize the fantasy and theming around retaining self healing potential. Powerful self-healing survivability tools ought to exist below the 20 line as the opportunity cost to take utility options elsewhere, tacked on to our existing abilities. This could come in the form of adding more powerful shield related talents, tacking defensive effects onto casting shocks, granting more powerful access to new hybrid weapon imbue types. There’s even opportunities to merge many of these effects together with older concepts like Static Shock causing shock casts to discharge your current active shields with some kind of benefit. Finally, considering how often we’re cited as a class that historically brought supportive effects, it would be nice to have tools outside of Ancestral Guidance/Wind Rush that meaningfully benefit our group.
Conclusion
While DPS and Restoration Shamans each utilize the Shaman class tree in different ways, all can agree that the tree feels restrictive, lacking in choice and is generally a hollow experience to navigate. It’s very telling that while DPS Shamans complain about not having enough things to put points into, Restoration usually has issues with having to give up major tools to remain functional. If the tree is going to remain utility focused with a very light impact on direct DPS or healing performance, then make that utility matter instead of bloating the tree. Utilize parts of the class that are barely represented here, and make us care about this half of our character’s tree. As it stands right now from an Enhancement perspective, the class tree is a chore to fill out when setting up a build rather than a key part of my loadout, and that’s just not very exciting for a core system.
As an example of the kind of tree changes we’re looking at and where power would be redistributed, for a thought experiment I’ve put together some points that would be nice to see explored. Note that none of these are suggestions, they’re just possible example areas I think would be worth exploring
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1H912YhtqL9Xi3bKJjuZkErx-P5Hooee5d0NzVjNpVJU/edit?usp=sharing
Bonus Post - Visual Updates
To tack onto this, we also would love to see updates to many of the aging Shaman visuals. Dragonflight introduced an incredible amount of great art and special effects that we’d like to see re-purposed in The War Within - most people would agree that some of our spell, particle and audio effects are sorely due for modernizing. Enhancement in particular engages in a complicated dance of abilities and effects that have little visual fidelity. Several of our abilities like Ice Strike, Frost Shock and Doom Winds have little to no spell effects whatsoever while Doom Winds manages to go complete stealth mode while also having no audio cues. For a specific example, take Ascendance, a dated model from Bastion of Twilight that feels old and out of place. Dragonflight introduced Dathea, Ascended which is much more striking, modern and appropriate without removing your own character from the field:
https://i.imgur.com/QMwFlMo.jpg
There were hundreds, if not thousands of new elemental themed abilities and effects from the Primalists that could be drawn from for reuse. Much of this expansion stung for Shamans from a thematic perspective - raids, dragons and wyrms all based on the elements and very little Shaman tie-ins felt like a lot like missed opportunities. Much like many resources being pulled from Cataclysm for Mists of Pandaria updates, we’d love it if Dragonflight assets were pulled forward and re-used for all Shamans.
Spec Tree
State of the Spec & Summary of Concerns
Enhancement launched in Dragonflight in an extremely strong state in terms of design and engagement - much of the design goals intended for the talent tree system were highlighted to great effect with our specialization tree. Overall, we strongly feel that Dragonflight was a slam dunk for Enhancement in terms of performance, gameplay, community recognition and most of all being incredibly fun to play. Unfortunately, looking ahead at The War Within we are seeing an unprecedented increase in choice, flexibility and fantasy which leaves our more rigid structure looking outdated, alongside some dated animations to boot.
Now is the perfect time to perform some critical updates that are necessary to address these core issues, and time is of the essence due to Shaman updates appearing much later in this alpha cycle. We’d like to see updates to the Enhancement tree in a sensible, but simple way by reusing existing talents and interactions in new exciting ways. We feel that it is best to get the bulk of the updates handled in one fell swoop rather than slower, per-patch iterative bandaids that result in an overall costlier and worse experience for players.
Between improving combat variety, reducing the excessive talent point “tax” and increasing build flexibility, there’s a lot of specific ideas we have and to put it as broadly as possible, here’s a list of things we’re going to discuss in more detail:
- Move critical combat pacing talents like Elemental Assault and Ashen Catalyst to be available sooner.
- Reduce the amount of 2 points nodes in the tree
- Split “dual function” talents into equal 1 pointers
- Rebalance 2 point pathing nodes into 1 pointers
- Add follow-up / combat flow customizing talents to the following nodes:
- Doom Winds, Sundering / Lashing Flames, Witch Doctor’s Ancestry
- Improve Specialization specific survivability
- Feral Lunge baseline
- Refreshing Waters & Focusing Insight
- Addition of competitive defensive option
- Windfury Totem Quality of Life Improvement
- Only spec taxed a talent point to bring group utility
- Bring the Totemic hero tree “baselining” effect directly to Windfury Weapon
- Spec tree impact on Hero talents
Where We Would Like to See it Go
First, we need to discuss some “lessons learned”, or design issues we witnessed throughout the expansion and during the TWW alpha. Currently, Enhancement is designed to exist in a point of enforced tension via point constraints, and that’s left us in a place where we often spend a lot for very little. If this were adjusted down, there would be much more room to expand on specific parts of the toolkit with new takes on old effects, and really double down on some of our core fantasy.
Notably, the current level 70 Dragonflight experience masks some critical issues that are present in both TWW hero trees and the traditional leveling experience as we had a recent opportunity to witness with the Mists of Pandaria Remix event. These aren’t issues that are so bad that the spec is fundamentally flawed, and could mostly be alleviated with some adjustments to our existing talent tree structure to futureproof our gameplay, which we’ll outline below:
Maelstrom Weapon Generation Control
Improvements to Elemental Assault in patch 10.2 and the introduction of Ice Strike and Swirling Maelstrom added something largely missing from the Shadowlands formula - predictable resource generation. As much of our generation relies on a complicated set of interactions that result in heavy momentum based gameplay, introducing more “floor” generation greatly improves the entire experience without compromising how the spec works. The issue here is that it’s become such a pivotal part of the flow for all builds that both being granted below the 20 line and costing 2 talent points results in spending precious final points on gameplay flow talents instead of cool capstones and heavily restricts build flexibility. Elemental Assault currently also comes way too late to help the leveling experience. Leveling in MoP remix without Elemental Assault generally feels frustrating with a hotbar full of abilities but nothing available to press since we simply don’t have the stats to support Maelstrom Weapon generation without a full talent tree
Basically, now that there is a small amount of predictability injected into our otherwise heavily randomized resource generation it should become a pivotal facet of the Enhancement Shaman kit. We would like to see Elemental Assault move above the 20 talent point line, only cost 1 point but lose its Stormstrike amplification effect as a reasonable compromise.
Talent Point Economy
The issue of Elemental Assault costing 2 (very expensive!) talent points leads into another critical issue, that being the sheer amount of 2-point nodes. These are largely pathing and gating nodes that stretch our builds thin and more specifically, cause compatibility issues with the new Hero Talent Trees.
Several 2 point nodes have a dual functionality - using Static Accumulation as an example, for each talent point you’re essentially getting two half talents at once. Each point grants 10% chance to refund Maelstrom Weapon and passive Maelstrom Weapon generation while Ascendance is active. Nearly all of our 2 pointers designed in this fashion could simply be split by their functionality into separate talents. For example, Legacy of the Frost Witch could be 2 talents, one for the Stormstrike reset effect (ideally just a Stormbringer proc!) and the other a physical/frost damage increase. If you spend 1 point on each talent (for 2 total) you result in the same value as before, but expand build flexibility for free. Builds that don’t focus on Stormstrike may still want access to a frost damage increase and can add it in while avoiding something they don’t care for
Talents that we feel could be split in this fashion include Static Accumulation, Legacy of the Frost Witch, Elemental Assault and Witch Doctor’s Ancestry (with Witch Doctor becoming a choice node instead). That we spend so many points on 2 point nodes below the 20 line (6 points total!) on every build permutation greatly restricts our ability to truly customize your combat flow. Really, we really just want the ability to choose which “dual effect” on these talents we want without being mandated to take both for 2 points.
Our remaining 2 point nodes include Hot Hand (which is probably fine staying 2 points, but can be addressed by moving it) Improved Maelstrom Weapon and Molten Assault. These talents are prohibitively large “tax” to talent point pathing and restrict builds far too much considering how vital they are for the spec to operate.
Improve Combat Flow Flexibility
An “Island” talent is one that we’ve identified as a one point talent that has no follow up talents or direct modifications that is expected to justify its worth on its own. Two key talents that fit this description are Doom Winds and Sundering, which both exist in a strong fantasy space but have come up short from their potential. Addressing this with interesting follow-up talents rather than simply buffing them keeps them from becoming too strong for a single point investment, while letting them fill out the space left behind from reducing mandatory point taxes on the tree, as discussed in the previous section.
Alongside these two, both Witch Doctor’s Ancestry and Lashing Flames could stand to have alternative choices due to their overwhelming influence on the flow of combat when taken. Witch Doctor’s Ancestry is an excellent talent, but demands a heavy GCD investment and an increase to complexity in moment to moment decision making. Lashing Flames on the other hand is a remarkably high skill AoE delivery tool that often turns players away from certain builds or interacting with the talent entirely. Both of these talents would benefit greatly from choice nodes that provide a way for players to more flexibly choose where the complexity in their gameplay lies.
Finally, with talents moving around and less 2-pointers cluttering the tree there’s some open space to add additional talents to the post-20 section of the tree that ought to serve as a thematic and mechanical bridge between Primordial Wave and the “storm” portion of the talent tree.
Specialization Specific Utility & Windfury Totem
The Enhancement tree contains 4 utility nodes within it, 3 of which are basically never taken due to a lack of competitive strength to actual performance with the last being Windfury Totem (which will be discussed second).
Starting with Feral Lunge, while it was popular in Legion and still effective in PvP, it simply has no justifiable way of competing against performance talents outside of remarkably specific scenarios (Mythic Raszageth). While we’re trying to avoid “whataboutisms”, this is very much the same situation as Flying Serpent Kick for Windwalker - it stands to be baselined as it’s just wasting space. Adding on to that is Focused Insight and Refreshing Waters which could be desirable talents in the class tree, but are laughably out of place in our spec tree. Spending a talent point on either of these options has some very minor merit during leveling but would simply find a better home in the class tree.
As far as defensive utility in the tree goes, if much of our talent point economy problems were eased then there would certainly be room or even desire to pick up a defensive talent if it was actually good enough to consider taking - but our existing options simply don’t fit the bill. We would even encourage condensing an important 2 point node (like something in the Improved/Raging Maelstrom Weapon area) and gating it behind a mandatory (desirable) defensive node to result in a similar 2 point cost. This could mirror the design made for the Havoc/Feral trees and a possible area to focus on that has seen little support could be Lightning Shield.
Windfury Totem is the final talent point that really concerns us. There isn’t a single other specialization in the game that is taxed a talent point to bring damage related raid or party utility. As a result, Enhancement just has one talent point less than any other DPS, and we’re often not even the biggest recipient of its value in a party! If Windfury Totem was so iconic to bring back in Shadowlands and keep it around for another 2 expansions AND make an entire hero tree around it then it just simply shouldn’t cost a specialization talent point anymore.
We’d really love to see the effect that Surging Totem in the Totemic Hero Tree has by tying the Windfury Totem aura to Windfury Weapon just rolled baseline into Windfury Weapon. It was definitely identified as a large quality of life improvement for the Totemic Hero Tree and we feel that point in particular is a critical failure point in the cost requirements when building around it.
Setup Time and Overt Weaknesses
There’s a growing concern that there’s a lot of setup time for in particular our AoE with certain talents that I think is the root cause of some misdirected complaints about Primordial Wave. This isn’t a sentiment I’m fully behind, but I think the biggest issue in this is Molten Assault not spreading the Flame Shock target cap naturally, which is an extra step that feels redundant to many players. Increasing the spread to 5 (while reducing it to 1 talent point) would go a long way. Exploring possible easier alternatives to Lashing Flames as well may be worth the effort - ideally in the form of improving Crash Lightning or simply providing a choice node that’s easier to execute and more generic, but less potent in its niche.
Our uncapped AoE situation is something that is an extreme weakness in Dragonflight that, if it comes up again, will simply exclude us from Mythic+ content. There are some steps being taken via the hero talents that are definite improvements here, but talents and abilities could really stand in better when this becomes a problem. Fire Nova is a key example that has no strong differentiator from Hailstorm, and again Crash Lightning could stand to have more of a punch in these situations. To improve build flexibility, it would also be nice to have its damage type converted to Stormstrike (Nature/Phys) to work for both Feral Spirit variations.
Lastly, just to reiterate from the Class Tree section, our defensive capabilities need to be significantly improved in a landscape like The War Within, where specs more durable than we are to begin with are getting even stronger, and our hero talent effects simply don’t cut it.
Conclusion
The new talent system attempted to set a paradigm for each of its class and specialization trees - that each tree would allow for flexibility with choice but still introduced some expected “paths” that resulted in a satisfying level of tension and trade-offs. Enhancement embodies this design better than most but it hasn’t gone without notice that the strict adherence to this pattern is going to result in a leash instead of wings in The War Within. Each specialization that has been reworked during Dragonflight and TWW alpha so far has seen an unprecedented level of choice, flexibility and fantasy.
Dragonflight’s greatest success for Enhancement was creating an environment that was more of a framework, enabling different themes to focus around which element or playstyle suited you the most. No other spec managed to achieve harmony in builds like we did, and even that is extremely thematic in itself and we’d love to see that stay - ideally in tandem with hero talents to support that goal. The vast majority of key feedback provided here are not brand new talents or overhauls, just a restructuring and a few on-brand callbacks to solidify that. As a small visual aid we have a sample tree as to the kind of structure we’re looking for in future:
https://i.imgur.com/Ury1ggk.jpg
Similar to the class tree you can see notes, again not proposals just areas that are worth exploring that currently feel like they’ve been missed
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ln-SZ2MwkVpE5M6gpS1zG8Qs0RethaQ6g7BShwulIGo/edit?usp=sharing
Hero Talents
Brief Overview of Hero Talent Impact
As I’m sure you and anyone who plays Enhancement is aware, Dragonflight created a split in builds between the “Elementalist” loadout (focusing on spells and element weaving) and “Storm” (focusing on Stormstrike and lightning finishers). Right now, one of the hero trees in question leans into one of these archetypes, while the other has a partial leaning but some clear cut issues fitting into it. If the intended goal is to split builds down the middle in this way (which I think is for the best, personally), it would be nice to know that going forward to formulate ongoing feedback about their design and tuning. If they’re supposed to equally support the entire tree, then there are significantly larger and more complex issues at play here that I’ll avoid going into so as to not get bogged down.
Stormbringer
Overall tree design is good. Very focused on Maelstrom Weapon generation/expenditure, addition is impactful and suits the goals (and even elevates in some places) that Storm plays for. A few key points I picked up on while playing this a lot:
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Lack of choice nodes - minimum on every other hero tree is 3, with a maximum of 5, while Stormbringer only has 2. Definitely space to add more.
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Lack of UI support - with no way of telling how close you are to your next Tempest or trigger, it’s really difficult to keep track of where you are in your current cycle naturally without using external tools. It was however very welcome to see Awakening Storms added to this.
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Tempest waste - since the activator for both the keystone and capstone can come from the same spells, there being no redundancy can feel terrible when a double proc happens out of your control. This leads to wasting a Tempest and considering there’s so much weighted into these casts, it would be nice to have it either auto-fire or bank charges if possible. This (partially) extends to Arc Discharge stacks too which can cause decision paralysis.
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Arc Discharge / Storm Swell - choice node with a double failure condition (picked the wrong talent, didn’t meet the target requirements) feels redundant. Could easily be merged or allow for a choice between which one you want to favor more, as this leads to bad feelings one way or another. Need to be very careful about Arc Discharge activation in single target as well, so I understand the design choice.
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Tempest Frequency - this is really good, but it feels extremely bad to get started initially on pull/first pack. This is a mix of slow momentum as we get started paired with the buff being temporary - it would be nice to have a node that gives burst activation on combat entry or make the buff permanent so we can carry it between packs/during boss RP.
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Shocking Grasp - always-on slows that are also somewhat unreliable almost always feel bad, and having no way to turn this off while playing Stormbringer is a potential headache that could easily be avoided with a choice node here.
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Nature’s Protection / Surging Currents - Nature’s Protection uptime is sporadic, and may potentially lead to holding momentum to use the defensive. Not terrible, but extra duration might be worthwhile. Surging Currents is largely redundant considering Maelstrom Weapon exists, unless it could supercede the spend process to avoid using resource on healing (which would be nice).
Totemic
Tying in with the initial point, this tree feels like it has a lot less direction. Instead of focusing on one mechanic it’s tried to include all of them to varying degrees of success. Since Elementalist (and by extension that portion of the tree) has very little representation, this tree being flawed leads to a potentially catastrophic problem for our talent tree, and it’s pretty crucial to get this fixed. An abridged version of the most pressing problems I felt while playing are:
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Totem cooldown/duration - it’s far too low and gets in the way of a very momentum heavy spec. We can often have 2, 3 or 4 very high priority abilities coming up at the same time due to the number of procs we need to react to. Adding yet another into the mix via Surging Totem that gets all of its value through constant pressing feels like one too much, and the rotation crumbles. This didn’t reduce ability maintenance by replacing windfury totem, it increased it.
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Totemic Rebound - cool idea, but could really stand to go the same way as Elemental Assault by adding in Lava Lash and Ice Strike to not cause so much build friction. This is likely to confuse players as to what’s important to press, and gets in the way of the cool part of this talent which is us empowering our totem directly. This conflicts too heavily with Lively Totems and Reactivity, which are both fine as talents.
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Imbuement Mastery / Supportive Imbuements - these are incredibly weak and seem to exist solely for fantasy purposes. Flametongue does a miniscule portion of our damage and this is highly unlikely to compete on the choice node in any situation, and the Windfury node only causes build confusion by signposting things that go against other portions of the tree. These could really stand to be more interesting.
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High talent point requirement - this has been slightly alleviated over Alpha but it’s still an issue - lots of active talents are mentioned by name (Windfury Totem, Hailstorm/Fire Nova, Sundering, Elemental Blast, Ascendance) that we have no realistic way of fitting together into one build. This is a major source of the tree feeling like it’s spreading itself much too thin instead of picking one portion of the tree to care about.
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Surging Totem damage type - this being Physical when it’s a core component of the tree’s damage delivery is a potential problem when we have the Feral Spirit/Elemental Spirits split. This may end up being a sim problem that players won’t be able to solve for themselves and also lead to huge talent ramifications depending on which one wins out, alongside dissuading us from Mastery (alongside Haste which doesn’t impact the totem itself).
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Earth Mote - this has a mandatory requirement for an active talent to use on top of the rest of the tree. Elemental Blast giving cooldown reduction will almost definitely lead to overflow if it stays at 2 charges considering our current playstyle it’s trying to target. Points get much, much too tight to support this effectively in Mythic+ builds that are also forced into Windfury Totem that it can’t really fit in either.
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Utility/Defense nodes - Swift Recall is basically useless, there’s not much else to say here. Wind Barrier could stand to be much more frequent at its current number, or much more powerful if it’s to be an active defense tool.
Bug List
Spec Bug List
Flurry currently reduces Weapon DPS while active, proportionally reducing ability damage with the attack speed increase- Fixed- Flurry stacks are consumed by Windfury Totem procs
- Flurry stacks are not consumed by Windlash (Ascendance) auto-attacks
- Primordial Wave direct damage doesn’t scale with Mastery despite being Elemental damage
- Earth Elemental HP buff can be cancelled while the elemental is active
- Lava Burst tooltip doesn’t update with Maelstrom Weapon damage bonus modifier
- Stormblast deals an extremely high amount of damage to certain target dummies, making it difficult to test (assumed it’s the accumulator bug)
Stormbringer Bug List
- Conductive Energy’s Lightning Rod does an unusually low amount of damage (roughly 3% of abilities that trigger it, not 20%).
- Conductive Energy’s Lightning Rod deals an extremely high amount of damage to certain target dummies, making it difficult to test (assumed it’s the accumulator bug).
Awakening Storms does not trigger from Stormstrike / WindstrikeFixedTempest is currently not cast or GCD hastedFixedTempest doesn’t highlight on the action bar when above 5 Maelstrom WeaponFixed- Rolling Thunder & Feral Spirit buffs cancel each other out when both are active, causing the buff to fall off when Elemental Spirits is not taken See this post.
Rolling Thunder grants Enhancement Stormkeeper every 50 seconds (Elemental aspect of the talent)- Storm Swell / Arc Discharge are both always active regardless of talent selection
- Stormcaller (formerly Tempest Crit Bonus) isn’t hooked up to most of our spells
Shocking Grasp doesn’t slow from Crash Lightning splash damage crits.Fixed- Tempest unintentionally interacts with Primordial Wave if the Maelstrom Weapon spend requirement is met on the Lightning Bolt that consumes it
Totemic Bug List
- Reactivity doesn’t work on target dummies (not a priority but it does make testing more awkward)
- Wind Barrier has something (I don’t know what) causing it to chain refresh every .1 seconds when totems are active. This isn’t consistent.
- Surging Totem Tremor casts don’t scale with Haste
- Can’t drag Surging Totem from the Hero Talent UI, have to drag Windfury Totem instead, unintuitive.
- Windfury Totem passive aura is applied via Windfury Weapon even if you don’t talent into the totem itself.
- Windfury Totem passive aura is not affected by Totemic Focus, unlike the totem itself
- Totemic Focus confers a bonus to Surging Totem tremor now, but visual doesn’t increase to indicate that
Earthsurge bonus tremor cast only deals bonus damage to the first target hit.Fixed
Also just underneath all of this I want to throw my hat in the ring since everyone else is making very strong statements about it, for Enhancement I personally really like Primordial Wave and don’t want to see it go (though it could use an updated icon) and I really don’t care for Chain Harvest, Fae Transfusion or Vesper Totem.
Would also like to say, the most recent alteration to Surging Totem’s Tremor casts (when viewed in isolation but it could be one of the mentioned hotfixes) feels like a strict downgrade in terms of needing to babysit the totem that was previously smart targeting and pretty fire/forget. It feels like it was a necessary change to make it work for Resto, but we were fine with the old behaviour (if it’s possible to separate them).
45 Likes
big hype for you guys, hopefully they cook for you all!
!!!UPDATE ASCENDANCE!!!
9 Likes
Honestly I’d delete the class and start over Shamans are very boring to play. Enhancement is just a speedy version of fury warrior, Elemental is a pretend mage, and restoration is a druid. Totems are pretty useless and don’t feel worth using most of the time imo.
If blizzard could figure out a cool way for totems to work without them sucking so bad I’d be down tho. I can’t stand timers on them as well.
This class design is chained to 2004 ancient design.
One thing I really really hate about this class is the temporary elemental summons and the counterplay of pressing buttons to reduce the cd to resummon them… why? Why as a master of the elemental plane do I get a 20 second or less elemental? I don’t like having to press buttons to resummon and then weave in other abilities in that rotation.
A lot of the problems people have with classes like this you create by design imo. All this high apm button mashing needlessness while fishing for tiny burst windows that last 3 seconds to squeeze abilities into for example. It just adds to the needless complexity on top of the bland ancient class design that has been added to over the years turning into some weird frankenstein version of itself. All while having to track tons of different buff uptimes in a convoluted system.
3 Likes
Shamans now officially have more blue posts on their thread than rogues 
But in all seriousness best of luck with what’s coming next week!
1 Like
You did it Shammies!
I hope you guys get a cool rework; you deserve it!
3 Likes
The idea is that tempest keeps the propties of lava burst when replacing it. So it has instant cast procs, or if replacing earth shock its instant. But tempest also has the same general functionality it currently does.
Tempest replacing Lava Burst would be so much better than lightning bolt and it keeps the same proc process and keeping’s the same spell function in its current form would be real nice.
2 Likes
I really like pwave, especially in tww. Doing a pwave into lvb into instant lvb gives 3 (6 if mastery procs) feels so satisfying when playing with the volcanic surge pvp talent.
I feel like Totemic would really be for larger battlegrounds anyway, in which case there would be plenty of people to incidentally stand in the area of effect.
Farseer seems superior (in output, not necessarily gameplay) for anything less than 10 people because that amount seems to lend itself to smaller scale engagements anyway
Thanks for update! I will now wait patiently for what’s been cooking.
1 Like
Hoping for good news, feels like Shaman has had band aids put over issues for so many expansions now that it gets kinda disheartening.
1 Like
Since it’s possible now that the devs are listening, I’ll make a wishlist.
-Get rid of ice fury
-Get rid of unleashed life or bake it into something else.
-Perma earth shield or on a longer duration.
-A change to resto mastery. The stat’s usefulness is greatly diminished as people gear up and outside of raid progression.
-Instant cast healing rain
-Make feral lunge baseline for enchance
-Lots of node cost reduction for all specs
-2 charges of Astral Shift
-Spirit wolf dmg reduction is at full % as soon as going into ghost wolf, not waiting on stacks to increase. I would also combine the Spirit Wolf and Thunderous Paws talent so they both work at the same time.
-Make the left tree easier to reach movement and utility like the other reworked trees. In resto I have trouble reaching Gust of Wind and I really want to take that talent because I love it.
-Something that doesn’t Pidgeon hole elemental into fire or lightning. I would almost split these into two different specs at this point. They use entirely different playstyles and stats. Just, something that keeps players from being forced into one or the other based on tier sets and such. But keep both playstyles available.
-Make it easier to see Earthen Wall Totem.
-Visual updates to… all shields, lightning spells.
-barbershop options for many of the elementals already in game, ascendence models, ghost wolf forms.
8 Likes
please add earth wall totem animation people can not see in the floor.
6 Likes