Revisiting Empowered Ascendance — Even if DK Empower is Gone

Classes Shaman
1

The new Breath of Sindragosa for DK and its empower functionality is what I want for Enh Ascendance.

  • Breath of Sindragosa has been redesigned – Call upon Sindragosa’s aid in battle, consuming 16 Runic Power to deal Frost damage every second to enemies in a cone in front of you. Deals reduced damage to secondary targets. 1.2 second empower, 2 minute cooldown, and has 3 stages.

    • I: Deals Frost damage instantly and lasts for up to 8 seconds. Refunds 75 seconds of its cooldown.

    • II: Deals Frost damage instantly and lasts for up to 15 seconds. Refunds 45 seconds of its cooldown.

    • III: Deals Frost damage instantly and lasts for up to 30 seconds.

    • Grants a charge of Empower Rune Weapon at the start and 2 Runes at the end.

    • Castable while moving with 30% reduced movement speed.

    • Developer’s notes: We’re exploring a new design space with this iteration of Breath of Sindragosa. We want this update to give you more control over how you use the ability, so you can adapt it to whatever the fight demands. We’re looking forward to hearing your feedback to iterate further or change directions.

So you see you can still get the full duration/max efficiency with max charge, but have an option for shorter bursts for whenever you need to dodge stuff or step out of melee or stay in melee and dmg from afar. The charge up time would take getting used to, but that’s why i’d like to replace DRE with Empowered Ascendance and keep 2 min Asc around as a choice. What do you guys think?

2

Plz don’t take my casino DRE

1 Like
3

It probably makes more sense to replace base Ascendance instead. Empowered Ascendance could reliably do that. The cast time would feel awkward, but I’d trade that for something like this:

  • I: Deals Nature damage instantly and lasts for 5 seconds. Refunds 75 seconds of its cooldown.
  • II: Deals Nature damage instantly and lasts for 10 seconds. Refunds 45 seconds of its cooldown.
  • III: Deals Nature damage instantly and lasts for 15 seconds.
  • Castable while moving with 30% reduced movement speed.

Enh is at its weakest when it cant melee its target. We have so many tools that can be used at range, and yet, many require melee attacks to fuel them. Ascendence is a powerful answer for this, but it’s extra range is seldom utilized. I believe this is because of its restrictive cooldown. Being able to empower Ascendance casts to surgically fit in uses when you want sounds like a great fit for the ability. When you wanna dodge, do mechanics, or even stay in melee and dps from afar.
Make ascendance more than just a dps cooldown. Without sacrificing much if any of that potential.

4

And DK empower BoS gone. Wish I got to test it before they changed their mind.

5

I brought this up a couple weeks ago, and while the Empower mechanic for Breath of Sindragosa has since been scrapped, I still think the design direction makes a lot of sense for Enhancement Shaman’s Ascendance.

Even if it didn’t work for DK, the idea of a scalable, flexible cooldown with reactive gameplay feels like a great fit for Enhance.

An Empower mechanic would give us control—letting us pop a shorter Asc to dodge, adapt, or stay in the fight from range when we’d otherwise go inactive. It also preserves the identity of Ascendance as a powerful DPS window while making it more tactical and fluid to use.

I think this design space is still worth exploring for Enhancement, even if it didn’t work out for DK. Would love to hear what others think—is this the kind of modernization Asc needs?

6

Hmm… I do like the idea of empowered spells here and there for classes that aren’t Evoker. But, I don’t feel that it would fit for Enhancement’s Ascendance. The reason for this is because it would absolutely be modified via Maelstrom Weapon (which is effectively ‘Nature’s Swiftness’ or ‘Tip the Scales’) so it would always be instant cast at the highest level of empowerment - Blizz has purposely designed DRE to trigger on the amount of Maelstrom/Maelstrom Weapon spent instead of spending less Maelstrom/Maelstrom Weapon more frequently. Now, they could remove that MSW interaction but then you’d go from a very rapid playstyle to a window where you must wait for an empowerment and then continuing on with your rapid playstyle… I don’t that that would really fit in this scenario but the idea of controlling burst frequency does sound interesting.

1 Like
7

Great points, and I really appreciate the thoughtful feedback.

I think there’s a small misunderstanding though—my idea for Empowered Ascendance wouldn’t be tied to Maelstrom Weapon at all. It’s not something you’d “cast” in the traditional sense, like an Elemental Blast or Lightning Bolt that MSW modifies. Instead, it’s more like a reactive burst cooldown with a short empower channel, similar to the DK Empower version (A bit confusing as I know the Emp BoS did have an RP consumption affect to it).

The empower time would just determine how long Ascendance lasts and how much cooldown it refunds, giving players more control over when and how much to commit based on the situation. So you could fire off a short burst in downtime or go all-in for a full 15s window when the moment’s right. I agree that Enhance’s rapid pace is important to preserve—and that’s why this would be something you prep for just briefly (1.2s channel), then continue your usual high-tempo rotation during.

And you nailed the most important part: controlling burst frequency is the real goal here. I’m just hoping for a tool that can make Ascendance feel more strategic and responsive, without disrupting Enhance’s flow.

Thanks again for the reply—interested to hear more if you have thoughts on how to make something like this work better.

8

Yeah, no problem. I do have some additional thoughts:

Viewing through a Stormbringer lens, Enhancement’s damage profile is currently pretty flat and mostly falls into 30sec burst windows; PWave+Tempest. Ascendance does provide additional burst potential but it’s not tuned to be an absolutely insane CD, it’s enough that it feels great to press and feels bad to ignore.

If you’ve played Elemental this expansion, you’d immediately realize that way too much damage is baked into Ascendance - your damage feels pretty lackluster in that 2-3 minute lull between CD usage. Because of this, nearly all Elemental players are begging for some reliable way to regularly spread Flame Shock so they can take advantage of Splintered Elements to not feel like trash when outside of Ascendance uptime… even if it meant a nerf to Ascendance.

I’ve played on the PTR a bit for Season 3 and the current design of the tier set is really fun for Stormbringer Enhancement - I feel that the more regular Ascendance procs (with also proc’ing Tempest) smooths things out even more. I kinda feel that these very regular procs are equivalent to your proposition of an empowered spell while not “disrupting” ability pacing. So I’d say that your intuition is great but it kinda seems like they have a “solution” in place?

Idk, maybe they’ll experiment on the PTR a bit more with empowered spells. Like you pointed out, they did try something with DKs… they can always scrap it if it doesn’t quite feel right.

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9

Really appreciate this reply — you raise some great points.

I agree that Enhance is feeling much smoother lately, especially with the PTR S3 tier set procs tied to Stormbringer + Tempest. I’m also excited to see how that shapes up. That said, I think there’s still a distinction between RNG-based smoothing and controlled burst flexibility that’s worth exploring.

What I’m trying to get at with Empowered Ascendance isn’t just smoothing out gaps or making Ascendance stronger — it’s giving players agency over how and when to use it. Right now, we either commit to the full 2-min CD or we don’t use it at all. The empowered model would give us the ability to react to movement, mechanics, or target uptime in a way that procs alone can’t cover, especially in content where positioning becomes a real limiter on performance.

I also totally get the concern about over-centralizing power in Ascendance (Ele definitely shows the downside of that). But I think that’s more about tuning, while the empower framework is about playstyle and control. Done right, I think it could enhance gameplay without creating dependency.

Totally open to the idea that PTR might already be heading in a good direction — but I’d still love to see Blizzard explore this design space a little further, even if just as a talent option. Appreciate your thoughtful response, for real.