Some of you may think this might be overexaggerated but I promise you enhancement shaman has the worst defensive capabilities in the game and its by a LONG SHOT. WTF is Astral shift ? 40% dam reduction for 8 seconds – 1.5min CD.
I think making Astral Shift usable while stunned would help move it more in line with other melee class defensive abilities or at least one of them. It would be very similar to the Warlock’s Unending Resolve at a slightly shorter cooldown in this case; Though Restoration and Elemental would have access to this, I agree it’s nothing outlandish at all for a melee class.
How to fix this? Make CAP totem an INSTANT CHANNELED AOE STUN. So it would instantly stun all targets around it as soon as it is put down but ppl who are out of the cap stun range can still target the totem and break it to free their stunned party members. This is healthy design with interesting counterplay and would also benefit the shaman by giving them an instant cc.
Absolutely agree on the defensive and totem issues, capacitor totem in particular. This suggestion seem elegant, though I’d settle for just immediately stunning the one attacking the totem perhaps bumped to 6 seconds and single target only if attacked in range; the instant channel implementation would still be much more desirable however.
The Static Charge talent is also extremely underwhelming on this row. I would have liked to see it come with a damage debuff scaling inversely with targets following the 3 second stun. Something like -30% damage at 1 target for 5 seconds down to -15% at 4 targets to bring it in line with other class stuns and compensate for the 1 minute cooldown; it also opens up some PvE utility for difficult pulls.
The other talents on this row could really use some defensive improvements as well.
- I’d love to see Spirit wolf front-load the damage mitigation (perhaps scaling up from 20% to 30% over 4 seconds) and compensate for the 100% damage loss with a damage bonus to the next few abilities based on how long you remain in ghost wolf form. This would provide a more interactive and readily available form of defense for predictable attacks (e.g. chaos bolt, Pyroblast, burst CDs, PvE, etc.) and encourage a jousting play-style that seems to fit the Enhancement shaman thematically.
Yeah I was thinking a mechanic where you consume all your shield charges to do damage/reduce damage and put your shield on CD would be interesting. Like u activate earthshield again and all charges are consumed and grant like 15% damage reduction for 15 secs and then it puts ES on cd for like 30 secs
- Earth Shield is in a tough spot because it’s baseline for Restoration and there is now a legendary that scales the healing by 300% while under 50%; I don’t believe it is good class design for Enhancement to use a Restoration legendary to be survivable, but this might limit any sort of tuning to damage reduction as you mentioned. However, I’d like to see the numbers tuned and trigger frequency extended to 6 seconds while the number of charges consumed scale based on damage between triggers. The concentrated healing would have a 60 second cooldown and only trigger on more than 30% life lost. The idea is to actually make it a viable defensive option that deters burst. Ideally, you’d want to do slightly more than 30% damage to the shaman in 6 seconds once they pop Earth Shield or a large portion of your burst damage may be healed (e.g. up to 9 charges consumed healing for 45% if brought from 100% down to 40% as opposed to only 10% if the first 30% is drawn out over 6 seconds after first use).
Regarding Shadowlands, the inclusion of Ice Strike is interesting as a flexible talent choice, but I would have liked to see another defensive component built into it as well. Something like a 3 second root followed by a 6 second snare on expiration / dispel to help with disengagements / peel / dispel protection and a moderate uptime armor boost putting us at plate + shield levels on average. Melee is still extremely unforgiving for Enhancement and they can’t use a shield to compensate as Restoration or Elemental could; the trade-off of random burst for a mix of defensive and flexible utility on this row is more acceptable in PvP.
Earth Elemental could use some love too. As others have noted, there is a conduit for a 20-40% health boost though it may come at the cost of the healing surge potency conduit. Outside of Ascendance, we don’t really have a good burst cooldown. So I could see good synergy with the Earth Spike talent (which is still kind of underwhelming) by reducing the cooldown while greatly increasing damage to the Earth Spike target up to Fire Elemental levels. In general, I would also like to see a spirit link like effect among nearby party members and the elemental while near the Earth Spike target that forces enemies to separate the team from the elemental or kill it; it would also help improve raid representation beyond the one Enhancement shaman required for Windfury by supplying a moderate healing cooldown limited by the elemental life.