Hi all, I’m some feedback on the new runes for Shaman. Outside of resto I’m not going to focus on numbers yet since we don’t have world buffs to test with, but I do have some thoughts on overall design of the new runes.
I’m mostly versed in Resto and Enhance, so I’ll give feedback for those two specs, plus a bit of general stuff at the end. Here goes:
Resto is gaining a rune that makes Chain Heal bounce to 4 targets (up from 3) and have 35% reduction per jump instead of the default 50%. This results in an overall increase of 34.1% healing to chain heal. This is a good change to incentivize the use of resto shaman’s iconic spell, but it has two issues:
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First - Chain heal is one of the lowest HPS filler spells for a healer - looking at the top 10 healing shaman on WCL (sod.warcraftlogs. com/zone/rankings/2009/#class=Shaman&spec=Restoration&dpstype=wdps&metric=hps) they averaged only 17.4% of their healing as Chain Heals. This means the new cloak rune is likely only about a 6% HPS increase. Rsham is currently around 30% behind every other healing spec (sod.warcraftlogs. com/zone/statistics/2009/#metric=hps&dataset=99) in terms of maximum throughput, so a minor buff is unlikely to increase their viability by much.
On the bright side, resto will also be able to run Earth Shield now, but it’s nearly impossible to find a good Rsham running it now so it’s hard to judge how much ES will add. Given Resto’s near-inability to OOM, it’s probably fine to have them be lower output as a trade-off, but if the gap is too large they’ll continue to be rare relative to druids and priests. -
Second - almost every top rsham is currently using Healing Rain. Using the same top 10 logs from before, the average Healing Rain cast was about 1700 healing and the average Chain Heal was 1100. With the new cloak rune, and without the ST set bonus boosting healing rain, taking Overload and spamming chain heal will result in ~730 HPS, while taking Healing Rain and casting it on CD (while spamming Chain Heal with your other globals) will result in only 630 HPS. Overload also gives you more DPS and boosts your Healing Waves, making it even more beneficial. In short, with the new cloak rune, I fear that Rsham will be pigeonholed into running Overload over Healing Rain, so Rsham will effectively get a new dead healing rune like Earth Shield was before SR went baseline.
Some (potential) solutions to the above:
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(If you want to boost Rsham throughput and have a standardized rune build) Move healing rain to belt slot - currently the only benefit that resto shaman gets from a belt rune is the mana return from Power Surge. Resto already has immense amounts of mana, so giving them an HPS option in that slot serves as a small HPS buff and gives them another spell to use besides Riptide and Chain Heal.
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(If you want to promote customizing your runes to the situation) Add a boost to healing rain to the new cloak rune. I don’t have anything specifically in mind - It could be something like “Healing Rain will heal 5 raid members instead of all party members” (like how Chain Heal bounces between parties), or a plain numerical increase, or whatever you feel is appropriate, just something to encourage using Healing Rain over Overload when the damage pattern of a fight makes Healing Rain good.
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As a side note, I’ve been including the 4th chain heal bounce as though it’ll always get value, but the classic bounce range of chain heal is very tiny. It’s pretty common for Chain Heal to not bounce at all if it’s not targeted at a melee, so resto shamans will often be one button spamming a tank to get all 4 bounces. Including an increase to bounce range in the cloak rune would be a massive quality of life boost and allow for more engaging gameplay.
Enhance in a raid setting got minor numerical nerfs from Mental Dexterity, while keeping their same rotation. I consider this a win since the spec is fun to play and likely needed some minor nerfs to not be overpowering in single target.
Outside of raid, they received a big nerf to their healing, which in combination with the damage nerf could make them feel fairly weak in PvP. They’re glass cannon-y and had only slows as CC. I’m hoping Feral Spirit will go a long way towards mitigating this, but I wouldn’t be shocked to see Elemental become the preferred PvP spec by a very wide margin (even moreso than it already is).
My main specific thoughts:
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2hander spec has not received any changes and is still going to be worse than dual wield. I personally don’t see a way to fix that without including more effects in the Two-Hand Mastery rune, since any changes you make elsewhere will likely boost other specs that are already powerful.
The class fantasy of 2hand enhance is inconsistent but powerful burst, so I’d suggest something that plays into that. Ideas could be like increasing critical strike multiplier for spells and/or attacks (which could also them feel better about having to run Lava Burst as their hand rune instead of having their own dedicated one) or something like making windfury give 3 extra hits instead of 2. I’m not personally attached to these specific ideas, but I do think that the 2hand spec should lean into burst with WF and having more powerful but less frequent Maelstrom spell casts. -
Lava Lash baits inexperienced enhance shamans into running WF/FT instead of WF/WF. The benefits of extra melee hits from offhand windfury (mainly Maelstrom procs, Static Shock hits, and Flurry uptime) are better than the damage boost to Lava Lash. I’d honestly suggest removing the damage boost that Lava Lash gets from Flametongue entirely since a lot of people see it, think they’re “supposed” to run flametongue, and nerf their own damage. Alternatively you could do something spicy to make FT actually better - maybe boost its spellpower scaling and allow flametongue crits to proc Elemental Devastation.
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Riptide is currently the only instant cast shaman spell that resets the swing timer. It’s easy to test this - I have a gif here: (imgur. com/a/cdcS2DQ) - as you can see, Flame shock, Earth Shield, (maelstrom cast) Lightning Bolt all leave the swing timer (the green and red triangles on my mana bar) moving as normal, but when I cast riptide at the end of the gif, my swings stop moving and reset. This is super counter-intuitive for players and makes Riptide much less appealing for enhance specifically.
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Feral Spirit (based on my testing) is scaling off of AP, but not SP. This is probably intentional to discourage its use by caster specs, but if that’s incorrect and you do want it to scale for all shaman specs it should have both AP and SP scaling.
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The new ghost wolf rune for indoors GW is nice for quality of life, but having it reduce the cast time of GW by 1 second (so it’s instant with talents) would be incredible and make me very happy.
For non-class/spec specific comments:
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The ring runes are cool, but some specs lack options. I’m specifically thinking of single-school caster specs like Shadow Priest or Mage, as currently implemented Shadow priest has only one rune that does anything for them (Shadow hit chance), and Fire mage has zero runes that do anything for them (since they cap hit off talents alone). Having a generic option for like an hp or mana boost would feel a lot better than leaving one of the rings effectively unengraved.
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PvP (duels at least) feels incredibly bursty again, the PvP DR will probably need additional tuning since damage is still outscaling hp pool.
