I am deeply unsatisfied with the current state of Enhancement. I feel the Great Prune has been a massive failure across the board, and Enhancement is no different. But, as we are too close to Midnight for any major changes to happen, here are some tweaks that would make it feel better without completely upending the current design:
Core Rotation
Ride the Lightning casting Chain Lightnings is awful. It creates visual spam that muddies the difference between casting our primary melee attacks and casting our MSW spenders, frequently jumps to things we’re not in combat with, and utterly undermines any “oomph” factor to casting a fully stacked MSW spender. “Oh yeah, watch out bad guys, I just hit 10 stacks and am about to cast… the exact same spell I’ve been farting out like a machine gun off of most of the buttons I pressed to get here.”
Change this to causing our active Lightning Shield to surge, damaging nearby enemies. This is less visually cluttered, easier to positionally control against pulling unwanted mobs, and creates clear visual distinction between a passive proc and spending a fully-charged finishing spell.
Voltaic Blaze feels awkwardly tacked onto the kit, being a spell with no setup but comparable direct damage power to our dedicated melee attacks before its guaranteed crits, more direct power than Chain Lightning even at full MSW stacks without its guaranteed crits, and having no interactions with any other part of our kit beyond generating MSW, which everything does. Fire Nova being a 30% chance to trigger also feels awful: total passive RNG mercy.
Altogether, this puts Voltaic Blaze in the position of being the strongest single button we can press from a cold start, which feels wildly wrong for a spec that’s supposed to be focused on melee combat with spell-weaving as finishers, and is highly misleading of its place in our rotation. Combined with the aforementioned Chain Lightning spam from Ride the Lightning, it also tips the balance toward making our magic eclipse our martial prowess.
Consider changing this spell to start weak and have some kind of charge-up mechanic. Maybe each cast of Stormstrike or Lava Lash adds a stack of +damage and +chance to Fire Nova to the next Voltaic Blaze. Or take a page out of Hailstorm’s book and make it gain power from MSW weapon consumption.
The addition of Elemental Tempo makes the cooldown reduction aspect of Hot Hand feel redundant, and throws off the sense of Lava Lash’s cooldown timing as it’s now operating off two different versions of reduction simultaneously. Consider changing the Hot Hand effect from “reducing the cooldown by 50%” to increasing the effectiveness of the Elemental Tempo effect during Hot Hand.
So far, I am not a fan of Totemic Momentum. Hot Hand already creates a high priority window for one spell above all others in Lava Lash, and extending that high priority to a second spell in MSW spenders makes the juggling act feel only more constrained. Weaving Lava Lash → Other Button → Lava Lash was easy and natural. Weaving Lava Lash → Other Button Prioritizing 10 Stack MSW Spender If You Have It → Other Button Prioritizing 5+ Stack MSW Spender If You Didn’t Have the 10 Stack Last GCD And Didn’t Get To 10 From Whatever You Cast Instead → Lava Lash is decidedly less so.
While we aren’t currently speccing into them, Lightning Strikes and Thunder Capacitor are both talents with high disruptive potential. Lightning Strikes is a step backwards from Legacy of the Frost Witch from the stated goals of reducing cognitive load and tracking burdens, as switching from a “+X% damage for duration” effect to a “+X% damage to next SS/LL” effect creates incentive to make sure you’re consuming that effect on the more powerful strike, which may not be what’s available. Legacy’s buff was much less demanding, its only complicating factor was its very short duration compared to the rate of MSW generation needed to proc it. Changing Lightning Strikes from a single attack buff to a +X% damage from SS/LL for 10 seconds buff would be much easier to manage while maintaining the importance of casting MSW spenders.
Thunder Capacitor is a problem for its Maelstrom refunds. This was the talent that made Stormbringer Enhancement broken in TWW S1, yet got everything around it nerfed instead of addressing the actual problem. Setting that aside, the rotational impact of this talent is also annoying. Unpredictable refunds of full MSW stacks throw a wrench into rotational flow, as spending those stacks is one of any Enhancement shaman’s top priorities. Getting a refund and needing to instantly spend them again right after we’ve cleared that button off our mental checklist is highly awkward. Change this effect to make your next MSW spender refund its MSW stacks, so we can at least know when we need to plan for double-casting in advance.
Cooldowns
Our cooldowns are mechanically awkward, and a thematic mess. Why does smacking the ground cause an apocalyptic weather event? Why are we summoning the iconic pack hunter one-by-one from disconnected individual cooldowns on different timers? Why do we have an auto-spending mechanic tied to the one window where we most care about spending on a specific spell? Why is our Hero cooldown double its Resto version? While condensing some of our cooldowns made sense on paper, the way it was done feels haphazard and awkward.
Surging Totem should be brought down to a 30 second cooldown with full uptime. This matches its Resto version for better cohesion between the different spec sides of the Hero talents, and brings back reliable/predictable Hot Hands procs from Whirling Fire.
Feral Spirit should be changed to spawn 2 wolves off of only Doom Winds, and focus their damage amplification on a single target as a general damage amp instead of specific elements. At the same time, they should be combined into a choice node with Primordial Storm, which now combos off of Doom Winds instead of Sundering. Lastly, expand Thorim’s Invocation to include Primordial Storm when talented, so that we’re aren’t beholded to a specific order of activation to avoid accidentally locking ourselves out of being able to cast Primordial Storm during Doom Winds because we’re auto-spending everything on LB/CL.
This will have the end effect of consolidating the earth-based Sundering and Surging Totem onto our 30 second cooldown rotation, and our wind-based Doom Winds and Primordial Storm/Feral Spirit effects onto the 1 minute cadence, with PStorm and Feral Spirit acting as AoE/ST optimization, respectively.
Durability
Raging Maelstrom separating our healing power from our offensive power is a good change in direction, but the current design is very restrictive and unwieldy. In particular, only being able to bank a single cast of Raging Maelstrom makes for extremely unwieldy weaving when we’re fighting anything solo, and will often line up poorly with how damage is coming to us in any group content. Please allow us to bank up to 20 or even 30 stacks of Raging Maelstrom while still only consuming a maximum of 10 per healing cast. This will make Raging Maelstrom much more flexible in how we can fit its healing into our moment to moment gameplay without affecting its overall potency.
Please expand Refreshing Waters to cover all self-healing, not just from Healing Surge, so Chain Heal in particular doesn’t feel like such a waste of a spell on us, and maybe Healing Stream Totem will actually be worth something. If you really want to go the extra mile, let Healing Stream Totem benefit from Raging Maelstrom empowerment, too.
Even if you’re happy with our passive defense for group content, Enhancement as a melee desperately needs better passive defense while soloing. Despite wearing the second heaviest form of armor, we feel extremely squishy against world mobs and delve bosses. Please, please give us some additional baseline defense for this. A “Stoneskin” passive that increases our Armor value by X% or grants us Y% Physical Damage Resistance or something would be immensely appreciated. But whatever form it takes, give it to us baseline, and early. I leveled another Enhancement shaman in Lemix, and questing was pure pain from the word “Go.”