Enhancement Damage Breakdown needs rework @Devs

Classes Shaman
1

I am raising an issue on enhancement in hopes that some developer reads this. This is not a performance issue but rather a gameplay/fun issue regarding the fluidity of this spec. The issue is the damage breakdown and I will suggest how to fix it.

Currently enhancement has an incredible hero talent (stormbringer), and tempest is one of my favorite abilities of all time that literally feeds players with instant dopamine on each press. However, this comes at the cost of all your other damage sources being near insignificant, let me elaborate:

Currently LB and Tempest make roughly 60% of your overall damage breakdown. On aoe Chain Lightning and Tempest make 65-70%+ of your damage breakdown. This is essentially coming all from one button. As a result, your stormstrike, lava lash, crash lightning & all your passive dmg procs (wf, flametongue, stormbringer, tempest strikes etc.) all make a miniscule part of your damage and feel very insignificant to press and only just a means of gaining maelstrom stacks.

Even though i love tempest, i think ALL of your buttons should feel significant to press and not hit like a wet noodle. A good representation of how the spec should feel is current enhancement in pvp. Stormstrike, wf etc. are heavily buffed in pvp and actually pack a punch compared to pve (meanwhile tempest and LB still feel incredible to press). I think this spec needs to transfer an amount of the damage from the spenders into the builders in order to make all of the buttons feel like they deal some damage.

Right now I can actually feel my damage go down when i press stormstrike, until i press Lightning bolt ofc. I firmly believe this shouldnt be the case. Currently 1 press of stormstrike on a 626 ilvl character, results in roughly 150-300k dmg on each press with all the passive procs included (with no cooldowns active). This is EXTREMELY low. Please look into it. I think each stormstrike press should result in around 500k-600k damage on each press with all passive procs included, and that damage should be removed from LB and CL respectively to compensate.

A target dummy test (Single Target) looked like this:

45 casts of LB/Tempest = 62% of breakdown

75 casts of fillers = 38% of breakdown

This means that each cast of a spender resulted in 1.4% of total damage, whereas each cast of a builder resulted in 0.47% of total damage. This is a HUGE disparity, probably more than any other spec in the game atm. Spenders are almost resulting in triple damage effectiveness than builders per cast.

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enhance has basically become lightning spec ele shaman

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3

Unironically true

4

I think you falsely correlate significance with damage breakdown, and creating a problem where there is none.

Stormstrike at the moment is in one of its most powerful states, and is hugely important, but its power does not come from its damage, but from the procs it generates.

Enh at the moment is not like a ret paladin where each builder is more or less the same and just press them off cd. Stormstrike has the role of most important ability (even more than lb/tempest) due to how many resources it generates. This does not corelate to damage in details breakdown, because the better usage you do of storm strike the better result you will see in tempest/lb damage.

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5

Exactly my point though. I did mention in the post that stormstrike is only a means to generate maelstrom stacks and i think that’s a problem. It’s fine to disagree, just stating my opinion on the topic. I think stormstrike should do more damage, while it still generates equally as much maelstrom and simply nerf abit the dmg of LB.

Personally I don’t like that I get to press stormstrike 50 times in 2 minutes and it only does 5-7% of my damage individually and an extra 10% with windfury etc.

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6

If your goal is to have stormstrike be our top damage (above finishers), then the damage it would need to do is gonna be way higher. The problem then becomes that if its damage increases even more, then it pushes lb/tempest/cl out of the rotation because they become less valuable as abilities compared to SS.

This will lead to an even more toxic playstyle than s2 of DF storm, where you just spam SS over everything else without doing anything else (and using lb/fillers just to fill empty gcds).

Yeah no problem with that. Just explaining the mechanics behind the playstyle, and how it is impossible for SS to be a serious percentage of our overall damage. Nothing short of a full rework will change that (and they will probably not do that, since they have classic that fills that playstyle).

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No, that’s not what i’m saying if you read the post. Currently spenders do 1.35% of overall damage with each press, builders do 0.47%. It could be, that builders do around 0.75% and spenders do around 1%. That’s similar to how it is with the pvp balancing. Stormstrike is doing much better damage, but it still isnt as much as LB & tempest.

No it isn’t impossible, its already implemented in the pvp gameplay and it feels much better. (In pvp stormstrike and other generators do more damage, and LB/CL do abit less damage. Spenders still do more damage but the gap is smaller.)

What i’m saying is the disparity right now is so large that there is a window where u can buff Stormstrike and nerf LB where it is still better to press LB :slight_smile:

8

Even making the assumption that this fixes your problem it also comes with other problems, like messing with balance (since ss is mainly a ST ability, while LB/CL/Tempest represent more of out aoe).

But the real problem with what you are saying is that you find SS doing 5-8% of our overall, and LB/CL/Tempest doing 20% of our overall too much.

In your example maybe you manage to bring those numbers to 15% for each of LB/CL/Tempest and bring SS to 10% of our overall. Nothing really is accomplished since that is your personal opinion about a perceived problem. Someone else might think that the optimal breakdown is for SS to be 50% of our damage, or WF to be 60%. Someone else might want FS to do 20% of our damage.

Blizzard does not balance the game around what abilities are first in our damage breakdown, but around enjoyable rotations. The ability breakdowns is a byproduct of our rotation.

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Thats already not true, since when you press crash lightning, you gain a buff where stormstrike cleaves nearby enemies.

Well not true since LB and Tempest is the same button and on my breakdown they do 60% of overall (put together) give or take (Including Lightning rod which is purely LB dmg).

You don’t get my point. The rotation is not enjoyable because only 1 button feels good to press and all your generators barely do anything except generate maelstrom. It’s simple mathematics and there is a window where they can change the balance of the breakdown without affecting the rotation

A good comparison is fury warrior. Imagine bloodthirst and raging blow which are frequently pressed only did 5% of your overall each and then your rampage did 60%, wouldnt be fun would it? Sure rampage would feel good but everything else wouldnt.

2 Likes
10

I actually came to the forums to post this exact thought as well.

Given how strong we have been lately a Nerf was expected, but it could also be a good opportunity for a slight buff to physical damage overall. Mainly in the form of Stormstrike and Windfury, which has been the core identity of this spec since vanilla after all (WF in particular!).

I dont mind being at the middle of the pack on dps performance (as long as the spec fills a certain niche and/or is satisfying to play), as long as we remain first and foremost a melee dps spec.

It’d be interesting to hear more thoughts on this, esp from devs.

Loving the stormbringer Hero talents overall though, totemic could use a little bit more love.

Off topic: On totemic I feel like a pet to my totem. Not to mention I think a chance to fill the party-buffing totem aspects of the enhancement class fantasy was missed with totemic. Aug evokers currently kind of fill this fantasy instead, dont they?

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I will also add that I like the changes 11.0.5 brought to Ascendance and Doom winds in particular

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Very true and exactly how i feel too. It will always be a priority for me to have good rotation flow & satisfying button press over topping the meter.

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I do like these changes too, however i think doom winds is abit lacking on single target. They could increase the initial damage it deals maybe to your main target, cause it actually feels super weak atm on ST

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14

Yeah definitely, my ideal version of it is more powerful WF overall and by extension Doom winds far better. I just vastly prefer it being a self buff rather than a melee-ranged damage ability like it was before the patch so credit where it’s due.

Tradeoff can be more damage shaved off LB or EB/PW doing less damage on cast and getting picked for additional effects rather than initial damage.

1 Like
15

no really if done correctly.
in wotlk, stormstrike was strong but it didnt have the stupid reset mechanic.

the reset mechanic was the first problem of the enhance iterations we had.

now at least the reworked version of 11.0.5 is not that terrible to play, but for some reason with still have to use primordial garbage.

doom winds now is strong in aoe but feels very generic. I wish we had the legion version, it was soooo much more fun.

and ye tempest is a useless addition to enhance, it is basically i stronger chain lightning which was just not necessary for the gameplay

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I agree with everything else you said but i disagree with the last part. Tempest feels amazing to press and i love the dopamine hit when you press it.

My biggest complaints have to be builder damage and the fact that you can’t have both ascendance and deeply rooted (why does ele have both?)

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17

Hard agree on doom winds, disagree on tempest. It’s fun to press and it’s nice that it just replaces your LB.

If Nerf on it is necessary for more physical damage I think a longer windup might feel better than nerfing the big hits.

One other thing is the sheer amount of feral spirits we have right now and how much of the damage is gated behind their buff. It’s nice that they are strong and it fits the spec, but at a certain point we are like Demo locks used to be with imps. Not 100% on how I like that

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I will vote against this and i ll explain myself.
Currently many specs are bloated and enhancement is one of them. The fact that Stormbringer rocks comes from:

  1. not using lava lash which debloats the whole universe
  2. Having a big source of dmg coming from spending maelstrom stacks.

In most of my cases in pvp i manage to stay close only for a while. With all the maelstrom sources nowadays from spirit wolves, refunds from spending them, primordial wave i manage to fill those gaps and stay competitive to this root fest. In addition the Ascendance CD change(took them 10 expansions to realise…!@#) made it usefull cd not only for burst but for these situations.

To narrow down the talk u did a good calculation there with spender/builder. If they buff the builders and nerf the spenders by alittle it could have an impact in PvE moving situations and maybe a tremendous impact in PvP.

For me the solution to this would come from totemic which in anyway buffs Lavalash builds and could be the builder>spender focused. When they understand that Lavalash should replace/enhance stormstrike and not keep them in the same rotation it will be a fun(debloated) and viable build.

1 Like
19

I agree with this and have voiced my opinion about this before as well.

I feel like stormstrike should do a tad more than just generate maelstrom weapon, the damage is so insignificant currently that you could remove it completely and it wouldn’t bringe the spec down a lot. And that would just leave you as a weird elemental shaman. The current iteration of enhancement could sit there and punch a dummy while casting LB/Tempest/CL at the main target and literally be 98% as effective.

That’s not the enhancement fantasy for me.

So a shift of some of the power into the melee talents would feel deserved and in line with the spec identity.

The shift in power has to be handles with care, since it could lead to problems with physical wolves with flowing spirits becoming too strong and the gameplay devolves to SS spam. (Like those totemic builds that so that), which is also not what we want.
On that note, stormstrike should be changed to do stormstrike damage type… Kinda obvious why.

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I liked the Elementalist Enhancer so much, the flow was great and for me it was the best implementation of a melee mage, the gameplay was awesome, why did they have to destroy it so badly. And then there’s another nerf coming, with the talent changes from last week it’s about a 20% dmg nerf for Elementalist Enhancer Playstyle. For 2 weeks i had on the puppet 980k with proc luck over 1 million Single target dmg. At weekend testing its around 750-800k… And with the 5% dmg nerf its even more -.-