DISCLAMER:
This is post is HIGHLY personal and I am aware that opinions will differ greatly between players. This is just my personal take and reasoning and everyone is welcome to argue or explain his different opinions.
Wall of text follows, tl;dr at the bottom.
CLASS TALENT TREE
While many people I spoke love the class tree, I cannot say the same for myself. While I agree that it is highly subjective, I will try to explain my grievances with the class tree.
- Highly utility based with limited throughput upgrades for enhance. While I agree that having much of the utility being in the class tree is a good choice, having just 7 nodes in the tree (with none of them in the 20 points part) feels underwhelming. After seeing the class trees of other classes, I ended up feeling quite underwhelmed by the choices.
- Utility is TOO situational and sometimes extremely underwhelming. To better explain this point let me give an example of utility I am excited about:
Ancestral Guidance.
It is off healing for the group/raid, but it is tied to your dps (or healing) and has a 2 min cool down. Having a 2 min cool down gives room to tune it well enough, that the button has impact when pressed (mattering in certain damage phases). On the other hand, totems like Mana Spring Totem, Stoneskin Totem, Tranquil Air Totem, having a low cool down, end up having watered down effects that might end up underwhelming.
A good example of this scenario is HST at the moment: it is a button that we can press when there is nothing happening and actually provides a small increase in hps, but the impact is so low that there is not a discernable difference if you press the button or not. - A good majority of the tree is tied to totems and totem utility (including one capstone).
This is not a negative by itself, but it is tied to the selection of totems we have available. In our case we lack impactful throughput totems (like cloudburst or magma totem) and our selection of totems is limited to low cd low impact and highly situational. Being able to reset the cd of magma totem might feel better, but for enh the best-case scenario is resetting the cool down of tremor, wind rush or poison cleansing totem. Those scenarios are dependent on the fights and highly situational, leading to an entire third of the tree feeling underwhelming. - A smaller problem that I see is that too many of the totems are party wide instead of raid wide. This was not a problem when WFT was the only party wide totem we had, but now we have 3 others (one for healer group, tank group, caster group). Again, by itself this is not a problem, but becomes one because of tuning.
Having wft being good was fine, as having one enh for the whole raid was not a problem. On the other hand, now with 4 different group totems, this will lead to either 4 shamans being needed for every raid, or the totems being so inconsequential that you can ignore all of them.
Things that I liked in the class tree:
- The overabundance of utility: While bordering on TOO MUCH, I like the fact that we get a wide choice of tools we did not previously have, like AG, Earth Grab Totem and Thunderstorm.
- Survivability: Actually this iteration on the class tree might have a problem of TOO MUCH survivability, I am kind of ok with that (although I understand if it gets nerfed).
- Gust of Wind: Enough Said.
ENHANCE SPEC TREE
While there are good points on the spec tree (looking at Thorim’s Invocation and returning talents), there are some issues that I particularly dislike.
- Placement of Pwave and Ascendance trees:
Those capstone trees feel misplaced, as Pwave is historically used with LL/FS centric builds, while Ascendance is used with SS centric builds. The worst part is needing either HH or Ice Strike to actually getting to Ascendance, two abilities you have little use in that spec.
I find that swapping those two trees would greatly improve the spec tree. -
Elemental Assault and Legacy of the Frost Witch:
Two of the popular effects that actually change the pace of the spec, are for no reason split into 2-point talents. This becomes even worse when considering that you get the most benefit of those 2 talents while putting only 1 point in each (getting the 1 MSW stack with each stormstrike and getting the stormstrike reset after each LB cast).
At this point this feels like a trap at worst or a feels bad scenario at best, considering that both of those effects work best as 1-point talents. - Potential Abilities Missing:
Having talents and legendaries that could work as 1-point talents turned into two points, actually feels worse after considering the potential talents we did not get.
A glaring example that other specs got is DRE, a staple effect that we had both in legion and now in SL. Having just 3 capstones there is ample room to include that too (and Asc interactions).
Another one is Chain Harvest. We were the only spec that actually felt good using this spell, as having it interact with MSW felt good. Losing this and the interaction with FS actually feels kind of a missed opportunity, considering we have 4 points and 1/3 of the capstones linked to Pwave.
A smaller one missing is actually the t28. Both tier sets felt actually kidna nice, giving you passive wolves at random times, and your wolves impacting your rotation with extra stormbringer procs. Especially considering we have talents like FfW and EW.
Some smaller pain points/notes:
- WfT nerf (from 20% to 10%), hope that this is just a typo and not a real nerf. Especially that at the same time that most other specs get some nice group utility (looking at outlaw rogues).
- Doom Winds: 75% seems like a weird number, when 100% was working quite nice for the whole expansion (even having a 4 sec reduced duration), would love to hear the reasoning for these changes. I think that would work better as stronger talent (closer to what we had in SL) and it being lower in the tree (even as a capstone).
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Button Bloat issues:
I really feel that the tree is TOO heavy on extra buttons. We are already one of the classes with the most key-binds, and heading into an expansion with extra returning utility/totems, I feel that the number of active spells needs to be reduced.
Especially considering the opportunity cost of picking an active talent is so low, the correct path might lead to scenarios we have 10-12 keybinds in our rotation. I believe it would be best to put some more active abilities in choice nodes (like ice strike with elemental blast) to reduce the bloat. -
Overflowing Maelstrom:
While I like the concept, this talent introduces a problem again that we managed to dodge in SL, needing max stacks to use on spells, and either casting spells with less stacks or losing stacks due to overcaping. I believe if it reduces the max stacks of MSW that spells use, it would be best to also increase the cap on MSW a bit.
Things that I like in the spec tree:
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Thorim’s Invocation:
Sounds amazing, introducing a talent that turns Asc in an actually working iteration of BFA/Legion Enh shaman is a work of art. Especially if it interacts with LotFW, then it will be glorious. It only feels bad that we do not get DRE to actually use it even more often.
on a side note: Can we please get the animation of old Stormblast for this LB (the previous storm animation of Ascendance). PRETTY PLEASE! -
Improved Stormbringer:
It is good to have some more mastery scaling in the SS focused part of the build, although I wish it was more (like instead of increasing the damage by 25%, it actually just changes the damage to nature completely without increasing it). -
Ice Strike and Swirling Maelstrom:
While I hate Ice Strike with a passion, I can admit that this version actually does not seem that bad, and would actually like to try it for some heavy hailstorm build.
CLOSING REMARKS
Despite the wall of text, what I heard from the community is general satisfaction, and actually I agree with that sentiment. Despite some flaws that I believe I pointed out in this thread, I think that with some correct changes, we might get the best version of ENH yet.
TL;DR:
Class tree:
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TOO much utility and not that much throughput increase in class tree.
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Some utility (particularly party wide totems) feel too low impact/low cd. Might be better to increase cd and effect.
Spec Tree
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Swap Pwave and Ascendance trees.
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Reduce LotFW and EA talents to 1 point each from 2.
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Give us back Chain Harvest and DRE.
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Beware of too many Active/Buttons.
Nice first iteration, needs work but solid foundations.