My opinions on PTR Enhancement Shaman

Classes Shaman
1

So i’ve been very worried about Enhancement Shaman looking at all the blue posts and beta changes and sadly I’ve had my worries confirmed. It doesn’t make sense that a class can have so many abilities on the bars (24 by my count before you take any talents) and feel like you sometimes have no buttons to press. 21 buttons that are useful in combat and yet I still feel like i’m missing a filler ability. Its obvious rockbiter was removed to combat the massive increase in buttons we have to press but honestly its noticable. Frost shock is the closest we have but I have two problems with it. The first is it has a 5 second CD so not really spamable and two it already has utility, its mean to be a slow, even though we already have a slow in earth bind totem. it would feel just as weird if warriors started using hamstring to dps. So IMO frost shock can go

The spec has been gutted and returned back to how it was pre legion but its missing some key things. One is totems. After the cheers of getting totems back at blizzcon we now are back to having only 4, two earth, one water no fire. it’s also missing the awesome lava lash spreading flame shock and then fire nova aoe. Instead we have crash lightning as our main aoe which no longer works in the current version of the spec as you can’t reliably hit storm strikes multiple times any more for the cleave damage. so crash lightning might as well go as well Or at least be move to a talent.

It feels very weird as I write this that I’m complaing about how bloated this spec has got in terms of the amount of abilities but at the same time I’m also complaining that we are missing things. This is where the fundamental problem is with Enhancement. To much fluff not enough substance. Why do we need two slows ? . Why do we need multiple range abilities as a melee spec, in this case we have frost shock, lightning bolt and chain lightning all of which perform a very similar but every slightly different role. It feels like all three of these could be removed and we just get earth shock like elemental as it basically performs in the same way. finally why do we no have three heals. in what situation am i going to be using chain heal as enhancement and how can you argue that searing totem didn’t play well with the spec but the tiny healing from healing stream does.

all that said credit where credit is due the talent tree is finally for the first time ever looking really promising. There some great build you can make, changing the way you play your spec which is what I’ve been asking for, for years. The only problem the talent tree has now is that you are going to struggle to fit a lot of these talents on to your already busy bar. if you really wanted to you could add another 7 on to the list of abilities. Its good to see elemental blast back working with maelstrom, but as i said earlier is kind of adds to the range problem. Ice strike has some nice play with the level 35 tier especially, i think it will be required if you want to play with fire nova properly. The only real issue is the level 30 and 50 tier. I’m not sure what earthern spike is doing here as it is such a boring talent (sundering would be better in its place). The other two are pretty much the same. I’m also not sure what earth shield is still doing here. It might be mathematically viable but it just feels a bit weird. you also can’t use it on yourself now if you have lightning shield up which your pretty much always will.

So how would I fix it. first of all abilities that can go. Frost shock, crash lightning, chain heal, cleanse spirit, Earh spike, earth shield. I think some of these could be pushed to the talent tree quite comfortably. I would like to see searing totem return as a CD with it buffing life lash. I could slive with this being a talent. bring back rock biter, It a melee spec I want it to feel like one. make it reduce the CD on storm strike and get rid of the random procs, it would give it some more control of our damage. finallya new ascendance model, it not necessarily bad its just old.

2

nope
Don’t give feedback to a class that you don’t even really play and have no idea of. No offense though

Frost shock was a great addition. They just forgot to implement earth shock like it used to be.
Sacrificing dmg for a slow while actually earth shock had an attack speed reducing.
Since they don’t want to button bloat they didn’t add earth shock as it would do effectively the same as frost shock just a little more dmg most likely. As all share the cd, it wouldn’t change much.

  1. they would need to reduce lava lash cd to 8-10 sec again
  2. maelstrom gen should be a little higher and less rng. Add a safe proc to ss and ll. Now we have it as a talent but it competes against a too strong option.

I hate that they add so many dmg modifiers to stormstrike again, it will make its base dmg worseless after nerf cries.

100% dmg inc on legendary
15% dmg inc on talent
and
20% dmg inc from earthen spike
or
90% dmg inc from dbl stormwolf

it would make it either absolutely broken with roll the wolves + legendary or it will be nerfed to trash like usualy.

Yes, we are missing stone claw and skyfury (CD version). I am happy that buff totems don’t come back because in a fast environment (except raids) those are annoying to use.
Windfury totem is unfortunately absolutely garbage in its current version

Crash lightning works very well and now buffs chain lightning. So no idea what you are talking about.
This was a great change for our aoe.

You mean a CD based slow that can be destroyed with 1 fart?
Frost shock is necessary and earth bind is utility for groups. How can anybody complain about that after we had frost brand which was absolutely garbage for 4 years.

as far as I can tell it will never be picked. We don’t need the slow as we have frost shock. It is more or less a melee frost shock with 0 interaction with our kit and competes against 2 very strong talents.

Earthen spike is a great talent but is should be buffed with a small knock up or at least it should hit 5 targets or add much more single target base dmg.

Roll the wolves and ascendence is the same trash as it was in bfa, I agree. Unfortunately earthen spike is undertuned which makes the other two trash options better.

You have no idea of this spec. These are all great abilities.

TL;DR

The spec doesn’t need much more to be great.

  1. Shaman rage, absolutely necessary
  2. wolves healing
  3. cap totem 0 charge time
  4. Lighning and earth shield needs to be stacked and LS should have -10% dmg red

Game play flow wise:

  1. increase maelstrom gen with guaranteed procs on ss and ll
  2. Ascendence 2 min cd
  3. earthen spike aoe dmg or base dmg buff
  4. Change roll the wolves to 3 wolves, 1 of each every time… or just add base dmg instead of rng modifiers and add the healing component
  5. Ghostwolf stacking can die in a fire

rest is more or less ok, although we will be locked into 2 legendaries and the same talents all over again, at least it will be playable.

Right now it will be Z tier in pvp again and in pve we will be dying to cleave dmg as per usual with boring gaps in rotation.

8 Likes
3

I’ve been maining Shaman since Wotlk mate, healer/enhance. You don’t need to agree with my opinions but I have played this spec when it was great and I was solo bursting down Sul in throne of thunder, I stuck with it in BFA through the absolute terrible number tuning early on and I even levelled through Classic as enhancement which I really enjoyed. This is currently the worst iteration of the spec i have played to date. Granted their are pieces of the puzzle to come but after BFA I don’t want to spend another expansion playing more on alts than I do my main.

Most of my complaint still comes from the fact that there is to much clutter. on paper a lot of the utility is great but some of it is only useful 5% of the time. Don’t get me wrong it nice to have utility but why does it all need to be crammed into one class ?

I’ve seen the chain lightning bit now sorry I did miss that one

I’ve also noticed if you only pick passives to try and reduce the amount of buttons on your bars, then there is an occasionally a 3 second window where you have nothing to do. Almost a none issue but worth including

Have you looked at the new talent tree ? first it resets the CD of Flame shock. which you are gonig to need if you take the necrolord covenant ability. this can also be used in conjunction with fire nova for some extra AOE. i’d rather have ice strike than frost shock.
alternatively you can use it with hailstorm in PVP if you want to frost shock, flame shock burst someone and have a bit of extra snare although that one is maybe a bit iffy.

I should maybe title this my initial emotion driven reaction as I really don’t want a repeat of BFA and even parts of early legion.

4

I wish we don’t have this problem, but adding more abilities that do negative dmg is not the way to just get more apm.
We need an increase in resource gen or a reduc in cds to achieve this without being all over the place like we are in bfa.

Yes ice strike interacts with fire nova and necrolord somewhat but it has a 15s cd and thus just gives you maybe 1-2 more flame shocks per mob pack.
Fire nova in general makes aoe too clunky and the ramp up is too long.
Hailstorm is a much better addition to the fast paced gameplay

the new talent elemental assault, I have no idea why it is on the aoe talent row.

Frost shock is way better because it is ranged and a spell that cannot be dodged or parried. Especially in pvp frost shock is a billion times stronger. Also 15s cd on a slow would be garbage. It would be great if it was a 70% slow, then it would add utility that we didnt have before. But I have no clue why they add a 50% slow on this spell when we already have a low cd 50% slow in our base rotation if flame shock is not necessary (pvp)
Would even be better if ice strike generates 2 msw or triggers wf or whatever and give it a wind name.
Wind fart for the garbage dmg it does maybe

It might work if the fix the bug (or not bug) with 10 maelstrom stacks do more dmg than 5 stacks.
If it is used in pvp solely depending on the balance and damage on frost shock vs hot hand vs cd red on ss

as it stands the burst setup rota is insanely stupid and you lose tons of dmg if you mess it up. Not great in my opinion especially with the ss legendary.

get 10 stacks of msw
spirit wolves → es → SS → LB → FS → SS → LB → ice strike → FS

that just takes way to long to unload your burst and the big dmg because scattered over time which nobody cares about. If everything would hit big time, your sustain would go through the roof which will not happen.

I am very concerned that we will hit like potatoes without those gimmicks.

all these systems will be the downfall for enhance once again and I hate to see it. There is no way they can balance these stupid 100%+ dmg buffs

anyways: we don’t need less abilities; we don’t need filler abilities; we need survival abilities and some speed up in gen and cd red

5

the thing is, playing enh in the open world atm does feel quite good. But i worry when all that haste goes and we have early expac rares, we are going to struggle geting into groups again. not had a chance to use the covenant abilities but i’m not sure they fix any of the gaps in the spec

6

I think we don’t need to worry about open world.
As it looks dmg and game play wise it looks also fine in m+ and raids but we bring 0 to groups and we are squishy so we are left out as we are now.
We do the same as in bfa just looks different.

In pvp we will be complete garbage without updated honor talents that introduce def cds.

Even with the healing conduit… even if 1 surge will heal 100% hp we just die in a stun and cannot even build 5 stacks msw before we are dead.

1 Like
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Yea healing surge is utter garbage at the moment. a 10% heal that uses your main resource to be instant is not great. Thats not change from BFA though.

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well at least in BFA you could use it while still dpsing or kiting, in the PTR / Beta, you need to hit something to generate stacks so you can heal, its counter intuitive, if we had more dmg reduction, dodge, general tankiness that would be fine, but we can’t go toe to toe with the other melee classes, we’ll just die

1 Like
9

it got gradually worse from expac to expac.
In legion we passively generated maelstrom in ghostwolf so we could even heal without being in combat. Healing surge healed okish, wasn’t nerfed in pvp and we could use 5 instant heals

In bfa this went away, but we still had tons of resources to waste, mainly because lava lash was basically not worth pressing. Healing surge healed almost for nothing, got dumpstered in pvp and even our mana regen was trashed

in sl we can use at best 2 instant heals after about 20-30 seconds of autoattacking somebody which then heals us for even less than in bfa. On top of it casting the heal doesn’t do anything and you would just die on a single dot

10

Agree, way too many spells and atm seems rly weak. Bm hunters less button and procs to lookout, and doing better dmg.

11

Could not agree more. :ok_hand:

3 Likes
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From my experience doing some testing on PTR without conduits and legendaries.

Looking at the talents the biggest points of contention imo are Stormkeeper, Ice Strike and Elemental Blast.

Stormkeeper: Really lacks synergy with a lot of the kit. You either cast it or waste 5 MSW on it for two empowered lightning bolts which don’t synergise with a lot of the playstyle. For example if you’re using hailstorm, you want to use LB to use up 5 stacks to gain 5 stacks of hailstorm, using the two empowered LBs from stormkeeper doesn’t have any synergy with that. Basically atm this talent feel bad to press and the buff it gives just does X more damage, if it has bad numbers its bad and it overall doesn’t have any synergy.

Ice strike: The only use I see for it currently is to increase the spread of flame shocks for Fire Nova on AoE but at the same time I don’t think we will use Fire Nova over Hailstorm except in mass AoE situations. Hailstorm will be better on 5 targets or less for sure. The issue with this talent might be the higher haste levels of being in BFA gear meaning we don’t really need to much more CDR on Flame/Frost shocks but at the same time with lower haste levels we won’t build as much MSW meaning we don’t need as many Frost Shocks to dump hailstorm stacks. Basically don’t really see how this is a useful talents unless Fire Nova is really strong and you want to try and maintain 4+ flame shocks on AoE.

Elemental Blast: Currently with how short the CD is, it feels very awkward to use. Even with BFA gear haste levels sometimes I don’t build enough MSW to use 5 on an LB before elemental blast comes off cooldown again. So I usually found myself either waiting for its CD to dump my MSW stacks or leaving elemental blast off CD for a long time because I used 5 stacks on LB. I think it would work better with a longer CD and more damage/stats buff.

Overall though it feels good currently imo. Based on my look at things theres interesting choices on each row atm.
Tier 1 with Lashing Flames for ST and Forceful Winds for AoE.
Tier 2 with Stormfury for AoE and Hot Hand for ST.
Tier 4 with Hailstorm as really good cleave and ST, Fire Nova for mass AoE and Elemental Assault could also be interesting in a stormstrike focused build.
Tier 6 is a bit boring atm as I don’t see any situation where you don’t use Sundering unless Stormkeeper has strong numbers.
Tier 7 as it is in live with Elemental Spirits finding use on Cleave/AoE and Ascendance being the key ST talent. Not really seeing how Earthen Spike fits into anything currently but we might see a build using it.

Only other things of note for me are Flame shock and Frost shock having that weird uneven cooldown, very annoying. And as others mentioned, bars are most certainly full as Enhance atm especially if you pick active talents but I don’t feel thats too much of an issue.

13

The way I see it, all the changes to enhancement early on, with the revision a few weeks back, gave me an impression that the dev team have some goals and talent builds in mind. However, right now (Aug 16th) all of it feels like it’s leading towards something that could potentially be great, but it’s not there yet.

Before I go into the talents, there is one overarching problem that I have with enhancement at the moment, and that is that it feels quite slow for a melee spec. Emphasis on feels, and that’s also where the vision I think the dev team has in mind comes in, as with the aforementioned talents.

Right, so, talents. I think I can see a mix or 3 different builds or choices, where:

  1. The Frost Build: Hailstorm MW based AOE (not bursty but short term)
  2. The Fire Build: Flame Shock/Fire Nova based AOE (sustained AOE)
  3. ST build

I can be short about number one, it’s here, it plays quite well, and it works great. You attack, you spend MW, Hailstorm does a good chunk of damage and feels rewarding.

Now number two, could be a potential FS-dot and Fire Nova build, and I’m excited for it to be just that for sustained AOE/cleave fights: spread your flame shocks, empower them with extra damage, and Fire Nova just like how it did in previous expansions. However, that build could be a thing, but right now it isn’t. Looking at the talents, here are some problems and/or suggestions:

T15: Lashing flames increases the dot damage on the target of LL. If this was a buff on yourself that would increase all damage of all FS that would increase the focus on applying FS on multiple targets, leading to:

T30: I see Stormfury as mainly a ST talent, and that’s fine, but Ice Strike could be a potent reset to apply more FS, if it had a lower CD, Hot Hand could be a proc that spread a FS like it did long ago.

T35: Whilst I like talents on the same row competing for a ST and AOE spot, to make active choices based on encounters, to me this tier is fine: ST in Elemental Assault, Hailstorm for “burst” AOE, and Fire Nova for sustained AOE (potentially).

T45: Crashing Storm does what it does, it should have an upside (good damage) and downside (it’s placement is static), Sundering is great, does a lot of damage, CCs and to compensate: a long cooldown. Stormkeeper though…I don’t see the point of it, at all.

T50: The biggest problem. This should be the OOMPH tier. And, currently, it’s not

Personally, I’d love if the T50 row is the epitome of the idea and even name of “Enhancement”. You’d greatly enhance your abilities, adding new functionality or strength to existing abilities. The talents are actually already there, but they miss that OOMPH.

Elemental Spirits: should enhance you and the wolves. It does that? Great! But… it’s RNG. So my suggestions: make them heal you, give you a reliable buff (haste? pulsate some AOE damage? make your MW spells stack to 10 instead of 5?) Just ideas.

Earthen Spike in itself isn’t bad, but it seems like an outdated spell regarding increasing nature and physical damage, where in a world were Hailstorm (frost damage) does so much damage, it falls behind on the current iteration of the spec. I don’t have any good ideas on how to change it, apart from it buffing physical and elemental damage (basically all damage) to make it a solid ST option.

Ascendance: I can be short about it: since SS resets are a lot lower, this talent falls behind a lot. Reading the tooltip of turning into an Air Ascendant is still a great flavour idea: making every melee attack proc Windfury, and changing Lightning Crash to, say, Tornado which makes both your SS and Windfury weapons cleave.

14

I did a lot of tests on PTR with my shaman and it feels a bit all over the place.

The place style with certain talents feel pretty fine from pve perspective ALTHOUGH bare in mind I am running around with 50% base haste.

The good:
-Hailstorm is an awesome addition, but should also untie flame shock and Frost shock
-Ice Strike plays fine if you use hailstorm

The bad:
Unfortunately everything else.

-Lashing Flames: this talent alone makes flame shock on single target my second highest dmging ability. I know that tuning is not done, but I don’t see them shifting everything. Right now Flame shock is critting for 2k and my SS is critting for 2.5k??
Talent feels awful on AoE because I do not have time to press it if I play ice strike and hailstorm.

-Forceful winds is the aoe talent and feels a little lackluster. In bfa it adds more resource gen, in SL it does nothing. The dmg also goes not crazy high but you lose ALOT single target dmg compared to lashing flames

-Ele blast: unfortunately ele blast is completely garbage. The stat increase is to small and the dmg is pretty much the same as lightning bolt. Not worth taking. Increase the dmg by a lot and increase the cd to 30s. With 12s CD you cannot use anything else.
Also in AOE this ability is worthless

ROW 30
I guess it offers together with the other talents some playstyle modifications. Pure single target with simple rotation vs. complex rotation which has currently the same numbers in single target but massively more in aoe (ice strike + hailstorm)
But PLEASE consider giving ice strike a 10-20y range!!!

row 45
Unfortunately completely useless.
-Spirit wolf would be okish without the ramp if you also add a dispel protection

-Earth shield is garbage as long as it doesn’t add the msw charge generation to it or let it stack with lightning shield
Also lightning shield is only useful because of msw generation, otherwise nobody would even use it. It doesn’t do like ANY DMG AT ALL

-static charge should remove the charge time instead of reducing the CD. Like this it is pretty whatever

row 60
well they tried…
-Elemental Assault can be used for simplification that is ok

-Hailstorm is awesome but the relies heavily on tuning. Could be great or trash

-Fire nova is pretty bad in its current form. Flame shock spread is a terrible mechanic for Fire Nova. Consider making it the other way round. Fire nova spreads flame shock to 5-8 Targets. Less hassle, more fun. If adds survive 12 seconds you get a super nova at the end because all targets trigger nova.
You need to know what you want to do with it. It is very hard to tune the way it is. Make the cd high to only use it once per pack, increase the dmg hard.
Make the cd low and rely on flame shock spread, the dmg needs to be lower but flame shock need to be able to spread.
My suggestion would be simple to balance and had great interaction with lashing flames

Row 75
This row makes me cry.
-Natures guardian should be baseline and even then it is bad. Especially in pvp it gets severely reduced by damp and ms effects making it worthless.

-Feral Lunge
Well if it should stay as a talent, fine, but remove the min range and make the max range 30-40y and add a 3s daze to it. In its current iteration it is absolutely unusable. In pvp due to latency the min and max range shrink to pretty much a 10-15y radius.

-Wind Rush totem
Does anybody every use it? Stampeding roar form is so much better than this garbage and Druid (now all of them) got it baseline. What a joke, really.
If you want to keep it, give it a freedom effect and reduce the cd to 1 min with a duration of 5 seconds. Better yet, just remove it and add feral sprint freedom in its place if you don’t give it baseline anyways

Row 90
There is no row 90, there is only sundering. All other options are non existent

-cashing lightning was once good in legion because it did dmg. Now it doesn’t do dmg, so what is the purpose?

-Stormkeeper shouldn’t be in enhance talent tree. The way it interacts with the spec is broken as well making it worthless while it being also very clunky.

-sundering
It is good, it should stay high dmg. If you lower the dmg, at least give it a 3s stun (knockdown would be better) instead of disorient.

Row 100
Oh well the elephant in the room. Row 100 could be deleted and nobody would care.
This row and its balancing is so sad.

-Ascendence is like a 1% dmg increase and it frustrates you because it puts a large target on your back “PLEASE CC ME, THX”

-Earthen spike is outdated. It would be ok if it just increase ALL dmg taken and would hit 3 targets

-Elemental spirits is now trash tier again without blood of the enemy. It is too rng and wolves don’t do much anyways. The dmg increase to SS or LL is worthless if those spells do minor dmg anyways.

Why we still get no clarification if the msw stacks 150-200% is intended or a bug? If it is intended, I will delete my shaman, then I can just move on.

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