Adrammelech

I have noticed no meaningful change on FB, maybe 25-40ish more damage per proc. The damage is hardly the issue with it anyhow though, we mostly want the snare/debuff.

 

tylore

I'm wondering what some of the other ENH shammies are thinking of this patch. I've notice some increased survivability for a couple of reasons. Most of my experience is in BGs with this patch since I haven't found a reliable team yest So I KNOW I need more experience just having trouble getting it secondary to a busy schedule.

ANyway to change this into the list I have had increased survivability because:

1. 4 totem drop, often in the heat of battles dropping totems sometime became secondary because of how it ate up GCDs, but with the 3-4:1 change they're great and much more helpful. Of course, Warlock still destroy my tremor totem before it breaks my fear still.

2. Shammy rage up a much better percentage of the time.

3. Seperate interrupt from shocks, leads to more interruped casts with increased damage. this has been pleasant to say the least.

4. Small benifet from combined Res changes and HP increase. ( I think I got about 250-300hp)

5. I haven't seen too much use from the insta-hex. I know I have used a non-full stacked maelstom in a couple time to try and sneak in a heal but not as useful as I had hope.

Somethings I would like to know is how are you guys using your totem bar?
I have my three bars set up as one from Melee (EB, Flame nova, Disease, and grounding (I'd like WF but stopping a HoJ and grip are too important I think), one for ranged (Tremor, flame nova vs searing, Frost resistance, and grounding) and finally a damage totem mostly used in a PvE setting but occasionally when I just want as much DMG as possible. (SoE, any Flame nove or magma, WF, and Disease cleansing) What are some of you guys doing?

Some gear questions...?
Pre-patch it seem like 3-4 pieces of PvE gear was where things were the best. Anyone adding some more PVP gear with the changes in the patch? I've experimented both ways and I'm leaning towards some PvE gear still. What res numbers will you guys be shooting for?

Weapon enchants..
I'm currenttly packing mongoose and and one of the AP ones as a place holder. Mostly I'm waiting some better weapons before re-enchanting and spending the money but I'm leanin towards Berserking for the extra AP. Any thoughts on this. Seems like a decent sacrifice with some of the extra survivabilty I've noticed.

 

kaoticz

Well, this patch has silenced all my Enhance QQ. Excluding 2's, which I refuse to participate in seriously or care about anymore, and which will be dumbed down next season anyway, I think we're in a REALLY good place.

I feel balanced in 3s and 5s. We bring a lot of good things to the table and don't do retardedly high damage or low damage if geared right. At the moment I'm running Enhance/Affliction/Holy Paladin in 3's, and we're ~2700. I mean thats a comp that you wouldn't really think about, but it does really damn well. My 5's team is running cleave with Enhance/Warr/DK/Resto Druid/Holy Paladin, and that also feels amazing (though earthbind makes cleave just so over the top anyways).

The interrupt not being shared with ES/FrS/FS is fucking huge and amazing. Shamanistic Rage being on a 1 minute cooldown was much needed for a long time and I requested it a lot, and it was finally granted. Hex on maelstrom is just icing on the cake, especially since I use it offensively to get a kill most of the time, whether its used on the target we're beating on @ 20% or less health to secure the kill to keep them from healing or w/e and just make them sort of confused as to wtf is happening, or used on an independent healer that we're locking down between Hex and HoJ or Strangulate or Fear or anything.

Notes I have... I no longer value picking up fire nova totem. Against good teams it is either destroyed or you're moving around enough that it doesn't even hit anyone. Waste of mana, and with shammy rage returning less mana I rarely ever get a full mana bar back anymore in arena. With cleave teams, I'm once again grabbing Imp Windfury totem over this talent.

I'm using a weapon chain over anticipation because of the hit rating it provides and because I just don't have the talent points to sink into a talent I don't feel is worthy of 3 pts. Remove the dodge % and make it a 2pt IMO.
I don't grab toughness because 5 pts for like 1500-2k hp is absurd, once again, remove the movement speed duration decrease from the talent and make this a 3 pointer. Other than those 2 qualms, I have no QQ over enhance. We're on a level playing field now.

Oh and, Dark Matter is fucking amazing in arena for enhance, as well as probably most other classes. The crit chance increase means resilience wont keep the flurry procs back or UR for that time, as well as grant some Ele Dev uptime, it just gives you massive burst time.

I kind of want to keep going but this wall of text is big enough. If anyone else replies I'll probably go on about what other choices I've made and why.

 

panny

Honestly, the biggest change for me is being able to frost shock and still interrupt. I also take back what I said about instant Hex being useless.

I don't play cleave, but I'm not sure I'd take imp. WF anyway. I rarely have the time to drop extra totems, I prefer to use GCDs for Purge. Do you have some Calls set up to easily redrop Grounding/WF?

It's weird, I see alot of Enh PvP specs going for Static Shock, but I still sometimes go oom with water shield. How do you keep your mana up? I usually dont use SR except as a defensive cooldown unless I'm bone dry.

I also wouldn't bother with a weapon chain. We can still do so much without a weapon most people are likely to use their disarms on someone else. I'm going for double Berserking once I have the points for my T2 weapon.

Fix Spirit Wolves not responding to commands.
DK/Rogue

 

kaoticz

Imp Windfury is a pretty big gain for an all melee team compared to some extra hit from dual wield and maybe a 3rd point in ele dev for myself. In between grounding totems I always drop Windfury and it makes a huge difference on damage, especially while wolves are up, since they do benefit from the totem they will heal you much faster not to mention do more damage.

I don't know, I seem to be able to find the time to Ground, redrop Windfury, purge, and wind shear and frost shock or earth shock depending on the targets. Its all about being able to micro manage. I'll hold back 1 purge GCD to get the windfury down. I have purge bound to my mousewheel because it was giving me CTS lol. I just spam my mousewheel the entire game pretty much and only stop for abilities and redropping a totem, and if Lifebloom is up on the target and it looks like I might purge it off if I keep going.

My calls are setup like so:
WF/Tremor/Cleansing/Frost Resist
WF/Tremor/Cleansing
Grounding/Stoneclaw (try to get both defensive cooldowns in 1 GCD)

I used to use water shield but using Static Shock is very nice for getting out the necessary burst you need to drop a target. If I'm starting to run low on mana and I'm being hit I'll swap to watershield for around 8 orbs worth of mana back and then swap back. I use shamanistic rage early on when being focused so its up sooner. I rarely if ever oom now even though I cannot fill up my mana bar to full with shammy rage as often anymore.

I get disarmed a lot, I don't know why, but they always disarm me. 10 seconds without weapons is basically game over, and a rogue will ALWAYS do it when you're going for a kill. The 2nd berserking enchant in pvp scenarios at best will give you an extra 100 dps or so. I'd rather use the weapon chain for the 5 seconds of damage lost on a kill/potential kill and also for the hit rating it provides since I'm pretty screwed on hit without it atm.

 

tylore

How much resilience should we be aiming for now? I can go from 180-200 with just a few PvP sets on to 900+ PvP stacked...

I still have the flame nova stun and have found it to be somewhat useful but haven't started my 5 mans yet either. However, I'll have to continue to evaluate to see if its something worth dropping the talent.

With Wind shear and shocks being on separate CDs is Reverberation as effective as elemental devastation? I've been wondering. We would lose the bonus crit damage but make up for it with and incrased ability for another instant damage spell and another interrupt. Going from 6sec CD to 5 sec CD would technically allow for (ignoring other CDS and GCD interference) 10-->12 shocks/min and 10-->12 interrupts/min. It also improves windshear because the 2 sec lock out only gives your taget 3 seconds to try and get off another heal or damaging spell as opposed to 4 seconds. So reverberation is (at least in my mind) almost 2x as good as it used to be.

 

kaoticz

If you can find the talent points for it. I run a dark matter trinket in my pvp set, so when that procs I generally get elemental dev up as well, and it really helps when bursting down an opponent (albeit unpredictable for when it will next proc, but the passive AP really helps get your damage closer to where it needs to/should be).

I run with 974 or 934 resilience currently with around 3800 ap.

 

panny

I used to use about 1000 resil (I was still using bits of Hateful) but when T8 vendors came out, I switched to 2pcT8 and run with 873 now.

I just realised Kaoticz was talking about being disarmed in 3s, which would make sense without another melee dps on your team!

Fix Spirit Wolves not responding to commands.
DK/Rogue

 

kaoticz

So yah, Enhance/Affliction Lock/Holy Paladin worked out really well. We only started playing like 2 weeks ago about, and stopped playing this past Sunday after making our push and securing gladiator from 3s. Given more time, I think we could have done even better ( and less disconnects from the lock costing us around 12 games :< ).

I really like the play style of this comp and just how well it shuts down teams with Druids especially, as well as paladins. Shuts down cleaves so well its stupid, and does really well vs RMP due to the fact that enhance with Frozen Power just bends over mages, and the fact that we can snare immune. The Wind Shear change was just enormous, it really made just a huge fucking difference, and I'm surprised many others just haven't realized how awesome it is. Actually, I'm not really surprised -- I recall the thread on these forums for Enhance 3.2 changes -- lot of people who didn't even know they had wind shock and thought we were losing an interrupt and being nerfed -- LOL.

All that aside, I really do believe the aforementioned comp is one of the best ways to go if you're going to PvP as enhance in arena. The other alternative being cleave, but like I said, this just shuts down cleave so hard and counters the hell out of a lot of comps, its amazing. I really don't think we had a hard counter, but alas, I think I've mentioned and repeated that several times so yah.

If anyone else has been successful with any other weird/random comps you've not really seen before post em here and let us know, it'd be great to see a lot more enhance shaman competing seriously in arena, since we're in the best shape we've been in since vanilla wow OPness .

REPRESENT

P.S. should totally think up a name for that comp I played... hmm... shadow purge?

 

MatsT

Does enhancement shamans really shut down druids that well? Seems to me that lifebloom+30% dispel resist makes it more or less impossible to purge away all the healing. At least that's how a feel as resto, I've tried spampurging druid hots a few times but nothing seems to come of it, feels like it's more useful to just bolt the target if you want extra pressure. One lifebloom 'bloom' per global cooldown is a pretty ok healing output.

Also I'm not doubting your word that you're beating cleave teams, but I'm not really getting why. Is it simply Earthbind that lets your warlock get away while slowing the opponents? Other warlock teams can have problems with warlock getting trained down too fast and I don't see how a shaman can help with that outside of Earthbind.

 

tylore

Nice to hear a good combination that's been working for you Kaoticz. I recently had a freind start gearing up his lock so maybe it'll be something to try.

Now, I was just reading a post in the regular forums about swapping in a healing/SP weapon for a quick heal. I never even THOUGHT about this. Would this be considered to be effective for PvP. You could even throw a quick earth living buff on it pre-fight for a little extra kick. It seems like it would be pretty easy to set up a macro to equip your healing weapon and cast HW or CH then re-equip your PvP. Might give and extra 500-600 +/- a small earth living proc for free.

Anyone using this or have a good macro suggestion? Maybe even swap out OH for SP shield for the heal then do a quick swap out for a little extra oomph.

 

kaoticz

As per the thing about a healing weap, I would probably just macro that in with your shield swap, and only use it if I'm planning/need to swap to a shield anyway.

@ MatsT: Between Banishes on Tree form, and just normal fears if needed on the druid, the lock already counters the druid pretty nicely. And the druid applies dots to everyone, meaning everyone sort of needs hots, and I'm able to purge everything down (I'll purge until there are like 2 stacks of LB being the only buff left on the target, so I don't accidentally get lucky with RNG and both don't resist a purge). Also an on demand interrupt as needed. Grounding totem is pretty nice for Cyclones too, heh.


As to why we beat cleaves, well, this would probably require me to go a bit more in depth with our strategy. But, as per keeping the lock alive (or me in some cases) there's just a lot of stuff you can do.

First of all, the new change to Earth Shock applies a 10% attack speed snare for 8 seconds when used. If needed, the lock can Curse of Weakness (which also lowers armor, so it provides a minor damage boost for me as well, heh). Even if it gets decursed its still a GCD they're using on that instead of a heal or casting a root or cyclone if vs a druid. We also have Hex and HoJ at our disposal.

I can drop an earthbind, and then run out to range to Frost Shock root one of them, which even if dispelled again slows them down long enough for some breathing space so the lock can get a fear off on one of them, and the lock also has the teleport, which he can use and then run away from. My frostbrand weapon should also keep one of them snared a lot of the time which makes it easier for the lock to kite.

Stoneskin totem stacks with Devotion Aura if the damage gets bad, and most cleaves you don't really have to worry about tremor nearly as much (if vs priest just make sure you know when their cooldown is ready, and a warrior will only get one off really). I mean even if a fear does go off and they hit the totem when it happens to screw you, I usually just trinket it right away and drop a new tremor to knock my team out of it, because that can really put your team in a bad place a lot of the time.

Don't get me wrong, sometimes they get us pretty low, but we manage to survive with all these tools. I mean when we go for a kill, the Fel hunter gets a CS off on the healer, and fear or banish, and if we can't use those we'll Hex or HoJ, and then use the vice versa following that. We communicate all our CC's in vent and coordinate them and that's what's most important.

Sigh... and I was really trying not to make another wall of text :\

 

tylore

The changes to EB totem are gonna hurt. I wish they'd decrease the GCD on SP if they're gonna take that away.

However, I think the changes on flameshock are interesting. Especially for fighting a rogues or other stealther's. Probably not worth glyphing into though since the crits likely won't trigger Elemental devastation.

 

Adrammelech

It seems like with the timing of the changes, and how specific they were to enhancement and BM that it was in response to "beastcleave", yet EP is so very redundant in that team, especially if they use the paladin variant.

Basically if you ran enhance + melee or enhance + caster (or play with a priest at all) you just suffered a major nerf to your team utility.

Ferals and Rets are way better alternatives now.

 

panny

Does Earthen Power work at all on Frost Traps and Desecration anymore? Didn't seem like it did at all in a few games of 5s we did.

Fix Spirit Wolves not responding to commands.
DK/Rogue

 

Adrammelech

It works, in the sense it removes the snare for a split second before the trap applies the effect again.

 

kaoticz

nvm, please delete