[Enhancement] Cataclysm Beta Changes (updated 11/4/10) - Page 10

Arzja · 09/03/10, 12:19 PM

Originally Posted by SentinelBorg

I'm pretty sure, that means the charges that get used up from incoming attacks, not the one we use for Static Shock. Because that is what they do, they deal damage to attackers.

I can confirm that. With the glyph the only reason for refreshing Lightning Shield is when it's running out.

alpha5099 · 09/09/10, 8:42 PM

New beta build, or internal build, has been posted on MMO-Champion, with a fair number of changes for shamans.

The major things affecting Enhancement seem to be an overhaul of the Stormstrike effect, the removal of Lava Burst from Maelstrom Weapon, a nerf to Ghost Wolf speed (which will come out the same as live if we use the Ghost Wolf glyph), a change to Unleash Wind, and a redesign of Elemental Precision which might make it worth speccing into.

Elemental
Stoneclaw Totem deal and absorb effect reduced by 50%.
Chain Lightning now has a 3 sec cooldown, down from 6 sec.
Earthquake base damage increased by 55%. Now has a 10% chance to knock down the targets (down from 20%). Lasts 8 sec, down from 10 sec. Mana cost changed to 60% of base mana, down from 86% of base mana. Cooldown removed.
Storm, Earth and Fire renamed to Earth's Grasp - Grants your Earthbind Totem a 50/100% chance to root nearby targets for 5 sec when cast.
Lava Flows now also increases the the periodic damage of your Flame Shock by 20/40/60%
Totemic Wrath is now a Tier 5 talent, up from Tier 4.
Elemental Precision now increases damage instead of your chance to hit.

Enhancement
Stormstrike now increases your chance to critical strike the enemy with Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, Lightning Shield and Earth Shock spells by 25% for 15 sec instead of increasing nature damage by 20% on the target.
Windfury Weapon - Unleash Weapon now lasts 6 swings or until 12 sec, instead of a flat 12 sec.
Ghost Wolf speed reduced from 40% to 30%.
Maelstrom Weapon no longer affects Lava Burst.

Restoration
Cleansing Waters base healing increased from [ 1916 to 2075 ] to [ 2634 to 2970 ]
Tidal Waves no longer affects Lesser Healing Wave. Now affects Healing Surge.
Telluric Currents is now a Tier 5 talent, down from Tier 6.
Improved Cleanse Spirit is now a Tier 4 talent, down from Tier 5.
Nature's Blessing is now a Tier 3 talent, down from Tier 5.
Improved Chain Heal is gone.
Restorative Totems renamed to Soothing Rains - Increases the amount healed by your Healing Stream Totem by 25%, and your Healing Rain spell by 15/30%.
Blessing of the Eternals is now a Tier 6 talent, up from Tier 4. No longer icnreases the critical chance of your spells.
Nature's Guardian is now a Tier 2 talent, down from Tier 4.
Ancestral Awakening is now a Tier 5 talent, up from Tier 3.
Improved Water Shield no longer affects Lesser Healing Wave. Now affects Healing Surge.

Ruga · 09/10/10, 2:21 AM

Originally Posted by alpha5099

New beta build, or internal build, has been posted on MMO-Champion, with a fair number of changes for shamans.

The major things affecting Enhancement seem to be an overhaul of the Stormstrike effect, the removal of Lava Burst from Maelstrom Weapon, a nerf to Ghost Wolf speed (which will come out the same as live if we use the Ghost Wolf glyph), a change to Unleash Wind, and a redesign of Elemental Precision which might make it worth speccing into.

The build was deployed on the beta servers.

They also have the Tier11 Enhancement Boni available:

# Item - Shaman T11 Enhancement 2P Bonus - Increases damage done by your Lava Lash and Stormstrike abilities by 10%. / Instant
# Item - Shaman T11 Enhancment 4P Bonus - Increases the critical strike chance of your Lightning Bolt spell by 10%. / Instant

I'm quite unsure about the change to Stormstrike.
The removal of LvB from MW was quite logical. They want to force us to use Nature spells so we allign with the Mastery Bonus we get.
Plus this, at least in my mind, would make Unleash Fire and with it FlameTongue on OH go away. I doubt they would want us to still use it for LL only as you'd have to wait 5 stacks from Searing Totem before using it.

Having said that, I can't wait for the beta realms to go back up so we can check out those changes first hand.

Brynmor · 09/10/10, 3:05 AM

Servers are up, a few discoveries;

LS can crit innately, I was able to proc ED only using SS and LLs.
UE-FT currently is not consumed by LL, nor does it affect the DoT portion of FS. Still works with FN and LVB.
The 10% max health per 5 sec feature of GW (that was never functional) has been removed from the tooltip.
Glyph of Ghost Wolf reduced to an additional 5% run speed. Down from 10%.

Will update with further unposted changes.

ziff · 09/10/10, 5:19 AM

Some questions about the recent changes:

1) Is the Stormstrike crit buff multiplicitive or additive? I'm assuming it is additive, but I want to confirm.
2) Could somebody list off exactly what Unleash Weapon for Windfury is now? It sounds like it's a 50% melee haste buff for the next 6 attacks, and lasts 12 seconds. Is this correct? Or is the 50% buff with Elemental Weapons @ 2/2?
3) Since I didn't notice that the Windury effect lost it's stack component, how does Unleash Weapon - Flametongue work now? Is it still a 20% Fire damage buff effected by Flame Shock DD, Flire Nova and Lava Burst?
4) Any other surprises like Lightning Shield now criting?
5) Now that Stormstrike has change to a crit buff, how did Glyph of Stormstrike change?

nxg · 09/10/10, 7:28 AM

Originally Posted by ziff

4) Any other surprises like Lightning Shield now criting?

In addition to that, does Lightning Shield overall has the ability to crit, or do only procs through Static Shock crit? Lightning Shield procs and Static Shock procs might have different behaviour.
Also I read that Flame Shock does not crit anymore (can't remember where, though), even if we won't stack haste anymore it might be useful to know.

Rouncer · 09/10/10, 10:19 AM

Flame shock still crits.
Unleash wind is the same as the last patch. It's 6 stacks that are consumed on melee white attacks from either weapon, similar to flurry but stacks with flurry. The buff itself has a 12 second duration so it expires when all the stacks are gone or when 12 seconds have gone by. The buff is 20% melee attack speed, 30% with 2/2 elemental weapons.
Unleash flame is 20% (30% with 2/2 EW) increased fire damage consumed by LvB, FS-DD and fire nova
Stormstrike glyph is still 8% additional nature damage.
Haven't checked on defensive procs yet and haven't had a chance to check the crit rate increase yet.

EDIT - Small surprise - Lava Lash scales with mastery rating
EDIT2 - Lightning Shield defensive procs can crit.
EDIT3 - Stormstrike glyph is 8% additional crit for nature spells. Glyph says 8% damage but when equipped the stormstrike tooltip updates to 33% and the damage range of LB remains the same. Running a mana bar of LBs average hit was 4473 and I had a 13.8% crit rate over 29 casts. Doing the same while keeping the SS debuff active the average hit was 4478 and I had a 53.6% crit rate over 28 casts.

ziff · 09/10/10, 3:55 PM

Originally Posted by Rouncer

Flame shock still crits.
Unleash wind is the same as the last patch. It's 6 stacks that are consumed on melee white attacks from either weapon, similar to flurry but stacks with flurry. The buff itself has a 12 second duration so it expires when all the stacks are gone or when 12 seconds have gone by. The buff is 20% melee attack speed, 30% with 2/2 elemental weapons.
Unleash flame is 20% (30% with 2/2 EW) increased fire damage consumed by LvB, FS-DD and fire nova
Stormstrike glyph is still 8% additional nature damage.
Haven't checked on defensive procs yet and haven't had a chance to check the crit rate increase yet.

EDIT - Small surprise - Lava Lash scales with mastery rating
EDIT2 - Lightning Shield defensive procs can crit.
EDIT3 - Stormstrike glyph is 8% additional crit for nature spells. Glyph says 8% damage but when equipped the stormstrike tooltip updates to 33% and the damage range of LB remains the same. Running a mana bar of LBs average hit was 4473 and I had a 13.8% crit rate over 29 casts. Doing the same while keeping the SS debuff active the average hit was 4478 and I had a 53.6% crit rate over 28 casts.

Thanks tons for the details. I'll update the Stormstrike glyph so it's switched over to a crit bonus. The rest of the items are already in the sim, except for maybe fire nova effecting Unleash Flame and the mastery effect with Lava Lash . I'll verify those later tonight.

I'm not really planning on focusing on getting the rest of the glyphs in though. I think getting the main mechanics correct and accurate are more important than getting in the glyphs that will change six ways to Sunday before Cata ships.

Rouncer · 09/10/10, 5:15 PM

Might want to set up the system to handle prime and major glyphs though. Probably could just relabel the minors to major and the major to prime and that should cover the basics since the minors will never be dps increases and most of the majors turned into prime anyway.

nxg · 09/10/10, 7:57 PM

Originally Posted by Rouncer

Flame shock still crits.

My bad, what I actually meant to ask was if it still scales with haste, don't know how came up with asking about it critting. Lightning Shield critting and Lava Lash being affected by the mastery make things more interesting. The Stormstrike Glyph might not be changed, though, for all we know it might just be set to increase the effect of it by 8, if I remember right we had something like this with a relic that affected the effect of Stormstrike instead of it's damage.

Rouncer · 09/10/10, 8:15 PM

It scales with haste but in a very different way. The ticks will get closer and closer to each other until it can add an additional tick and then it shoves that in there. The way it works with clipping is that the dot lasts the full duration each time and if you cast the new one between that last tick and the end of the dot itself it just continues the timer to the next tick without interruption. If you cast in between then it just continues the tick timing but adds the new duration from that point to the dot itself.

SentinelBorg · 09/13/10, 4:11 AM

About Lava Lash and Mastery, I tested that the day they implemented the Mastery. Thought that everyone knew that.
After the test I even reforged all my haste to mastery rating because of that fact.

I would even tend to say, that our Mastery is too strong at the moment. Compared for example to Frost Death Knights, that have a similar Mastery with the same scaling, but that only affects Frost damage.

That Lightning Shield can crit now has the effect I hoped it would have when I suggested it on the beta boards. The critical hits of defensive procs perfectly substitute the loss of raid buffs when doing solo-PvE and PvP. I now have a higher uptime of ED, then with LvB auto-crit before.

Taowth · 09/15/10, 4:24 AM

Since you guys should be 85 by now, how much base mana does Enhancement have @ 85?

Editing so I don't have to make a new post for a minor reply. Yea, I wanted to know the base mana so I know how much in proportion to the pool that Water Shield and Mana Spring returns @ 85. Thanks for the links, I don't follow the EnhSim thread since its not really a discussion on mechanics. The increased base regen is definitely an interesting note as well, something I noticed on the PTR.

Rouncer · 09/15/10, 8:38 AM

Originally Posted by Taowth

Since you guys should be 85 by now, how much base mana does Enhancement have @ 85?

Why does it matter to enhancement? Everything we do is based on base mana. Our mechanics spend base mana and return base mana but if you are just curious or are trying to relate things to water shield I posted the values in the EnhSim thread. If you are trying to make a post about real values mana return in PvP you should be aware that there is a large amount of mana returned on a regular basis to all of the classes whether in combat or not. It's not very much to an int spec but for a base mana one it ends up being significant. I can't log onto the beta atm but from what I can remember it's something like 1100 mp5 for shamans

Base mana - EnhSim updated thread

About base regen rate - Balance Raiding in Cataclysm

Acidbaron · 09/15/10, 11:19 AM

In our current Cataclysm build, we have cut the Primal Wisdom talent (and give it as part of the Enhancement passive) and reduced Unleashed Rage from 3 to 2 ranks, but with the same overall effect. That should take care of the extra talent points that the tree seemed to have.

We are still working on making the Searing Totem a little smarter.

Source: post 54, ghostcrawler

Didn't see this in the OP yet, so thought it might be worth mentioning here, although those changes probably have yet to be made on beta and ptr servers.

While still downloading the ptr client, these changes on first glance to glyphs and talents seems to be given us much more free gcd's then we have now in wotlk, could be totally wrong on that however.