[Enhancement] 4.1 changes

ziff · 02/24/11, 1:50 PM

Some notes just dropped for 4.1. Didn't see anything in the patch notes that directly effected us, but this line was interesting.

First we want to balance the area attack potentials between different damage dealing talents, you can expect changes regarding this one in the testing phase.

And looking at the mined data from mmo-champion:

Fire Nova now has a 40 yards range, up from 30 yards. Cooldown reduced from 10 sec to 4 sec. Now Ignites your Flame Shock spell on any nearby enemies, causing each of them to emit a wave of flames that deals 647 to 724 Fire damage to every other enemy within 10 yards.
Improved Fire Nova has been replaced with Seasoned Winds - When you successfully prevent an enemy spellcast with Wind Shear or Grounding Totem, you gain [if (PL<=70) then PL else if (PL<=80) then PL+(PL-70)*5 else PL+(PL-70)*5+(PL-80)*7] resistance to that spell's magical school for 10 sec. (PL = Player Level, and if you're wondering, that's basically the same resist aura as any other spell)

Well isn't that interesting. Not sure how well the new Fire Nova will work for us, but at least they are trying to solve the clunkiness of it. The new talent we get for interrupts is interesting. Mainly for pvp?

Rouncer · 02/24/11, 2:22 PM

Actually might be really good in a raid as well provided the additional resistences stack.

ziff · 02/24/11, 2:39 PM

My initial assumption is that they won't.

Another thing I noticed, while not related to Enhancement, is how Elemental is going to have more viable aoe tools. In the mmo-champion note, it listed Earthquake as getting nerfed 40% damage. But what it fails to list is that they are changing it away from a channeled spell to a 2.5 cast time with a 10 second cooldown. It'll be nice for elemental to fire off an Earthquake and then working on a Flame Shock/Fire Nova/Chain Lightning sequence. Not bad. Hopefully we will get some other tools as well, since we don't really have a cleave/whirlwind mechanic outside of MW5CL.

Here's the snippet from the official patch notes, and surprisingly Seasoned Winds does stack. Makes it much much more interesting, but for some reason it doesn't effect holy damage? Probably keeping consistent with no other holy resistance on players. Maybe more of a balancing worry around Paladins, just not sure why they would be called out specifically. It's not like Shadow priests will have many options if we interrupt a Mind Flay.

Shaman (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Skills/Talents)
Fire Nova has been redesigned and decoupled from shaman Fire totems. Instead, it now pulses that same area-of-effect from each target that is afflicted by the shaman's own Flame Shock debuff. It now damages all enemies except the target hit by Flame Shock. The ability's cooldown has been reduced from 4 seconds, down from 10.
Magma Totem now lasts for 60 seconds, up from 21.
Stoneclaw Totem's area-of-effect threat pulse no longer affects critters.

Elemental Combat
Earthquake is no longer a channeled spell. It now has a 2-second cast time, lasts for 10 seconds, and has a 10-second cooldown. Its damage has been reduced by 40% from its channeled version.

Enhancement
Improved Fire Nova has been redesigned and replaced by a talent called Seasoned Winds. When an enemy spell cast is successfully prevented with Wind Shear or Grounding Totem, the shaman gains magical resistance (in an amount equal to what a protection totem/aura would grant, stacking with such buffs) to the spell school(s) of the interrupted spell (except for Holy spells), lasting 10 seconds.

On the Fire Nova change, still not sure about it. It's unclear if it will consume the Flame shock, but if not we can cast 4 Fire Novas per Flame Shock cast. Which will be nice for fights with a boss and ancilarily adds. But in typical aoe trash situations like in BoT right now, the adds won't stay alive long enough to make this workable. We are basically using the old Shadow Priest Mind Sear mechanic, but we have a more costly restart mechanic since it will take and extra GCD just to restart Fire Nova aoe. Add in the shock cooldown, and it makes restarting Fire Nova even more painful.

Hothgor · 02/24/11, 4:22 PM

Originally Posted by ziff

Here's the snippet from the official patch notes, and surprisingly Seasoned Winds does stack. Makes it much much more interesting, but for some reason it doesn't effect holy damage? Probably keeping consistent with no other holy resistance on players. Maybe more of a balancing worry around Paladins, just not sure why they would be called out specifically. It's not like Shadow priests will have many options if we interrupt a Mind Flay.

On the Fire Nova change, still not sure about it. It's unclear if it will consume the Flame shock, but if not we can cast 4 Fire Novas per Flame Shock cast. Which will be nice for fights with a boss and ancilarily adds. But in typical aoe trash situations like in BoT right now, the adds won't stay alive long enough to make this workable. We are basically using the old Shadow Priest Mind Sear mechanic, but we have a more costly restart mechanic since it will take and extra GCD just to restart Fire Nova aoe. Add in the shock cooldown, and it makes restarting Fire Nova even more painful.

The ramp up time is just as bad with the new implementation as it was with the old implementation. Without the Flame Shock Glyph, it will take us 15 seconds to fully utilize our AoE. With the glyph we have to be in 'AoE mode' for 25 seconds before we reach our peak potential. That's why I said in the other thread that I wished they'd simply have killed off Fire Nova and buffed Magma Totem to compensate. We've now gone from having the second worst AoE to a vastly improved AoE that takes the most amount of time to ramp up.

We need an Enhancement only ability that will 'spread' our Flame Shocks to multiple targets a la Pestilence, or perhaps a small redesign of Unleash Flametongue to accomplish the same thing (via a glyph perhaps?).

ziff · 02/24/11, 4:22 PM

I'm a little disappoined to see an Agility trinket come out specifically excluding us, Hungerer Now of course this could indicate that they are going to have a trinket solely meant for Enhancement shaman, but given Blizzard's record on class specific trinkets I'm not holding out hope on that.

Funaria · 02/24/11, 4:45 PM

Classes: General

* All non-damaging interrupts off the global cooldown will now always hit the target. This includes Pummel, Shield Bash, Kick, Mind Freeze, Rebuke, Skull Bash, Counterspell, Wind Shear, Solar Beam, Silencing Shot, and related player pet abilities.

It will be interesting to see whether this will result in our optimal gearing being below spell hit cap at all, or whether the extra spell and melee hit will still rank higher than mastery.

Cheysuli · 02/24/11, 5:07 PM

Originally Posted by Funaria

It will be interesting to see whether this will result in our optimal gearing being below spell hit cap at all, or whether the extra spell and melee hit will still rank higher than mastery.

Hit rating value should not be changed at all. Spell hit cap is so good because large portion of our damage are spells. I think this change is focused mainly on healers and tanks.

ziff · 02/24/11, 5:33 PM

Honestly, it's about time this got changed. Nothing was quite as bad as having a non-dps character try to do interrupts and have them miss constantly since they never had any hit rating on their gear. Now if they would only extend this to cc spells in PVE it would be perfect.