Since so many classes have gotten this kinds of threads over the past weeks, I'd figure we could make one for Enhance. The talents just got released today, so lo and behold, plenty to discuss. First of all, I think most changes are pretty decent. Pretty much stuff we needed.
At first glance, I was disappointed they kept Shield Spec. Even when reducing it to 2 talent points, no one is going to get it. I don't even get why it's there in the first place. But I disgress.
Continuing on the first tier, we can see the new and improved Ancestral Knowledge. At first I was disappointed again, but you will soon see why you should not be (in a few tiers). Next up is the good old Enhancing Totems. No brainer there, didn't get any changes. Next to it though, the new Elemental Shields. I don't think it's too shabby for 3 points, being a first tier and all. 15% damage on lightning shield and 15% more mana gained from water shield charges. Might not be worth 3 talent points, or it might. Needs some theorycrafting. It does have some synergy with a later talent, again.
Next tier. Guardian Totems got some insignificant buff to windwall and stoneskin. Nothing noteworthy. Same goes for Imp Ghostwollf and Thundering Strikes. Unchanged.
But now. This is where the good stuff starts rolling in.
"Mental Dexterity - Increases your attack power by 100% of your intellect."
My first thought was negative, I mean now they actually have a reason to put intellect on our gear. Then I thought about it a little, this is not insignificant. With my current gear setup which is rather mail light, I'm at 270 intellect or so raidbuffed. That's 270 AP, right there. Just 'free". I'd say this is a damn good talent, although it does scares me a little bit Blizzard might overdo it with intellect on mail again. This also adds a reason to get Ancestral Knowledge, for a little free AP. The rest of this tier is unchanged.
Next tier, unchanged too... moving on. Next three tiers, the same... moving on.
And new stuff again. Improved Stormstrike. The wording on that site is bugged, so disregard that.
"Improved Stormstrike - Increases the amount Stormstrike charges by 2 and reduces the cooldown by 2 seconds."
I feel this is pretty decent. Adding 2 charges to SStrike means a longer uptime for Elemental Shamans, adding a buff to them. With this talent, Stormstrike is going to be a 8 second cooldown. I'm a little too tired for theorycraft at the moment, but I'm going to guess at a ~50% uptime on Stormstrike (if you dont have wind serpents), making it roughly equivalent to a Curse.
Next tier, Improved Shamanistic Rage. Damn time.
"Improved Shamanistic Rage - While under the effect of Shamanistic Rage you have a 100% chance to be immune to Stun, Movement Impairing and Snare effects."
PvP toy, but nevertheless might be handy for some encounters. To the other side of Sham Rage we have Elemental Shields synergy with Static Shock.
"Static Shock - You have a 6% chance to inflict an enemy with a Lightning Shield Orb charge everytime you do damage. In addition, you gain 3% more spelldamage while Lightning Shield is active."
Like I said, this will maybe make Lightning Shield a little more valuable. It all depends on how much we'll need our Water Shield, I suppose.
Now it's time for the REAL good stuff. This talent is like a dream;
Weapon Specialisation:
Axe - Increases critical strike damage bonus by 25%
Mace - Has a 5% chance to increase your melee haste by 10% for 15 sec.
Fist - Attacks from your fist weapons have a 5% chance to reduce the enemies armor by 20% for 6 seconds.
Where to start in this amazing talent. First of, it appears that you will benefit from using f.ex one mace and one fist. Gaining both boni, as they are on the same talent. Secondly, from first non-theorycrafting glance, it seems the Fist spec is the superior one. Of course this talent will stand and rise with the question whether or not these procs will have a ICD or not. Will need testing.
And last, but not least: Feral Spirit
Summons 2 Spirit Wolves under the command of the Shaman, lasts for 30 seconds.
First reports have indicated that these wolves leave a debuff on the target, increasing critical strike bonus damage and apparantly a stun. Also possess a bleeding effect, apparantly. I don't have more information on this. This does increase our raid DPS buffing even more, so this looks to be a good talent.
To end this pretty big post, speccing will be interesting. There's a lot of new stuff to get in Enhance so I don't think we can spare 16 points to get totem range and 3% hit anymore. On the other hand, Elemental Devastation is down a tier and is very easily accessible. And now that melee crit and spell crit are merged, it might actually be a very good talent. Will need some theorycrafting on that.
Weapon Specialisation is simply awesome, and the fact that it encourages using 2 different weapons makes it all the more appealing to me (style ftw!!!).
Yay for Ghost Wolves, about time! Even if they do nothing at all, I'll still love them!
Giving shamans an incentive to use Lightning Shield over Water Shield is great, too, since usually I have more than enough mana thanks to Shamanistic Rage.
Overall I really like the attempt to put some decent synergy into the talents / talent trees, also with other classes. It makes them feel more complete instead of something randomly thrown together.
Good stuff so far, no complaints from me anyway!
"If teh alliance had shamens, we wud win more battlegrounses" - random ally (Pre BC)
Mental Dexterity - Increases your attack power by 100% of your intellect."
This is essentially a way of getting us to change focus on which gear we aim for.
The majority of Enhancement Shaman tend to find that leather melee gear, usually rogue gear, is better for dps, at the cost of armor and intellect.
This talent will make gear with intellect much more attractive. OK, we will still share leather gear, but the druid gear will be more attractive than pure rogue gear, and the mail gear that is supposed to be our class gear will also become more appealing.
It also reduces the need for us to choose mana increasing, or mana cost reducing talents by encouraging us to use gear that will increase our mana pool.
Mental Dexterity combined with the changes to hit and crit, make Totemic Mastery the only justifiable reason to subspec resto now. Elemental subspec with Concussion+Elemental Deavastation look far more interesting.
The main question will become this. Does my increased mana pool from gear offset the extra cost of dropping totems from loss of Totemic Focus and Totemic Mastery?
My first reaction when I saw Improved Stormstrike was that it was going to play hell with our cycles. Trying to weave an 8 second stormstrike, a 10-second twisting cycle, and a 6(5?) second shock cooldown just doesn't work. Even if we can't stormstrike every 8 seconds though, we can use the shorter cooldown as wiggle room to hold stormstrikes until windfury is up without throwing off our twisting/shock cycles.
Regardless its a good talent for the extra charges alone, assuming you raid with an ele shaman or a moonkin or both.
Elemental Devastation looks nice with the changes to hit/crit rating, probably as good as Nature's Guidance or better. The rating changes are nice for elemental in general, but trying to twist with no Totemic Focus, no water shield (because of Static Shock) and increased lv80 spell costs might be too much in Sunwell-equivalent gear.
Weapon Spec is the most interesting new talent though. Anyone know whether the fist proc is self-only? If the fist proc reduces armor for everyone, our weapons are going to be fists or nothing. If not, I can see mainhand axe/offhand mace or mainhand axe/offhand fist being good - get the crit bonus on your mainhand where it matters, and get a proc that buffs both weapons from your offhand. Using a fast mace or fist offhand with flametongue might be worthwhile for more buff uptime, but there's no way to know yet. (The new elemental talents imply a change to flametongue, presumably some kind of buff, and the hit/crit rating change would make flametongue offhand less terrible.)
Cool though it may be, I'm dreading what weapon spec could do to our itemization. We're an offspec, we're not going to get as much custom-tailored itemization as, say, rogues, and even rogue weapon itemization was an abortion at the beginning of TBC. Unless Blizzard is planning to put two axes, two maces, two fists on every badge vendor for every tier, I'm not looking forward to being this dependent on very specific and possibly nonexistent weapon drops.
For all we know now Blizzard gets rid of the benefits of twisting altogether come WotLK. They've stated they're not happy with it, and a new expansion seems like the perfect time to rework the mechanic.
The tree could use some pretty heavy trimming though, seems really bottom heavy now, can't see me spending less then 60 in the enhance tree now, which does leave a perfect amount for getting the useful stuff in the elemental tree.
Well lets look at how it works for some of the current end game gear for ench i took Leggings of the immortal night and Starstalkers as an example
using sunwell EP values Leggings of the immortal night would be worth 424.49
Starstalkers 355.17
wile they are far from equal blizzard have atleast manedged to make "hunter mail" abit more viable for shamans.
and bye the way you mention that spell and melee crit are merged were did you read/find out this?
Thought this was pretty common knowledge by now, but from the patch notes:
- Hit Rating, Critical Strike Rating, and Haste Rating now modify both
melee attacks and spells.
- Spellpower:
All items and effects which grant bonuses to spell damage and spell
healing are being consolidated into a single stat, Spellpower. This
stat will appear with the same values found on items which grant
“increased spell damage and healing” such as on typical Mage and
Warlock itemization.
For classes which do not heal, they should see no change in the
character sheet other than new tooltip wording.
Healing characters will see their bonus healing numbers on the
character sheet decrease, however, all healing spells have been
modified to receive more benefit from spellpower than they received
from bonus healing, with a net effect of no change to the amount
healed by their spells. Some talents have had to be rebalanced to
accommodate this change, but the amount healed will remain roughly
the same. In addition, some talents will provide only healing spell
power.
ah I am sorry indeed I only followed up on the "spell power" dident know it applyed for stats are crit and hit aswell.
Might also add the lava burst since it seems to give a free crit. And there for free elemental devastaion proc.
Lava Burst Rank 1 You hurl molten lava at the target, dealing $s1 Fire damage. If Flame Shock is on the target, Lava Burst will consume the Flame Shock, causing Lava Burst to critically hit.
Depending on its cooldown this spell let alone could make elemental devastaion sub build worth it. That is ofcourse assuming its instant.
Mental Dexterity - Increases your attack power by 100% of your intellect."
This is essentially a way of getting us to change focus on which gear we aim for.
The majority of Enhancement Shaman tend to find that leather melee gear, usually rogue gear, is better for dps, at the cost of armor and intellect.
This talent will make gear with intellect much more attractive. OK, we will still share leather gear, but the druid gear will be more attractive than pure rogue gear, and the mail gear that is supposed to be our class gear will also become more appealing.
Yep, that was the first thing I thought when I read about that talent. It's a really good change if it works out properly in my opinion, now we wont just look like mismatched rogues with a bit of hunter loot here and there!
The enhancement tree still needs quite some work. The biggest problem it has in it's current state is that it does not change the skill rotation of enhancement shamans at all, which is quite the problem actually. The trainable skills aren't out yet though, so it's too early to judge. The changes themselves look decent enough on themselves though.
Ancestral knowledge is useless, +6% int, so say you have 500 int raidbuffed, then this talent would give you 30 extra int for 30 AP and 450 mana, especially now that it is skippable in favor of other talents.
I still have issues with:
- the fact that stormstrike even has charges. Make 2/2 improved stormstrike give it a + 10% nature (and arcane) debuff that lasts for x seconds.
- totemic mastery. Isn't it time to give this ability as a trainable one?
- a new attack. Enhancement shaman need to excite their rotation a bit. The clickable wolves sure help, but something like a cleave talent (like sweeping strikes), or a new clicky that causes all your attacks to hit with the power of the earth having a chance of doing <something> ... would be nice. The LS change is a step in the right direction, but I think it's time to add new mechanics instead of trying to improve the old ones.
- Shamanistic rage becoming the skill where everything gets dumped into. It would be nice if you could split it up in shamanistic wrath and shamanistic healing for example. (I bet being feared trough the duration of SR will be awesome)
The 51 talent point dogs look like they have a bleed, stun and a third skill. Which could mean that they will be more than just glorified treants.
edit:
- What about the rumours of an air elemental pet? Is there any truth to that?
- Does anyone have any numbers on the new shock (lava)?
Mental Dexterity - saw this and thought...hot damn free AP! Can't turn this down espcially at 100%. Like stated i currently have 293 INT and thats roughtly 300 FREE AP!! Jesus i want this talent right now
Improved Stormstrike...interesting , we dont raid with an Elemental Shaman at the moment but i can see keeping 4 Charges up being useful if we did, while at the same time reducing the cooldown to 8 seconds.
Improved Shamanistic Rage is a nice PVP toy but i dont see myself using it as a raiding shaman that much. While building a raiding spec i skipped this talent.
Summon Ghost Doggies i was a little dissappointed with. Just dont like having my 51pt talent as something i will most likely have no control over, all that aside they "could" really rock and be a considerable chunk of DPS if it works that they are indeed what the Illundai says and a debuff on the target.
Now weapon spec....WOW this talent alone has almost made me decide to stay ENH and shelve the idea of rerolling DK. Thinking about combining Axe/Fist or Mace/Fist ..mmmmmmmmmmmm. It will just come down to what kind've proc / debuff it applies , how long it lasts, and what exactly the cooldown on it is, and if you can mix/match and it not requiring both of the same type equipped.
For all we know now Blizzard gets rid of the benefits of twisting altogether come WotLK. They've stated they're not happy with it, and a new expansion seems like the perfect time to rework the mechanic.
This was my first thought on mana as well. With the new additions to the tree, Static Shock encouraging LS use over WS, and Elemental Devastation looking to be worthwhile (both for it's new placement and the merging of melee/spell hit) I get the feeling that it would be much more difficult to maintain totem twisting. Personally I hope they break/fix twisting in wrath.
edit: By the way, that talent calculator linked in the OP is broken now that someone linked it on the WoW forums.
No, apparently someone posted links to them on the Blizzard WoW forums
Edit:
oops, was trying to find where I saw this information on the wotlkwiki forum, and just realized it is 3 posts above mine in this thread.
Feel free to delete this.
Ancestral Knowledge definitely appears to be a teaser talent for Elemental and Resto, not for Enhancement as Exewut pointed out. A full suit of T6 has less than 200 int on it, so that would 12 Int from 3 talent points. The Int to AP conversion talent by itself though is a definite boon. Go to LootRank and try it out, just change Int to a weight of 1 using the sunwell values, every armor slot except legs and chest gain an Intellect item (feral or mail) as the best in slot over the normal rogue leather items.
It is also much more in line with the paladin equivalent Divine Intellect. Lest I be remembering wrongly, many a shaman signed on the Blizz "what you want changed for wotlk?" thread that they were miffed 5% mana did about as much as licking one's keyboard to performance, while paladins got a nice, rounded, double that effect at the same talent position, with added BoK scaling and a little dash of crit in too.
From first glance there are a few interesting points: The fist effect notes "reduces armor" not "ignores" implying it's raid-buffing. Unless I'm mistaken too, elemental devastation is shallower in the pool too; I'm starting to see good value in fast OH fist to proc the armor pen, enchanted with Flametongue (which does something else too now, I understand? spellpower is it?) keeping up Devastation and the armor pen.
As a mage, however, I'm most excited about the aoe knockback. When needed, the ability to clear mobs of poor'ol aoe can be quite significant.
Might also add the lava burst since it seems to give a free crit. And there for free elemental devastaion proc.
Lava Burst Rank 1 You hurl molten lava at the target, dealing $s1 Fire damage. If Flame Shock is on the target, Lava Burst will consume the Flame Shock, causing Lava Burst to critically hit.
Depending on its cooldown this spell let alone could make elemental devastaion sub build worth it. That is ofcourse assuming its instant.
This is very interesting, in my opinion. It should be instant as otherwise you'd have a hard time timing it with Flame Shock, and as long as the cooldown is ten seconds or less, you should be able to have near 100% Elemental Devastation uptime (at the cost of the final Flame Shock tick).
Am I to assume there is no new aggro reducing talents for us to play with?
Whatever for? Apart from the handful of token fights designed around it, aggro really isn't an issue anymore. <edit> bleh, already beaten to it
I'm personally hoping that the fist weapon spec talent proc is a self buff. Based on 1h itemization in TBC we could be stuck with some really crummy weapons for quite some time if so. Though based on the fact that the effects for the other weapon types are also self only buffs I don't that'll be an issue.
It does make me curious on how the various effects of this talent stack up to each other.
Doing some quick back of the napkin math, using 2 axes should be a 10% damage increase. Tried to calculate the rest, but the complexity along with not knowing if the buffs stack/refresh is a bit to much for my mathematically challenged brain.
<edit>
Originally Posted by peer
This is very interesting, in my opinion. It should be instant as otherwise you'd have a hard time timing it with Flame Shock, and as long as the cooldown is ten seconds or less, you should be able to have near 100% Elemental Devastation uptime (at the cost of the final Flame Shock tick).
I highly doubt it'll be an instant, seems much more likely to be another element nuke for our elemental brethren for the WOTLK Hydrosses. <yet another edit> Strike that, seems it has a 8 sec cooldown
Last edited by Stopokingme : 06/13/08 at 10:14 AM.
Unless I'm mistaken, I believe that the AoE knockback ability (Thunder) is elemental-only, which makes it a bit less exciting for protecting other aoers.
As to the enhancement tree, I am generally thrilled with the changes. The spellpower/healing/crit changes are a mammoth boon to shamans before talents even come into play, and mental agility and (theoretically) flametongue weapon will further ensure that DPS shaman can land non-trivial heals in a pinch. The rearrangement of early enhancement ensures that no talent points are wasted (woohoo!), and Mental Dexterity is the obvious gear solution that needed to be implemented. Improved Stormstrike is great for synergy, and another huge opportunity for synergy comes from the Flameshock/Lava Burst mechanic. If elemental shaman can consume the flameshock dots from enhancement shaman, then there will be a boat load of theorycraft and dynamic gameplay to optimize damage from stormstrike charges, flameshocks, and Lava Bursts. I actually hope that Lava Burst is not insta-cast for precisely this reason.
I am very curious to learn how Weapon Specialization will be implemented. With a 1.4 speed flame-tongued OH and permanent flurry, a mace OH should give roughly a 50-55% uptime on the haste; whereas, a fist OH would give a 26-28% uptime on the penetration. If the buffs only affect the hand that applied them, then axes easily win for the MH and probably win for the offhand unless increased spell crit makes a fast OH with flametongue competitive with a slow, windfuried OH. If the buffs from one hand affect the attacks from both hands, then MH axes appear to pull ahead when supported by either a fast mace OH or a fast fist OH.
The only talent I am concerned with in terms of enhancement is actually Stormstrike, and my concern isn't about the shaman talent as much as it is about rogue assassination talents. In this incarnation of the Alpha talents the synergy between an elemental shaman and an enhancement shaman is just about perfect. Enhancement provides enough Stormstrike charges for elemental to get the buff on just about every cast, provided that the elemental shaman rotates in Lava Burst to eat the shaman's Flameshock every 10 seconds or so. There might even be an extra charge for a wrath every 8 seconds, which will work out well if Moonkin cycle an occasional wrath to boost their Starfire damage. However, that amazing synergy goes down the tubes if assassination rogues use fast OHs with high IP poison proc-rates as a way to maintain DP on the target and get energy regen. If mutilate rogues eat charges with envenom, its not that big a deal, but I hate the idea that 240 damage IP applications will eat more of the charges than 1500 damage lightning bolts or wraths.
Mental Agility is simply there to make Shamans use Hunter loot instead of Rogue loot.
There won't be any Druid leather anymore to snap up, instead Blizzard is trying to merge things into one big lump. Leather goes to Rogues and Druids and should be equally good for both. Mail will go to Shamans and Hunters and should be equally good for both. Big emphasis on should.
Stormstrike Cooldown with 2 additional charges should be sufficient uptime I would hope. I doubt there'd be a serious rotation issue as I can't possibly see them lettting totem twisting exist.
I have my doubts about the Weapon specialisations affecting other weapons. It doesn't work that way for other classes either, most notable with Rogues. I'd be inclined to think they only affect the (attacks made with the) weapon of that type.
06/13/08, 5:53 AM
