Thanks for the optimism.

Shock rotating is gone, making Stormstrike only nature and only affecting our own damage combined with Elemental Fury killed it. Earth Shock on every cooldown.

Where exactly do you intend to pull 5 points out for Reverbration? You have to give up either Elemental Focus or several points in Elemental Fury to get that. Or remove a point from Improved SS or UR or....

That's why I think it would be better if they simply caused spells made instant by MW to do a % less damage (leaving the numbers to them to tweak however necessary). By removing fire and frost damage from Stormstrike, they already effectively reduced LvB's damage by 20% (assuming you cast it when there is at least 1 charge left). I don't see why this couldn't work.

Doing that would give us a reason to use Flame Shock in our rotations again, and give us back our high ED uptime. The synergistic rotation we had was much more "fun" for me than the new one, regardless of damage.

I think he meant that there is no other CC with BOTH a cast time AND a CD. Psychiic Scream is instant with a CD while Fear and Poly are cast but can be spammed.

As far as waiting to 80 I think the worry is doing instances for some Shammies who need to PuG. Since Puggers always want CC and we offer none until 80. My take is I never PuG for the very reason that they think they need CC or to overpower a run.

Depending on the PPM of MW it is possible (although unlikely) that reverberation is more DPS than elemental fury. Using the numbers Rounced used in his example, reverberation would outperform elemental fury on shocks (12.5% increased avg shock dmg vs 16.7% more shocks). Any decent proc rate (15 seconds for a 5 stack would probably do it) on MW would move elemental fury ahead (although there is slightly higher elemental devastation uptime to consider).

<edit> Although if flametongue and searing are used fury would be better without question.

<edit2> UR might be able to be sacrificed (if you regularily raid with a frost DK and/or a Marks hunter) for some raiders to allow elemental fury and reverberation (not necessarily 5/5 in each).

Off the top of my head, warlocks' howl of terror has a cast time and a cooldown.

The problem with LvB being taken off MW isn't that it hurts our damage so much that it was great fun. Get 5 crits, *boom* crit LvB, 9% crit to melee, and repeat, always trying to keep that 9% crit buff up. Now it's simply attack for X amount of time for 5 stacks of MW, instant LB, repeat. Less fun.

As to whether LvB was "meant" for elemental shamans or enhancement, if it was only meant for elemental it would be a talent, not a base spell.

That's exactly my point. I'm not complaining about the changes because they're nerfing us too terribly much, I'm complaining because they're swinging wildly with the nerf bat without actually considering impact.

I think that is their design philosphy with us. Whether it is a nerf or a buff they just go at us with a machete and hope things look right at the end. Personally I support designing lavalash as a replacement for LvB for us.

Pretty sure that can be talented to insta cast. Either way, locks are godly at CC due to all their different fears and banish.

And LvB WAS designed for elemental shamans. It gave them a spice for their oh so boring rotation of LB spam, oh CL is off CD, LB spam. It was just a nice little toy that enh shammies got to use. And as has been said before, Chain heal isn't a talented spell, but for enh shamans to use that as a heal is a lolslapinthefacewhydyouwasteyourmana. Hands down Healing Wave heals for more for roughly the same casting time (depending on whether you talent into or not). As has also been said before, the problem with hybrids is that we have all these spells that are SPEC dependent (WF, Chain Heal, Chain Lightning) etc. Blizz implements hybrid spells but unfortunately hybrid spells rely on deep talents to make them viable. Why do you think that a 30/31 hybrid shaman is just total CRAP? It is sad but true, Hybrids rely on specs and spec dependent spells to do anything worthwhile. We get nerfed because our specs boost the living crap out of spec dependent spells, vicious cycle huh?

Good news about Spirit Wolves:

Has anyone worked out with the other DPS in their guild who is taking what for Wrath? Atm I am discussing it with the potential DKs and our current hunters. The only thing I can see myself taking in enhancement as far as Imp WF totem, enhancing totems or UR is enhancing totems. Abominations might will be up all the time for Blood DKs, Imp Icy talons for frost DKs as well and both get personal buffs from it and dont have mobility/range issues. I was thinking since enhancing totems only give us a 23 str/agi increase, that guardian totems my be better for the raid since I can drop it in range of all the tanks for more survivability and DPS from various armor = ap etc talents such as bladed armor, armored to the teeth. Thats 38 more AP if they are talented with imp stoneskin, vs 24 (23 from SOE, and a little over 1 for Ap from the armor-agility) more for them with talented soe. Since Horn of Winter is base line (same as soe/goa), I could leave that up to the DKs as well. I know that this varies depending on who is all brought to the raid, but I am looking at various options atm, and trying to find what is best.

HoW is only equal to base line SoE though. Improved SoE, and especially with the SoE glyph, is better.

Right you are, I overlooked that glyph. Imp SoE would be a bigger benefit for the raid. As far as UR and Imp WF, if the raid composition contains a Blood and Frost DK on a regular basis, I see no reason to not put pts elsewhere.

Nah you made it too complicated.

/castsequence reset=combat/8 Stormstrike, Earth Shock, Lava Lash, Earth Shock, Stormstrike, Lava Lash, Earth Shock, Lava Lash

Just hook that up to a G15 or your mousewheel and you should be all set.

Please stop posting about my class. If you think FS->LvB is too much to keep track of go play something else. If you are content to monkey macro a static rotation instead of dealing with a little variety, keep it to yourself and don't influence my class design.

I'm sorry to be a dick about it but I'm sick of crap like this.

Wow, you guys need to chill out about complexity of a class and just focus on theorycrafting and balancing of the class more.

Back on track, has anyone looked into the weapon enchant now that we're on a PPM system? I'm assuming slow/slow is going to be the optimal choice, but what about weapon imbues?

WF/FT: better LL damage, no OH stealing WF procs
WF/WF: higher WF proc chance, more MW proc opportunities.

The complexity question is pretty moot anyway: if Blizzard's current goal is to roughly equate the dps and utility of all DPS specs, then having a complex rotation merely means you need to do more work for the same benefit as some other class gets with less work.

In other words: pressing the buttons isn't going to make you better at your class, merely competent.

You know, even full-out macroable classes like hunters and single button classes like warlocks and elemental shaman have a pretty wide variation between good players and bad players. I've seen the same one-macro hunter played by three different people with dramatic differences in output.

Even if it comes down to mashing a single button, people that mash faster, with no latency will outdps people that mash at a sane speed with 100ms of latency by a fair margin.

I think it's more a matter of situational awareness and ability to respond to encounter dynamics.

If blizzard really is averaging dps output across classes, that's terrific. It means we can earn our raid spots instead of having to fight for them against vastly superior dps classes.

Indeed...

You're clearly a master of enhancement shaman mechanics. I will stop messing with your class, and I will also start gemming straight crit, ap/crit, and ap/mp5 to emulate your awesomeness.

Look, It's not an issue about being complex, it's an issue of variety. Blizzard made bold statements about how they were going to change the way we were playing, and make enhancement more interesting, but after this last change, it is clear that it was all a farce. There will be no way to distinguish between a good and a bad player, as anyone can monkey macro the class and do adequate DPS, and look like he knows what he's doing. Hell, in WOTLK, it will be far easier to play an enhancement shaman than it is now in live, considering you don't have twisting to deal with. But...such is the problem with classes that are entirely proc-based I suppose.

P.S.: Hi Bearvermra!

I'm surprised you didn't notice me earlier (like way earlier) =P

Right now, my focus on the enhancement shaman spec is really how much output we do. Even as it is right now, we can do a one macro totem twisting macro (SS>WFT>GoA>FS, reset= 10) and it'll only do like 70 dps less than a perfectly weaved totem twisting rotation. The complexity of a class merely distinguishes good players and average players more easily, and doesn't serve anything beyond that. I'd rather bring a person that can only spam one button, but can pay attention to GTFO of the fire, over a person that's perfect on a complicated rotation but dies every time when a boss is at 75%.

Overall I think the changes are good. If we're doing too little DPS after this change they can just buff the proc rate of Windfury weapon, or the damage from stormstrike, since these two areas are more loosely related to spell damage than other areas such as FT.