I just made a thread on the Beta forums that I think would interest you all to see. I'll repost it here and if you see anything drastically wrong with my ideas, please say so and I'll either edit them or delete the post:
Repost:
From the perspective of a long-time hardcore raiding shaman who couldn't stand not twisting because it actually gave me a little bit more to do than I otherwise would.. please, please consider the "fun" aspect of our class. Maelstrom Weapon made being enhancement fun. Really fun, actually. I loved actually having to make split-second decisions about what ability to use in my next GCD, and the "nerf" to MW reduces a lot of the complexity and thusly a lot of the fun.
Regarding the Windfury Weapon 3-second Internal Cooldown: to my understanding this was implemented long ago because of the potential for extreme burst in PvP situations. That being said, I offer the following suggestion:
Do not allow "instant" attacks such as Stormstrike and Lava Lash to proc Windfury Weapon, and increase the proc rate on white hits to compensate while also removing the internal cooldown. Incidentally, this change would increase the viability of Windfury on the offhand because Lava Lash would not be "eating" potential Windfury Weapon procs, but would still allow Flametongue Weapon to be used on the offhand due to the increase in damage of Lava Lash that Flametongue Weapon provides.
Regarding the ability to dual-enchant Flametongue Weapon on fast caster weapons to get a quick 5-stacks of MW and have very powerful instant-cast LvB, LB, and CL: this is an unintended consequence of MW being an on-crit ability. However, it's not inherently bad, so I offer the following suggestions:
Idea #1: Reduce the overall effectiveness of Stormstrike on spells; make it a flat 10% only for the shaman's spells, for example, or a flat 5% for the entire raid.
Idea #2: Remove the ability for enhancement shamans to get 200% crits. I'm not sure why this was given to us to begin with, and it seems a somewhat "easy" fix to drastically reduce the spell damage output of enhancement shamans.
Regarding Flametongue Weapon mechanics on the whole:
Change how the weapon enchant scales with spell damage. Rather than (BaseDmg*WeaponSpeedModifier) + (10%*SpellDamage), make it (BaseDmg + (10% * SpellDamage)) * WeaponSpeedModifier. This is an extremely easy change to make and would go a long way toward removing the necessity of equipping fast mainhands and offhands when using Flametongue Weapon.
These three changes along with retracting the changes made in the current build would provide an adequate solution, I think. Shamans would desire both crit and hit -- crit to get MW stacks, hit to get Windfury procs. I believe this would reduce the extreme scaling of shamans at higher levels of gear due to our inability to solely stack crit. The inability to get 200% crits and the change to Flametongue Weapon mechanics would would reduce the effectiveness of stacking spell damage.
Please consider these changes or something along these lines, Blizzard. We would retain the "fun" aspect of Maelstrom Weapon while reducing our reliance on spell damage to do effective damage.
Last edited by Xoya : 10/01/08 at 5:27 PM.
Reason: Made it prettier.
Hothgor: Elemental gear wasn't better before this patch and it's not after. Solo testing don't give right result. In solo paly it even might be better but who care about that. Your macro reset swing timer every 8s and this give elemental gear edge.
Mental quickness is almoust only reason that keep melee gear ahead caster gear don't ask nerf to this talent. Blizz could actual buff it if they wan't melee gear be superior.
Edit: changed napkin math to sim results.
Notes:
Maelstorm PPM dropped at 12 to 4.
Lightning knives are still best.
Lavaburst/flameshock still stick at rotation.
Crit scaling RIP.
I completely agree with some of your points, but respectfully disagree with your simulated findings. I downloaded the latest simulators and again noticed that there is no option to simply cast Lava Burst when it is off its cooldown. Lava Burst is simply too high of a damaging ability to NOT use. Not only does it have an insanely high base damage range, but it gives us a 100% guaranteed uptime for the additional 9% melee crit! This is the crux of my argument and how I was able to pull off those 'amazing' and 'scary' 2700+ dps tests that GC called 'creative theorycrafting' on the forums. This is how I was able to still pull off 2150 dps self buffed last night on the test dummies.
Edit: Rouncey, I just read your post on the beta forums:
I did some of the earlier testing on this mechanic. How it seems to work is they utilized the same mechanic for Maelstrom Weapon that they used for the new Slam mechanic for Warriors.
When you have the Maelstrom Weapon buff your swing timer doesn't reset, it pauses at whatever point it was at while the spell is cast and then once the cast completes it finishes the swing in progress. If Maelstrom Weapon is making the cast instant then there is no interruption of the swing timer at all.
This is easy to tell with a very slow 2 hander.
Make sure you have no haste buffs (flurry or anything like that) get a stack or 2 of Maelstrom Weapon up. Hit a mob and then count in your head till the next hit is just about to land (I was using a 3.6 speed so would count to 3, for example) and then start casting a spell. When the spell finishes your next melee hit will occur practically instantly after it.
What's a lot of fun and some really nice burst is to get a 3-4 stacks of Maelstrom Weapon up and then start casting on something in melee range that is hitting you back. They get 1 seconds total worth of interruption now so if the cast time is longer then the GCD you can spam Stormstrike and get the cast spell + melee white hits + Stormstrike to all hit at exactly the same moment.
I consider Lava Burst the 'slam' ability of WotLK. If you look at my previous posts on this subject in regards to weapon setups and macros, you should note that all along I've been advocating the use of LvB whenever it is off cooldown. Warriors constantly used slam to dramatically increase their damage output in TBC, and the same is true for us with Lava Burst! Maelstrom Weapon to me is just a simple way to reduce the lost attack time due to casting a spell. Before you outright dismiss my findings, Pitbuller, I suggest you at least TRY to replicate my work using REAL TIME testing methods, or at the very least include an option in the simulator that lets us cast LvB regardless of if we have a full MW stack.
I completely agree with some of your points, but respectfully disagree with your simulated findings. I downloaded the latest simulators and again noticed that there is no option to simply cast Lava Burst when it is off its cooldown. Lava Burst is simply too high of a damaging ability to NOT use. Not only does it have an insanely high base damage range, but it gives us a 100% guaranteed uptime for the additional 9% melee crit! This is the crux of my argument and how I was able to pull off those 'amazing' and 'scary' 2700+ dps tests that GC called 'creative theorycrafting' on the forums. This is how I was able to still pull off 2150 dps self buffed last night on the test dummies.
The thing is we should never cast a spell as an enhance shaman, the point of our spec is to swing our weapons and use instant casts, which makes us different from rogues and fury warriors but still a melee class. Casting lava burst without the MW proc is quite obviously not what blizzard intended for us and quite simply makes no sense. If Lava Burst base is seriously that high maybe they need to adjust the base damage and give us back fire damage to stormstrike, but than they will also have to change or add a talent for elemental to rebuff lava burst as it is also part of their rotation (as of now).
Originally Posted by Mochiloc
until I got home and was trying to figure out why I looked like I had been kissing the Tin Man all morning.
I can see tossing out LvB with a half-full stack of MW working out, especially since MW doesn't reset the swing timer as long as the buff is active upon casting.
But is casting LvB every CD--no matter what--really better than waiting for at least one MW charge? What about in a raid setting? Is this kind of use exclusive to lightning knives or would a more traditional WF based setup benefit to the same degree?
I hope they never "nerf" the RNG. I play the shaman for the burst damage. It's what we do that rogues and warriors don't...spikey damage from a ton of different sources.
Xoya, your suggestions are straightforward and insightful, though I personally feel it's wrong to prevent SS from proccing WF. The chance for a double-proc gib is very low, especially if you fix the proc rate to an independent 20% per hand, and the other reason I play the shaman is cool feedback systems like SS -> WF.
Idea #2: Remove the ability for enhancement shamans to get 200% crits. I'm not sure why this was given to us to begin with, and it seems a somewhat "easy" fix to drastically reduce the spell damage output of enhancement shamans.
I don't have a Beta account so I can not agree with you there. This is a great idea, it looks like most of our spell damage is coming from the 6 to 7k LvB Crits.
It sounds like a Fast FT/FT set up is still doing more damage then a more traditional set up.
I might also recommend that you consider posting about LvB's free crit with preconditions. I'd rather that it was rolled into an elemental talent high up the tier and that we simply lose the ability. The loss of the instant fatty crit and the 100% ED uptime should balance our dps out enough that the other changes can be rolled back in (LvB would lose 50% or more of its dps and the ED up time reduction should be 10%+ of a dps loss).
This could fix both our over scaling and the caster weapon trends.
I might also recommend that you consider posting about LvB's free crit with preconditions. I'd rather that that is rolled into an elemental talent high up the tier and that we simply lose the ability. The loss of the instant fatty crit and the 100% ED uptime should balance our dps out enough that the other changes can be rolled back in (LvB would lose 50% or more of its dps and the ED up time reduction should be 10%+ of a dps loss).
Then they might as well take LvB out entirely, because it'll be exactly the same as Lightning Bolt, Fireball, Frostbolt, Wrath, Starfire, Shadowbolt, and Smite (etc): a ranged magic ability that has nothing special about it unless you talent into it (if even then), except this one would have a cooldown, so it couldn't even be used as an alternate nuke against nature resistant/immune mobs. They can't remove the cooldown, either, because that would enable fairly high guaranteed burst on a 12 (or 10, with Reverberation) sec cooldown for elem shaman (FS -> LB -> LB -> LvB crit -> FS -> LvB crit -> LB -> repeat).
The thing is we should never cast a spell as an enhance shaman, the point of our spec is to swing our weapons and use instant casts, which makes us different from rogues and fury warriors but still a melee class. Casting lava burst without the MW proc is quite obviously not what blizzard intended for us and quite simply makes no sense. If Lava Burst base is seriously that high maybe they need to adjust the base damage and give us back fire damage to stormstrike, but than they will also have to change or add a talent for elemental to rebuff lava burst as it is also part of their rotation (as of now).
They cant 'nerf' Lava Burst unless they want Elemental Shamans to go back to only using LB and CL in their casting rotations. That was the stated goal of introducing Lava Burst in the first place: adding some variety to elemental shaman rotations. Now arguably, they could 'fix' the deep elemental talents to increase the damage done by Lava Burst, which would eliminate it from our 'rotation'. Trouble is, it would have to be something like 40% damage reduction for this to ever be the case.
And who is to say we should 'never cast a spell as an enhance shaman'. That's the same silly mentality that we had when TBC came out with regards to 2 handers vs dual wield. They have completely changed the functionality and rotations of almost every class in the game in BOTH expansions so far. How arrogant of you to suggest that we should 'never' do something! If things do not change and you plan on raiding with your Enhancement Shaman, you will QUICKLY find yourself sitting out on raids because you have pigeon holed yourself into gimpy damage all for your arrogant OPINION that we should never cast a spell.
We're still not happy with how pushed Enhancement feels towards caster gear and feeling like a caster in general. We want to keep the spell damage in there, but it will probably end up being less to push Enhance back towards melee. This might let us undo some of the recent nerfs to physical damage, but no promises until we get things to a state that we like.
And who is to say we should 'never cast a spell as an enhance shaman'. That's the same silly mentality that we had when TBC came out with regards to 2 handers vs dual wield. They have completely changed the functionality and rotations of almost every class in the game in BOTH expansions so far. How arrogant of you to suggest that we should 'never' do something! If things do not change and you plan on raiding with your Enhancement Shaman, you will QUICKLY find yourself sitting out on raids because you have pigeon holed yourself into gimpy damage all for your arrogant OPINION that we should never cast a spell.
Beowolf, Ask yourself do you really believe blizzard wants you to cast spells while being talented into a melee character? No of course not, I'm not saying that I wouldn't cast it if it was in the best rotation but it seems like a silly mechanic that will have to get changed from a logical standpoint.
P.S. Stop being so hostile Beowolf, you take everything out of proportion when most of the time people are agreeing with you. You might want to update your character too since you no longer play a mage.
Originally Posted by Mochiloc
until I got home and was trying to figure out why I looked like I had been kissing the Tin Man all morning.
Then they might as well take LvB out entirely, because it'll be exactly the same as Lightning Bolt, Fireball, Frostbolt, Wrath, Starfire, Shadowbolt, and Smite (etc): a ranged magic ability that has nothing special about it unless you talent into it (if even then), except this one would have a cooldown, so it couldn't even be used as an alternate nuke against nature resistant/immune mobs. They can't remove the cooldown, either, because that would enable fairly high guaranteed burst on a 12 (or 10, with Reverberation) sec cooldown for elem shaman (FS -> LB -> LB -> LvB crit -> FS -> LvB crit -> LB -> repeat).
First off comparing it to something else cross class isn't really helpful. I'll use my favorite argument style, a Reductio ad absurdum; by the same logic Renew should be removed because its virtually the same thing as Rejuvenation. Warlocks should just get 1 dot that does 2k dps and one giant 30 point talent that says Affliction on it. The game is full of redundant abilities already one more isn't going to kill anyone.
Secondly it would still function exactly the same as it does now for Elemental shamans, it would just function differently for the Enhancement Shaman. So if its viable now in an Elemental Rotation then it will still be viable after.
It fixes both the "too much scaling" and "Fast FT/FT" problems and its fairly uncomplicated.
You might even be able to get away with leaving everything exactly the same as it was post 9014 and just remove the auto crit feature on LvB, and still get a reduction in caster gear desirability and the Fast FT/FT thing.
Beowolf, Ask yourself do you really believe blizzard wants you to cast spells while being talented into a melee character? No of course not, I'm not saying that I wouldn't cast it if it was in the best rotation but it seems like a silly mechanic that will have to get changed from a logical standpoint.
You may feel I'm being argumentative about this point, but we have been a hybrid for 4 years now, and we have been able to cast spells for 4 years now. Nothing has changed at all!!!
If they did not want us to occasionally cast a spell, they would never have giving us the MW ability at all. Its use is not limited to only instant casts you know. In PvP or PvE, a few charges could mean a LOT when trying to get a heal off in an emergency, or just to blast some pesky mage while rooted with a guaranteed LvB crit. It was NEVER designed so that we would only use it at 5 stacks in all circumstances!
I would agree with that; not in all circumstances. But that's a straw man, because nobody said that you'd never want to use MW with <5 stacks.
When an enhancement shaman interrupts his standard melee DPS cycle to cast a non-instant spell, he's ignoring and invalidating nearly all of his talent points, and that is most definitely an unintended consequence of the current design. The devs don't want us to cast a non-instant lava burst after each flameshock as part of our standard DPS cycle. Arguing otherwise is pretty silly.
Plenty of us enjoy being a melee/caster hybrid. However, that's not standing in melee range casting spells, that's doing both. If gimping melee dps produces more spell dps than you lose, something is broken. Enhancement shaman are designed to cast instant spells. It allows you to keep moving if needed, it doesn't disrupt your melee, and it makes spells an addition to your arsenal, not a replacement. If you want to chain cast and throw in occasional instants, elemental is sitting right there, two trees over. You can even stand in melee range if you feel the need, you'll actually have more armor anyway.
The design intent for the class, as stated repeatedly by the developers, is for it to do melee dps, enhanced by spell damage. Every build where that isn't true is still broken. It's great that people are testing it and pointing it out, but if you really think it's going to play that way in LK, you're deluding yourself. Resetting your swing timer isn't going to be useless, but it's going to be a dps loss in most circumstances (ask paladins about Hammer of Wrath). Hopefully weapon speed won't be as important as it once was because we all like choices, but if I wanted to use daggers I would have rolled a rogue.
Last time I ran my 3.0 gear comparison, there were a few pieces of caster gear on the list (Hood of Hexing for example), but NO weapons. Caster weapon DPS is too low and the speeds are all wrong. Spells are still only around half our damage, I can't see how wearing "all caster gear" could ever give "better results."
Lot's of people have said something about caster gear being superior. Only numbers we have got is solo testing. Sim produced ep values showed that there was couple caster jewelry on top spot at 70lvl. All real gear pieces was pure melee gear. At 70lvl caster weapon base dps made those obsolate. But 80lvl caster weapon dps scale too that those are real option. Sim have showed this. 80lvl ep values have shown pure melee gear after every patch. All caster gear was never showed by sim or even napkin math. Only some pointless solo test have made. Those don't prove anything.
T7 enhancement gear have 70% of spell power that elemental t7 have becouse mentall quickness. If someone wan't prove that caster gear was better download last patch sim and use naxx10man caster gear stats and show that was better. If you can get over 4860dps then it was better.
This patch did nerf crit and ap scaling but didn't succesfully nerf spell power. If they try cut or dps by 20% patch was success.
Hothgor: There was option at dedmonwakeen sim to test how viable is under 5stack Lava burst. It showed 3-10% dps loss. Resetting weapons is really bad to our dps. But if it works like slam then it's definetly viable use 2-3stack burst casts.
The real reason 2x flametongue is so prevalent is a mix of wanting fast weapons to stack more maelstrom and getting 2x the spellpower bonus from double imbuing. I feel that the latter is the obvious candidate for change, as well as Flametongue's unequal scaling with weapon speed.
I still fail to see why Blizzard couldn't slap on a coefficient nerf with MW (as I suggested; going 35/30/25/20/15% reduced coefficient of all spells) and swapping Elemental Fury for Call of Thunder. Changing Call of Thunder to reduce casting by .2/.4/.6/.8/1 second and increasing the coefficient by 1/2/3/4/5%. This would cause crits to do less damage - Elemental Fury is out of reach. At the same time it gives the added bonus of reducing spell damage dealt overall. Of course, you'd have to undo the other melee nerfs and revert MW to proc 20/40/60/80/100% from criticals.
I would agree with that; not in all circumstances. But that's a straw man, because nobody said that you'd never want to use MW with <5 stacks.
When an enhancement shaman interrupts his standard melee DPS cycle to cast a non-instant spell, he's ignoring and invalidating nearly all of his talent points, and that is most definitely an unintended consequence of the current design. The devs don't want us to cast a non-instant lava burst after each flameshock as part of our standard DPS cycle. Arguing otherwise is pretty silly.
The simulator right now assumes you only use MW with a 5 stack. However, Tukez just said hes working on an update that lets you cast with less than 5 stacks. While your logic for the melee interruption while casting is sound, it negates the fact that we can get 4-6k crits EVERY time, while we would be hard pressed to do that much damage with melee only. That's why I'm always able to outperform the simulator DPS wise :P
After looking at our tree versus Elemental I do not understand why Lava Burst was not a late talent for Elemental to get added DPS when they enter melee. If they removed it from being an ability to an Elemental talent, about as deep as Lava Lash, they could rework Malestorm Weapons as well as our base melee damage. As it stands now once we reach 75 LvB isn't optional in rotation, it is required simply because of its base damage and interaction with Flame Shock. The goal is to move us back to melee damage but that isn't truly possible with a new must use spell. Without the spell there would not have been a need to nerf stormstrike as well. Prior to 75 my choice is either a heal or lightning bolts. That works well with the "old" method. Putting SS damage bonus back on fire would give Lava Lash great use and keep us in our "melee" plus instant attack rotation we are used to.
I have to admit, I am still pretty shocked that both Static Shock and MW are straight percentages chances. For all of BC, Blizzard moved away from straight percentages to speed scaling PPM to prevent people from gaming the system via weapon speed and haste. Even Flametongue is ostensibly balanced according to weapon speed (though it is shocking that the coefficient doesn't scale with speed as well).
Now we're seeing people gaming the system, and I think the answer is obvious: pick a PPM for both, scale the FT coefficient, and be done with it. Damage from spells will still scale with hit, crit and AP, but not with haste or weapon speed, and this lack of speed scaling will make WF pull ahead.
Once they make WF the obvious choice on the main hand (and by extension, slow weapons), they've basically done the job.
All that said, I will play however is best. Toots is my DPS character, he's an important part of my guild's roster and as such I'll whip out the god damn lightning knives if I have to. It's not like enhancement in BC was ANYTHING like enhancement in vanilla and it's certainly an iconic play style. I'm just a little irked that this predictable scenario continues to elude the designers when the solution is time tested and obvious.
While your logic for the melee interruption while casting is sound, it negates the fact that we can get 4-6k crits EVERY time, while we would be hard pressed to do that much damage with melee only.
Absolutely, and that's why it'll be nerfed. I'd bet my hat on it. At best it'll end up as a situationally useful gimmick build.
I have to admit, I am still pretty shocked that both Static Shock and MW are straight percentages chances. For all of BC, Blizzard moved away from straight percentages to speed scaling PPM to prevent people from gaming the system via weapon speed and haste. Even Flametongue is ostensibly balanced according to weapon speed (though it is shocking that the coefficient doesn't scale with speed as well).
Now we're seeing people gaming the system, and I think the answer is obvious: pick a PPM for both, scale the FT coefficient, and be done with it. Damage from spells will still scale with hit, crit and AP, but not with haste or weapon speed, and this lack of speed scaling will make WF pull ahead.
Once they make WF the obvious choice on the main hand (and by extension, slow weapons), they've basically done the job.
All that said, I will play however is best. Toots is my DPS character, he's an important part of my guild's roster and as such I'll whip out the god damn lightning knives if I have to. It's not like enhancement in BC was ANYTHING like enhancement in vanilla and it's certainly an iconic play style. I'm just a little irked that this predictable scenario continues to elude the designers when the solution is time tested and obvious.
About the percentage thing: it's basically a spell version of combat potency they are working on, thinking that it'll push to slow/fast as rogues use. However, they overlooked the fact that flametongue scaled better with fast mainhand as well so that fast/fast becomes the best choices.
Just a random thought, but since MW now affects ALL spells with a cast time of less than 10 secs (minus ghost wolf), why not change the wording of it to something similar to Nature's Swiftness, like "....reduces cast time of any damage or healing spell with a cast time of less than 10 sec..."
As to MW, I agree it should go back up to the 20/40/60/80/100% stack on crit that it was originally, but to change it to something similar to that of Lightning Overload, where the next spell cast is either cast for free or at a reduced mana cost...30% ish? (would solve our mana problems) and does half the damage and NO THREAT (which was our OTHER concern due to our large amount of damage coming from spells). Wouldn't that effectively nerf the amount of spell damage that we do without messing with our melee damage? So instead of seeing 7k+ LvB crits, we only see 3kish crits. That would allow us to gain back our flurry and DW spec stats as well as the SS buff but keep the new "combo point" feature that everyone seemed to be so happy with. ED would also remain up at 100% upkeep so our melee dmg would still be buffed.
and all the other classes have it, why not roll in a "increases OH wep dmg by x%" into DW spec, would actually make our OH more viable, and wouldnt that constitute a 1% dps per talent point budget allocation?
Like others have said, scale Flametongue's coefficient with weapon speed.
Increase Frostbrand's coefficient to weapon speed/3.5 so that it's damage isn't so unbelievably pathetic.
Change Lava Lash so that it can work with Frostbrand too but as a PvP oriented mechanic. When Lava Lash is used with an offhand imbued with Frostbrand have it apply Frostbrand's snare to the target (just the snare without the proc's damage). That way it would be an option to snare a target without being forced to utilize our Shock timer.
Change Stormstrike to apply it's melee damage as nature so that it can utilize it's own buff as well as hopefully increasing it's damage to the point where it would again be favorable to use a slower mainhand.
Change Dual Wield spec to either give 3% hit to spells too, or just drop the +hit aspect altogether and have it increase offhand damage by 10/20/30% (which would work well with my next change)
Change Unleashed Rage to a 33/66/100% (3 points instead of 5 and the buff would be constant no matter how many points spent) chance on next crit to give the buff to the party/raid and add in the selfless buff of 1/2/3% increased melee and spell hit for the shaman as a constant.
I would still love to see them incorporate Water Shield into Static Shock so that the talent could be used to either for more damage or for more mana.
10/01/08, 5:22 PM
