[Enhancement] Future Legion Resources

[Advent]

So I've been running the beta for atleast a couple of days now and I just dropped by to say that you'll get another shaman into the fold.

Enhancement is probably the most satisfying spec out there, atleast in my opinion. Very visceral and meaty with good sound effects, flashy effects and overall a fun rotation.
Now I know the trackrecord of enhancement but hey, I guess we can all just hope that we'll be numerically sound come Legion raids.

You may be disappointed. The only time I remember enhancement being solid during the first tier of an expansion was MoP. Come to think of it MoP was the BEST time to be enhancement imo. #BringBackStormblastAnimation

[Lockheartx]

After leveling Windwalker to 110 and running around with it for a bit I decided to find another melee spec to try out and fell back to my first raid spec of Enhancement. I'm enjoying it, but feel like I need to install an addon to help keep track of the various buffs that need to be kept up. With that in mind, what addon do some of you run to help with this? I've been trying to avoid addons beyond Skada to keep things simple, however, I'm feeling it may be time to make a bit of an exception.

[Kaljurei]

What are peoples' outlook on how tuning will look like for Enhancement? At this point streams and vids are showing Enhancement damage pretty much near top tier.

[Deleted]

Amelio 's hasn't been much change regarding the power of his spells . It will probably be tuned to down. Indeed, it is very (too?) Strong current

[Coffeh]

Amelio 's hasn't been much change regarding the power of his spells . It will probably be tuned to down. Indeed, it is very (too?) Strong current

Indeed. Can't have enhancement one of the top damage specs. That's reserved for the usual classes.

[Darleth]

After leveling Windwalker to 110 and running around with it for a bit I decided to find another melee spec to try out and fell back to my first raid spec of Enhancement. I'm enjoying it, but feel like I need to install an addon to help keep track of the various buffs that need to be kept up. With that in mind, what addon do some of you run to help with this? I've been trying to avoid addons beyond Skada to keep things simple, however, I'm feeling it may be time to make a bit of an exception.

WeakAuras/PowerAuras are probably the best addons to help track buffs/debuffs. I'm too lazy to configure the whole thing on beta though, because well... its beta...

What are peoples' outlook on how tuning will look like for Enhancement? At this point streams and vids are showing Enhancement damage pretty much near top tier.

My guesses are only AoE and certain talent nerfs (Landslide/Crashing Storm) to bring us a bit more in line. Other than that I dont see a lot of nerfs happening.

Edit: there are enough other classes which are way stronger. People either didnt adjust to new playstyles (my guess) or have no clue how to play anyway. I haven't seen a lot of "good" players in beta, besides tanks...

[Schlosh]

Has anyone mathed out the best route to take for the artifact? I want to know before going down the wrong tree.

[Darleth]

Has anyone mathed out the best route to take for the artifact? I want to know before going down the wrong tree.

If Crashing Storm stays the way it is, meaning its stronger for singletarget, get the 3 nodes for Storm Strike damage in there. Doom Wolves for extra singletarget/cleave damage is also pretty good. Other than that: pick the damage gain nodes asap.

[Kaljurei]

WeakAuras/PowerAuras are probably the best addons to help track buffs/debuffs. I'm too lazy to configure the whole thing on beta though, because well... its beta...



My guesses are only AoE and certain talent nerfs (Landslide/Crashing Storm) to bring us a bit more in line. Other than that I dont see a lot of nerfs happening.

Edit: there are enough other classes which are way stronger. People either didnt adjust to new playstyles (my guess) or have no clue how to play anyway. I haven't seen a lot of "good" players in beta, besides tanks...

Demon Hunter Vengeance spec really deserves a nerf on AOE, but otherwise I've only seen Shadow Priests and Warriors being near enough to be called the top tier damage specs.

[Manu9]

Demon Hunter Vengeance spec really deserves a nerf on AOE, but otherwise I've only seen Shadow Priests and Warriors being near enough to be called the top tier damage specs.

Veng already got nerfed a few days ago. It's fixed.

[Deleted]

Indeed. Can't have enhancement one of the top damage specs. That's reserved for the usual classes.

I play sham (elem or enhance since 4 years old). I hate have bad tuning in my class but i never saw shaman top dps except 5.4 enhance pull/short fight. I really hope elem could have his good extension too and enhance being good too

[Deleted]

Anyone having done some decent testing with enhancement pvp talents?
My personal idea of best choices:
-Adaptation
-Reinforced Armor
-Counterstrike Totem
-Swelling Waves
-Static Cling
-Shamanism

Reasoning:
-Adaptation strikes me as best mainly because of the 60s cd vs the 2m one of Gladiator's Medaillon. We dont have control over what we cancel, but as it states "Loss of control" I'll assume it doesn't mean movement impairing effects, such as snare and root effects.
Since the amount of cc was reduced across the board, I imagine it will be not that easy to make longer cc strings work. With the first one being instantly removed, not only do you save yourself 1-2s from reaction time, but the enemy will also need some time to realise you have this talent and have to use another cc, where with meddailon they'll cast it just before the first one's ends. It'll save keybinds as well and you'll overall have to worry about less.
Relentlesss seems just not good enough. While it'll save you quite some time in a multi-cc string, being unable to break any cc will be your doom often.

-Reinforced Armor isn't all that enticing, but it is dependable. With strong burst capabilities of many specs and shamans being squishy come legion, enemies will push past that mitigation area of hardiness fast, rendering it useless. We'll have selfheal and with a healer we'll possibly be able to survive for a time, but expecting to be topped so much we'll make lots of use of Hardiness seems unrealistic to me.
Sparring sounds good on paper in against pure melee teams, but 20% chance on 50% reduced damage is for once unreliable and for another, across the board, comes to ~10% mitigated melee damage, which is not that much to begin with, but also completely uselesss against casters, and again, the proc happening on small hits and not proccing on big ones is like to ruin your day often enough.
There is the chance of having it proc on a series of strong hitting melee strikes and halving damage taking during enemies using cds, HOWEVER it completely messes with the next talent of choice in that scenario:

-Counterstrike Totem: Throwing all enemy damage done within it's 20y range back to the lowest hp enemy in the same area, this is probably not just our strongest pvp talent, but maybe the strongest of all pvp talents or even the strongest player ability AT ALL.
Think about this: 3 Shaman team. 1 resto, 2 enh.
Enemy team has a melee that comes rushing in. Shaman team is close to each other. Melee (let's say warrior) pops bladestorm. Every shaman drops Counterstrike totem.
Warrior takes 100% of damage done to each target/per totem. Since it is 3 targets and three totems, that's 900% of the damage done taken by himself.
Now add the 2 enh's own damage and any warrior attempting this will in effect perform a 100%life self-execute. With a low cd of 30s and long duration of 60s, even killing totems fast (which will not be that easy with three totems), expect a lot of punishment.
Even with non aoe-dmg cooldowns from other classes, expect this to be a friggin' nuke in your hands. And you haven't even included your own team's damage cooldowns ^^.
30% +crit damage and extra hits sound awesome, and would also be nice shaman-team synergies, but counterstrike is just that much stronger, I believe.

- Swelling Waves: PW potentially will heal you when you dont need it. Not always do you need a heal when you are dispelled (take cc dispell for example), or when you dispell with purge yourself. Spectral recovery will have synergy with the artifact trait generating generating MW (which then can be used for heals), but having to remain in a non-combat form to receive a meh-passive heal seems not that big of a gain.
SW basically doubles all your selfheals. Since selfheals are done only when they are indeed needed, this is almost always made full use of. The 3 second delay of the second heal is actually a benefit, imo, since you may have healed yourself to full with the first one, but expect further damage in those next three seconds, so you can get a preemptive heal when that happens.

- The 5th pvp tier is the least impressive, tbh. Forked Lightning seems strong in comparisson to RtL because of a combined 500% spell damage, but you'll do that to the targets you're not focusing, so unless you're focussing on aoe pressure or other split-up damage schemes, that damage will not contribute all that much to overall pressure, as we do not stromstrike that much. I dont know if it can do it, but there's also the risk of it breaking the cc on further away enemies with it. Would suck to use SS in a burst/kill-window and through it take the healer further away out of cc.
RtL is simply weak. Even if it hits three targets, which in arena is close to never, it'll hit for less than a single Forked Lightning hit.
Static Cling seems to be even worse, but at least in the Counterstrike vs Melee scenario we can throw in another 15% dmg modifier to the counterstrike damage, and since it triggers with 2 Stormstrikes, this'll be likely to be used with burst windows, making those more reliable. If Ascendence, with windstrike will still refresh Stormstrike's cd, using Ascendence will be a surefire way to use SC right of the bat together with CST.

- Shamanism: LotC and TS seem simply bad to me. Stormlash is a proc and hence unreliable. I also hate the concept of it. TS increase cd revocery rate by 30%. So I guess in those 10s duration, we'll recover 13s of cooldowns across the board.
So if the totems runs it's full course, we'll have saved ourself (and allies') 3 seconds of waiting for each and every cd.
Not impressive.
Dunno how Shamanism exactly works in regards to BL stacking (with 2 enh in the team, can we buff each other and have 60% haste?), but at the very least we'll be able to get 20s of 30% haste every 45s, so that's nearly 50% uptime. pretty decent burst-wise, imo.


A funny side note:
Doomwinds: 45s cd to make all melee attacks trigger windfury
Windfury totem: 30s cd to have us proc extra wf attacks (does this stack with 2 enh in a arena team? (if not, replace second Wft with 30% extra crit damage)
Windsong: 45s cd to give us 20% ats
Ancestral Swiftness: passive 10% haste and ats
Shamanism/BL: 45s cd on 30% ats (60% if we'll be able to stack it with 2 enh)

we'll be able to line up all of that stuff every 45s. seems pretty powerful, though I suspect Counterstrike Totem to still seem superior.


Anyone having tested stuff like that?

[Schlosh]

@Omanley1

I did some arena skirmishes yesterday with counter strike totem and shamanism. Made a macro to pop heroism+doom winds at the same time and if I have my counter strike totem down before I pop that any class that doesn't have an immunity was literally dead within 2 globals. It was hilarious. Even without counter strike totem doom winds + heroism together in pvp is a HUGE amount of burst.

[Darleth]

Demon Hunter Vengeance spec really deserves a nerf on AOE, but otherwise I've only seen Shadow Priests and Warriors being near enough to be called the top tier damage specs.

Yeah, another reason to not nerf classes into oblivion. Rather buff the others to be as equal as possible. DH's are also pretty good in terms of dps. Vengeance got nerfed already but is still too high for a tankspec.

[DeiVias]

What are peoples' outlook on how tuning will look like for Enhancement? At this point streams and vids are showing Enhancement damage pretty much near top tier.

Boulderfist is going to be hit with the nerf bat, i know that much.

Enhance and Unholy are the top 2 right now according to sims.

We all know Shaman will never be top come live.

[Hivey]

Windsong (talent) macroed with Doom Winds (artifact) = win?

One gives auto attack damage boost while the other boosts attack speed and they're both on a 45sec cd. Perfect match?

[Deleted]

I still think its in an early stage, and you cant or should rely on any given information atm. ofc u can adapt and expand ur knowledge about whats current, but in the end of the day, shamans wont see the light and be top notch dps, as mages, and shadow priests, and warlocks

[Coffeh]

We all know Shaman will never be top come live.

Maybe after 12 years it's finally enhancement's turn to top the damage charts for a while? Maybe the spec has waited long enough and deserves some time in the sun, all other classes will look upon shaman with envy, people will reroll to shaman to own the damage meters, even...

Oh man, I almost got through that without cracking up. Yeah right, and go buy some ice skates in Hell.

[Kaljurei]

Boulderfist is going to be hit with the nerf bat, i know that much.

There are sims? Is there a link? I know it's not worth much at this juncture anyway.

Also, how is Boulderfist doing so much damage. I've seen some streams and it seems to be doing second or third highest damage among the damage sources. It's double of Rockbiter but has a 6s CD with 2 charges, if anything I'd have thought that autoattack or LL would do more damage, or at least that Stormstrike would far outstrip it, but the damage difference is miniscule ~2%. It doesn't seem correct.

[nazrakin]

There are sims? Is there a link? I know it's not worth much at this juncture anyway.

Also, how is Boulderfist doing so much damage. I've seen some streams and it seems to be doing second or third highest damage among the damage sources. It's double of Rockbiter but has a 6s CD with 2 charges, if anything I'd have thought that autoattack or LL would do more damage, or at least that Stormstrike would far outstrip it, but the damage difference is miniscule ~2%. It doesn't seem correct.

Its the button you're hitting most often and 300% spell power + mastery scaling is a fairly hard hit relative to anything thats not SS. I dont have Doomvortex on my Shaman and, as far as I can tell, its not even worth casting LL unless BF is on CD (which is less than 6secs thanks to flurry) or I'm cleaving-- even if Im maxed out on Malestrom BF takes priority because it hits way harder. And if Vortex's tooltip damage is accurate it wouldnt change anything even if i did have it.