The 5.4 Shaman Thread

[flak]

Best glyph for Enh PE/EM ...... after smal buffs for UF and EB its looks like Blizz wona us to no longer run with this build....sad

Good, because it's the best spec for burst and the best spec for overall dps - why would you pick anything else.

[looorg]

this is the first ptr patch and lot more will come so it is enough time to add new skills what ever.
what this patch provides in useful information is t-set bonus and first view of talent changes. that's it.
it would not be the first time that shaman changes happens late in ptr period and this is not the final patch of ptr^^

This is what we hear every patch and expansion -- it's coming later. That usually turns out it's so late it doesn't even make it into the patch/expansion or it is so late in the patchcycle that they panic and just buff some numbers a very minimal amount cause they just blew all their time and effort on the other classes as per usual.

[Deleted]

Precisely. I heared the exact same argument when i was posting during beta and showing why we are going to hit a brickwall of suckyness later on in the expansion. I was being notoriously shut down with "it's only beta" "there is time yet" "changes are comming". It gets old, fast, especially since it's not even this expansions issue (Hello Firelands).

[Roboctopus]

Wont FE glyph make it so that we can reset its cool down with our talent? Therefore making it One Minute FET every 3 minutes or so?

[Deleted]

Call of the Elements talent resets cooldown of totems with base cooldown <3 mins. So, sadly, no.

[madokbro]

Do you guys think Ele single target damage would increase enough to at least decent-ish damage compared to other casters? Especially in non-movement fights. I know it's way too early but wanted to gather some insights.

[Endus]

Guess we won't see many changes for elem in 5.4. I'm fine with that. But i do wish they would clean up some lose ends in our lev90 talents.

-Could be wrong, but isn't PE empowerment just a joke? 5% damage increase, really? That means you need to do like 600k for it to be worthwile, since your PE does 30k on it own. I'm just wondering why anyone would use it atm...
-Can we have our PE/EE being summoned next to our flame shocked target plz? Atm it takes our pe/ee like 5sec to move to our target and start attacking it. That's 5sec damage lost...
-Unleased fury has been worthless for elem. Not sure if this 10% LB increase will be enough to bring it on par with the rest of our lev90 talents.

PE Empowerment isn't meant to be a DPS increase. It's meant to give you an option for boss fights with things like air phases, where the elemental can't path to the boss but you can still shoot him; it means the remaining duration on the FET isn't a total waste.

The 10% increase to LB on UF will quite possibly shake things up for Elemental; the differences between UF and EB/PE aren't as huge as people think. The last run of tests I think we established that EB/PE were about a 10-11% increase, and UF about a 9%. It's far enough below that it's the clear loser, currently, but it's not like it's useless and provides nothing.

This is what we hear every patch and expansion -- it's coming later. That usually turns out it's so late it doesn't even make it into the patch/expansion or it is so late in the patchcycle that they panic and just buff some numbers a very minimal amount cause they just blew all their time and effort on the other classes as per usual.

This is based predominantly on perspective, not facts. There have been just as many times when changes did come, later in the PTR, exactly as we needed. They aren't "panicing and just buffing some numbers". They aren't ignoring Shaman in general. That is simply untrue. You hear the same thing from those unhappy in EVERY class; that Blizzard is ignoring some major concerns of that community and doesn't care about their input.

If you think something needs fixing, give them feedback. That means actual numbers and a professional attitude, not "OMFG you nubs, fix Resto nao!"

[Deleted]

If you think something needs fixing, give them feedback. That means actual numbers and a professional attitude, not "OMFG you nubs, fix Resto nao!"

I would redirect you to the "Shaman status atm" topic on these forums for some actualy numbers and a bit-by-bit list of class issues. Issues that has been brought up as early as Firelands (lack of spread healing, lack of 10m throughput) or all throughout MoP beta (numbers too low, mana issues compared to other classes, HR making up for too much of our healing). Issues that still haven't been fixed. It's less of a "NAO!", it's more of a "YDAY!" at this point.

Also, are you sure actual numbers are enough to convince you? After all, you keep claiming "numbers arent everything".

[Endus]

I would redirect you to the "Shaman status atm" topic on these forums for some actualy numbers and a bit-by-bit list of class issues.

Dude, I've been agreeing that Resto is in trouble for several patches, now. I'm not disputing that, or saying those numbers don't exist, I'm explaining how to make that feedback heard on the official forums without having it discarded because you dressed it up in anger and rudeness.

Also, are you sure actual numbers are enough to convince you? After all, you keep claiming "numbers arent everything".

Numbers ARE everything. I haven't claimed otherwise. I've just argued for using the right numbers, in the right ways.

Using straight HPS numbers according to Raidbots, for instance, as a measure of healer performance between classes, that is a flawed model, for reasons I've gone over before. That doesn't mean "numbers aren't everything", it means that HPS isn't the most important number. Not even remotely the same thing.

[Omanley]

The enh 4p one looks like one of their "experiments", with the possible baseline implementation next x-pack (which would be awesome, considering we've asked for this so many times to make enh less static, and more unpredictable, as well as more interestingly scaling with haste).
I just hope that when they implement it, we'll also have FrS on a separated cd finally, or we'll share elemental's fate in being screwed out of FrS for the sake of our burst.

The 2pc however...

2P Bonus (New) For 10 sec after using Unleash Elements, your attacks have a chance to unleash a random weapon imbue.

Not sure what to think. It is far to uninformative.
- Does random mean ANY shaman imbue?
- Does random mean any shaman imbue, except earthliving, which is resto only?
- Or does random mean any of the two imbues used?

I expect the 3rd, because randomly unleashing rockbiter would be rather...impractical

- With attacks, do they mean any damage source, or are there exclusions? (Pets? Totems? Spells? Procs? Weapon imbues? Auto hits? Melee Strikes?)
- With chance, what exactly are they thinking of? 10% 20%?

Does the 2p include Unleash Fury?
- If it didn't, we'd look at the measely physical/fire damage of either imbue, a little extended haste buff duration...and well... the fire spell modifier still doesn't affect anything besides FS and FN (with the 4pc, resettable LL would be awesome in conjunction with that mod, IF they included LL)
- If it did...In case of wf unleashing, we'd get longer uptime for Static Shocks proccing on autohits or more often bonuses to msw5x lb

So the t16 seems to aim at making UF better(and enh more challenging playstyle-wise), with the SS debuff improving on EB and the glyph making FET less matching with cooldowns (I think).
Also a lb buff, making msw5x more important, all the while having EB stronger as well, to keep it higher prio.

Looks like EB will be going nuts towards haste so as to not waste 2pc procs to much. Even UF seems to be going further towards haste though with UF empowering the 2pc (if it does). Seems that 5.4 will make it a tough choice for enh to choose elements...which is good, obviously.

With random unleashes and random LL resets, it looks like 5.4 enh will go towards wotlk times in terms of being kept on your toes, seems fun so far.

[jayinjersey]

I actually think the FE glyph is a subtle nerf to our burst...well our repeated burst.
I'm only 517 with 510 weapons but I"ve seen my WoL show 700k DPS every 3m...that's pretty F'ed up.

I hope they add some for of animation when LL procs like they have for LB...cause I get angry when I have to do that myself (ticks me off when they miss things like that)

[Xanda]

For now i like everything about enha in 5.4.

I expect the 2p to work like this.
We cast UE, then for 10 seconds our attacks will have a chance to trigger another UE effect. So we'll have 6 faster strikes or another stack of unleash flame, or frost damage and slow. I hope rockbitter will not be counted. :P

[Aleksej89]

Why is the FE glyph getting nerfed? No reason what so ever to have FE at 2.5 minutes and waste 0.5 min to line it up...

[Omanley]

Why is the FE glyph getting nerfed? No reason what so ever to have FE at 2.5 minutes and waste 0.5 min to line it up...

To nerf PE and make the others more interesting, I imagine. And to nerf enh overall burst, which, as it sounds, is over the top atm.

[Nebria]

To nerf PE and make the others more interesting, I imagine. And to nerf enh overall burst, which, as it sounds, is over the top atm.

if they want to nerf enhance burst they should change enhance skills and not shared talents or glyphs^^
hopefully we get a new edition of "what and why we changed x, y, z" for each class. really liked it.

[Futhark]

Judging from the icons, the item sets are going to look awesome, again with the wolf-theme, but I like it :3

Yeah, what's the deal with these Kor'kron shaman items? The icons don't say "raid" in them like the mage and warlock sets do, but they are obviously a shaman themed set (that I wouldn't mind for t16):

[Omanley]

also wondering what our new tier is going to look like, because after seeing the new pvp set, I'm very tempted to grind some Conquest points just to get the helm for Xmog!

Shoulders are also awesome with thos hanging paws.
Only downside with the style is that colourful stuff. I like minimalistic sets, as the flashy stuff looks like it's trying to hard imo. With that green or blue or purple, it'll be harder to much with previous tribal stuff.

[Sarevokcz]

PE Empowerment isn't meant to be a DPS increase. It's meant to give you an option for boss fights with things like air phases, where the elemental can't path to the boss but you can still shoot him; it means the remaining duration on the FET isn't a total waste.

The 10% increase to LB on UF will quite possibly shake things up for Elemental; the differences between UF and EB/PE aren't as huge as people think. The last run of tests I think we established that EB/PE were about a 10-11% increase, and UF about a 9%. It's far enough below that it's the clear loser, currently, but it's not like it's useless and provides nothing.

Just curious, where do you get the idea, that EB or PE is 10-11% increase? I run my gear with and without 90l talents and it was about 5,2% difference to PE, 6% to EB and 4,3% for UF.

Anyway, even with UF potentially being equal on paper, it has its problems, useless at cleaving/aoeing, hindered at frequent target switching. tbh, it would need to be superior to other talents on single target for me to consider taking it, given how aoe/switching-happy most fights are. Right now, PE is for the big-CDs-needed and lots-of-aoeing and ideal-fightlenght fights, EB is for need-extra-nukage-on-adds and general single target fights and UF... well, it has no real perk, maybe the mobility factor compared to EB, but at the cost of the utility UE sometimes offers.

[Embermoon]

To nerf PE and make the others more interesting, I imagine. And to nerf enh overall burst, which, as it sounds, is over the top atm.

If It allowed you to use Call of the Elements, to drop another fire elemental, right after the first, I could see it as a decent option, but yes, it completely screws with the timing, on an EM/PE build. With the way the CotE tooltip reads, I'm not sure it would work, though.

Also, who says enhancement burst is over the top? Forum poster opinion, or Blizz dev?

As for the enhancement set bonuses, I'm going to reserve judgment, until I see how they play out. For now, it looks like they could be promising, depending on the mechanics behind the scenes.

[Endus]

Just curious, where do you get the idea, that EB or PE is 10-11% increase? I run my gear with and without 90l talents and it was about 5,2% difference to PE, 6% to EB and 4,3% for UF.

On re-thinking, I believe it was a combined combination of the T4 and T6 talents, since EB/EotE and PE/AS were optimal combinations, so it was those two compared to the highest-parsing combo with UF.

Anyway, the point was that UF is far from useless, even prior to 5.4. It's just not quite as strong as the other options. A buff like this will bring it more in line, though we'll have to wait for some updated sims and likely a later PTR patch (to be sure all intended changes are online) to be certain.

Anyway, even with UF potentially being equal on paper, it has its problems, useless at cleaving/aoeing, hindered at frequent target switching. tbh, it would need to be superior to other talents on single target for me to consider taking it, given how aoe/switching-happy most fights are. Right now, PE is for the big-CDs-needed and lots-of-aoeing and ideal-fightlenght fights, EB is for need-extra-nukage-on-adds and general single target fights and UF... well, it has no real perk, maybe the mobility factor compared to EB, but at the cost of the utility UE sometimes offers.

If we're picking T4/T6 talents for situational reasons based on what the fight requires, rather than having one or two of them be "right", then that's ideal. The goal isn't to have one option be "superior", it's to have all three be close in value and each with situtational advantages.