Legion Enhance: Few things I would change.

[Semiprogamer]

To start, I do like the ideas on what they're doing with enhancement but like most people probably I have opinion and few tweeks in my mind on how the spec should work.

1. Get rid of Stormlash and make Flametongue into a party buf. I'm thinking about this ability specifically in a dungeon or raid setting and when you use it it buffs everyone around you like Spirit Link Totem.
*If not this then just GET RID of Flametongue, atm its just making enhance clunky.
2. Been thinking on how to make AoE more interesting and though it already sounds very enjoyable, returning that Stormstrike buff where nature spells have increase crit chance would be cool. Especially if it effects all targets damage in the cone and adding Chain Lightning back would actually make that damage relevant, also making Lightning Shield a much more enticing talent choice.

For now that's really the only changes I personally would like to see. If you like leave a comment, if you don't like or have your own opinion on changes please also leave a comment.

[wordup]

To start, I do like the ideas on what they're doing with enhancement but like most people probably I have opinion and few tweeks in my mind on how the spec should work.

1. Get rid of Stormlash and make Flametongue into a party buf. I'm thinking about this ability specifically in a dungeon or raid setting and when you use it it buffs everyone around you like Spirit Link Totem.
*If not this then just GET RID of Flametongue, atm its just making enhance clunky.
2. Been thinking on how to make AoE more interesting and though it already sounds very enjoyable, returning that Stormstrike buff where nature spells have increase crit chance would be cool. Especially if it effects all targets damage in the cone and adding Chain Lightning back would actually make that damage relevant, also making Lightning Shield a much more enticing talent choice.

For now that's really the only changes I personally would like to see. If you like leave a comment, if you don't like or have your own opinion on changes please also leave a comment.

Going to write this under the presumption that you have access to Alpha, since that isn't fully clear; if you don't, I fully understand that some of the "new" things lack a lot of context as they did for me so you might be a bit half-baked in your guesses.

1) Stormlash doesn't currently work properly right now, so it's hard to judge if it even needs changing. If you switched it to not only a party buff, but one that could be kept up 100% of the time guaranteed on a group, that would cause tremendous balance issues in, as you say, a 5 man setting, so I can't see that being an even remotely useable suggestion, especially given 5mans are supposedly going to be more prominent, but the strength of said damage buffs have to scale up into raid environments.

2) AoE; 3 things here:

• Stormstrike buff has no impact unless it's applying to all targets, and is possibly one of the least interesting debuffs applied by any class on live right now; if it applied to all in the cone then potentially that could do some benefit to Crash Lightning, however the damage type Crash deals is dependant on the spell (Stormstrike = Nature, Lava Lash = Fire) so that would have to be reflected in its strength. As it is though, bonus chance to crit seems like a very weak bonus in general now we don't rely on sub-standard spell crit chance for primary abilities, and I think bringing that bad is unwise.
• Chain Lightning falls into the exact same situation, we're now far more focused on melee strikes with direct melee scaling, going back to having split Melee/Spell without a fleshed out system to balance the two and make them work feels like a step in the wrong direction if the rest of the kit is to remain, which you seem to like.
• Lastly, Lightning Shield. This is not intended to be an AoE ability in its current form, in fact it deals relatively good damage as a talent, it's the talent tier it's placed on that excludes it from any use or viability. Suggesting it turn into an AoE ability directly conflicts with two other active AoE abilities in Sundering and Fury of Air, one of which effectively operates in the same way as Lightning Shield. Having multiple, very similar talents that also extend to AoE dilutes the talent identities and even worse push us further into simply being "do AoE, nothing else" situations that have plagued WoD.

[Deleted]

Looking at the new FT, it speaks volumes of the many goal that blizz has tied to it:
1) They wanted to keep an old name around for nostalgica's sake, and to have previous players not feel lost as much. FT was never a really engaging spell though, so thy're now trying to make it more interesting.
2) They want to emphasise the "enhance" aspect of enhancement, which is largely represented in the old imbues. WF was made interesting again with doomwinds, FT received this new look, and rockbiter was remade into something entirely different, just like FT, to satisfy point 1): keeping an old name around, but with a meaning.
3) They wanted to keep a maintenance spell in our toolkit after getting rid of FS and UE. Blizz didn't want to have the loss of FS/UE feel like it left a hole, they made FT like a mix of the two, plus it's own, older version. Blizz cleverly tied up several aspects that we grew used to into one ability that adds maintenance and fits our class theme.

Now, with all the praiseworthy aspects about this, there's points about the ability I am "meh"-ish about.
1) It is ~sort of~ a melee dot and passive damage, so it is barred of dealing all to big damage. It adds to the damage source count as well, contributing to the overall number extent limit of each ability. If we go the (almost) highest maintenance route for enh (which seems to also be the one with the highest output (windsong/landslide/?spiritual affinity?/FoA/Ascendence) plus artifact traits, including another maintenance spell may stretch it already.

I dont have access to alpha, so I cannot comment on how it feels though, gameplay-like.
But would it be an option to raise it's cooldown to a minute or 90s or something, and have it deal impressive damage during that time? Maybe be included in Crash Lightning if it isn't already?

Or instead of that, maybe remove it's cd and raise it's range to that of LB, and remove LB. That way, we'd share less with ele, retain a range pull, and have a QoL improvement as far as boss engagement goes (FT => GoT => start damage). The initial damage of FT strikes me as similar as LB's, and I find it a little irritating to keep LB on my bars just for the ocassional ranged pull.

2) I'm happy that CL (Chain Lightning) went away for the reason both wordup and I brought forward. We're a melee spec. CL is ele's tool and we've shared it long enough. I am not opposed to a new, unique to enh ability similar to it though, but designed with melee combat in mind. I would say something like forked lightning, dealing cone damage in front of us, but then I'd have to say Crash Lightning is essentially that, right?
If we we're to get an additional aoe ability, I'd hope for sundering maybe, as a base ability, but without the knockback, and dealing respective damage. Would look good to combine the lightning aspect of Crash Lightning with Sundering.

3) LS imo would be cool as an aoe-dps and/or survivability cooldown. There was that warrior ability I cant seem to remember or find on wow-head, which allowed for warriors to reflect damage back to the attacker (back in wotlk).If you used it with bladestorm against another warrior during bladestorm, you could get ridiculous results.
I imagine LS would be nice like that; a significant damage reflect cd. Imagine it in pvp. It would keep the essence of the spell, but put significance begind it. Would definately make it a pvp talent though.
The other approach would essentially be the road of Fury of Air. A strong ability that would prompt player attackers (melee) to seek distance/lay off you, while doubling as an aoe cd. That said, FoA does that already, though I cant shake the doubt the ability was conceived for utility (aoe snare) instead, and is supposed to deal 160% weapon damage in total, not every second. The other two abilities in the same tier are just that much weaker, and support my theory. You currently have no option but take FoA, but if it were minor damage-wise, while still consuming that MS, you'd only ever used it for the snare (if at all), freeing up the other two options.

[Yopparai]

Might be slightly off topic,but I was reading a post in the pally forums about hybrid tax. I know the devs keep saying that hybrid tax hasn't been a thing for years, but there's real concern, in that thread at least, about enhance and ret both dealing less solo damage because they offer significant buffs to other players. I know alpha isn't tuned yet, and so it's probably a bad time to ask, but has anyone on alpha experienced this?

Devs said the new logs will include the damage increase of other players from our buffs, to us in the logs, but that's not my concern. I'm more concerned about solo play and being able to kill things as effectively as others.

I personally don't mind being a buff bot, it's part of the reason I picked up enhance in BC, but kind of think instead of nerfing our damage it could be in place of a utility skill, like the ability to soak for example.

[bloodmoth13]

To start, I do like the ideas on what they're doing with enhancement but like most people probably I have opinion and few tweeks in my mind on how the spec should work.

1. Get rid of Stormlash and make Flametongue into a party buf. I'm thinking about this ability specifically in a dungeon or raid setting and when you use it it buffs everyone around you like Spirit Link Totem.
*If not this then just GET RID of Flametongue, atm its just making enhance clunky.
2. Been thinking on how to make AoE more interesting and though it already sounds very enjoyable, returning that Stormstrike buff where nature spells have increase crit chance would be cool. Especially if it effects all targets damage in the cone and adding Chain Lightning back would actually make that damage relevant, also making Lightning Shield a much more enticing talent choice.

For now that's really the only changes I personally would like to see. If you like leave a comment, if you don't like or have your own opinion on changes please also leave a comment.

Ewww no to both!

I dont mind losing stormlash and buddy buffs, but changing one for another isnt fixing anything

Flametongue is fine, its a short term maintenance buff, no different to a single target dot and really just a replacement for flame shock

Stormstrike buff was horrible, glad its gone, it allows stormstrike to deal decent damage by itself, wheras in the past its budget was bogged by its shitty buff, which served only to devalue crit, be clunky and make our lightning bolt useful.

If you want a more interesting AOE, pick up one of the many talents.
and if anything is going to be done with aoe, its swapping crash lightning for lightning shield baseline and making it pure aoe, like it always should have been, then crash lightning can be a talent or whatever.

[Murderdoll]

Because its not 100% working right now, I think there really needs to be some clarification on how its intended to work.

Whenever you attack with your weapons enhanced, you have a chance to enhance up to 2 allies or yourself, causing attacks and spellcasts to deal additional Nature damage. Celestalon has said that damage will be attributed to the source of the buff.

I have two problems with it.

Because its random, it can go on the shitter DPS or the brilliant DPS, it can go to someone who gains very little or a lot from that extra nature damage. If its going to be counted as OUR damage and taken into account for our tuning, I am a little worried this might lead to a situation where RNG can be very very cruel.

My other issue that Blizzard has gone on and on about making our damage more active. Removing the sheer amount of passive damage sources from our toolkit that we care little for. What do they do? Add one right back, they may as well have kept Static Shock.

I am just struggling to come up with a good reason as to why its in. We have a passive, random, non controllable buff that punishes bad luck. As some are also suggesting, does this mean that our ACTUAL damage will be lower and supplemented with attributed damage? - is this a return of a hybrid tax of sorts?

[Deleted]

Might be slightly off topic,but I was reading a post in the pally forums about hybrid tax. I know the devs keep saying that hybrid tax hasn't been a thing for years, but there's real concern, in that thread at least, about enhance and ret both dealing less solo damage because they offer significant buffs to other players. I know alpha isn't tuned yet, and so it's probably a bad time to ask, but has anyone on alpha experienced this?

Devs said the new logs will include the damage increase of other players from our buffs, to us in the logs, but that's not my concern. I'm more concerned about solo play and being able to kill things as effectively as others.

Stormlash numbers wise at least is not working as intended. Not sure if it was actually triggered on other people but didn't really pay attention at the time of my raid tests.

It's design philosophy is worse than Ret. It suffers from the same major flaw that your personal damage is gimped in return to buff other people (regardless if the damage counts to you or not on combat logs) but at least Ret can cycle blessings through specific output targets.

Ex: That mage is blowing his CDs now, he is the highest ST class in the game imediately buff him. Ok now the sub rogue is going ham and he has soul cap on - switch asap.

Meanwhile we have to deal with the nature of the Stormlash selection, who could even target the Ret instead of the Mage or the Rogue for all I know and the total damage would vary insane ammount from pull to pull. Getting as much consistency as possible is key in progression raiding and Stormlash has none.

But thats not the very worse part. This problem will aggravate outside of the serious cutting edge guilds where you have the bottom-of-the-barrel DPS with high spec specific percentiles doing at least equal output than top tier DPS classes with low percentiles. It will be Dark Intent all over again where people will fight for that buff exclusively.

My other issue that Blizzard has gone on and on about making our damage more active. Removing the sheer amount of passive damage sources from our toolkit that we care little for. What do they do? Add one right back, they may as well have kept Static Shock.

You mean like our damage sources are like 70% covered by Wind/Stormstrike, Fury of Air Rockbiter and then petty lil stuff like Doomhammer procs?

Yeah Yeah tuning, but its not that much diferent from live if you count all of them.

[Semiprogamer]

Going to write this under the presumption that you have access to Alpha, since that isn't fully clear; if you don't, I fully understand that some of the "new" things lack a lot of context as they did for me so you might be a bit half-baked in your guesses.

1) Stormlash doesn't currently work properly right now, so it's hard to judge if it even needs changing. If you switched it to not only a party buff, but one that could be kept up 100% of the time guaranteed on a group, that would cause tremendous balance issues in, as you say, a 5 man setting, so I can't see that being an even remotely useable suggestion, especially given 5mans are supposedly going to be more prominent, but the strength of said damage buffs have to scale up into raid environments.

2) AoE; 3 things here:

• Stormstrike buff has no impact unless it's applying to all targets, and is possibly one of the least interesting debuffs applied by any class on live right now; if it applied to all in the cone then potentially that could do some benefit to Crash Lightning, however the damage type Crash deals is dependant on the spell (Stormstrike = Nature, Lava Lash = Fire) so that would have to be reflected in its strength. As it is though, bonus chance to crit seems like a very weak bonus in general now we don't rely on sub-standard spell crit chance for primary abilities, and I think bringing that bad is unwise.
• Chain Lightning falls into the exact same situation, we're now far more focused on melee strikes with direct melee scaling, going back to having split Melee/Spell without a fleshed out system to balance the two and make them work feels like a step in the wrong direction if the rest of the kit is to remain, which you seem to like.
• Lastly, Lightning Shield. This is not intended to be an AoE ability in its current form, in fact it deals relatively good damage as a talent, it's the talent tier it's placed on that excludes it from any use or viability. Suggesting it turn into an AoE ability directly conflicts with two other active AoE abilities in Sundering and Fury of Air, one of which effectively operates in the same way as Lightning Shield. Having multiple, very similar talents that also extend to AoE dilutes the talent identities and even worse push us further into simply being "do AoE, nothing else" situations that have plagued WoD.

Appreciate the feedback. I wasn't really to specific about how the Flametongue buff would work and that was my fault. I had a couple of ideas but none of which was a constant group buff which would screw up grouping.

I always enjoyed enhance because it was the only spec that felt like battle mages, getting to toss out a couple of ranged spells which is why I preferred Chain Lightning to stay.

[nazrakin]

Flametongue seems perfectly fine to me, its basically a flameshock that buffs you instead of debuffing the target. It has a generous recast timer, very high dpct, synergizes extremely well with our ridiculous attack speed, and in a future where LL spreading FlS is gone having it as a buff instead of a debuff means you dont have to burn additional gcds applying it to new targets.

The only issue I have with Stormlash is that you have no control over who it'll go to. It should be made into a buff just like GBoM. Min/Maxing the effect by deciding who is the best person to apply the buff to based on group composition and encounter mechanics is an interesting decision. Im not bothered by any of the other concerns Ive seen. I dont think it is anything like Dark Intent, others wont care at all about who the buff goes to since it does nothing for their personal output - they wont notice whether they have it or not. And itd be easy to tune our solo output so that we never feel it.

[Semiprogamer]

Looking at the new FT, it speaks volumes of the many goal that blizz has tied to it:
1) They wanted to keep an old name around for nostalgica's sake, and to have previous players not feel lost as much. FT was never a really engaging spell though, so thy're now trying to make it more interesting.
2) They want to emphasise the "enhance" aspect of enhancement, which is largely represented in the old imbues. WF was made interesting again with doomwinds, FT received this new look, and rockbiter was remade into something entirely different, just like FT, to satisfy point 1): keeping an old name around, but with a meaning.
3) They wanted to keep a maintenance spell in our toolkit after getting rid of FS and UE. Blizz didn't want to have the loss of FS/UE feel like it left a hole, they made FT like a mix of the two, plus it's own, older version. Blizz cleverly tied up several aspects that we grew used to into one ability that adds maintenance and fits our class theme.

Now, with all the praiseworthy aspects about this, there's points about the ability I am "meh"-ish about.
1) It is ~sort of~ a melee dot and passive damage, so it is barred of dealing all to big damage. It adds to the damage source count as well, contributing to the overall number extent limit of each ability. If we go the (almost) highest maintenance route for enh (which seems to also be the one with the highest output (windsong/landslide/?spiritual affinity?/FoA/Ascendence) plus artifact traits, including another maintenance spell may stretch it already.

I dont have access to alpha, so I cannot comment on how it feels though, gameplay-like.
But would it be an option to raise it's cooldown to a minute or 90s or something, and have it deal impressive damage during that time? Maybe be included in Crash Lightning if it isn't already?

Or instead of that, maybe remove it's cd and raise it's range to that of LB, and remove LB. That way, we'd share less with ele, retain a range pull, and have a QoL improvement as far as boss engagement goes (FT => GoT => start damage). The initial damage of FT strikes me as similar as LB's, and I find it a little irritating to keep LB on my bars just for the ocassional ranged pull.

2) I'm happy that CL (Chain Lightning) went away for the reason both wordup and I brought forward. We're a melee spec. CL is ele's tool and we've shared it long enough. I am not opposed to a new, unique to enh ability similar to it though, but designed with melee combat in mind. I would say something like forked lightning, dealing cone damage in front of us, but then I'd have to say Crash Lightning is essentially that, right?
If we we're to get an additional aoe ability, I'd hope for sundering maybe, as a base ability, but without the knockback, and dealing respective damage. Would look good to combine the lightning aspect of Crash Lightning with Sundering.

3) LS imo would be cool as an aoe-dps and/or survivability cooldown. There was that warrior ability I cant seem to remember or find on wow-head, which allowed for warriors to reflect damage back to the attacker (back in wotlk).If you used it with bladestorm against another warrior during bladestorm, you could get ridiculous results.
I imagine LS would be nice like that; a significant damage reflect cd. Imagine it in pvp. It would keep the essence of the spell, but put significance begind it. Would definately make it a pvp talent though.
The other approach would essentially be the road of Fury of Air. A strong ability that would prompt player attackers (melee) to seek distance/lay off you, while doubling as an aoe cd. That said, FoA does that already, though I cant shake the doubt the ability was conceived for utility (aoe snare) instead, and is supposed to deal 160% weapon damage in total, not every second. The other two abilities in the same tier are just that much weaker, and support my theory. You currently have no option but take FoA, but if it were minor damage-wise, while still consuming that MS, you'd only ever used it for the snare (if at all), freeing up the other two options.

Like your ideas. I didn't mention this in my post but I want Chain Lightning to work as your mentioned. Don't know if you've ever heard of a game called Smite but there's a character that shoots lightning in a cone through his weapons and it looks amazing to me which was what made me want CL back.

[Deleted]

Like your ideas. I didn't mention this in my post but I want Chain Lightning to work as your mentioned. Don't know if you've ever heard of a game called Smite but there's a character that shoots lightning in a cone through his weapons and it looks amazing to me which was what made me want CL back.

They could apply forked lighnting graphics to crash lightning...and/or give us Stromblast graphics back during ascendence.

[Murderdoll]

The only issue I have with Stormlash is that you have no control over who it'll go to. It should be made into a buff just like GBoM. Min/Maxing the effect by deciding who is the best person to apply the buff to based on group composition and encounter mechanics is an interesting decision.

The GBoM situation shows its own problems. We can start to micro manage ANOTHER class to reach our potential. I can forsee a whole set of WA strings set up to track who has CDs or Trinkets running. It would be fine if you can safely say I want it on X Player EVERY TIME - so lets just track X's trinkets and CDs, but that might change. During a priority target burn, you want to throw it on someone, means youre going to have to have maybe an AP/SP tracker or something similar to judge who your best choice is during a period of time.

Sure, at the bare minimum, just using GBoM will be an increase, no matter who it is on. But for the Heroic and certainly Mythic level raider, optimising that buff is going to be important. Im in a middle of the road mythic guild at the moment and enjoy pushing myself, but even for me, it sounds interesting but it sounds overwhelming from the POV with a class with things to track already.

[nazrakin]

The GBoM situation shows its own problems. We can start to micro manage ANOTHER class to reach our potential. I can forsee a whole set of WA strings set up to track who has CDs or Trinkets running. It would be fine if you can safely say I want it on X Player EVERY TIME - so lets just track X's trinkets and CDs, but that might change. During a priority target burn, you want to throw it on someone, means youre going to have to have maybe an AP/SP tracker or something similar to judge who your best choice is during a period of time.

Sure, at the bare minimum, just using GBoM will be an increase, no matter who it is on. But for the Heroic and certainly Mythic level raider, optimising that buff is going to be important. Im in a middle of the road mythic guild at the moment and enjoy pushing myself, but even for me, it sounds interesting but it sounds overwhelming from the POV with a class with things to track already.

I agree that hot swapping it in the middle of combat would be cumbersome and it should probably be a decision you make before combat. That could be corrected by making it so that you cant recast it in combat as long as its active, that way only if someone dies/disconnects with it you do you have the option of recasting it on someone else.