New Shaman Ability Ideas, mostly from an Enhancement Perspective

[felhoof]

I have only seen one change of making static shock proc off of LL and SS that will help us with heavy movement fights. They said they were looking into this. Here is my idea to help with this.

Slicing Winds (or something that sounds cooler). You are infused with the power of wind; your melee attacks create shock waves that hurl slicing winds at the target. While in melee range, the slicing winds cause your melee attacks to do an additional X% weapon damage. Outside of melee range up to 25 yards, your melee attacks send slicing winds at your target doing Y% weapon damage.

This could be cooldown based, lasting about 15s with 45s-60s cooldown, or permanent but with X, and Y being low to prevent it from being OP. If we are in melee it gives us a little damage boost (I think of X as being 5-10%). But if the target is up to 25 yards away, we could still hit them with something other than spells. More importantly, we would still be “meleeing” the target creating MW stacks and proccing Primal wisdom. Instead of the common gap closer, we would get a range extender. I see this working with auto attacks, SS will do its damage buy maybe the wind carries the debuff or maybe the debuff doesn’t work with this, LL although it wouldn’t do fire damage, and windfury. It doesn’t make sense for this to proc flametongue.

Elemental Presence or (something cooler)
While you are “surrounded” (within 80 yards) by your 4 totems your totems gain 30 yards reach (giving us ~80ish yrd range) and you are saturated with their power gaining:


Elemental shaman gain Name?: Your rolling thunder ability has the chance to grant you 2 lightning orbs instead of 1.

Enhancement shaman gain Elemental Infusion: Your totems infuse you with the elements causing your melee (only auto?) attacks to do additional 5-10% damage as fire/frost/nature whichever is greater.

Restoration shaman gain Rising Tides: Increases the effectiveness of Tidal Waves by x%.

In addition if one of your totems is destroyed while you are surrounded by them you absorb the power lost from the totem and gain:

Elemental shaman gain Name?: The absorbed power of the totem gives you six additional Lightning Orbs.

Enhancement shaman gain Elemental Surge: the element absorbed from the destroyed totem causes your melee attacks to damage as that element. Lasts 10(?)s can only happen once every 60(?)s.

Restoration shaman gain Soothing Storm: When your lightning bolt hit you target, it procs a chainheal emanating from your target healing the raid/party member with the lowest health. Lasts 10(?)s can only happen once every 60(?)s.

Since a lot of our buffs are given away this give us a reason to still drop our 4 totems. It also punishes people for killing our totems. I tried to think of something cool for the resto/elemental surrounded effect that wasn’t too powerful.

Elemental Surge may be too OP since against a tank with 75% physical damage reduction you would do 4 times more damage to that target. Against someone with 50% reduction you would do double damage and against a clothy with 20% you would do 25% more damage. If it is too OP, maybe attacks could do 50% physical damage and 50% elemental.

I thought about the idea of Soothing Storms back in vanilla since shaman were supposed to be (back then) the offensive hybrids and we needed to be resto to raid. I think it fits in well with the direction Blizz is taking healers. Soothing storms to make it more interesting could use all nature damage spells, earthshock procs riptide, chainlightning – chainheal, and lightning bolt – one of our single target heals.

I am sure people in PVE would try to get their totems killed to absorb the power, if there wasn’t away to get it to work reliably in PVE. I wasn’t sure of the best way to do this. I thought maybe, after you have been surrounded by your totems for 30s you gain the totem death effect. I didn’t want it to be as soon as we drop all 4 since we try to position them before the fight starts.

Thoughts?

[ykza]

Slicig winds sounds like a really, really good idea, besides it's something that as far as I know isn't on the game at all, so it would go against the homogenization and help solve our movement problems.
The idea of having a cooldown i could use to keep up my dps while moving sounds great and it's something that could diferentiate good and bad shamans considering our rotation is getting much simpler.
the totem one sounds nice, but the range alone should be enough and we're geting it from talents if we can be arsed to get it.