Questions regarding Enhance playstyle in MoP Beta

[Embermoon]

For those of you who have been playing (and ideally raiding) on enhance in the MoP Beta, I was curious about the feel of enhance, in general, and the usefulness of ascendance in particular. Aside from the increased damage from mastery-boosted damage, what about the fact that it's all at a 30 yard range? Is that a benefit? Has blizz designed any boss phases to make that useful?

Also, what about the talents? Are you finding yourself swapping them out, to offer varied utility on different fights, or are you sticking with the same six talents?

Lastly, what about hex and bind elemental? Are they seeing any use, like we had on tier 11 raid/dungeon trash?

---------- Post added 2012-08-09 at 06:05 PM ----------

Delete this thread, please. I didn't see the multi-page thread, which is essentially the same topic.

[angeleg]

From my own experience, talents are pretty much worthless, but thats just me. Ascendance is pretty cool indeed but I feel the duration its to short for its coldown you get almost no feel from it, and for the last tier of talents im still trying to decide between unleash elements and elemental blast.

[Abysire]

From my own experience, talents are pretty much worthless, but thats just me. Ascendance is pretty cool indeed but I feel the duration its to short for its coldown you get almost no feel from it, and for the last tier of talents im still trying to decide between unleash elements and elemental blast.

I will honestly agree here. Enhancement didn't get much of a buff in terms of usefulness when it comes to choosing these abilities. I'm going to enjoy Echo of the Elements, Frost Shock and Ancestral Guidance now, though.

[TenDance]

From my own experience, talents are pretty much worthless

Sorry? We got a valid tanking cooldown on top of SR, making us one of the most viable classes in MoP to eat some damage (usage not only limited to ultraxion-like encounters) or a shield which works great versus aura-damage, we got mobility and CC free (without sacrificing DPS), EM + AG + Ascendance is WAY better than a moonkin channeling tranq (because WE still do damage) and if consistent numbers are preferable, EotE and conductivity are rock solid talents to support your raid.

Tier three and six are kind of... dismal in my opinion. That might be true. But I encourage you to place some trust in your capabilities to make a kill happen. DPS isn't the only useful thing during raids. CC is great on some fights and dishing out some serious healing is a godsend during progression. Maybe in 10s even more than in 25s. Usually things aren't that clear set and you won't need "three healers, two tanks, five DPS". Most of the time you might come clear with only two healers, but sometimes just a small amount of extra healing is lacking. That's what you provide - without sacrificing major DPS.

[angeleg]

Sorry? We got a valid tanking cooldown on top of SR, making us one of the most viable classes in MoP to eat some damage (usage not only limited to ultraxion-like encounters) or a shield which works great versus aura-damage, we got mobility and CC free (without sacrificing DPS), EM + AG + Ascendance is WAY better than a moonkin channeling tranq (because WE still do damage) and if consistent numbers are preferable, EotE and conductivity are rock solid talents to support your raid.

Tier three and six are kind of... dismal in my opinion. That might be true. But I encourage you to place some trust in your capabilities to make a kill happen. DPS isn't the only useful thing during raids. CC is great on some fights and dishing out some serious healing is a godsend during progression. Maybe in 10s even more than in 25s. Usually things aren't that clear set and you won't need "three healers, two tanks, five DPS". Most of the time you might come clear with only two healers, but sometimes just a small amount of extra healing is lacking. That's what you provide - without sacrificing major DPS.

We are not tanks so i will assume that you were refering to as we got defensive coldowns for survival, wich is good, but if you are elemental or enhance then we are not healers so why do we have to chose healing spells. Im not saying we cant help heal I often do in my raids with healing rains+healing stream instant chain heal etc. But we will see i just tested Ancestral Guidance and I really like it

[Walktheline]

What I experienced from my Shaman on MoP:

-LL hits quite less (around 60% of what it hitted before)
-LB dmg percentage also fall bit, although i was using echo
-FS dmg has increased extremely, and glyph, you can throw a lot of ES in there too
-WF and FT is also quite a bit lower than on live
-Stormstrike got more important since it now nearly as hard as LL
-FireElemental is INSANELY strong, i got fights, where FE did like 15-20% of my total dmg (without speccing into Elementals)
-lightning shield does also more dmg compared to live server
-aoe is still quite meh, but with echo you get sometimes nice numbers.

[Orrion]

Sorry? We got a valid tanking cooldown on top of SR, making us one of the most viable classes in MoP to eat some damage (usage not only limited to ultraxion-like encounters) or a shield which works great versus aura-damage, we got mobility and CC free (without sacrificing DPS), EM + AG + Ascendance is WAY better than a moonkin channeling tranq (because WE still do damage) and if consistent numbers are preferable, EotE and conductivity are rock solid talents to support your raid.

Tier three and six are kind of... dismal in my opinion. That might be true. But I encourage you to place some trust in your capabilities to make a kill happen. DPS isn't the only useful thing during raids. CC is great on some fights and dishing out some serious healing is a godsend during progression. Maybe in 10s even more than in 25s. Usually things aren't that clear set and you won't need "three healers, two tanks, five DPS". Most of the time you might come clear with only two healers, but sometimes just a small amount of extra healing is lacking. That's what you provide - without sacrificing major DPS.

I busted up laughing when you said Conductivity was a rock solid talent. Conductivity is atrocious.

[Sforza]

Is the talent "Elemental mastery" worth for enhancement? pvp wise.

[angeleg]

For pvp I think Unleashed fury is coming up ahead for enhance, but I havent really tested the elementals talent much.

[Aleksej89]

As a dps-heal hybrid class, we get a "heal while you dps" row of talents - instead of an ANOTHER row of crowd control talents.

Honestly i would rather take a semi useful "heal while you dps" talent than yet another CC to which every boss will be immune.

[Radux]

Is the talent "Elemental mastery" worth for enhancement? pvp wise.

Very debatable.

It could amount to some awesome pressure when stacked with Ascendance.

On the otherhand, EotE has a 30% proc rate for Enhancement. This means you are effectively doing 130% averaged damage on your damage spells. On top of that, EotE also procs from your heals - and since a lot of Enh use their MSW for CC and healing, it's almost a no-brainer to go with EotE over EM (from what I've observed/deducted).

[TenDance]

I busted up laughing when you said Conductivity was a rock solid talent. Conductivity is atrocious.

Maybe for you. For a min/maxing progress-oriented raid, this talent can be truly helpful, as is the current Tiersetboost to healing.

But if you consider progress-oriented to be the same as "I would love to loot cool stuff sooner than others", than maybe you're just not the audience talents like these had been introduced for.

@Radux: MW in PvP strongly depends on uptime. As a melee, your opponents will try everything to keep you away from them, therefore reducing your uptime on them. MW is a heavily uptime-dependent passive, making any spells relying on MW a rather rare occurrence in PvP.
In short: if you find yourself whacking your opponent enough to have significant amounts of MW-proccs, chances are high you won't need an EotE-procc. But an EotE-heal could possibly turn the tide if things aren't going that well, but given the fact that you won't cast that many heals in a critical moment, chances are high you're out of luck and your heal won't be doubled.
Since MW scales with haste, a well-used EM could provide you with additional MW-stacks to almost guarantee extra-healing, without relying on luck alone. But this would almost force you to decouple the usage from ascendance. Not only because such heals (and their gcd) would be better off during a later part of the duel, ascendance might force a lot of your opponents to throw their CC on you. But since a lot of CC has a roughly 30s-cd, it's all a matter of timing. And somehow, stuff like that resembles a game of poker.

[Orrion]

Maybe for you. For a min/maxing progress-oriented raid, this talent can be truly helpful, as is the current Tiersetboost to healing.

But if you consider progress-oriented to be the same as "I would love to loot cool stuff sooner than others", than maybe you're just not the audience talents like these had been introduced for.

@Radux: MW in PvP strongly depends on uptime. As a melee, your opponents will try everything to keep you away from them, therefore reducing your uptime on them. MW is a heavily uptime-dependent passive, making any spells relying on MW a rather rare occurrence in PvP.
In short: if you find yourself whacking your opponent enough to have significant amounts of MW-proccs, chances are high you won't need an EotE-procc. But an EotE-heal could possibly turn the tide if things aren't going that well, but given the fact that you won't cast that many heals in a critical moment, chances are high you're out of luck and your heal won't be doubled.
Since MW scales with haste, a well-used EM could provide you with additional MW-stacks to almost guarantee extra-healing, without relying on luck alone. But this would almost force you to decouple the usage from ascendance. Not only because such heals (and their gcd) would be better off during a later part of the duel, ascendance might force a lot of your opponents to throw their CC on you. But since a lot of CC has a roughly 30s-cd, it's all a matter of timing. And somehow, stuff like that resembles a game of poker.

I'm a hardcore raider, thanks. Conductivity is piss-poor.

I'll post here the math I did on the WoW beta forum, and you can disprove me at your leisure. Caveats: This was before the Fire Elemental nerfs, so it doesn't take into account the Stormstrike buff, ES scaling, or Lightning Bolt scaling nerfs.

Here you go:



Let's use the numbers from the sim. Highest profile is currently 113k dps.

Damage contribution from the abilities that activate Conductivity add up to about 22%. Lightning Bolt is 14% of that, ES and SS make up the other 8%.

That's 24,860dps going toward Conductivity. Conductivity halves that, so 12,430 healing per second among everyone in the Healing Rain.

That's 1,243 healing per second to a stacked 10 man raid.

That's 497 (rounded down) healing per second to a stacked 25 man raid.

Those are pretty pitiful healing numbers considering the health pools in Mists.

Also, consider these:

1) Lightning Bolt's contribution would decrease due to keeping HR down. This is not taken into account here, and would further lower the healing.
2) The healing would be more staggered, due to SS/ES having long CDs and LB not being used as often.
3) HR is being used to maximum benefit. Less people ups the healing per person (obviously) but I doubt HR would be worth using for offspec healing without close to maximum benefit.



Current highest Enhancement sim has the damage from abilities affecting Conductivity at ~23% - Stormstrike 7.9%, Lightning Bolt 10.6%, Earth Shock 4.5%. So the math up there remains essentially the same, and Conductivity - unless there's been some massive buff to the talent I don't know about - remains atrocious.

I'm not sure if Echos of those abilities contribute to Conductivity, but even if they do it remains absolutely terrible.

[angeleg]

I can see no one taking conductivity anytime soon, simply because its so bad and the other options are pretty good imo, I really like ancestral guidance as enhance wich feels like you are actually helping by healing while you are dpsing.

[Deleted]

I busted up laughing when you said Conductivity was a rock solid talent. Conductivity is atrocious.

I would 100% disagree here. On live in hc progression you often drop HR. On garulon for example your stacked up with high raid damagw on top of the boss. This talent could allow your raid to drop a healer for that extra dps to kill the legs because you do half the HPS of a healer with it. Its not bad at all. Situational yes but that doesnt make it bad at all. An elemental shaman only casting LB, flame shock and instant lvbs will.do 75% of the dps of a true dps but way more healing. Min maxing is exactly where you would use it.

[Edit : Sorry for typos. Bibi and Chaud finally got around to fixing the site for Android, was typing on my phone haha]

[TenDance]

I'm a hardcore raider, thanks.

Who labeled you this? Your ego?

First, your math is flawed. It's not about "healing like a healer", it's about what you would have to trade. For conductivity, it's one (already ALL healing-based) talent and MW5-stacks.
So what do you loose? Talentwise: none. It's not a decision of "shall I heal?" It's "how will I benefit my raid". And therefore you trade some (rather meager) LB-dps versus some solid healing. You'd even been too lazy to include the healing HR does baseline - without conductivity.

If you solely care about DPS, I'm sorry to inform you, hybrid classes have high chances that you do other things besides pure DPS in order to get the most benefit out of it. Shadow priests (and, during wrath, retribution-paladins) had this playstyle for years. And SPs still have that with VE being an active cooldown.
Your job will be to choose which talent will help your raid the most. Ofc, most of the time, AG - synced with EM - will be your choice, but conductivity has it's places.

[Emophia]

Windfury hitting like a little bitch is going to be painful to stomach.

Oh my poor Windfury, how cool you used to be...

[Orrion]

Who labeled you this? Your ego?

First, your math is flawed. It's not about "healing like a healer", it's about what you would have to trade. For conductivity, it's one (already ALL healing-based) talent and MW5-stacks.
So what do you loose? Talentwise: none. It's not a decision of "shall I heal?" It's "how will I benefit my raid". And therefore you trade some (rather meager) LB-dps versus some solid healing. You'd even been too lazy to include the healing HR does baseline - without conductivity.

If you solely care about DPS, I'm sorry to inform you, hybrid classes have high chances that you do other things besides pure DPS in order to get the most benefit out of it. Shadow priests (and, during wrath, retribution-paladins) had this playstyle for years. And SPs still have that with VE being an active cooldown.
Your job will be to choose which talent will help your raid the most. Ofc, most of the time, AG - synced with EM - will be your choice, but conductivity has it's places.

My mentality labels me hardcore. That and being in US top 100 guilds since Sunwell. My current guild isn't quite as hardcore as they used to be (which is what I needed) but we're still US ~75th on a 10 hour raid schedule.

I don't include HR's base healing because that's not really important - dropping HR for healing help when the raid is stacked is a no brainer and I never contended we wouldn't or shouldn't do that.

Do you find a flaw with the contribution numbers? Do you realize how little 1k or less HPS will matter with the health pools in Mists? It borders on completely meaningless. I am looking at "how I will benefit my raid" and I don't see it. I don't see Conductivity benefiting my raid. It just does too little. It's completely laughable.

Not to mention that the top contributor to Conductivity's healing - Lightning Bolts - are lowered when a) you're keeping HR down and b) you're EB spec.

I would 100% disagree here. On live in hc progression you often drop HR. On garulon for example your stacked up with high raid damagw on top of the boss. This talent could allow your raid to drop a healer for that extra dps to kill the legs because you do half the HPS of a healer with it. Its not bad at all. Situational yes but that doesnt make it bad at all. An elemental shaman only casting LB, flame shock and instant lvbs will.do 75% of the dps of a true dps but way more healing. Min maxing is exactly where you would use it.

[Edit : Sorry for typos. Bibi and Chaud finally got around to fixing the site for Android, was typing on my phone haha]

Yes, you often drop HR, but that doesn't change the fact that Conductivity's contribution borders on meaningless.

[Deleted]

Orrion. Quick questions:

Does your math include:

1. Baseline Healing Rain Healing?
2. Baseline Healing Rain Healing with 100x increased heals with Glyph of Healing Storm?

I'm assuming the glyph won't work for the damage component of any conductivity uptime.

Also another thing to consider is self healing with MW5 Surge during Conductivity for the heal copy - again with Glyph of Healing Storm.

[Orrion]

No, the math doesn't include Healing Rain. Healing Rain itself has nothing to do with Conductivity anyway, it merely has to be active to enable the talent. I'm judging the talent contribution only.

As for MW5 Surge during it - Conductivity is only a 20% conversion on heals. I don't know what Surge hits for with Healing Storm in PvE, but 20% of it spread among 10 or 25 people probably isn't going to be very significant.

I mean, if a Surge hits for 200k, then that's 40k going to Conductivity. That's a 4k heal per person in a 10 man and 1.6k heal per person in a 25 man. That would be a garbage healing amount with Cataclysm's health pools, never mind Mists. And I don't think Surge hits anywhere near that high, but I picked a very high number just to illustrate how little Conductivity does.