Enhancement Shaman - Yay or Nay .II

[Endus]

Well, concerning talents:
My take on them is that others to a large part have talents as a means to improve their base abilities (example: warrior tier 1, which focuses on improving charge/mobility), or, if they add new abilities, making it ones that are purely optional and/or very similar in purpose.

Shamans though have talents largely to get stuff they otherwhise lack. So while a warrior will at best lament about what kind of charge improvement he takes, or wether he wants an aoe snare or knockback, an enh shaman is forced to decide between his only real peel and getting a freedom effect back he lost, and needs for mobility/keeping up with others.

You're creating a false distinction, here.

Everyone gets talents that add new abilities or improve their existing abilities. Shaman do too. There is no significant qualitative difference with our talents versus other classes. Everyone is tuned around having these new abilities. Ours aren't magically more necessary than anyone else's are.

Your own example perfectly shows this. Warriors get mobility stuff, Shaman get mobility stuff. Two of the Shaman options are offensive ones, aimed at limiting enemy mobility, rather than improving the Shaman's mobility, but so is one of the Warrior ones; Warbringer CCs the target rather than improving the Warrior's mobility any further.

The only difference is that you have, for some unstated and unsupportable reason, decided that Shaman should have every ability they could ever want or need before factoring in any of the optional choices, unlike literally every other class in the game. And when Shaman have to make a choice that matters, like this, you construe that to somehow be a lack in Shaman design, despite again literally every other class in the game making similar choices for similar purposes.

Some talents are simply mandatory, which kinda makes it cookie cutter again. Some'll say pvp is occasional, so nothing wrong with having cookie cutter there, but I think that's bullshit.

No talents are mandatory. Some might be suboptimal for certain circumstances, but there's always choices to be made. And yes, PvP is a situational circumstance. You choosing to focus on one narrow aspect of the game, particularly Arena PvP, does not mean your choices based on that focus are somehow universal. You're the one limiting your choices, by focusing only on one narrow aspect of the game. If you widened it to even rated BGs, you'd start to see a lot more validity in some of the options you're dismissing. And once you expand it to include PvE and the other specs, the talents are all pretty balanced.

Deliberately narrowing your focus to one particular circumstance and saying that there's a set of talents that are optional for those circumstances does not make the rest of the game irrelevant to Shaman design. That's YOUR focus, not the design team's focus. And for most classes, if you narrow their perspective that much as well, some of their talents are going to stand out as "mandatory" as well, for the same reasons.

Because the factor is the narrow focus you're using, not the talent design.

IMO talents shouldn't be "required". You should be able to fare well w/o them. You should havbe your base needs taken care of already. Enh has severe baseline lacks, hence requiring some talents, changing it from extra flavor/sugar on top like others have it to hardly-different-from-the-old-talents.

That isn't how any class is currently designed, and isn't the intent of the current talent system. Your choices are supposed to matter. If you can fare well without making those choices at all, they DON'T matter. Making talents irrelevant would not in any way be a positive contribution to the game. That's what minor glyphs are for.

[Crackleslap]

The only problem i have with Enhancement is that damn flamtongue/searing 5 stacks now appears in my buff bar instead of my attacking target which now makes it a lot more difficult to determine if i have 5 stacks or not. And is now forcing me to get an addon.

[Cishir]

Just use Lava Lash off cooldown when nothing ahead of it is there, you'll be fine.

[kustom]

Getting all your cooldowns rolling during the start of a pull can take a bit to get used to, but overall the spec is doing well. I have no problems holding my own on single target fights.

No talents are mandatory. Some might be suboptimal for certain circumstances, but there's always choices to be made. And yes, PvP is a situational circumstance. You choosing to focus on one narrow aspect of the game, particularly Arena PvP, does not mean your choices based on that focus are somehow universal. You're the one limiting your choices, by focusing only on one narrow aspect of the game. If you widened it to even rated BGs, you'd start to see a lot more validity in some of the options you're dismissing. And once you expand it to include PvE and the other specs, the talents are all pretty balanced.

Deliberately narrowing your focus to one particular circumstance and saying that there's a set of talents that are optional for those circumstances does not make the rest of the game irrelevant to Shaman design. That's YOUR focus, not the design team's focus. And for most classes, if you narrow their perspective that much as well, some of their talents are going to stand out as "mandatory" as well, for the same reasons.

Because the factor is the narrow focus you're using, not the talent design.

This is true. While some talents are lackluster on a certain fight or match.. on another the tables can turn completely. A good player will be changing his talents to fit every situation instead of being stuck with what someone else considers "cookie cutter". Enhance speccing is as wide open as you will allow it to be.

[miffy23]

Well now at 465 pretty much done with heroics, gonna try out LFR tonight and normal MV next week. Still love the 5.0 changes to pieces.
I don't get the complaints about clunkyness tbh, you can macro so much together, it's literally 3 seconds to pop all CDs and then you just burst everything to pieces for 20-40 seconds. It's absurd. The healing on Ancestral Guidance with all CDs is ridiculous, i've seen my entire 5 man group not lose an inch of HP while I was bursting.

No idea what some people are complaining about with dps. I think many, not just Enhancement shamans btw, tend to forget several factors: a) the stats continue to build almost exponentially. You'll literally double your dps from ilvl 440 to 470. Stats are far more important than some take into account sometimes.
b) pretty much all DPS are competitive with each other in PVE now. Yes sure some are better for AOE situations, others have better burst, but overall i would say that "bring the player" has never been more accurate, while still in the trinity system.

If you suck in dps in heroics, it's either your gear or you'Re doing it completely wrong, simple answer. Any DPS spec around 440 should be pulling 40k easily, add 20k with each 10-15 ilvl easily.

[Emophia]

Damage is fine in Vaults.

Still feel like FE does too much tho.

[shokter]

Just use Lava Lash off cooldown when nothing ahead of it is there, you'll be fine.

Can anyone confirm this? From what I have read we are meant to wait until we have 5 stacks to use Lava Lash. Perhaps he meant that by the time the above situation is in play the shaman will already have a 5 stack, however in my exp this is not always true.

[Cishir]

I meant that you should always have 5 stacks by the time it is up at least a very, very large majority of the time to the point where keeping track of it constantly is more hassle than reward. It'd have to be mostly heavy movement fights and even then you never want to "hold" onto abilities, it'd just be lower in the queue if anything.

[woopytywoop]

What else would you do? Extend the gaps not pushing LL because it has 4 stacks?
It always should have 5 stacks and when it doesn't have, you still press it.
The stacks don't provide that much a damage boost to justify waiting on it.
Remember LL also has a base damage unaffected by stacks. Delaying it is not good, You'll use LL less over the fight and use this base damage less, which will result in a greater dps loss.

on topic,

enhance is too slow. I hope it will improve with stats over tiers, but atm it's just the most boring dull spec. I only have fun when speccing EM during cd's, that's the gameplay I like. Seeing that MW bar empty after using SS > LL combo, makes me want to cry. Or after your opener with UE, FS while running and then SS, LL and then still having only 2 stacks. But ye numbers are there and burst is insane. However, I care less about this, I'd rather play an UP fun challenging spec than this balanced boring spec. It was already slow in cata and they even managed to take more pace out. I do hard cast, but now it often happens with 1 MW while in the past it barely happened in my gaps I only had 1 MW. And forging for full haste etc, makes it more fun to play, but lowers dps (personal experience and also sim tells me). I'm playing ele atm. Trying enhance in pvp made me want to cut my wrists as it's useless and near defenseless. Everyone outplays your long cd's already with their basic short cd's. I advise enhancers to just jump the hunter/war train and play comps that kill within the first 30sec or get killed later.

[Tides]

Can anyone confirm this? From what I have read we are meant to wait until we have 5 stacks to use Lava Lash. Perhaps he meant that by the time the above situation is in play the shaman will already have a 5 stack, however in my exp this is not always true.

Unless you're replacing Searing totem every 2nd global, there should realy never be a time your totem aint generating 5 stacks in 10 seconds, unless you've left it oor.
I usually have the 5 stacks by the time my LL still has 1-2 seconds left on the Cooldown iirc.