Enhancement Talent revamp, requesting feedback.

[Luk3ling]

I've always been an Enhancement Shaman, and I hope to remain one for WotlK, but as time flows ever onward and the Shaman changes arise, I'm more and more inclined to make my rogue alt in to my new main.

The main hope of this tree is to cure the bloat in the enhancement tree, but not just by dumbing down the talents, but actually giving a solid, clear cut choice on how you wish to play and who you want your character to be.

Getting to it: http://www.war-tools.com/t57733.html

It's a bit more empty than I'd like, I want to give a solid reason to invest more than 50 or 51 points in enhancement(Which I believe the arrangement now does, but not to the extent I would like.), but I also would like for 21/50 and similar builds to be enticing as well.

Any feedback is welcome as long as it is constructive.

Also, please keep in mine, I put this together in about an hour and it's still very unfinished.

Thanks in advance!

EDIT: The change to the "Improved Shields"(Empowered Shields) talent was made due to the the new incarnation of "Static Shock"(Elemental Overload), as the old version would be considerably weaker with the new version. I'm aware and still considering the 15% less healing on Earth Shield.

[Scalptus]

http://www.war-tools.com/t57733.html

??? what is this exactly

im confused, is this a theory craft or ???

do i put points into what i think should be changed? :O?

[Tal]

The wartools website allows people to create their own trees and talents, to see how they would look. You just put points into slots as you would a normal tree, to see how the point spread would work. Seems self-explanatory to me....


@ Luk3ling:

Some of the things you put into your tree break the standard talent tree rules that Blizzard follows. Your 'Savage Combat' skill needs to be attached to Storm Strike at the very least.

Tieing Dual-Wield to Storm Strike is unnecessary, imho.

You've removed Spirit Weapons, which takes away both our parry skill and our only (non-windshock) aggro reduction. Not good. Definately not good.

It appears you aim to beef up Two handed weapons to make them viable. Savagery looks like it would be really good for doing that, though caution would need to be taken to make sure it isn't either over or under powered.

Heavy Weapon Specialization, however is neither 'needed' to make 2H weapons viable, nor balanced in that it gives us 2% crit for 1 skill point, while all other classes and specs only get 1% per skill point. Whether an argument could be made to whether Enh Shaman 'deserve' it or not is irrelevant imho, they would never allow it to happen, they would simply find another way to improve the balance if they felt the point was valid.

I certainly felt your Lupine Cunning skill should be implemented as you wrote it, and the placement of Empowered Shields and Elemental Overload where it was accessible to other specs makes a lot more sense than the current beta build.

I'm a fan of shamanistic rage (I QQed when it was reduced from 30sec to 15sec though...at 30sec I could often off-tank in heroics for long enough for the tank to taunt the mob off me, particularly if it was a caster mob. Sadly 15sec is too short to fulfill this very useful though very limited OT role) but I still feel Shamanistic Rage suilts our role in the party better than Spiritual Attunement.

Spiritual Attunement is a tanking type skill, meant to give time for healers to top off a tank before they go down when they sustained a heavy load of burst damage. If an enhancement shaman is utilizing this skill with enough regularity to merit putting talent points in it, either their tank sucks or they have no clue how to avoid aggro (granted, without the spiritual weapons talent, it'd be considerably harder to avoid pulling aggro while doing any dps at all!)

Your Static Shock ability looks good, its just in the wrong tree. What purpose would a talent that only impacts on Chain Lightning have, so deep in the Enhancement Talent Tree? This really belongs in the Elemental tree, if you ask me.

I feel these issues need to be addressed before the tree will become viable.

[Zmrzlinar]

it would be cool if we have some 2h weapon talents(to make it viable in pvp for example)
too bad we have too many on hit abilities which makes 2h crapy(malestrom, static shock, ....) even for pvp
maybe this is the thing blizz should think about

[Moar Pew Pew]

it would be cool if we have some 2h weapon talents(to make it viable in pvp for example)
too bad we have too many on hit abilities which makes 2h crapy(malestrom, static shock, ....) even for pvp
maybe this is the thing blizz should think about

Enhancement Shamans waited a very long time for dual wielding. Lets try not to take a step back...

[Karpalo]

How about titan grip instead of feral spirits :P

[Zmrzlinar]

Enhancement Shamans waited a very long time for dual wielding. Lets try not to take a step back...

some were waiting for dual wielding, others were waiting for 2h to become better
i like dw, but it would be nice if we could have a choice, a real choice, not stupid choice as its now

[Maenetus]

WotLK two hand maces and axes have Str on them
besides feral staffs there are no physical DPS staffs in WotLK
And shaman don't use pole arms

in other words in WotLK enhancement shaman using staffs will be even less of an option.

[Themessiah]

This is just an idea, but perhaps it would be better to tweak the original tree, and work within that frame, than to just effectively 'start again'?

[Scalptus]

some were waiting for dual wielding, others were waiting for 2h to become better
i like dw, but it would be nice if we could have a choice, a real choice, not stupid choice as its now

You cant have a choice, cuz its nearly impossible to make something EXACTLY balanced, like...

Fury warr vs Pve MS warrior

sure PVe ms warr can do ok damage, and gives 4% more damage to raid, but every1 goes fury cuz it does better damage

or perfect example - Affliction lock vs Destro lock

people go affliction while they start raiding, but as soon as you get passed kara / gruuls / magtheridon your done with it, and its useless, and now you need to build a new set of gear for destro. so why go affliction in the first place...?

[Luk3ling]

Taking into account advice from fellow shamans and from the posts here, I'm actively making tweaks to the tree that should be up soon.

@ Luk3ling:

Some of the things you put into your tree break the standard talent tree rules that Blizzard follows. Your 'Savage Combat' skill needs to be attached to Storm Strike at the very least.

Actually, I intended to do exactly that for it, And planned to change Heavy Weapon Specialization to a crit damage bonus, I just didn't do so before I published.

Tieing Dual-Wield to Storm Strike is unnecessary, imho.

Whether it needs to be tied to anything can be the focus of an entire debate, but I agree.

You've removed Spirit Weapons, which takes away both our parry skill and our only (non-windshock) aggro reduction. Not good. Definately not good.

If you read through the notes, Parry is now trained in early levels and the threat reduction was rolled into the class as a whole, and also applies to Instant Cast spells. (But weakened to make Wind Shock that much more important)

It appears you aim to beef up Two handed weapons to make them viable. Savagery looks like it would be really good for doing that, though caution would need to be taken to make sure it isn't either over or under powered.

I just want them to have a place again really, and it seem like the clearest way to give players a REAL choice in which talents they want and who they want their character to be.

Spiritual Attunement is a tanking type skill, meant to give time for healers to top off a tank before they go down when they sustained a heavy load of burst damage. If an enhancement shaman is utilizing this skill with enough regularity to merit putting talent points in it, either their tank sucks or they have no clue how to avoid aggro

Spiritual Attunement was added pretty exclusively with PvP in mind. 90% of Enhancement Arena goers -Do not- want Maelstrom Weapon, and that's understandable. Between Spectral Transformation and Spiritual Attunement, a team would finally have to think twice about whether to focus the Shaman first.
[/quote]

Your Static Shock ability looks good, its just in the wrong tree. What purpose would a talent that only impacts on Chain Lightning have, so deep in the Enhancement Talent Tree? This really belongs in the Elemental tree, if you ask me.

Static Shock was born with PvP and personal choice in mind. With Static Shock CL would make a good alernative to using Frost Shock, and thus keeping your interrupt ready in case it becomes needed.

You cant have a choice, cuz its nearly impossible to make something EXACTLY balanced...

I'm not even trying to make 2H balanced to be equal to Dual Wield. That wouldn't be anything resembling realistic.

[Gomexus]

Your changes are too spread out and unfocused. Half of them are related to other talents and the other half are related to 2h weps.

Your new melee attack would end up being less helpful as far as applying a shock's secondary effect. Frost shock is used to catch up, earth shock is used to interrupt...both of these are usually needed when the target is away from you...not in melee range. Given it's long CD and sub-par damage it would also be hard to fit into a rotation of any kind. It would get sat on until you missed an earth shock on a priest and could use this as back-up.

Your shamanistic focus change is WAY to strong. Don't justify it by saying shock costs are not reduced anymore because regen'ing 250-300(assuming a modest 2k AP at 80) mana every crit is insane. With this talent we would never go below 50% mana using Shock/SS/Mael and Rolling Thunder.

Spirit Wolves are gonna be garbage if you wanna suggest something in their place just get rid of them.

Flurry change is not needed...there are few times when flurry is not up the whole fight...30% speed 3hits > 20% speed 5 hits.

Increase mana reduction of Imp GW Talent and just remove the movement impair reduction. Elem/Resto are not meant to have it thats why it is so far down our tree right now...increase mana redux to 15/30% and be done with it. Elem Resto won't spec for it anyway since they wont be using it to get out of snare's/root's. 30% is a large enough margin for enh to be able to take advantage of spec trans more often.

Spiritual Attunement sucks for PvP. Having a healer handy when stunned or below 30% is not always an option. If you want to add something for survivability then add a straight dmg decrease...dmg reflect...magic reflect/redux. Atm if your healer is CC'd you gain absolutely no benefit from a 5 point tier 9 talent...it's trash as you have it now. Hell even making it return 6/12/18/24/30% of dmg received to the attacker/caster while stunned or under 30% would be an awesome change.

You have some good ideas...better than I could probably do...but I am better at telling others whats wrong than doing it myself =P

[Luk3ling]

Your changes are too spread out and unfocused. Half of them are related to other talents and the other half are related to 2h weps.

Your new melee attack would end up being less helpful as far as applying a shock's secondary effect. Frost shock is used to catch up, earth shock is used to interrupt...both of these are usually needed when the target is away from you...not in melee range. Given it's long CD and sub-par damage it would also be hard to fit into a rotation of any kind. It would get sat on until you missed an earth shock on a priest and could use this as back-up.

Your shamanistic focus change is WAY to strong. Don't justify it by saying shock costs are not reduced anymore because regen'ing 250-300(assuming a modest 2k AP at 80) mana every crit is insane. With this talent we would never go below 50% mana using Shock/SS/Mael and Rolling Thunder.

Spirit Wolves are gonna be garbage if you wanna suggest something in their place just get rid of them.

Flurry change is not needed...there are few times when flurry is not up the whole fight...30% speed 3hits > 20% speed 5 hits.

Increase mana reduction of Imp GW Talent and just remove the movement impair reduction. Elem/Resto are not meant to have it thats why it is so far down our tree right now...increase mana redux to 15/30% and be done with it. Elem Resto won't spec for it anyway since they wont be using it to get out of snare's/root's. 30% is a large enough margin for enh to be able to take advantage of spec trans more often.

Spiritual Attunement sucks for PvP. Having a healer handy when stunned or below 30% is not always an option. If you want to add something for survivability then add a straight dmg decrease...dmg reflect...magic reflect/redux. Atm if your healer is CC'd you gain absolutely no benefit from a 5 point tier 9 talent...it's trash as you have it now. Hell even making it return 6/12/18/24/30% of dmg received to the attacker/caster while stunned or under 30% would be an awesome change.

You have some good ideas...better than I could probably do...but I am better at telling others whats wrong than doing it myself =P

"Your changes are too spread out and unfocused."
Elaborate.

Shamanistic Focus: is a complete mistake, I didn't think about changing it at all, actually, I imported what I thought was a beta-accurate talent tree. It'll be fixed ASAP.

Spiritual Attunement: I basically just have to disagree. Maybe I should tag Fear or Charm into the effects that activate it, but Spiritual Attunement would be far superior to Maelstrom Weapon in Arena.

If you read the Restoration tree (Which is notes and clarification) Ghost Wolves have a Damage Reflection mechanic on it. Fully stacked it reflects 25% of healing back to healers as damage. Scar Spirit is a Ghost Wolf passive.

Flurry: Taking into account the inclusion of Savagery, 45%(65% with WFT) haste with a 2-hander MIGHT be a little much combined with other talents.

Spirit Wolves
I'd much rather keep them and just make them worthwhile, just discarding them is a waste, and Blizzard wouldn't consider it at this point.

Rolling Thunder
You may be right about this.

[Gomexus]

Something I was just thinking of to replace wolves might be kinda cool...it would need some tweaking but it would kinda tie in all aspects of our class and fix some problems we have...


Spiritual Medium

Whenever the shaman has an active totem affecting them they gain a benefit depending on the type of totem:

Earth: The shaman receives 10% less damage from physical attacks.

Fire: The shaman deals 5% extra dmg with all attacks and spells.

Water: Critical attacks and spells have a chance to restore 15% of the shamans AP. (big chance semi long internal CD...like 20% chance with a 15sec internal CD.

Air: The shaman receives 10% less damage from magical attacks.

Basically if you take the time to lay all four totems and stay in range you will get:

10% less dmg taken from all sources
5% more damage dealt
Chance on Crit to restore mana

Seems to me like a pretty neat idea. It would definitely make totems alot more important for PvE and PvP, and also make killing totems alot more important for your opponents in PvP. If they also fix totem killing macro's to the point that the opposing player actually has to put forth some effort to kill them then this would be a very good talent.

It would be along the lines of the new Marksman talent for stings and the already existing warlock talents in demonology for pet types. It would have the drawback of remaining in range of the totems and re-dropping them if they are destroyed. Seems pretty balanced imho but i dunno.

[Gomexus]

"Your changes are too spread out and unfocused."
Elaborate.

Too many points that affect other talents and not baseline skills and/or dps/survivability. Too many points included to make 2h worthwhile.

Shamanistic Focus: is a complete mistake, I didn't think about changing it at all, actually, I imported what I thought was a beta-accurate talent tree. It'll be fixed ASAP.

Heh when I first saw it I was like "omg OP much!"

Spiritual Attunement: I basically just have to disagree. Maybe I should tag Fear or Charm into the effects that activate it, but Spiritual Attunement would be far superior to Maelstrom Weapon in Arena.

If you read the Restoration tree (Which is notes and clarification) Ghost Wolves have a Damage Reflection mechanic on it. Fully stacked it reflects 25% of healing back to healers as damage. Scar Spirit is a Ghost Wolf passive.

Maybe I read it wrong but what I took it as was that whenever the shaman gets stunned or is below 30% health...whenever a heal is cast on them it heals them for 30% more. What I meant was that if you do not have a healer around...or he/she is CC'd when you are below 30% or stunned...then this talent does no good at all. The only time this talent is worthwhile is when you CAN be healed while stunned or under 30%. The times that this talent would be beneficial are few and far between.

Flurry: Taking into account the inclusion of Savagery, 45%(65% with WFT) haste with a 2-hander MIGHT be a little much combined with other talents.

True...I see the reason for the change now. As I said above though making changes and/or adding things to make 2h weps viable may not be the best course of action. The only class in the game atm that sticks with 2h'ers for raw dps is paladins because they do not have DW. For pure dps DW is superior across the board for all classes...even in pvp. War's use two Handers to combine burst with MS...for all out dps they still do better with DW.

[/b]Spirit Wolves[/b]
I'd much rather keep them and just make them worthwhile, just discarding them is a waste, and Blizzard wouldn't consider it at this point.

I highly doubt they will scrap them either, I just have alot of issues with a micro-management pet on a long CD.

[/b]Rolling Thunder[/b]
You may be right about this.

It can be good just needs some tweaking...especially with the CD.

[Luk3ling]

I highly doubt they will scrap them either, I just have alot of issues with a micro-management pet on a long CD.

Me too, that's why I removed the duration and cooldown but increased the mana cost. if I tweak it properly, the wolves will always be at your sie ready to do your bidding unless they're killed.

Their personal DPS is lower for the cooldown and duration removal, and they're primarily there exclusively for utility until Shadow Assault comes in to the picture for PvE.




[/quote]

Something I was just thinking of to replace wolves might be kinda cool...it would need some tweaking but it would kinda tie in all aspects of our class and fix some problems we have...


Spiritual Medium

Whenever the shaman has an active totem affecting them they gain a benefit depending on the type of totem:

Earth: The shaman receives 10% less damage from physical attacks.

Fire: The shaman deals 5% extra dmg with all attacks and spells.

Water: Critical attacks and spells have a chance to restore 15% of the shamans AP. (big chance semi long internal CD...like 20% chance with a 15sec internal CD.

Air: The shaman receives 10% less damage from magical attacks.

Basically if you take the time to lay all four totems and stay in range you will get:

10% less dmg taken from all sources
5% more damage dealt
Chance on Crit to restore mana

Seems to me like a pretty neat idea. It would definitely make totems alot more important for PvE and PvP, and also make killing totems alot more important for your opponents in PvP. If they also fix totem killing macro's to the point that the opposing player actually has to put forth some effort to kill them then this would be a very good talent.

It would be along the lines of the new Marksman talent for stings and the already existing warlock talents in demonology for pet types. It would have the drawback of remaining in range of the totems and re-dropping them if they are destroyed. Seems pretty balanced imho but i dunno.

The steps they're taking to fix totem killing macros is pretty much nothing more than making Stoneclaw Totem 'protect' other totems. Whether that means Stoneclaw takes damage instead or whether all totems have a chance to stun when attacked while Stoneclaw is active doesn't matter really, Stoneclaw is earth as is Tremor, meaning it's not worth a whole lot.

I personally like my idea for Feral Spirit and think they could work out well if maybe we had a way to recall and heal them or if they had a sizeable amount of HP. Something like 30% of the Shaman.

[Gomexus]

The steps they're taking to fix totem killing macros is pretty much nothing more than making Stoneclaw Totem 'protect' other totems. Whether that means Stoneclaw takes damage instead or whether all totems have a chance to stun when attacked while Stoneclaw is active doesn't matter really, Stoneclaw is earth as is Tremor, meaning it's not worth a whole lot.

I personally like my idea for Feral Spirit and think they could work out well if maybe we had a way to recall and heal them or if they had a sizeable amount of HP. Something like 30% of the Shaman.

Feral spirit could be good if they design it similar to what you are saying. Something similar to a warlocks fel hound...not alot of dmg...but tons of utility.

I'd still like to see some kind of tie in with totems and making them important. I guess my idea is loosely based on the T6 Elem 2pc bonus that gives boosts if a totem of each type is active. Whether it replaces wolves or not is moot to me. I'd just like to see them give us some survival. I realize though that it will come at a price and imo totem range and frailty is a fair price to pay.

[Scalptus]

Feral spirit could be good if they design it similar to what you are saying. Something similar to a warlocks fel hound...not alot of dmg...but tons of utility.

Or what about mages water elemental could be more of a better similarity, considering theyre a last talent spell

that would be AWESOME

they'd have so much utility and do so much dmg = gg