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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsCataclysm Beta: Enhancement talent preview
by Rich Maloy 
Jul 15th 2010 at 6:00PM
The way things stand now, leveling as enhancement doesn't feel like enhancement until the 30s, when we get Windfury, or 40s, when we currently get Dual Wield. That stretch of 20s and 30s really is rough right now, if you are true to the path of enhancement. Heck, even Faience from Choose My Adventure is feeling the pain of the lack of enhancement in the 20s. But no more! We will be enhancement from the beginning with dual wield plus hit, attack power conversion to spellpower and an off-hand attack!
The talent tree is highly streamlined, but with only 41 talent points to spend, we won't be painting the trees with points. I don't see any tough choices in the enhancement tree, and getting down to Feral Spirit should be easy with something like 0/31/0. The last 10 points could look something like 8/33/0, but that remains to be seen.
Ancestral Swiftness
Ancestral Swiftness will be amazing. On the recent Raid Warning shaman roundtable podcast, Rouncer and Juggy -- two enhancers who I respect a lot -- both emphasized the importance of run speed. We were talking about these things before the revised trees were released; at that time, Improved Ghost Wolf and Ancestral Swiftness were separate talents. They both said they'd max both out, even if it meant sacrificing points in passive damage components. The new combined talent is a perfect example of removing talent tree bloat and making each talent point impactful.
Mana regen
Primal Wisdom will be our big mana-returning talent. With this, we'll be gulping down goblets of mana squeezed from the pain we inflict on our foes. Drink it up, brothers and sisters, drink it up. Will our cup runneth over?
On a recent enhance simulation using the latest EnhSim, I had 110 procs per minute (PPM) for white damage, with 13.44% melee haste from gems and gear, before raid buffs. With a 40% chance to proc, that would give me 44 PPM of Primal Wisdom. Since I'm not in the beta *coughBlizzardinvitemepleasecough*, I'll just use my current mana levels to finish the calculation. I'm at 5,976 base mana, 5% of which is 299, which means at 44 PPM I'll have 13,156 mana return per minute. With no intellect on melee gear, we can expect our mana levels to stay around baseline; thus at those levels, we should be able to refill our mana pools 2.2 times per minute with continuous attacks.
Comparing Wrath to beta is not the ideal way to sim this stuff out, but with Primal Wisdom, Mental Quickness reducing the cost of instant-cast spells and Shamanistic Rage still in full force, our little blue bars should stay full.
Rotation
Our rotation hasn't been simplified yet, though. From all I can, tell we'll still be cooldown-starved at all times. Don't get me wrong, I love that about enhancement; it's one of my favorite things. Even in those rare moments when absolutely everything that could be on cooldown is on cooldown, even then I have something to do: refresh Lightning Shield or Magma Totem.
It looks like we'll drop from our rotation:
- Magma Totem replaced with Searing Totem
- Fire Nova does not work with Searing Totem
And adding to the selection of spells for enhancement:
- Searing Totem, as noted above
- Maelstrom Weapon Lava Bursts
- Unleash Elements
- Spirit Walker's Grace to use on the move
One talent that has piqued my curiosity is Elemental Precision. The spirit portion of this talent is a waste for us, but would the extra hit for fire, frost and nature spells boost our damage more than Call of Flame? It's too early to tell, and no doubt we'll have many revisions between now and then.
PvP
Lastly, I'll speculate a bit about enhancement in PvP, though I am admittedly not much of a PvPer these days. As I'm experimenting with builds, I wonder if Searing Flames and Improved Lava Lash will be worth taking at the sacrifice of some defensive abilities. Also, how many points should we put in Totemic Vigor? Will one point be enough to prevent drive-by totem killing, or will be need a full two points? An enhancement PvP spec could look something like 7/34/0.
Also, did you notice Frozen Power is gone? No more snare? Sure, we'll get an additional slow from Unleashed Weapon: Frostbrand, but we lose the damage buff and root effect. Plus Frostbrand is still not included in Elemental Weapons. This needs more development; I will surely miss the loss of the snare effect.
What do you think of the talents thus far? What would you like to see?
May all your hits be crits!
Reader Comments (Page 2 of 2)
tonyplus Jul 15th 2010 11:30PM
SaintStryfe was referring to the shield on the specialization select screen, which is the icon for lightning shield.
alpha5099 Jul 15th 2010 7:48PM
I am in god damn love with Ancestral Swiftness. I want to make sweet, sweet love to it. It is a great talent, it makes one of my favorite Shaman abilities actually useful, and it has, for my money, one of the greatest icons in the whole game.
My one and only concern, and this is only a problem from a leveling perspective, is that it's kinda high in the tree. As it currently stands, we can be wholly specced into Improved Ghost Wolf as soon as we hit 16 and can train it. But under the current talent paradigm, with Ancestral Swiftness in the second tier, we can't pick it up till level 21 or 22 (depending on when we'll be getting our talent points; Wowhead's assuming the second point is at 11). I would really love to see Ancestral Swiftness put in the first tier, maybe switching places with Elemental Weapons.
Also, what exactly is the status of our weapon imbues at low levels? According to Wowhead we're still getting Flametongue at 10 and Windfury at 30, but Frostbrand's been bumped up to 26, Earthliving's been put off till 54 and Rockbiter is insanely placed at 75. Before the talent overhaul was announced, there was some speculation that our imbues might become unique, although that was mainly to counter Resto and Ele speccing into DW, a problem we obviously no longer have. But the imbues have not been made unique, right? So we'll be running around with double Flametongue at 10, possibly popping Frostbrand on the main hand during that stretch from 26 to 29 before we get Windfury?
Boobah Jul 16th 2010 2:40AM
The biggest reason they wanted to make imbues unique was to prevent enhancement shamans from using Windfury on both weapons; without the internal cooldown, it has the potential for too much burst, but the cooldown causes problems, too.
Rail Jul 15th 2010 8:35PM
Also with the new ability Primal Strike at lvl 3 makes you feel OP while leveling.
Angrycelt Jul 15th 2010 8:55PM
I'm leveling my first shammy ever... I've felt OP for ages as it is!
Jackwraith Jul 15th 2010 10:07PM
Overall, my concern isn't with the Enhance tree in particular, but with all of them: Where is the variety? Where are the "interesting choices" that GC and the devs emphasized with this overhaul? I look at the early tiers of the 3 shaman trees and see numbers: +2% damage here, +3% chance there. The only choices are when something shows up that is obviously PvP or sub-par (like Nature's Guardian) and that "choice" is to not take something that isn't worth the points.
Furthermore, the talent path is still perfectly predictable. It's very clear what will be the required path to maximize DPS for both Enhance and Elemental and to maximize efficient healing for Resto. There are no "choices" here. If anything, there are fewer because of the present paucity of available points.
If Blizzard wanted to narrow it down to 30 specs and eliminate the bloat, then they've done so. Congratulations. If they wanted people to make interesting choices, perhaps the first place to start would be to take the obvious talents in the 1st tier of each tree that don't belong there for that spec (like Elemental Devastation) and move them into the spec that will doubtlessly take them. Why waste time with obvious "choices"? Is any Enhance shaman NOT going to take Ele Dev?
Also, I like the concept behind Ancestral Swiftness, but if GW can be used indoors, then the other half of the talent (increased footspeed) is superfluous. It's just like GW is now but in reverse: you'll use the the increased footspeed for the 3 levels it take to get another talent point and then you'll use nothing but GW because it becomes instant cast and moves you faster (in the same way that we now use GW for 4 levels (2 hours of play) before hitting 20 and getting a mount that moves faster.) So, in essence, we're paying 2 talent points to make GW instant-cast (just like now) and moving a little faster for 3 levels prior to that. The upside of this is that GW is now usable indoors, so it comes out OK in the end, but it's also costing us 2 even-scarcer talent points to do that. It just bespeaks a lack of focus overall.
Granted, first iteration, plenty of changes to be made, etc, etc. But what I see in most of the spec trees is, like the first go-round of Cataclysm changes, a lack of the vision that the project is presented with: still mandatory "choices", still a lack of variety amongst specs, still a bunch of talents that do nothing but tweak numbers. That's not what we were told we were getting.
LB Jul 15th 2010 10:27PM
Increased movement outside of Ghost Wolf form not useful? Are you high?
Increased movement outside of Ghost Wolf form will help with loads of stuff, for multiple classes! Enh Shamans will be able to stay on target easier, and will be able to catch up to fleeing targets easier, making kiting of that spec harder, and Ele Shamans will have an easier time kiting, and let's not forget Spiritwalker's Grace now...
RockDwg Jul 16th 2010 12:16AM
thought they were going to Bring back the SHAMMY Tank for Cat. But guess not....this make me sad
Boobah Jul 16th 2010 2:44AM
Where'd that come from? Shammy tanking was dead and buried back in BC, gimmicks with overgeared toons notwithstanding. The only bit of 'hope' for that was one aspect of one spell, and the blues jumped right on that speculation and said, quite clearly, 'no.'
nemeleisis Jul 16th 2010 4:28AM
Why only WotLK shaman skills are missing? ......
I didn't see i.e. druid skills missing, they have been compressed together in different talents.
and oh yes ..... this is realy stupid ......
/delete magma totem
/searing totem replace magama totem
/fire nova doesn't work with searing totem
so what they wanna' say is: no more AoE for enhancement shamans.....
and second ..... what if people play without dual wield ..... they get only 1 specialisation bonus?!
I hope this is not final!
Tushar Bharadia Jul 16th 2010 5:29AM
Sounds so much like trolling, but fuck it, I'm bored.
You still have Magma totem. If you'd actually bothered to read the article, you'd see that Searing replaces it in single target scenarios.
Also, if you're playing Enhancement without dual wielding specialisation, you're doing it wrong.
nemeleisis Jul 16th 2010 4:46AM
I agree with you about the lack of choice.... but the increased movement speed is a very good thing ...... GW triggers a global cooldown ..... it's ok if you want a little more speed to catch up with someone or to escape slowing effects, but don't compare 100% of 15% increased movement speed with time spent on trigering GW, time wasted with global cooldown and the fact thet you will exit GW when any skill is cast.
More .... it's logical that the 15% increased movement speed will remain when you are slowed in GW ..... because you keep 100% of normal movement speed ...... wich now is 115% ......
So the talent is a very good improvement but ....as you said ....very predictable.