Totem Talk: Tier 12 through an enhancement shaman's eyes
by Josh Myers 
May 7th 2011 at 6:00PM
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. On Saturdays, Josh Myers tackles the hard questions about enhancement. Can we tank? Can we DPS with a two-hander? How does one shoot web? The answer to the first two is "no," and roll a hunter for the third!
Enhancement is a spec that has struggled with its tier bonuses in the past. Back in The Burning Crusade, we had such gems as tier 5's Your melee attacks have a chance to reduce the cast time of your next Healing Surge by 1.5 seconds, a bonus that provided absolutely no benefit to DPS beyond allowing us to live through a sticky situation. In Wrath of the Lich King, tier 8 gave us one of our best bonuses of all time: Increases the frequency of Maelstrom Weapon being triggered by your melee attacks by 20%. A patch later, tier 9 saw us unfortunately dropping that bonus for the overly boring and terribly mediocre An additional 3% chance to proc your Static Shock talent.
Cataclysm hasn't been significantly better so far. On the one hand, our current two-piece bonus is amazing. It gives us a 10% increase to Lava Lash, our hardest-hitting and highest-priority ability, as well as slightly buffing Stormstrike. At the same time, our four-piece bonus is 10% critical strike chance to just Lightning Bolt. This bonus isn't terrible in and of itself, but it's coupled with terrible itemization on both the legs and the chestpieces and bad itemization on the gloves. Most enhancement shaman will find best in slot is heroic tier 11 helm and shoulders, Heroic Tunic of Failed Experiments, Twilight Scale Leggings, and Heroic Proto-Handler's Gauntlets. Four-piece tier 11 need not apply.
Wednesday night, set bonuses for tier 12 were discovered on the 4.2 Public Test Realm. In an awesome twist, Blizzard themed all of the set bonuses around the raid they will drop in, the Firelands. Classes like death knights that don't already have fire spells to work with receive passive bonuses like Your critical strikes with melee abilities deal 15% additional damage as Fire damage over 4 sec. Specs like elemental, which already have fiery moves to work with, get set bonuses like Your offensive spells have a chance to reset the remaining cooldown on your Fire Elemental Totem, seamlessly weaving the theme of the raid with the class' abilities. Enhancement, which uses a surprising number of fire abilities itself, falls under this second category.
Enhancement is a spec that has struggled with its tier bonuses in the past. Back in The Burning Crusade, we had such gems as tier 5's Your melee attacks have a chance to reduce the cast time of your next Healing Surge by 1.5 seconds, a bonus that provided absolutely no benefit to DPS beyond allowing us to live through a sticky situation. In Wrath of the Lich King, tier 8 gave us one of our best bonuses of all time: Increases the frequency of Maelstrom Weapon being triggered by your melee attacks by 20%. A patch later, tier 9 saw us unfortunately dropping that bonus for the overly boring and terribly mediocre An additional 3% chance to proc your Static Shock talent.
Cataclysm hasn't been significantly better so far. On the one hand, our current two-piece bonus is amazing. It gives us a 10% increase to Lava Lash, our hardest-hitting and highest-priority ability, as well as slightly buffing Stormstrike. At the same time, our four-piece bonus is 10% critical strike chance to just Lightning Bolt. This bonus isn't terrible in and of itself, but it's coupled with terrible itemization on both the legs and the chestpieces and bad itemization on the gloves. Most enhancement shaman will find best in slot is heroic tier 11 helm and shoulders, Heroic Tunic of Failed Experiments, Twilight Scale Leggings, and Heroic Proto-Handler's Gauntlets. Four-piece tier 11 need not apply.
Wednesday night, set bonuses for tier 12 were discovered on the 4.2 Public Test Realm. In an awesome twist, Blizzard themed all of the set bonuses around the raid they will drop in, the Firelands. Classes like death knights that don't already have fire spells to work with receive passive bonuses like Your critical strikes with melee abilities deal 15% additional damage as Fire damage over 4 sec. Specs like elemental, which already have fiery moves to work with, get set bonuses like Your offensive spells have a chance to reset the remaining cooldown on your Fire Elemental Totem, seamlessly weaving the theme of the raid with the class' abilities. Enhancement, which uses a surprising number of fire abilities itself, falls under this second category.
Two-piece bonus
The enhancement two-piece bonus is worth salivating over. When you read it, you should literally drool on your keyboard and then write a strongly worded letter to Blizzard nominating the equipment design team for president of the world. The set bonus? Your Lava Lash gains an additional 5% damage increase per application of Searing Flames on the target.
For the less multiplication inclined, that is a 25% bonus on top of our already hardest-hitting ability. That is 15% more than we're getting from our current two-piece, provided we're Lava Lashing at five stacks of Searing Flames. While this bonus shines a little less on fights like Cho'gall, when you often will Lava Lash the Corrupting Adherent without switching your Searing Totem off Cho'gall, it will be absolutely amazing for single-target DPS phases.
If Blizzard follows its tier policy of tier 11 and makes hands, legs, and chest available from valor points, we'll be able to keep our excellently itemized tier 11 shoulders and helm and grab tier 12 pieces for our legs, chest, and hands. Since those pieces are currently either filled with the terribly itemized tier 11 pieces or well-itemized off-set pieces that give no bonus, replacing them with T12 won't be sad at all. My prediction is that early best in slot for Patch 4.2 will be Spaulders of the Raging Elements, Helmet of the Raging Elements, Twilight Scale Leggings, and tier 12 hands and chest, depending on how well those two pieces are itemized. That is, of course, only best in slot until we get to the four-piece bonus.
Four-piece bonus
The tier 12 four-piece for enhancement is also awesome, but it's a slightly understated awesome: Your Stormstrike ability also increases Fire damage you deal to that target by 6%. At first glance, this seems underwhelming, until you consider that enhancement actually does a ton of fire damage. Lava Lash, Flame Shock, Unleash Flame, and Flametongue Weapon hits will all benefit from this fire damage increase, as will any Fire Nova's from targets next to the Stormstriked enemy. If Searing Totem benefits from the damage increase as well, the bonus becomes even more awesome.
To me, there is only one real downside to these bonuses. We haven't yet seen models or stat makeups of shaman tier, and with these excellent bonuses, we know we'll be using the pieces anyway. Right now, we have to take it on faith that this tier is gear we're going to look good in and hope that Blizzard doesn't decide to be mean and itemize all five pieces with crit rating and haste.
Show your totemic mastery by reading Totem Talk: Enhancement every week. We've got enhancement-specific advice on rep gear, heroic gear, and raiding gear, plus tips on maximizing your utility skills and tactics for raiding Blackwing Descent.
Filed under: Shaman, (Shaman) Totem Talk, Cataclysm
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Arkensis May 8th 2011 2:28PM
WTB Elemental Column? Anyone...?
Angus May 7th 2011 6:54PM
Sat is enhance. Another columnist does elemental. I don't remember what day she has.
ddaz May 7th 2011 7:12PM
I agree. There has not been an elemental column in over a month.
Eldoron May 7th 2011 7:12PM
There is one >
danielabrems May 7th 2011 7:40PM
Now, now. I'm sure there's a valid reason.
Eldoron May 7th 2011 7:14PM
Man, I feel the same, I really hope this one will look good. T11 was'nt bad, but.. wasn't very good either.
Crispn May 7th 2011 7:37PM
I have an enhancement question... Ive been using Claw of Torment and Maimgor's bite for my weps, but recently got the Claw of Agony offhand. Is the proc from the wep set (1000 haste) worth losing the agility from Maimgor's?
Saeadame May 7th 2011 7:45PM
Doesn't haste really suck for enh?
Crispn May 7th 2011 7:48PM
yes, but curious if the large amount of instant haste would raise dps.
Josh Myers May 7th 2011 8:03PM
Haste really sucks for enhancement, as does strength. Maimgor's Bite is our best in slot mainhand until Heroic Nefarian, regardless of set bonus.
Eldoron May 8th 2011 9:53AM
Some theorycrafting here: if haste really sucks, why does the wind buff of the drake boss in Vortex pinnacle boost enha dps so much? It gives me 6k more I think
Nopunin10did May 8th 2011 10:06AM
I can speak to this.
The haste buff is fun, but I'm getting better performance overall from Maimgor's/Torment than I did with Agony/Torment.
Nopunin10did May 8th 2011 10:09AM
@Eldoron
It's not that haste itself sucks. The buff from the wind boss increases your haste by a sizable percentage, and you will see a dps upswing. Bloodlust still makes you dps like a fiend.
The problem is that haste rating increase haste percentage at such a low rate that it is flat-out uncompetitive when you look at other rating stats, particularly mastery.
When enhancement shaman say "haste sucks", it's not that it's a lousy stat in of itself. It's that there are far better ones for the same item level budget.
Kagitaar May 7th 2011 9:55PM
My fear is the with all this loveliness Lava Lash is going to face the Ret Paly treatment. I can just hear the whines of morons who hug our friendly fire stick and drool, while we bash their brains in with a 60k LL.
Josh Myers May 7th 2011 11:47PM
The likelihood of that happening is incredibly slim. Lava Lash on it's own is not that easy to set up in PvP, and then on top of that you'd have to wear at least two pieces of PvE gear...four for max Lava Lashness. Giving up that much resilience for tier bonuses would not be a good thing.
wyrmofthesea May 8th 2011 4:45PM
I'm not saying the scenario is common or easy to set up, I'm saying morons are morons and I've seen much stupider things from Bliz regarding PvP. I've had my enh forever and ret since BC, just a touch gun shy.
Saz May 7th 2011 11:33PM
For once the enhancement tier bonuses made me quite happy in the pants. Can't wait to see the models for this set, nor can I wait to see the bonuses in action.
Sotton_knite May 8th 2011 9:20AM
When I first saw the set bonus I was really pleased. I still am fairly pleased with them but looking at other class set bonus got me thinking about swapping out the 4 piece bonus for something like:
Your LL has a chance to summon a flaming spirit wolf that does something cool
boss May 9th 2011 12:44PM
"Your LL has a chance to summon a flaming spirit wolf that does something cool"
I'd really love to see this tooltip in-game ;D
Cad May 9th 2011 5:09PM
I'm stuck between elemental and enhancement on my shaman. I'm in a 10 man raid guild with two melee DPS (Rogue and Warrior), myself, a mage or warlock and a shadow priest. Both of my armor sets are getting pretty close in ilvl but my elemental set is a bit better. I'm trying to do my best for the raid in putting out as much DPS as I can, however, I'm concerned that if I go Enhancement for good it's going to put more stress on the raid with 1 less ranged DPS.
Is enhancement really so much better DPS than elemental that I should consider the going enhancement? Or is raid balance more important? Any ideas appreciated.