Totem Talk: The enhancement shaman of 2011
by Josh Myers 
Jan 7th 2012 at 8:00PM
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. Josh Myers once only tackled the hard questions about enhancement but has recently expanded his sphere of responsibility to all shaman DPS specs. (And no, two-handed enhancement is still never coming back.)
One of the nicest things about 2011 for enhancement was that it wasn't 2010 any more. If you've been an avid reader of my column, you probably know by now that I think that 2010 will most likely (and hopefully) go down in history as the year in which Blizzard tried and was often successful at driving droves of enhancement shaman away from the class in masse. An overcomplicated rotation that still gave us the worst single-target DPS of any spec in the game, terrible mobility, lack of scaling from armor penetration (worst. stat. ever.), absolutely zero competitive AoE DPS ... The list of the bad things about the Icecrown Citadel/Ruby Sanctum era is worth an article in and of itself. In fact, I think we've done a number of those in the past.
So one of the best things about 2011 was the changes made to address a lot of those issues. Ancestral Swiftness gave us the normal bonus run speed that classes like ret paladins received, and since Ghost Wolf was changed to be usable indoors, we're much better at maximizing time on target. Armor penetration was thankfully removed from the game (coincidentally, I'm fairly certain that 4.0 saw a significant drop in headache medicines to WoW players), and the awesomely cool mastery stat was added in its place.
AoE was reworked multiple times, and 4.3's final iteration is actually very potent, particularly on longer-lasting packs of mobs such as heroic Madness of Deathwing or Yor'sajh the Unsleeping. Our priority system was also reworked to be less strenuous on your fingers, but that's mostly just led to our filling in gaps with Lightning Bolts at three or four stacks of Maelstrom Weapon.
All in all, 2011 was actually not that bad of a year for enhancement, but that's partly because anything would have been better than Wrath of the Lich King enhancement.
Where we are now
This isn't to say enhancement didn't have its downsides this year. After all, we sort of hijacked the DPS-focused Ask the Devs thread back in June, and we did organize the People for the Ethical Treatment of Shaman movement. We had a lot of grievances to air in those days! Our AoE was still in a miserable place and would stay that way until nearly the end of the year. Spellpower weapons also dominated this year. With their being the weapon of choice during early tier 11 and the Eye of Purification being BiS throughout Firelands, between a third to a half of this year was spent with spellpower weapons being our best main-hand choice.
What does the future need to hold for enhancement?
Enhancement still has some very glaring issues that we're hoping to see addressed in the future. Overall, the spec is in a fine place right now, offering competitive single-target damage, solid long-term AoE damage, and powerful group utility, be it in personal damage reduction, buffs, or heals. However, due to the nasty beast known as stat scaling, it's impossible to predict whether single-target DPS that's competitive one patch will be as competitive the next.
Quite simply, there needs to be a change made that allows us to benefit from crit or haste. Currently, we hit cap at 1,742 hit rating, expertise cap at 540, and then stack mastery to infinity and beyond. Unfortunately, due to our sharing gear with hunters, mastery doesn't always show up on our off-set pieces, but the leftover crit/haste pieces that do show up are incredibly bad for us. Even for pieces that do have mastery on them, if the other stat isn't hit or expertise we get slightly annoyed.
But that's not all enhancement would like to see addressed. There's also our DPS cooldown ... or rather, our lack of a DPS cooldown. When Feral Spirit was first introduced at the end of The Burning Crusade, it was both a potent cooldown and a powerful, 45-second-long heal. Unfortunately, their damage was severely neutered in Cataclysm. Compared to the powerful cooldowns of other specs like Combustion, Avenging Wrath, or Pillar of Frost, and our burst DPS for fights like Spine of Deathwing is just not as competitive as it could be. Thankfully, currently our sustained single-target damage is enough to keep us viable, even without a strong cooldown. Looking forward, though, it'd be really excellent to see Feral Spirit either redesigned or replaced with something that actually makes us feel like we're contributing in a burst DPS phase.
Show your totemic mastery by reading Totem Talk: Enhancement every week. We've got enhancement-specific advice on the latest gear and tier gear set bonuses, and we'll help you dig in and learn to level the enhancement way.Filed under: Shaman, Analysis / Opinion, Raiding, (Shaman) Totem Talk, Cataclysm
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Greg Jan 10th 2012 12:46PM
/totallyagree that ghost wolf doesn't feel that great. When I learned the spell, I thought OK- now I'm going to start wrecking things. It was ok- just not fantastic.
K.B. Jan 7th 2012 11:06PM
I still play enhancement even though it's easily one of the weakest classes in the game.
Jack Mynock Jan 7th 2012 11:17PM
You're not doing it right.
Eyhk Jan 8th 2012 9:56AM
It may be just nostalgia talking, but my enhancement shaman misses BC. Left her at 80 and haven't played her since.
vicTORIrush Jan 7th 2012 11:26PM
I love going in as dps as enhancement. The change to our AoE makes me super happy, especially when I see fire EVERYWHERE. And I don't really think enh dps is weak. I go into an LFR group and on all the fights (save Madness... yay useless raid-wide haste buff!) I sit comfortably in the top 5 dps of the raid. Maybe it's just because I'm comfortable with enh rotation or what, but I can pull fantastic numbers.
Allenok Jan 8th 2012 1:28AM
Ive been an Enhancement Shaman for a long time. Im glad we are finally seeing some love. Right now, Im even top DPS in my 10man guild group. What Id really like to see is an article detailing what all the best upgrades are for us in the Dragon Soul raid. For instance: "Are the t13 set bonuses as good/better than t12," "Which of the trinkets that drop inside are best," "drops vs Valor gear, " etc.
Thanks
samckendree Jan 8th 2012 6:10AM
I'm also top dps in my 10m group, its definitely much more fun than WotLK. As for gear, the T12 2-piece is going to be better than the T13 2-piece, but once you get enough for the 4-piece, then it should be safe to switch over. The LL bonus is so much better than the 20% LB buff. Trinkets I'm having a hard time with myself, mainly because RAWR doesn't advise them well at all. Wrath of Unchaining and Vial of Shadows are more than likely your BIS this patch. If you are a raiding enh shaman, I highly recommend you google 'rawr' and learn how to use it. Just dont trust the trinkets it advises.
Arrohon Jan 8th 2012 10:05AM
Try Ask Mr. Robot's BiS list. It'll tell you which pieces are BiS, and where to get them. That way you can grab your BiS valor first instead of purchasing something less than optimal.
sidhebane Jan 8th 2012 2:30AM
I'm still a little miffed at the hit thing. We share our gear with one other class, which needs less than HALF the hit we require. Nor do they require expertise at all, meaning that hit and expertise are pretty damn light on mail in general. This leads us to using an enormous part of our gemming budget on these stats. The worst thing is that my melee hit is always higher than my spell hit (not sure why), so I end up with 19% on melee :(
I'd REALLY like a talent which gave us spell-hit mutiplier, just to redress the huge difference in required hit between Shaman and Hunter, and between the two parts of a shaman's damage. Something like, you gain 1.5-ish spell hit per general hit would be nice.
samckendree Jan 8th 2012 6:04AM
You need to sim or Rawr/optimize your gear. I have no problem getting hit capped and expertise capped with absolutely NO gemming towards either of these stats. You should be reforging to hit/expertise and gemming straight AGI for the most part.
peter.boer90 Jan 8th 2012 11:13AM
I'm LFR geared, and i have 1 agi/hit gem. Rest i get trough reforging. There is one positive thing about haste/crit being useless, is that you never have to think twice about reforging it to hit or expertise. It take some getting used to.
What i sometimes do is reforge Expertise away on an item with hit/expertise, and put mastery on it. Then on another item with Mastery/haste, i reforge the haste back to expertise to still reach my expertise cap. This is how we puzzle my friend.
For trinkets, i would skip ANY trinekt with a haste or crit proc. I can think of trinkets from Spine (stacking agi buff), the one from Avengers of Hyal (very good, with mastery and agi on use), the hit trinket from JP, ragnaros' trinket, and the shared Dragon Soul trinket, with agility and dmg on proc (not 2 fan on this one, but itæs a lot better then ANY haste trinket)
About the hit talent. we have to reach the spell cap, and the extra hit we then have allows us to hit more often with auto-attack. Not a big increase, but an increase none the less.
I wonder though, if when we top our 10 man groups, is it that we are so good, or that the others are slacking?
grendelstein Jan 8th 2012 10:58AM
The reason it's relatively easy for us to reforge to meet hit/expertise caps is precisely because haste (and crit to some extent) are so useless and that so many of our off-spec, and even some spec pieces, are loaded with it. Enhance has about 2300 total rating to achieve between hit and expertise and that is significantly more than ANY other class/spec has to get.
Jack Mynock Jan 8th 2012 1:23PM
The flipside is that even though we have to stack so much hit, it still scales pretty well with our melee swings because of Flametongue and Maelstrom. Hitting spell cap is one of the things that makes enh what it is. In fact for my gear setup rawr is showing hit after spell cap as slighty better than haste. That's the real problem. After meeting caps we only have one good secondary to choose from, which wasn't a big deal in T12 since most of the gear was so well itemized, but in T13 it feels like we're getting screwed by the itemization even though our dps is in a pretty good place on most fights.
Forget crit. For MoP I'm hoping the number priority for enh is getting us scaling better with haste... prefereably without resorting to some combo point system. Not scaling well with the Madness-like haste buffs that pop up all the time is no good, but to me the real issue is not scaling well with Hero/Lust which is up during the most important phase of almost every fight. Feels bad not benefitting from your own buff.
As for Ghost Wolves, a good start would be if it snapshotted your stats like every other temporary pet in the game. Let me line up some procs and trinket uses, potions, or w/e and bring them out. They need to snapshot or be rebalanced so they can be permanent. Either way we're going to need a cooldown.
Fletcher Jan 8th 2012 6:01AM
My enh shaman was one of the first ones I got to 85, but I've not done much with him since. Part of that is the onus of leveling leatherworking - a truly onerous job - and part of it is that the spell priority has changed, and keeps changing, and I can't really be bothered relearning the class with every content patch. I have enough trouble relearning paladins every expansion.
Jack Mynock Jan 8th 2012 1:28PM
Man, I could totally see where you're coming from... if it was even remotely true. We've had one change to our priority during this entire expansion. In 4.2 with the big buff to Stormstrike, it became top priority over Lava Lash. Having to hit Stormstrike then Lava Lash instead of Lava Lash then Stormstrike sure was tough. I thought my brain was going to fall out.
slewis_msp Jan 8th 2012 8:53AM
I love my enhance shammy. Love. Enjoy those #1 rankings now while they last. Scaling is the bane of our existence and it's becoming quite clear that it's still a huge issue. One that has me starting Dragon Soul as a hero but I can already see the day approaching when I put him down and gear up the second warrior. I'm pretty sure the secret to our viability lies in making haste a useful stat, I just can't seem to come up with a good solution for scaling haste into our damage. Not having any burst phase only exemplifies our weakness as the people around us benefit proportionally more and more from the very buff we bring, lust/hero.
Samckendree Jan 8th 2012 9:02AM
This. I cringe everytime I hear the call for Heroism.
Jack Mynock Jan 8th 2012 2:18PM
Reworking static shock so that it procs off of melee swings would be an easy fix. I think this is how it worked in Wrath. It's not very interesting though. I'd prefer an answer that meant hitting a button.
A big part of the reason haste is so bad is because of flurry. WoL shows my Flurry uptime at ~98.7% on my last Ultraxion kill. That's 30% melee haste all the time. We also have another 10% melee haste from Unleash Wind on average. Another 10% from our totem. We've got 50% melee haste before we get a point of haste from our gear.
Basically, there are 2 (interesting) ways to go about making haste better.
The only thing that benefits from haste is melee swings, so it stands to reason that you have to do something with those swings. Something along the line Maelstrom Weapon. Obviously, MW isn't enough. Maybe we could use another proc... something that would give us an instant cast Lava Burst or some new spell altogether (something watery), or maybe just reset the cd on Lava Lash. The philosophy behind haste is that you get to hit more buttons, right?
Or they could give us a resource system. Haste is better for every other melee class because it interacts in some way with their resource. Here's the problem. Blizs gave paladins a new resource this expansion. They gave ret the abilty to have crusader strike's cd be reuduced by haste, so the can generate more Holy Power. Not only is ret still not too big on haste, their 'rotation' is a mess and feels incredibly clunky. Obviously, that's just my opinion.
Personally, I feel like MW and Static Shock are the keys. If Lightning Bolt (or something else?) on 5 stacks became our number one priority, wouldn't that make haste a lot better? What if they redesigned static shock so that it built up charges that buffed Lightning Bolt... sort of like rolling thunder. They could make static shock work off of melee swings again because it would no longer be passive damage. I think some rolling thunder/ fulmination like mechanic for enh based of of static shock could be really cool. I'm all for anyhting that further blurs the liine between enh and ele.
Titusx Jan 8th 2012 9:57AM
I wasn't sure which stat between haste and crit should be improved so I can benefit more from it. But reading this, haste should be the one. Haste seems to be an overall favorite that helps many specs around the raid... and Heroism, never forget the big Ding.
I say they should add a talent that ups your spell damage based on how many stacks of Maelstrom Weapon you have, unlike the tier set bonus that just gives a bonus as long as you have at least 1 stack. That way it makes us want to build up more stacks faster thus wanting haste. Also maybe allow searing totem to fire faster according to haste.
Crit would be awesome if they made it so that it increased not just our crit chance but our spell crit damage as well. So the more crit we have we also crit for more.
Balancing and number crunching needed of course.
Vkishman88 Jan 8th 2012 10:00AM
I personally don't see the sense in making haste a higher priority of a stat. Does anyone watch their haste during a fight? If I have Flurry, Unleash Wind and a trinket proc, I'm sitting at 125% haste and that's self-buffed. While it would be nice to see more benefit from haste, it wouldn't make any sense to make it a stat priority.