Possible Specs at 70

Its safe to assume the new talent tress will get released before the expansion just as they did with the last expansion. With that in mind I've been tinkering around with some new Enhancement Shaman specs in the new trees with a level cap of 70.

One thing is for sure, we will never have to get back into the Resto tree again so we can tinker with Elemental Devastation builds.

6/55/0 - Raiding
This first spec takes in Improved Shields& Static Shock to get some additional passive DPS out of lightning shield. It then taps into Maelstrom Weapon and combines that with 1 point in Elemental Devastation. I wonder if this will be a bad compromise by trying to squeeze both Static Shock passive damage and insta-cast Lava Bursts--which I'm still not sure how that's going to pan out.

9/52/0 - Raiding
Slight variation on the one above but taking out the Improved Shields and Static Shock in place of more points in Elemental Devastation. Also puts 1 point in Call of Flame and 3 into Enhancing Totems. I will be testing both of these to see which turns out more damage both in raid and out.

0/56/5 - PvP
Remember how I said "we will never have to get back into the Resto tree again" earlier? I lied. In this PvP spec I put 5 points back into Totemic Focus. In PvP I spend a lot of time dropping totems, especially if a Warlock or Hunter has a totem-kill macro for its pet. I also put 2 points into Earth's Grasp for the increased radius on Earthbind totem.


Hopefully we get to test these out soon. Until then, keep the faith!

Zul'Aman Timed Run: Greatest Thing Ever

Whoever came up with the idea of the ZA timed chest run deserves a raise. Or if they already got one then give them another. I have to say that ZA has proved to be one of the most challenging and thoroughly enjoyable instances I've played in my 3 years of WoW. Now I am slightly biased because I love troll content. I loved ZF while leveling and I loved ZG in pre-BC, so naturally I'd be a fan of ZA. However my love this time goes beyond just the models and skins and gets to the heart of the instance: its timed reward system.

The instance was released 10 months ago and I still find it exciting to clear and challenging to work towards that last timed chest. When we got the 3rd chest for the first time in our guild I went bananas. I was as excited for that as I was for our first Zul'Jin kill.

While ZJ and clearing the instance is a goal, there remains another goal: the bear mount. So despite having cleared ZA we have not mastered it and so we have not captured the trophy of ZA mastery. And that is the ultimate goal; not just the mount but the complete mastery of the instance. That is the brilliance of the instance: despite having it on farm, we still have more to accomplish in there.

To give you an idea of how far we’ve look at the timeline of ZA in our guild:
• 11/16/07 – Nalorakk gets skinned
• 11/30/07 – Akil’zon gets killed
• 12/7/07 – Halazzi gets hated on
• 2/2/08 – Jan’alai gets jacked
• 2/4/08 – Hexx Lord Malacrass? Done.
• 3/11/08 – Zul’Jin loses his other arm and we get to experience the lovely music of ZA for the first time
• 6/5/08 – We crack open the 3rd timed chest

It took us four months to get our first full clear. It took another three months to get from 2 to 3 timed chests. Three months of shaving off time, minute by minute. It has been nearly 3 months since first getting that 3rd timed chest and we still have 5 more minutes to take off the run to get the 4th chest.

In the same time frame our guild went from wet-behind-the-ears in SSC to being 4/9 in BT. We are plowing through Black Temple in 25 man content and have not yet mastered the ZA challenge. The challenge is why I keep coming back to ZA and why I love it.

To me, ZA is pure awesomeness.

Shaking Off the Rust

Whew, nothing like another few instance runs and an Archimonde fight to get the last bit of rust off the ol' enhance fist weapons. I'm waaaay behind on my WotLK research. I've spent most of my time in-game this last week just updating my UI. I promise I'll have a UI show-off post coming up. I went almost entire Ace mod based; the only non-Ace one I'm using is Segui, which I use for fun emotes and chat bubbles when I rez or pop Heroism.

Tonight I ran Arc and realized I did so without Windfury on my weapons for most of the fight. I need to find an ACE version of SmartBuff. Add one more mod that to the list of mods I already use. More to come tomorrow when we tap Teron and Bloodboil.

Back in the Saddle

I'm back in the saddle officially as of tonight. Feels good after taking some time off to get back online. Unfortunately one of my hard drives crashed last night so I spent all day today getting Windows reinstalled on my data drive. Then the install of classic WoW, followed by BC install, followed by downloading patch 2.3, then 2.4, then 2.4.1. and finally 2.4.2. That's to say nothing of getting my add-ons back in order.

Ah well, I raided Hyjal tonight with nothing more than Bongos2 and Perl Classic. It was an experience. I was thinking going into the raid "maybe this will be good and I can break free of being so mod-dependent." Nope. Not gonna happen. I'm putting them all back and going right back to where I was before: mod crazy and loving it.

The Hate on Melee

In my time off I've had a chance to reflect on my adventures in Azeroth. Growing up pre-BC as a Boomkin was amazingly fun despite that I barely understood the game mechanics. I just knew I absolutely loved the hybrid Druid class. Then comes raiding and MC which meant only one thing: resto. Along comes Burning Crusade, I get Finn to 70, get frustrated trying to heal 5 mans as resto--back when we were all in greens and blues. I started Stoney and fell in love with the enhancement tree. End game for Stoney proved to be a challenge of running in, running out, and always running around. In Karazhan Prince was the only "run away bravely" fight so I didn't know what was in store for me until the night we hit High King and Gruul's Lair. To this day, not a Gruul's fight goes by on Stoney that I don't either a) get decimated by a Hurtful Strike or b) have to run out of melee range and sit back to let the OT's catch up on threat.

Looking back now I wonder why the hate on melee? Melee is not a minority spec by any stretch of the imagination. If you consider the 27 talent trees (9 classes x 3 trees) 10 of the choices require melee range: feral druid, prot pally, ret pally, 3x rogue, enhance, 3x warrior. That's over 1/3 of the spec choices, 5 of 9 classes that can be melee, 2 fully dedicated to melee 100% of the time. I can understand pre-BC where your raiding role was predetermined by your class and the only ones within melee range were the prot warriors and rogues. Yet one of the intentions of BC was to break classes out of that strict end game spec determination. One would think the boss fights would reflect the new possibilities. But they don't.

The largest problem facing melee dps is of course the 10% threat threshold. Ranged dps has to pass 30% of the tank's threat in order to pull aggro, however in melee range that cap is reduced significantly to only 10%. That is a pervasive problem regardless of boss. That problem aside, melee faces four challenges that do not haunt ranged:

1. Run In / Run Out - when you have to get out of melee range to avoid the boss' phase/talent, e.g. High King or Leo's whirlwind.
   
2. Hurtful Strikes - "2nd highest on threat" sounds like a great idea, until the OT's rage runs out. I also consider aggro drop & target switching abilities
   
3. Minimum Distance - any splash or AoE effect; ranged has far greater space to work with while melee is cramped around a hit box not big enough to avoid splashing everyone.
   
4. Run Around Like an Idiot - Kill this, then change targets and kill this, then change targets again. Ranged just has to turn, maybe, whereas melee has to run around like an idiot.
   

Let's take those four problems and see where we as melee face them. For this I'm only considering 25 man raid instances and only up to Black Temple. In fights where everyone (ranged and melee alike) are affected by one of these problems I do not count it (i.e., RI/RO on Solarian is everyone's problem) What follows are the list of bosses by instance and what problems melee faces with each.

Raid	Boss	RI/RO	HS	MD	RALI
GL	High King	X			X
GL	Gruul		X
Mags	Mags	X
SSC	Hydross
SSC	Lurker	X	X*
SSC	Tidewalker
SSC	Fathomlord
SSC	Leo	X			X
SSC	Vashj	X		X
TK	Al'ar	X
TK	VR		X
TK	Solarian				X
TK	Kael	X		X	X
MH	Rage	X
MH	Anetheron
MH	Kaz'rogal			X*
MH	Azgalor			X
MH	Archimonde			X
BT	Naj'entus			X
BT	Supremus	X	X
BT	Akama
BT	Teron
BT	Gurtogg	X
BT	RoS	X	X
BT	Shahraz
BT	Council	X			X
BT	Illidian	X			X
Total		13	5	6	6

* Lurker doesn't technically have a hurtful strike, but when the tank and the OT get whirlwinded out of range and you happen to resist it... the results are bad.
* Kaz's war stomp is not a splash effect but can be easily outranged by all but melee

Did I miss anything, or overestimate on any fight?
By far the biggest problem melee DPS faces that ranged DPS does not have to face is the Run In/Run Out scenario. Nearly half of all bosses (13 out of 27) require melee to play the hokey pokey.

The only boss fight which I can say explicitly favors melee over ranged is Phase 3 of Zul'Jin where everyone gets the Energy Storm debuff: cast a spell and take 1250 in damage. One phase on one boss that punishes casters. That's it. Rough times mages and warlocks, rough times indeed.

I would love to see a little more melee love in the next expansion. Maybe bigger hit boxes on bosses, and absolutely more caster-specific hurdles such as in Phase 3 of ZJ. What other ways could the developers balance the fights to make challenging for both melee and ranged?

WotLK Changes 7/25 & 8/1

Continuing right along with the changes for Enhancement Shamans in WotLK using my Nobel-nominated SEESWARS system let's start with three massive and entirely horrible changes.

Weapon Specialization: Removed. (Axe - Increases the critical strike damage bonus by 5/10/15/20/25%. Mace - Has a 1/2/3/4/5% chance to increase your melee haste by 10% for 15 sec. Fist - Attacks from your fist weapons have a 1/2/3/4/5% chance to reduce the armor of your target by 20% for 6 sec.)
SEESWARS - 5
This was a great talent. I was thoroughly excited to see how this would play out in end game and with gearing selections. I was particularly excited by the Axes effect which would increase crit damage and scale with gear. But instead it's replaced with this half-assed piece of shit talent:

Maelstrom Weapon - When you critically hit with a melee weapon, you reduce the cast time of your next spell by 4/8/12/16/20%. Stacks up to 5 times. Lasts 15 seconds. (5 Ranks)
SEESWARS - 4
I have to sink 5 talent points, then crit 5 times in order to get a free cast of a spell that I would otherwise never freakin use because... I'M MELEE SPEC!! Hi, news flash: Enhancement is the MELEE tree. When I first saw this change I had to read it twice and then double check they didn't suddenly move the Elemental tree over to the middle. But there it is as plain as day: a melee talent being replaced by a caster talent, not in the first two ranks but as the 46 point talent.

There is a decent discussion happening on the comments section of Wowhead for this talent with most posters excited to combine it with an Elemental Devastation build. In the comment thread runjah makes the most important point but is unfortunately buried as a reply towards the bottom of the page. His words that are the make-or-break for this talent: it resets the swing timer.

I'll say that again for the kids in the back row: IT RESETS THE SWING TIMER! That means working in a Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, or the new Lava Burst will throw off your Windfury procs in the worst case scenario, in the best case you'll have to carefully time your insta-spells with your WF internal cooldown, your Stormstrikes, and your shocks.

Maybe I'm being bitter here because they took away Weapon Specialization which was such a cool talent. Maybe I'm being bitter because they are forcing the Elemental Devastation build on me (currently that build is garbage, but that may all change as you'll soon see). Or maybe I'm just being lazy and I don't want to have to time my shocks with my Stormstrikes with my WF with my Lava Bursts.

There are two rays of hope here. First one poster commented that Blizzard already changed the talent to work for every spell, though the tooltip does not yet reflect the change. And secondly, one commenter speculated they mean for it to NOT reset your swing timers. If that comes to pass then I will revise my rating. But for now I'm not happy about it.

Anyone out there with a beta key willing to test this one out extensively? Does it reset your swing timer? Does it throw off your WF procs? Would it be worth it to spend 5 points in this purely for DPS' sake?


Nature's Guidance is missing from the Restoration tree.
SEESWARS - 5
There is no mention of it in the WotLKWiki.info site but I stumbled across this little tidbit while mocking up a few builds. If I could give this a worse rating I would. 'Hello, welcome to Northrend, please turn all of your current gems for +Hit ones. Thank you and enjoy your stay.' What an absolutely horrid thing to do. It was one of the great things about an enhance shaman, we didn't have to stack Hit Rating like an idiot (i.e., rogue) because we got 3% from Nature's Guidance and 6% from Dual Wield Specialization. Not so anymore. We now have another 3% hit to make up after this loss.

The only bright side here I already alluded to above: this could make the Elemental Devastation build a viable one for Enhance Shamans. Regardless, we will be forced to sacrifice other stats for hit rating when we didn't have to do so before.


The range of all “friendly totems” has been increased to 30 yards, up from 20.
SEESWARS - 1
I felt like injecting some good news. Yay 30 yard totems! As a result, Totemic Mastery was removed. With Nature's Guidance gone, Totemic Mastery implicit in all totems, and Totemic Focus a 1st tier talent, the Elemental Devastation Build is looking more viable.


Shamanistic Rage now gives your successful melee attacks a chance to regenerate mana equal to 15% of your attack power. (Old version : mana regeneration equal to 30% of your attack power)
SEESWARS - 4
Only a slight nerf compared to the blasts above, but a nerf nonetheless. Why must you punish us Blizzard? And why must you constantly mess with Shammy Rage? At first it was 15% for 30 seconds, then 30% for 15 seconds. Then you added the reduced damage component. Next came Improved Shammy Rage. Which was subsequently taken away. And now the effectiveness of this ability is halved with one hand while the other hand serves up insta-spell casts.


Feral Spirit now lasts 45 seconds instead of 30 seconds.
SEESWARS - 3
I don't even have the heart to get into how incredibly mediocre this 51 point talent will be. I've read rumors of the wolves getting stun or some other ability. If that happens then maybe... but until then this is a bit fat MEH. For me it comes down to the question of the usage of the talent point. Just because it's there doesn't mean we need to use it. Are these wolves going to be the Shaman version of treants, or will they have some additional usage like a Shadowfiend or the ever annoying Water Elemental?

WotLK Changes 7/17

What follows are the additional changes to the Enhancement Shaman talents/spells/abilities that Blizzard made on 7/17/08. I'm a bit behind on my posts and there's a lot here, so dig in. I covered a number of changes in a previous post so I will continue with the changes I did not get to that day. I will rate everything with my own patent-pending SEESWARS... i.e., a scale from 1 to 5 with 1 being the best and 5 being the worst.

All totems are now considered on the "Physical" school, and no longer magical spells.
SEESWARS - 1
Very cool. This means silencing effect no long prevent dropping totems. Such a major change that I can't believe I didn't post it before.

Ancestral Knowledge: Now increases your Intellect by 2/4/6%, instead of increasing your total Mana by 2/4/6/8/10%.
SEESWARS - 2
Another cool change when you consider the new talent Mental Dexterity which increases your Attack Power by 33/66/100% of your total Intellect (3rd tier, 3 points). Combine these two talents for free AP and for making mail gear actually desirable.

Enhancing Totems is now a Tier 1 talent, up from Tier-2.
SEESWARS - 3
Meh. Depends if I have any talent points left over, which by all accounts so far its not looking like I'll have points to spare to put in here.

Frostbrand's snare effect has been increased to 50%, up from 25%.
SEESWARS - 3
This could be interesting if in a PvP or arena situation a team wanted to sacrifice the shaman's dps for the slowing effect. It is not considered a magical debuff so it can not be dispelled. However, the loss of damage due to not having WF would be significant. I would not sacrifice Windfury for this.

Improved Shamanistic Rage: Removed. (While under the effect of Shamanistic Rage, you have a 50/100% chance also cause you to be immune to all stun, snare and movement impairing effects.)
SEESWARS - 4
Bad bad bad. What was a fantastic (and one of the few) PvP bones thrown to Enhance gets taken away. The ONLY reason I did not give it a 5 was because it is replaced by this:

Spectral Transformation - You have a 50/100% chance to remove all movement impairing effects when you transform into a Ghost Wolf, and your Spirit Wolves to have a 50/100% chance to be immune to all stun, snare and movement impairing effects when summoned.
SEESWARS - 1
OK, that's better. Granted I would like to have both :D but then it would be constant QQ from the filthy cheating rogues that Enhance Shamans are OP. Can't upset the Blizzards favored ones now can we? ... But I digress, this talent is cool because it clearly states it is an impairment clearing effect, whereas Improved Shammy Rage was only preventative medicine. I'll take the points in this, hands down. Of course this also serves to explain why Ghost Wolf went from being 100 mana to 13% of base mana; if you're going to turn us into druids then you might as well give us some of the benefits, too. Right?

Ok that covers things... for now. More to come shortly as we look into some really shitty changes in the next post.

WTH WotLK and the SEESWARS

I feel like I'm entering the confessional... (anyone that grew up Catholic knows what I'm talking about) "Forgive me readers it has been three weeks since my last post." Three weeks and a lot has changed on the Shaman tree for WotLK. Some good, some bad.

To deal with the changes and their impact on the Enhance Shamans out there, starting with this post I am implementing the Stoneybaby Exclusive Enhance Shaman WotLK Applicable Rating System. Heretofore known as SEESWARS. Every change will be met with my precisely calibrated (though often times just flat out guessing) rating on its effect on the effectiveness of Enhancement Shamans.

1 - Windfury Crit TO DE FACE! We love you Blizzard!! (best thing evar)
2 - Cool, thanks for throwing us a bone Blizzy
3 - meh/TBD (impact will be mediocre, irrelevant, or remains to be seen)
4 - Sux but we'll slug through
5 - WTH WotLK?! Blizzy hates Enhance but you already knew that (nerf bat)

With the SEESWARS scale laid out I'll dive into the changes on the next post.