Enhancement Shaman Changes Patch 3.0.8

There's not much out there for us this patch, but I do like what I see. Here's a quick recap:

Fire Nova Totem: Now no longer generates threat.
Good stuff. We can drop these totems earlier to coincide with an AoE pull and not have to worry about it pulling its own threat off the tank.

Magma Totem: The damage and scaling has been increased and no longer generates threat.
More damage here and no threat is awesome. I'll be interested to see how much more damage it does.

Mental Quickness: Reduced the mana cost of instant cast Shaman spells by 2/4/6% and increases spell power by an amount equal to 23/46/70% of your agility.
This is AWESOME. Love it! 70% of my Agi goes into SP as opposed to 100% of Int. That's another 45 SP for Stoney immediately. This will also change the EP value of Int and the relative worth of Ancestral Knowledge. Looks like we'll be leaning to leather once again.
Thanks guys for the correction! Revised 12/15: This SUCKS! OK it's a nerf. Not that big of a nerf but a nerf nonetheless.

Edit (again) 12/15 - update from Ghostcrawler (Thanks Phil for the link)
Long story short, after reading your feedback and thinking about it some more, we no longer like this change and are going to revert it. We will likely swap the positions of Mental Quickness and Static Shock as some of you have suggested. Bottom line: Mental Quickness will still convert attack power to spell power.



Lava Lash - Fixed a bug which allowed you to use the ability even if you had a shield in offhand. Now requires a 1hand axe, fist or dagger to be able to be used.
Damn, I guess I missed out on Lava Lashing with a shield.

And then there are changes to Elemental Warding and Elemental Shields in the Elemental tree (go figure!) that will have PvP implications.

• Elemental Shields: This talent has been removed. It has now been merged with Elemental Warding.
• Elemental Warding: Now reduces all damage taken by 2/4/6%. Changed from only reducing Nature, Fire and Frost by 4/7/10%.
• Elemental Shields was reducing flat physical damage, not a percentage. Now properly reduced by a percentage.

Elemental Warding coupled with Toughness could make for some great damage mitigation in PvP.

Gems

Sorry for the late reply to the question about gems, RL has been busy and I've not been online in a few days--and won't be back to raiding until Thursday night with the crazy week I have coming up.

As for gems... I went all AP & Crit, with 1 Hit Rating gem. I replaced all of my Str related gems. My Armory profile hasn't updated since 10/16, which was before I made these changes so they are not yet reflected online.

I wanted to use as few hit gems as possible so I figured out how to do my gear and enchants in such a way that I only needed 1

I then used as honor points and DKP to pick up the following:
1 x Bold Ornate Ruby - Honor Points
1 x Gleaming Orante Dawnstone - Honor Points
1 x Smooth Ornate Dawnstone - Honor Points
1 x Rigid Lionseye - DKP
1 x Gleaming Lionseye - DKP
1 x Bright Crimson Spinel - DKP

The three red gems went into my helm, the Grimgrin Faceguard, where I skipped the socket bonus to stack AP. Then all of the yellow gems went 1 each into my chest, gloves, belt, and legs to get the socket bonus on each of those.

It was a nice upgrade across the board. If you don't have enough Honor Points or access to gems through your guild bank you should check the AH. Prices are dropping on everything right now and you can probably pick up some rare-quality gems on the cheap.

WF vs FT

I tested WF vs FT again today and came up with similar results from yesterday: WF beats out FT by about 3% total DPS.

In each sim I ran fully raid buffed with Stoney spell hit capped and in her current gear (including way too many Strength gems). I used Vanir's fists as models for both the slow and the fast weapons.

For Slow/Slow WF/WF I used the WF glyph, and for Slow/Fast WF/FT I used the FT glyph. Here are the two EnhSim config files for your reference:
config-stoney-slowslow-hitcap.txt
config-stoney-slowfast-hitcap.txt

Maybe if you gemmed, chanted, and geared for spell power the WF/FT setup would pan out, but my results coincide with what I'm reading out there on the net.

I hope this answers your question Demtee. Use the config files I listed and run EnhSim and let us know if you come up with a good setup.

Enhancement Points for 3.0.2

OK. After running the EnhSim tool with Slow/Slow WF/WF and my best rotation among the five spells, I came out with current EP values. Keep in mind these are relevant to my current gear. That means two things
1) I am going to change my gear based on these values and then run the simulator again
2) they may not be relevant to you if you were at a lower or higher progression level than me

But what the hell, they can make for a nice baseline for all of us:

AP	1.00
Crit Rating	1.87
Hit Rating	2.53
Expertise Rating	3.02
Haste Rating	1.49
Armor Pen. Rating	1.40
Spellpower	0.48
Strength	1.00
Agility	1.79
Intelligence	1.17
MH DPS	6.80
OH DPS	4.13

What I find interesting is the high value for Hit Rating. That is interesting because I ran the calculations assuming I was already hit capped. What I'll do is just treat it like I used to treat Defense on my feral druid: it is the single most important stat until capped, then when capped its EP value goes to zero. (FYI in case you missed my post below, the hit cap for Alliance is 164 and it's 177 for Horde).

Next step is to plug these into my EP calculation spreadsheet and see what I need to replace.

EnhSim Results, and Other Findings

I've been running EnhSim playing out different variables. My limitation is that I am really only running it in Enhancement gear so I can't test results against pure Ele gear or a mix of Ele and Enhance. I do have some good findings though just from my pure Enhance gear setup. All tests were based off the 8/53/0 spec with Imp Shields instead of Imp Ghostwolf.

Across the board Slow/Slow beat out Slow/Fast regardless of enchants or spell rotations. Slow/Fast was usually around 50 DPS lower than Slow/Slow. I suspect this is due to my current gear setup, so I would be interested to know if anyone ran tests in mixed gear to see if the spell damage coefficient kicks in and makes up for the OH-eaten WF procs.

Result 1: Slow/Slow we go! I'm definitely relieved that I don't have to rush out and find a decent fast OH weapon.

Next, spells. There are five possible spells we can use in our rotation now:

1. FS - Flame Shock
2. SS - Stormstrike
3. ES - Earth Shock
4. LL - Lava Lash
5. MW5_LB - Maelstrom Weapon 5 point Lightning Bolt (aka instant)

I tested 192 different simulations. First I used a WF/FT setup I ran all 96 possible combinations of FS, SS, LL, and MW5_LB while keeping ES last. Then I switched to WF/WF and ran all 96 possible combinations of FS, SS, ES, and MW5_LB while keeping LL last.

Running these tests while fully raid buffed in Enhancement gear using Slow/Slow weapons I found that WF/WF edged out WF/FT.
Average DPS for WF/FT across all rotations: 1911
Average DPS for WF/WF across all rotations: 1936

Result 2: WF/WF ftw!

It would seem things haven't really changed, just that I'm now kicking out a helluva a lot more damage. But again, I come back to the fact that it may be heavily gear dependent.

As for a priority of spells, it's a tough call but let's say I'm in the middle of a fight and all of my CD's are up at once and I have 5 procs of MW built up, what do I do? I Flame Shock. FS does on average more damage than the other spells. It's close, but the DoT makes the difference. The next best spell is MW5_LB, followed by ES and then SS. Really, it's splitting hairs. I could mash all five of my spells and still come up with 1930 DPS.

Result 3: Roll Face Leftwards Across Keyboard to Maximize DPS

Well, maybe not to that extreme...

Hitting Hit Cap

It has been determined by the brain trust at Elitist Jerks that there is now a specific hit rating that Enhance Shamans must reach. That is 177 for Horde and 164 for Alliance. (Alliance shamans benefit from the Draenei aura that gives +1% Chance to Hit)

There a lot of ways that you can reach the hit cap, the key is to do so without gimping the rest of your stats. Here are some of the easiest ways to get up to the hit cap including buffs, rep rewards, and easy-to-get rings:

1. Arcanum (formerly Glyph) of Ferocity +16 - CE Revered - If you don't have this you better start grinding CE rep now!
2. Spicy Hot Talbuk +20 - kill them 'buks!
   
3. Enchant Gloves Precise Strikes +15 - 6 GPE, 2 AD, 2 LPS
   
4. Violet Signet of the Master Assassin +25 - Kot Exalted & Quests
5. Ashyen's Gift +21 - CE Exalted
6. Fused Nethergon Band +28 - 60 BoJ
   
7. Garona's Signet Ring +18 - Curator
8. Ring of a Thousand Marks +19 - Prince Mal
9. Shaffar's Band of Brutality +19 - Heroic Mana Tombs
   

As for Stoney, I'm hitting hit cap by doing the following:

• +24 Grimgrin Faceguard
• +16 Arcanum of Ferocity
• +20 Pauldrons of Primal Fury
• +23 Belt of the Silent Path
• +17 Softstep Boots of Tracking
• +25 Violet Signet of the Master Assassin
• +21 Vanir's Left Fist of Savagery (or Brutality)
• +20 Spicy Hot Talbuk

For a total of 166 Hit Rating. It's 2 points over the cap, but it was the best I could come up with based on my current available gear, and without regemming anything.

3.0.2 Enhancement Specs at Level 70

We have to start somewhere so let’s start with specs.

8/53/0 – is the spec of choice right now. There are a few variations on this based on whether you solo or raid, or whether you are selfish or selfless. Regardless there are some absolute must-haves:
• Thundering Strikes
• Shamanistic Focus
• Elemental Weapons
• Flurry
• Mental Dexterity
• Spirit Weapons
• Unleashed Rage
• Weapon Mastery
• Dual Wield / DW Specialization
• Lava Lash
• Mental Quickness
• Stormstrike
• Improved Stormstrike
• Shamanistic Rage
• Maelstrom Weapon
• Feral Spirit
• Elemental Devastation (Ele tree)

After filling out these points it doesn't leave much room for play.
• 5 points in the first tier of Elemental
• 4 extra points to use in Enhancement

A raiding Enhancement Shaman must bring the following to the table:
• Enhancing Totems (Tier 1)
• Improved Windfury Totem (Tier 5)

The reason I say you "must" bring these things to the table is that one of the core ideas behind the shaman is that of a support class. Totems, Unleashed Rage, and Heroism/Bloodlust add value raid-wide. So Imp WF Totem eats up the 2 points in Enhance.

As for the last 2 points in Enhance either put them into Improved Shields or Improved Ghost Wolf. I took Imp Shields on Stoney but linked Imp Ghostwolf here.

Then it’s a matter of where to put the first 5 points in the Ele tree which depends on your mana pool. I recommend starting out in Convection to be sure you’re not going OOM before your Shamanistic Rage is up again. If you find your mana is strong then put the points in Concussion.

Variations:
1) Unleashed Rage - There is some discussion right now if UR is required in a raid with a properly speced hunter but the general consensus seems to be that 5/5 UR is still needed raid-wide (if not for our own benefit). Once Wrath rolls around there may be some overlap with a Frost Death Knight, but again it's nothing we need to worry about for now
2) Static Shock / Imp Shields - if you wanted to try something different you could spec 2 points into Static Shock and 2 into Imp Shields

PvP specs to come at a later date.

I Heart 3.0.2

Out of the gate all I can say is WOW. I was kicking out 1550 dps on the target dummy and that was without raid buffs, without optimizing my gear, without hit capping, without putting on a fast off-hand, and without a set rotation. The cooldowns on all my spells were up so fast I didn’t know what to hit next. I was mashing buttons so fast that if I were rolling my face across the keyboard it would be just as effective. Lava Lash (LL), Stormstrike (SS), Flame Shock (FS), and Maelstrom Weapon Lightning Bolts (mwLB) were all begging to be used every time I looked down at my action bar. I didn’t even have time for Earth Shock (ES) because everything else seemed to be coming up so fast.

I have a lot of notes and I’m still running sims. I’ll be posting updates throughout the day with my findings. Stay Tuned.

Official Shaman 3.0.2 Patch Notes

EDIT 5:23PM-- Though not all the changes in the prior patch notes went live today, everything for Shamans DID go live. I've replaced all the text that I originally posted this morning with what a breakdown of the changes that are relevant to an Enhancement Shaman and those that are not.

It is confirmed: patch 3.0.2 goes live today-of course we already knew this but now it's "official." Below are the patch notes which can also be found here

Relevant to Enhancement Shaman

• All totems are now considered on the "Physical" school, and no longer magical spells.
• Anticipation (Enhancement): Now is a 3-point talent, down from a 5-point talent and now reduces the duration of disarm effects on you by 16/25/50%.
• Ancestral Knowledge (Enhancement): Now increases your Intellect by 2/4/6%, instead of increasing your total Mana by 2/4/6/8/10%.
• Call of Flame (Elemental): Now also increases the damage of your Lava Burst spell by 2/4/6%.
• Concussion (Elemental) now increases the damage of your Thunder and Lava Burst spells.
• Convection (Elemental) is now a 3-point talent, down from a 5-point talent. Now lowers the mana cost of Thunder and Lava Burst.
• Dual Wield Specialization will now increase the chance to hit while dual wielding by an additional 1/2/3%.
• Elemental Devastation (Elemental) is now a tier-2 talent, up from tier-4.
• Flametongue Weapon: Now has a passive spell damage.
• Maelstrom Weapon proc chance reduced to 3/6/9/12/15% on critical hit when you deal damage with a melee weapon. Now affects chain heal.
• Improved Lightning Shield (Enhancement) is now Improved Shields, and is in Tier-2.
• New Talent: Elemental Shields (Enhancement): Increases the damage done by your Lightning Shield orbs by 5/10/15%, increases the amount of mana gained from your Mana Shield orbs by 5/10/15% and increases the amount of healing done by your Earth Shield orbs by 5/10/15%.
• New Talent: Mental Dexterity (Enhancement) - Increases your Attack Power by 33/66/100% of your Intellect.
• Shapeshifting will no longer cancel Water Walking.
• Stoneclaw Totem: Health of the Stoneclaw totem is increased by 5% of the Shaman's total health.
• Stoneskin Totem now increases armor instead of reducing physical damage.
• Stormstrike will no longer affect Fire or Frost damage.
• Strength of Earth Totem now also increases agility.
• The range of all "friendly totems" has been increased to 30 yards, up from 20.
• Tranquil Air Totem has been removed. (Threat is being addressed by modifications to the base threat of players and/or "baked" into tanking abilities.)
• Unleashed Rage is now raid wide and increases melee and ranged attack power within 45 yards.
• Windfury Totem is now a flat 20% melee haste totem. All ranks have been modified.
• Windwall Totem has been removed.

Other Changes (for Ele & Resto)

• Ancestral Awakening and Improved Water Shield will now affect Riptide.
• Call of Thunder (Elemental) now also increases the critical strike chance of your Thunder spell.
• Earth's Grasp (Elemental) is now a tier-1 talent, up from tier-2.
• Elemental Focus (Elemental): Now also can proc off Lesser Healing Wave and Healing Wave, and can be used on all healing spells.
• Elemental Fury (Elemental) now requires Elemental Focus as a pre-requisite
• Elemental Precision (Elemental): Chance to hit reduced to 1/2/3% from 2/4/6%, but threat reduction increased to 10/20/30% up from 4/7/10%.
• Enhancing (Enhancement) Totems is now a Tier 1 talent, up from Tier-2.
• Fire Resistance Totem will now increase fire resistance by 130 and lasts for 5 minutes.
• Flametongue Totem is now a flat spell damage totem. All ranks have been modified.
• Flurry now increases attack speed by 5/10/15/20/25% for your next 3 swings after dealing a critical strike.
• Frostbrand's snare effect has been increased to 50%, up from 25%.
• Ghost Wolf's mana cost is now 13% base.
• Grace of Air Totem has been removed. (Agility has been rolled over into Strength of Earth Totem)
• Healing Grace (Restoration): Healing Way and Ancestral Fortitude are now affected by the dispel resistance portion of this talent.
• Improved Fire Totems (Elemental) is now (again) Improved Fire Nova Totem. It now has a 50/100% chance to stun all targets for 2 sec.
• Nature's Blessing no longer increases spell damage from Intellect, and the effect has been reduced to 5/10/15% from 10/20/30%. This is in result of the new spell power system.
• Players should notice little to no change in the power of the spell relevant to healing spells.
• New ranks have been added of Water Shield, starting at level 20. (Level 20, 27, 34, 41, 48, 55, 62, 69)
• New Spell: Earthliving Weapon - Imbue the Shaman's weapon with earthen life. Increases healing done by x and each heal has a 20% chance to proc Earthliving on the target, healing an additionaly over 12 sec. Lasts 30 minutes.
• New Talent: Cleanse Spirit (Restoration) - Cleanse the spirit of a friendly target, removing 1 poison effect, 1 disease effect, and 1 curse effect.
• New Talent: Tidal Force(Restoration): Increases the critical effect chance of your Healing Wave, Lesser Healing Wave and Chain Heal by 60%. Each critical heal reduces the chance by 20% and lasts 20 seconds.
• Rockbiter ranks 5 through 9 have been removed. Windfury Weapon is intended to replace Rockbiter at level 30.
• Storm Reach (Elemental): Now also increases the radius of your Thunder spell by 10/20%.
• Tidal Focus (Restoration): Now works with Earth Shield.
• Totemic Mastery talent removed and replaced with "Tidal Force".
• Totem of Wrath will now last 5 minutes.
• Wrath of Air is now a flat 10% spell haste totem.

Patch Day Coming!

Are you ready? Are you excited? I don't know what I am to be honest. I'm not pure melee, I'm not Str gems, I'm not even sure if I'm in the right gear. I've got a few pieces of caster gear and a few pieces of extra mail in the bank--including an extra pair of Gloves of the Forgotten Protector stashed away in case I need ele gear, at least it'll be T6.

I'm mostly worried about weapons. Should I have been saving up my badges for a caster off-hand that I can imbue with Flametongue for the extra casting kick? I seem to recall that I have an extra Amani Punisher saved up from a ZA run somewhere... but now that I look at it I see it's a freakin MH weapon. So basically I'm completely unprepared for tomorrow as far as weapons go. Great. Looks like into heroic MgT I go looking for a caster weapon.

I'm scanning the Enhancement Shaman thread at Elitist Jerks right now and I hope to have some summary and answers for the Enhancement crowd out there without having to wade through 123 pages of forums posts.

The best thing I found is the ShockAndAwe mod. Go and download this now. In the words of the author: "ShockAndAwe displays timer bars for Shocks, Stormstrike, Windfury (internal CD), Maelstrom Weapon, Lava Lash, Lava Burst, and your shield. It optionally shows number of orbs on left shield, stacks of MW, advises of next shock in rotation."

I'm also running some EnhSim calculations tonight to try and get optimize the following 4 areas:
1) Spec
2) Weapons & Weapon buffs
3) Gear/Chants/Gems (i.e. Enhancement Points)
4) Spell rotations

When I have results and answers I'll post what I find. Any suggestions that are working for your Enhancement Shamans are most welcome.

No Caster Weapons

Saw a blue post this morning, here's the highlight: "If you are saving up badges or arena points or whatever for your enhancement shammy, I would definitely NOT go out and get two fast caster weapons."

Here's the full post:

We view Enhancement as a melee class that should be wearing melee gear. However, one of the interesting things about the shaman is throwing out some spells with that melee too.

Our view of things is that some smart theorycrafters started wondering if using two fast caster weapons with two flametongue enchants would end up being the right way to go. The way the discussion sort of ended up was "maybe, but it might be close" but a lot of the community took that as a mandate. Or maybe they were just shocked by the supposition because it felt wrong for a melee class. We agree it feels wrong, so we're doing some tweaks to make it even less likely to be the most optimal set up. If you are saving up badges or arena points or whatever for your enhancement shammy, I would definitely NOT go out and get two fast caster weapons.

Heartbreaker

I cried a little tonight. Really.

Well, ok maybe not.
But it was emotional.

We missed getting our very first bear mount in the guild by 30 seconds. Thirty freakin seconds. It could have been the extra time we took after Jan'alai. It could have been the three deaths along the way to Halazzi (mind included) that took an extra 10-20 seconds each. It could have been the 1 extra scout and the 1 extra pat we had to kill. It could have been anything in that 45 minutes.

We got to Halazzi's room with under 5 minutes to go. The first time we got the 3rd timed chest it was under 6 minutes. I knew we could do it and reminded everyone about that first ring.

The first phase was not promising; it was not going fast enough. By the time he popped out of his first split phase the mages must have started up their engines and we were roaring through him. We unloaded on him. Hard. DPS was unreal. Then in the 2nd split we lost our rogue to a Flame Shock. Then a mage to a totem. It was down to the wire with Fire Elementals out, Heroisms used, all pots and HS on cooldown and every major trick in the book already blown. The hunter went down and we were now down to only 3 DPS. Then a healer. We were on our last legs coming into the final 25%. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the little gnome step out of her cage and catch fire. The mount was lost. Less than 30 seonds after that Halazzi fell.

There was screaming, wailing, and the gnashing of teeth. It was lost.

According to WWS we did the fight in 3 minutes 16 seconds. Maybe we could have shaved off 15-16 seconds with all the dps up. Realistically the time was lost along the way in the prior 45 minutes. No one is to blame. Everyone did their job and did it splendidly.

In all likelihood the patch will drop on Tuesday. In all likelihood that patch will replace the bear mount with something else. In all likelihood I have failed in my mission to bring the bear mount to Unorthodox.

If it is the end of the Amani War Bear mount then I want to thank everyone in Unorthodox that stuck with me along the way. Nearly a year of running ZA, learning it while undergeared, gearing up while wiping, and most importantly pressing deeper and deeper into the content against the clock. Too many names to name but thank you all for learning with me, for wiping with me, and for standing by me.

And by the way, the timer is still there and we're going to beat that clock even if there isn't a mount at the end.

Patch 2.4.3 for Enhance Shamans

For a sub-patch (is that the right term?) there are a significant amount of changes taking place, and not just bug fixes but gameplay improvements, UI changes, nerfs and buffs. Here are a few key pieces for enhance shamans:

Dispel effects will no longer attempt to remove effects that have 100% dispel resistance.
This will affect Purge on enemy targets. Currently I do not know if Purge attempts to dispel non-dispellable effects, but I can only assume this is an improvement.

Cheat Death: This talent has been rebalanced significantly. Killing blows are no longer 100% absorbed. If the Rogue is below 10% health, the killing blow is still completely absorbed; if the Rogue is over 10% health, enough damage will be absorbed to reduce the Rogue’s health down to 10%. For the following 3 seconds, damage is not always reduced by 90%; it is now reduced by a maximum of 90%, depending on how much resilience the Rogue has. The damage reduction will be four times the damage reduction resilience causes against critical strikes.
Oh man oh man. Rogues will actually require resil? One calculation I saw was that to achieve the pre-patch level of mitigation a rogue would need well over 430 resilience. Now when we have that damn rogue down to below 3% I know my Stormstrike will waste him and not just bounce off his cheat.

Activated beneficial effects from jewelcrafting trinkets can no longer be dispelled.
If you are a JC and use the trinkets this should be good news. Though Stoney is a JC I don't use the JC trinkets because I have better ones for both PvE and PvP. I'm curious, can you use the trinkets in arena?


Magister's Terrace nerfs listed here.

This seems to be a pattern of Blizzard's: release content erring on the side of difficult then after a few months nerf it for the masses. In some regards I'm disappointed to see what I've earned, most often the hard way and early on, be brought down a notch for the sake of the masses. But on the other hand I suppose it's the nerfing that keeps the semi-casual players interested and thus subscriptions high--so I can see how it is a good decision from a business point of view for Blizzard. But I digress, I posted here about how to get your enhance shaman into an MgT run as most groups were only looking for CC classes. I expect groups will still be looking for CC classes but the nerfs should make it easier for us enhance shammys to get in runs.


Earth Elemental: This pet will now leash back to its totem when pulled beyond 50 yards away.
I've never had a problem with this but again I suppose any bug fix is a worth a fix. Anyone know of any specific cases where this was a problem?

That covers 2.4.3 for Enhance Shammys. Enjoy!