Enhancement Shaman Guide
Some of our class writers have written up their first impressions of the 12.1 class changes and tier set reviews. We've listed all of them below.
Some of these articles were released earlier than others, and may be out of date now.
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Enhancement Shaman Going into Patch 12.1
After a pretty rocky start to Midnight and a tumultuous first season (including a slew of buffs), Season 2 brings with it a few target changes that, hopefully, will have us starting much better than last time:
Developers’ notes: We’re happy with Enhancement Shaman’s gameplay going into Curse of Ula’tek. Our goal with these changes is to preserve that gameplay while improving performance outside of cooldown windows, where damage can feel weak. Strong interactions between Windfury procs and Maelstrom Weapon generation were making it difficult for the downtime between cooldowns to breathe.
Lightning Bolt damage increased by 20%.
Chain Lightning damage increased by 20%.
Lava Lash damage increased by 15%.
Stormstrike damage increased by 15%.
Melee damage increased by 15%.
Doom Winds now increases the chance of Windfury Weapon activating by 50% (was 100%).
Hero Talents
Stormbringer
Tempest main target damage reduced by 10%.
Tempest secondary target damage reduced by 30%.
Totemic
Surging Totem Tremor damage reduced by 15%.
Surging Totem Surging Bolt damage reduced by 10%.
Before getting into the weeds of all the changes, I'd first like to say it's really nice to see a developer's note that actually comments on how devs feel about the specialization - something we've been missing since the first stages of Alpha. Regardless of whether the changes hit the mark or not, having some perspective on where they're at when it comes to Enhancement's development is very helpful when trying to understand the process behind its development over the first season. Before jumping into the analysis, these are almost universally buffs: Totemic gains roughly 3% in all situations (though loses 1%~ in mass AoE), while Stormbringer fares better, gaining 3-5% depending on target count.
While I don't think they've achieved what they're looking for here (and I definitely agree it needs adjustments to alleviate the focus on cooldown windows), I do strongly agree with them that the specialization's gameplay right now is very good. The rework in Midnight succeeded on a lot of levels from a mechanical point of view, but what was lost in the transition was rewarding feedback loops and, to some people, that hurt a lot. I intend to dig deeper into the cooldown situation later in this article, but first I want to tackle the new set bonus.
Tier Set Bonus
After a Tier Set in Season 1 that was, at best, whelming, the offering coming in Season 2 has a lot more mechanical implications than before. Having already seen a major improvement in the build released this last week, it's shaping up to be much better than our current option, though a little more complicated on the surface than it looks:
Enhancement Shaman Venomous Abyss Tier Set
2-piece - Voltaic Blaze causes your primary target to erupt in a Fire Nova every 2 seconds for 6 seconds. Fire Nova deals 200% increased damage to the primary target of your Voltaic Blaze.
4-piece - Fire Nova reduces the cooldown of Crash Lightning by 2 seconds, and increases the damage of your next Crash Lightning by 8%, stacking up to 5 times.
Off the bat, having a bonus built around Voltaic Blaze is definitely a bold choice. This has mostly sat as a filler button, and while good, injecting it into the already busy rotations of both Stormbringer and especially Totemic as a central focus means it's easy to overstep and make things complicated. There's a hidden opportunity cost for both the 2-piece and 4-piece here, pulling global cooldowns away from buttons that activate the Crash Lightning splash, creating a small amount of anti-synergy with the additional stacks provided by the 4-piece. Currently, Stormbringer is heavily favored by both bonuses, since it actually has the GCDs to integrate Voltaic Blaze as a priority while making use of the Crash Lightning CDR. Totemic on the other hand has more of a struggle juggling all of its competing effects with this added on top. The Apex Talent, Storm Unleashed, also adds in some difficulty for maximizing the cooldown reduction as well, as procs often prevent you from keeping it on cooldown while CDR is cycling.
That's why the change to the 2-piece this week was so important. The previous iteration having a killswitch whenever a second target arrived (removing the 200% damage multiplier entirely) meant that the most consistent value provided by the 2-piece was extremely sensitive to even the smallest add being nearby. With the change, it's a much stronger universal set, but the value is heavily weighted toward that 2-piece (which isn't necessarily a bad thing). These types of bonuses that are contingent on hitting a single target have been tried before (most notably in early Aberrus testing) and weren't fun then, so I'm very happy to see Blizzard catch that and pivot before it hits live servers.
With these changes in mind, this set is looking to be a solid addition to rotational gameplay, making it even easier to consistently remain GCD locked, while also shoring up the value of a button that was previously on an island. It also gives a good reason to have Fire Nova talented in single-target, allowing for an even easier flex into cleave than we already have. It's worth mentioning that, while the bonus is improved by the talent, it's not a mandatory swap, since the 2-piece is self-sufficient with its own Nova procs. While it's likely both trees can fit it in due to the weak central block of talents, it's nice to see a less forceful implementation of a talent-locked tier set. It looks to be a solid all-rounder bonus, providing meaningful damage in virtually all combat situations through active gameplay while even adding in extra priority damage to boot.
The State of Enhancement
With a season under our belt seeing Enhancement in a live environment, I'd like to take the chance to revisit some of the issues that came up in Alpha and Beta that still haven't really been addressed. I'm also going to highlight a few other hot topics across the community that really could do with some attention to sand off the rough edges people consistently draw issue with. To start, I want to wheel back to the bluepost and talk about our cooldown situation.
Cooldowns Cooldowns Cooldowns
Enhancement has had a lot of different damage profiles over the years, but in particular in Midnight it's very aggressively pivoted into a cooldown focused all-or-nothing specialization. Some people love this (and, with the way Midnight has gone, not having big cooldowns is a massive disadvantage), but I think in this transition Enhancement has lost something that was, previously, one of its biggest strengths - flexibility. The blue post even states that they're trying to shift some damage out of these windows, but the only thing that took a noticeable hit was Totemic through the Surging Totem nerfs (though mostly offset by other buffs), and was also the only tree impacted by the Windfury Weapon reduction during Doom Winds in mass AoE.
The dichotomy that was set up in The War Within (in between all the reworks, rocky tuning and misfires) had us with a burst oriented tree - Stormbringer - and a more sustained option, Totemic, echoing the unique two-build style we had in Dragonflight. Instead now, the only thing that differentiates them is whether you want 2-minute burst or 1-minute burst, but both of them have all-or-nothing profiles centered around cooldowns. There's no option to diversify your damage profile or lean toward sustain damage, not helped by how limited the number of talents on our current tree is. Neither Hero Tree has a major difference in how they deal damage or path through the tree, with the only major difference being Totemic needs to pick up Hot Hand. Normally, this would be a talent "tax", but because what few options are available are so limp, it barely matters. Which tree wins in the current landscape comes down to how a couple of key mechanics are tuned against each other, or if a fight/dungeon significantly favors the respective cooldown timings they're locked to.
It's a shame that previously distinct trees that provided choice between each other - within their own hero tree and on the specialization tree - have been diluted so much. Instead, they often both use the same cookie cutter loadouts with one or two superficial swaps. Currently, the choice is driven entirely by whether you play Ascendance timers for Stormbringer or Doom Winds timers for Totemic, because neither tree even has the option (nor the incentive) to switch over to the other timer. There's two key factors in this: for Stormbringer, Descending Skies hard locks it to Ascendance no matter what, since you effectively remove an entire hero talent the moment you switch over. On the other hand, Totemic tries to present the option with Oversurge, but with Surging Totem's base cooldown and the amount of weight put into overlapping each totem drop, the trade-off isn't nearly good enough to throw away the consistency of a 1-minute timer and spend an extra talent point on the spec tree.
We've departed so strongly from a specialization with meaningful profile choices on our tree and between our hero talents that, at this point, there mightaswell be only two talent options presented when you open up the tree - a red Totemic one and a blue Stormbringer one.
Stormbringer Needs a Mulligan
The tuning improvements over the course of Season 1 paired with both the Season 2 changes and a more favourable tier set did a great job lifting Stormbringer out of the hole it was started in. With that rise in both popularity and viability though, I see the same sticking points that were highlighted when the redesign was revealed come up time and again from players taking it into serious content. By far the most contentious is Ascendance and, by extension, Doom Winds procs and its deck of cards. You can click the toggle below for a brief explanation on what these types of procs are if you haven't heard of it before.
What is a "Deck of Cards" Proc System?
Deck of Cards procs Explained
Deck of Cards systems are used sparingly across the game, but they have existed for quite a while - first experimented on all the way back in early BfA testing. Essentially, they're marketed as a way to avoid crippling bad RNG streaks, while trying - to some degree at least - to limit the potential to highroll. The way it works is pretty similar to its namesake:
A "deck" of potential opportunities to proc an effect will be assigned - for example's sake let's say 100 - and each time you activate the trigger, one "card" will be drawn. Of this "deck" of 100, any number of "cards" - for this example let's say two - will be assigned as a trigger, granting the effect. Every time you cycle through all 100 "cards" by activating the trigger, the "deck" will reset and a new deck of 100 will begin, with 2 randomly assigned new trigger cards inside it.
Some past examples of these include Convoke the Spirits' "exceptional spells" for Druids, Immolation Aura resets through A Fire Inside for Havoc, and a lot of Enhancement spells over the last two years.
Currently, Storm Unleashed, Tempest, Deeply Rooted Elements and Doom Winds triggered through the Ascendance talent all function on these systems. Since Maelstrom Weapon spent to cycle the deck isn't fixed, instead each individual stack is batched in 10 (with no two cards being less than 10 stacks apart).
Because Doom Winds has had so much power baked into it through the addition of Thorim's Invocation, these are extremely similar in power to Ascendance windows. Previously, Ascendance existed as the reliable on-demand cooldown, as opposed to Deeply Rooted Elements that sacrificed control for more frequent - but unpredictable - procs. With Ascendance having a very similar effect tacked on, it inherited the same issue - the assigned deck that limits procs is so large that it's incredibly frustrating to play with. It requires a full 600 Maelstrom Weapon to be cycled per deck, with 3 procs contained within. At its worst, if your first deck has its 3 procs within the first 100 and your second deck has them weighted to the last 100, you could go 1000 stacks between them (taking around 5 minutes). This is compounded by the deck not resetting unless you relog, meaning it's possible to unknowingly pull with the debt of a depleted deck (or stack a deck prior to a pull provided the raid will bother to wait for you).
We have two other effects using this system - Storm Unleashed has a 5 in 250 deck, and Tempest has a 2 in 100 deck. Both of these decks are small enough and limit effects that are, while strong, far less explosive, so they often cycle in a way that feels mostly invisible and successfully smooth out RNG. Conversely, pairing a deck as large as Doom Winds has with an effect so powerful does the opposite - it lays it bare that something has its fingers on the scales, which is the opposite of what deck of cards is supposed to achieve. This shift moves it away from player-positive bad luck protection, and far more toward player-negative high roll prevention. That means anecdotes about the effect often focus on the negatives of bad procs, because good procs are so unlikely. I often see takes such as "well the procs are just a nice bonus, it's not the main part of the talent", and I want to dispel that - you are paying a talent point premium to double the cooldown of your burst windows, and Ascendance, even with the additional duration, is absolutely not twice as strong as Doom Winds. These procs are part of the budget. Add on that procs so rare can misfire into dying pulls, trigger right before downtime, and even proc but not extend the buff and it borders on ruining the feel of the tree entirely.
To inject some disclosed personal bias, it's not a secret that I'm not the biggest fan of how Deeply Rooted Elements feels. I understand why people like it, but as an effect I find it drowns out fun gameplay loops with RNG death spirals. That makes me averse to the entire Stormbringer tree (which I enjoyed a lot in The War WIthin) being polluted by both the talent existing, and DRE-but-in-a-trenchcoat being tacked onto the active version of Ascendance. Having no way to play a more controlled version of the tree (at a reasonable loss) due to Descending Skies existing tainted what is otherwise a great iteration of the tree. I accept some players clearly enjoy it so removing it carte blanche definitely isn't the solution, but there's no good reason for two functionally identical versions of the same polarizing mechanic to occupy both spaces on a choice node - especially one that warps an otherwise enjoyable tree to play so much.
A Question of Priority
On the topic of how our damage is distributed, historically speaking Enhancement has always been a specialization that deals solid priority damage, even in periods where its AoE has been... lacking, even having one of the earliest examples of a real "funnel" mechanic with the original Fire Nova. The Midnight situation has stripped this entirely, and instead we often lose priority damage (in some cases a significant amount) with each target added.
This is in no small part due to the change to Crash Lightning splitting its damage. This was necessary to give room to tune it up into a punchy effect for single target, but the extra Maelstrom Weapon it provides pales in comparison to the past, while actively removing damage from your priority target. While Stormbringer softens this blow slightly with Lightning Rod, Totemic suffers massively when extra targets get involved, especially during Surging Totem. More of its damage has soft-cap splitting, and effects like Totemic Rebound (a single-target component of the tree) will always fire on the last target Chain Lightning bounces to rather than your main target. This has flipped what was previously a clear strength of the specialization completely on its head, and we often struggle to single out key targets at a time when the game increasingly moves toward incentivizing specs that do so - as highlighted in a recent post regarding Mythic+ philosophy in Season 2.
The specialization has always had a decent amount of its damage split when extra targets are added, but the biggest impact has come from overhauls to the talent tree. Almost every single valve we previously had to increase throughput via extra targets was removed, so when the Crash Lightning change happens on top, it compounds the drastic profile change - once again, felt most by Totemic. Previously, we had the original Ashen Catalyst (scaling Lava Lash damage and CDR through Flame Shock ticks), Surging Elements (previously Splintered Elements) increased Haste with extra targets, and most importantly Witch Doctor's Ancestry. The latter meant that the huge increase to Maelstrom Weapon generation provided by Crash Lightning had somewhere to go when it overcaps via CDR. Instead, we still gain extra resources through Crash Lightning splashes (though obviously less than before), but it doesn't convert to much of anything since our spenders are weaker than before, and often saturated by our standard rotation.
As mentioned earlier, our talent tree is very light on choices, so this feels like prime real-estate to move into. A solution available in the tree would provide meaningful build choices depending on needs (moreso than Stormbind will ever manage), as having a way to offset the amount lost from Crash Lightning when extra targets spawn would be a premium pickup for both trees. The 2-piece change was of note here, saving us from having yet another effect that would pull away damage from our main target whenever extra enemies were present. It's an especially important concern now that designers often involve immune adds in encounters - damage will still split onto these indiscriminately, but there's absolutely nothing we can do as Enhancement to mitigate this because of how ever-present it is in our current toolkit.
History Repeating
I want to close the analysis on the situation with our Hero Talents. Throughout The War Within, every season (aside from the tail end of Season 3 when development stopped) followed the exact same pattern: content releases, one hero tree is overwhelmingly the best, it gets iterated on over the course of the patch, and by the end both Stormbringer and Totemic are roughly even. Then a new season releases, tuning happens or a weighted set bonus is introduced, and the cycle begins anew. Every time this was frustrating to see how close the trees were brought at the end of a given season, only to be immediately reset back to square one with each new content release.
In Midnight, Stormbringer was woefully undertuned at release, but has been improved to such a degree that both it and Totemic have a healthy relationship in the current meta (although very similar), with choices dictated by boss timers or dungeon layouts - reaching what I would assume is the dev's goldilocks zone: both are playable in all content. With the proposed changes in Season 2, it's looking alarmingly similar to The War Within's pattern though. Totemic is hit harder by the nerfs, and benefits less from the buffs. Stormbringer has gear options available that favour it, a far easier time integrating the set bonus into its rotation, and gains more from both bonuses. In Totemic's case though, nerfs to Surging Totem are meaningful to both its overall throughput and its niche for burst AoE, while Stormbringer's Tempest nerf is almost entirely offset by the buffs to both Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning.
I would really like devs to take a second look at where damage is distributed for Totemic (in particular Lava Lash, Sundering and Supportive Imbuements), ideally leaning toward effects that should reward execution throughout combat rather than just during cooldowns. Alongside these tuning needs, I'd also like to finally get clarification on why Lightning Strikes is implemented in the way it has been - this is a talent that can, theoretically, be talented into without any means to activate it, since it requires 10 Maelstrom Weapon stacks to be spent. This doesn't mirror the talent it replaced (Legacy of the Frost Witch) which used an internal counter, playing far better through that redundancy. This gatekeeps it as an option for Totemic, and makes spending rules for Stormbringer greyer than they need to be.
Following Season 1 Stormbringer is in a great spot, and I very much want it to remain as a strong option (RNG Doom Winds procs notwithstanding), but I do not want to see the option to switch between them removed once again due to mis-managed tuning. This was a huge shame for Stormbringer this tier, and for Totemic in Manaforge Omega - in the current climate forcing us in one direction with builds only serves to further limit a specialization that has very little flexibility in its talent choices to begin with.
Closing Thoughts
Although the sections above strayed into the negative, I want to reiterate, the state of Enhancement's gameplay right now to me is very good, and it came out of Midnight's rework in a well rounded state. The problems above are, sadly, ones that were highlighted during that testing period, and after a season spent in a live environment it's only drawn them into sharper focus.
The rework did a great job of doing what the spec needed, creating breathing room to actually design the spec in a focused direction with some iteration, rather than being a jumble of legacy mechanics pulling it in different directions like at the end of The War Within. I echo the dev's statements that the gameplay itself is fun to execute and they should be happy, but what still needs work is rewarding that gameplay. Too often does it fall into the hole of skill expression only mattering every 1-2 minutes when cooldowns are up. It doesn't need a return to the galaxy brain stack of dominos Stormbringer ended up setting up in Manaforge Omega, but it shouldn't feel like managing Maelstrom Weapon properly or maximizing your Hot Hand window barely even matters in between.
Even with that said though, while it's been a rough couple of tiers when it comes to tuning, Enhancement has always (somehow) managed to land in a spot where it feels fun to play, and that hasn't changed. While its performance is certainly not as rewarding as its best tiers, with some of the rough edges from its initial rework sanded off I think it could proudly stand alongside some of the best iterations of the spec without much issue. Midnight's gameplay loop still stands as a good example of their redesign philosophy, but players should be enjoying the fun payoff of that design work within the content of each given season, not in spite of it.
