3.0.2 – Shaman, Full Enhancement
Going to see if my shaman partner for 2v2 wants to see if we can push 1700 rating for more points and so I can work towards the Guardian’s boots (something to do) as well as, ideally, have enough points for S4 legs this week (to upgrade from my honor-obtained S2 version). In addition to all of this helping arena/bg play, I plan on using this high-stamina gear to tank with in WLK, so the more, the better.
Also, I wanted to do more Titan Grip testing on the PTR, but the talent is currently not working. It’s not letting you equip two 2-handers, and it reads as decreasing your chance to hit with attacks requiring a melee weapon by 0%. However, there is a new talent in the fury tree called “Armed to the Teeth,” which increases your strength by 1/2/3 for every 400 armor you have. At 10734 (or something similar) armor, that’s 80 more strength and 160 more attack power. I believe this talent was added to mimic a Death Knight talent that operates similarly, and will make for a good talent in any build.
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Long story short, Enhancement is fun. As I predicted, though, it is easy to run out of mana if you end up casting a lot of instant Lightning/Healing spells with Lightning Shield up instead of Water. However, it seems so far like you can have Shamanistic Rage ready each time you run out of mana so long as you don’t need to recast Lightning Shield too often.
I spec’d 0/61/0 for my testing, so this is without Elemental Devastation from the Elemental Tree (whenever you crit with a spell, your melee crit chance goes up (by 9% I think?)). I tried one build with Spirit Wolves and one without.
The Wolves themselves are your pets, both controlled by a single pet bar (I forsee that possibly being buggy). They have a Dash ability, I think an instant attack, and their auto attack. As well, a percentage of the damage they deal is returned to you as health (though possibly also to your party/raid). The damage they do is not spectacular, but that is fine.
One change I noticed on the latest PTR build is that they reverted the Ghost-Wolf-goes-Travel-Form talent that allowed your Ghost Wolf to remove movement impairing effects (as well as making your Spirit pets immune to stun/fear effects). Instead, now, it causes your Earthbind Totem pulses to remove such effects from everyone in your party. This is a neat change, though it is of course still easy to just kill the totem. I’m not sure how balanced that will be for PvP; most shaman I encountered in the BGs were elemental on the PTR, and I’m not brave enough to go in there myself.
Also new to the tree is another one-point talent and instant-attack ability called…er…I forgot the name. (I do this a lot.) It is along the same chain in the enhancement tree as Spirit Weapons and Dual Wield, being the bottom of that chain and requiring 35 points in enhancement (and I think becoming the only one-point talent in any tree for any class to require a number of points not evenly divisible by 10). For those not following the patch note changes, it is an instant attack with your off-hand weapon that does 25% extra damage if your off-hand weapon is enchanted with Flametongue.
Hmmm.
I will leave it to the math folks to figure out if that’s a damage increase over Windfury in the off-hand, but I would bet that the spell damage offered by the new version Flametongue and the Enhancement Shaman’s casting of Lightning Bolts and Healing Waves will make spellpower pretty handy.
Mostly, I see the Enhancement tree becoming heavily crit-dependent. With Strength now granting only 1 attack power per point (instead of 2 in this current pre-3.0.2 patch) and Agility’s crit-%-per-Agility being nerfed, I’ve already gone through and re-gemmed my shaman for more critical strike rating in preparation. It’s been a noticeable dps loss in the interrim, but I’m interested in seeing what it does for me post-patch.
Update: Theorycraft on abilities and talents over at Elitistjerks
September 23, 2008 at 12:01 pm
With my own shaman crawling his way to 70 (63.5 right now), I’ve been watching the beta news obsessively. I haven’t played on the PTR yet, but my thoughts are much the same as yours. Crit has always been a huge part of the Enh Shammy’s key stats, and it’s only going to be more important with Maelstrom Weapon now.
Elemental Devastation is pretty much, in my opinion, going to be a must-have talent to support the Enhancement tree. It’s been a while since I’ve read the general patch notes (I focus on class-specific stuff), last I heard Blizz was consolidating some of the stats and making things like hit rating affect spells and melee equally. Do you know if they did the same with crit?
In any case, once a shaman gets rolling with spell/melee crits it should be something to behold. I’m still torn, because part of me wants to prioritize Hit rating over Crit rating (I hate seeing MISS chains) to a point, but since most melee gear tends to have a nice assortment of both it’s not that big a deal. Gemming is where it gets hairy.
What’s your take on the Spirit Wolves? I’m skeptical myself, but that may just be because I find longish cooldowns annoying (Shamanistic Rage feels pretty irrelevant outside of dungeons now that I have Water Shield). A shaman is pretty much his own walking party now though; between Earth/Fire Elemental and the Wolves, you have 3 additional NPCs helping you smash face (!).
September 23, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Yes, all crit/hit/haste stats are combined so far as melee vs. spell goes. I believe that even Thundering Strikes (or whatever the shaman +5% crit talent is called) also affects spells now, assuming it follows the same path as retribution paladins’ Conviction.
Another thing about hit, the “standard” enhancement shaman raid build as it stands typically includes points in resto, in order to obtain the talent Nature’s Guidance, which increases your chance to hit with melee and lightning spells by 3%. This talent before would hit-cap your melee specials (which I think included only Stormstrike and Windfury extra attacks), which was important. Now, if we’re going for Elemental Devastation instead, we will need more hit (albeit only 3%) in order to hit cap those specials, not to mention having another one to consider (Lava Lash).
So far as the Ghost Wolves go, I only used them a couple times, and the PTR was horrendously laggy at the time, so I thought I’d see what I could do in Winterspring. Turned out not much. I plan on trying them out a bit more, but just haven’t yet. Good news is they can solo (er, duo?) level 55 nonelites! Woo! XD
September 23, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Having never had a shaman at the level cap, I can’t really comment on Raid specs, but in theory I understand the difference between Pre-3.0 and Post-3.0, and that’s the total switch from going sub-resto to sub-elem.
In fact, I was planning a switch to a traditional 0/4X/X build for Nature’s Guidance and the totem enhancers once I hit 70, but now I’m definitely abandoning Resto in favor of Elemental, precisely for the reasons I spoke of above.
Besides, Nature’s Guidance was removed, wasn’t it? Which means we have to stack +hit again. Tell me this though, why would raiding shamans stop stacking +hit once the melee specials were capped? Doesn’t white damage make up like, 50% or more of an enh shaman’s DPS? You’d think white misses would be really really bad, especially with the increased miss chance due to Dual Wielding.
Enlighten me, I’m genuinely curious. Is there a ‘magic number’ of +hit that needs to be met (like on my Lock), or is it much lower than the full cap?
I’d also heard that we can now eliminate all chances to miss on a boss, whereas previously there was always a 1% chance to miss, by raising our hit chance to +16%.
September 24, 2008 at 4:23 am
So are Shaman going to need to gear up just like a Hunter? Should be interesting. So once you get to regear your Shaman, do you expect to see a DPS increase, or do you expect it to stay relatively the same? The wolves sound really interesting too.
September 24, 2008 at 2:20 pm
@Feren:
From EJ, your white damage, yes, is 50% of your total damage. However, up until this coming patch anyway, Strength is your best bet for gems and Expertise (until capped) is your best bet for gear (see the Shard of Contempt, one of the best melee dps trinkets in the game for any class). But mostly, due to the relative lack of availability of Expertise on gear, you look for attack power through Strength, primarily, followed by Crit rating.
Once you hit cap your specials, hit only affects 50% of your damage, while Strength and Crit will still be affecting a much larger percentage of it (not 100% due to shocks, closer to 90%) as well as the added benefit of Crit keeping your shock costs down and maintaining Flurry and Unleashed Rage.
That ‘magic number’ for melee (dual-wielding melee) is 9% (I think 142 rating), the point at which your specials will no longer miss. That 1% you’re referring to only applied to spells. You will still have a 13% chance to miss with white (normal melee) attacks, but you are still better off stacking Strength.
This all changes in the coming patch though, as Strength will only be granting 1 AP per 1 Str instead of 2 as before, and Agi and Int (the latter with 3/3 in that new talent) will also be granting 1 AP per. As well, we have yet another talent that relies on the shaman critting in melee (Maelstrom Weapon), and yet another that relies on our critting with spells (Elemental Devastation). So it is my theory that enhancement shaman, just like elementals, should stack crit after getting enough hit. Yes, we’ll need 3% more to cap the specials, but I’m pretty sure I have that on my gear already. Having a talent that gives you a 6% boost is quite handy.
@Dakk:
Well, yes and no. It’ll let them better use the same gear as hunters, so they can completely neglect Strength on mail gear and ease the itemization issues quite a bit. I already use quite a bit of hunter gear on my shaman (in addition to some rogue gear) so I have quite a bit of agility and intellect. As well, they are changing the existing enhancement shaman items (pvp and tier items, mostly) to have straight attack power instead of strength.
So far as dps increase/decrease, I think that the gear changes and stat weights, once they take effect, won’t change shaman dps near as much as the new talents will.
October 17, 2008 at 8:28 am
hi there, how’s life?
October 19, 2008 at 12:08 am
[...] 3.0.2 – Shaman, Full Enhancement Going to see if my shaman partner for 2v2 wants to see if we can push 1700 rating for more points and so I can work [...] [...]
October 20, 2008 at 7:43 pm
Forenczys, an equal amount of hit rating should never be taken over crit rating. Not only does crit affect all attacks instead of just your white dmg but a higher crit % will also decrease those “miss chains.” Hit rating does not decrease your chance to miss it increases your chance to hit…which sounds like the same thing but its not. A “hit” in the sense of the stat is just a hit, it does not mean a landed blow. Whether or not you have a 99% chance to hit or a 0% chance to hit, if you have 40% crit 40% of your swings will be critical strikes, unless youre fighting something like an evading rogue from the front. When your swing goes off the game rolls your opponents dodge, parry, block, glancing(if its a mob), then your chance to crit them, THEN your chance to HIT them, whatever is left over results in “miss.” The table rolls take priority in that order as well. So if you have zero hit rating and talents and your opponent has a 25% dodge, 5% parry, you have 40% crit = 70% (of your attacks fall in this range) leaving 30% to be decided as a normal hit or a miss, with no talents or rating you have 25% chance to miss on those remaining attacks 30*.25 = 7.5% … so 7.5% vs that opponent will be misses. Also WF acts off of landed blows and not hits, as enhancement shams we live for wf crits…not wf hits so the crit helps there too.
Also Elemental devastation still seems pretty worthless to me, base enhancement spell crit is 5%, against anyone with even half way decent pvp gear an enhancement shaman will have a 0% chance to spell crit them = 0% to increase your melee crit. Correct me if im wrong.
This is also uber lame about the strength point changes… Im sure blizzard just did that and has no intention of fixing the stat values on all the strength gear we’ve all so diligently collected. I am glad about the wolves, even if theyre not that effective, theyre probably the coolest spell in the game right now and we’ve been begging for it since Jan ‘05. Earthbind snare removal I haven’t really seen as “working” well at all maybe its buggy idk i havent spent too much time with the patch yet.
October 21, 2008 at 5:25 pm
The homogenization of hit/crit/haste values means that Shaman spell crit goes up just the same as melee crit. You’ll have your base from intellect, another 5 from Thundering Strikes, and then more based on your crit rating.
The stat changing was just to make mail gear more friendly to shaman without having to provide two different sorts of mail gear. Yes, they did reitemize the shaman gear in the game to reflect this…none of it has any Str on it now. Excepting the possibility of that mail belt in SSC…Blizz has a tendency to miss non-set items like that. I haven’t looked, though, concerning the belt. Could be wrong.