The Most Recent War Within Changes for Enhancement
Following the most recent build that brought with it the much anticipated "Shaman Rework" that had been advertised in many places, it may have come as a bit of a surprise to some people that the reaction from the Enhancement community at large wasn't particularly positive. I'm writing this today mostly to explain what caused the situation, explain what was viewed as necessary, and to dispel a few fairly vicious accusations about why the reaction was what it was. The thing is, we only
wanted a "light touch" as mentioned by the post itself, it's just that it didn't really feel like that's what we got. I'm going to start with what the reaction was
NOT about (no matter how much you think it may be):
- It was not about getting a full scale rework - much of the changes that (rightly or wrongly) were expected were instead related to making the spec work now that hero talents are available. As you'll see later, what are considered the most important changes are, in the grand scheme of things, incredibly minor and the kind of thing that has been happening across the board elsewhere.
- It was not about losing Тотем неистовства ветра - our raid buff. Broadly speaking, Enhancement players are pretty happy about the change converting it to Небесная ярость, as now it can affect everyone, we don't have the hassle of building windfury groups nor do we have to babysit a totem. Losing a "guaranteed" raid spot for the health of the class and game as a whole is a fair price to pay.
- It was not about numbers, or performance, or "being OP" - how good our numbers are has never really been a concern, tuning hasn't happened yet. The outcry isn't about being the strongest, it's about not losing the playstyle that we've enjoyed in Dragonflight due to the current risk of it being buried beneath the impact of new systems.
I stand by my praise of the spec's design in Dragonflight, something people have had no hesitation reminding me about. The situation that has come out of The War Within beta has been squarely related to how the hero talents have upset a very tight balance, and one of the negative changes that arose from the build this week. The reason that Enhancement worked so well in Dragonflight was, as has been repeated throughout, the unique approach of two builds in
Storm and
Elementalist. Due to having two, it meant that some of the more problematic elements of each could be ignored in lieu of the perceived goal and the successes that
were happening, and that there was usually a backup build for each content type.
The entire tree was predicated on a very tight friction of points at the very end of each build that had some low impact decisions to be made for each (aside from one build that fell out of favour) - and what hero talents and the most recent change did was turn that into an incredibly punishing lose/lose decision.
What Did People Actually Want?
While everyone else is clamouring for a rework, and much like any player it would be nice to see a fresh look with cool new toys, I
agree with the general sentiment people are repeating back - Enhancement is
mostly fine and it didn't need very much to transition to a new expansion. The difference is, the two key changes that did need to be made to allow room for the hero talents and fix a long standing problem was
incredibly important, and on the surface relatively simple:
- Reduce the 2-point talents Натиск лавы and Улучшенное оружие Водоворота to one point each
- Baseline Тотем неистовства ветра and roll the effect into Оружие неистовства ветра (this mostly happened, but the Шквал change made this irrelevant)
As you can see, players weren't at their core asking for very much. It was a pretty low bar to clear to get us to a state where players would have been 90% satisfied, which made the disappointment boil over. With the change to
Шквал moving it into the spec tree and becoming required pathing for some builds to boot, this neutralized the main benefit of the class tree change and injected in
even more friction to the tree than before as we lose something we got for free in the same vein as
Тотем неистовства ветра. Any change beyond this would have been appreciated, but the entire sentiment around the rework being bad for us stems from the first point.
Considering we have a staggering
NINE 2-point talent nodes and there's been an active campaign to reduce these (in some cases down to zero for some specs), and that it causes such an intense talent point pinch with the new systems, it was expected at the very least these two would be targeted. The
only reason I can think of as to why this wasn't done is because specs require a bare minimum number of points to invest, because the broad scale impact on any build's numerical strength (rather than able to just add flexibility) is remarkably minor. This is kept in check because
almost all of our talent packages tend to contain 2 tax points, one key extra talent and then a payoff talent - we gain very little from mix/matching singular options outside of flexibility and we're currently
being taxed on the payoff talents.
What Problems Needed Adressing?
Relative to how explosive the response was from many, no, it's not
that bad,
but it does feel very bad to be hamstrung by a new system that's supposed to be a universal upgrade. To put into context the problem related to our live builds:
- Elementalist single-target can no longer reach its full live build due to the loss of the node link between Шквал and Оружие стихий. This means we have to sacrifice Кружащий Водоворот - and the build desperately needs resources even moreso than usual at an expansion launch.
- Elementalist AoE now has to give up Шквал, an additional activator for Горячая рука.
- Storm single-target is largely unchanged.
- Storm AoE now has to specialize even more than it had to before, picking either single-target or AoE for 5 full talent points on top of the 2 it spents to get access to baseline effects.
These aren't trivial points to lose anymore, and it's exacerbated in particular by the Totemic hero tree. This tree
requires 3 active buttons to make use of in different situations (alongside some tax points to get there - most crucially
Натиск лавы). The worst offender here is
Бушующие стихии pushing toward
Удар духов стихий and
Раскол, forcing
Elementalist builds down the same path as
Storm in having to decide on
either single-target or AoE, on top of the tax it has to pay to pick up AoE talents in the first place, because there's no possible way to fit in both
Удар духов стихий and
Раскол.
Below are the three builds that have been most strongly impacted by the introduction of hero talents and the most recent changes:
Elementalist Single Target
Beta
|
Live
|
Elementalist single target is a situation that I feel is extremely likely to solve itself - the link from
Шквал through to
Оружие стихий being lost in the build update resulted in pathing that was critical for us to reach the bottom left. The talent we have to instead path through to get there in
Гнев шторма comes at the cost of crucial generation in
Кружащий Водоворот (highlighted in
blue), but does very little to really assist in the build's goal. There's a reason this was moved to be non-mandatory for the builds during Dragonflight after all.
Elementalist Totemic AoE
Totemic Elementalist is by far the most impacted by this, and without the changes I don't think it's a realistic option. Elementalist AoE already has a pinch on live when it comes to either finishing the second point in
Атака стихий or
Кружащий Водоворот, and was forced to drop
Раскол going into Season 3 - sacrifices that sting but are doable. What Totemic does is reintroduce that requirement for
Раскол, while also reinforcing
Удар духов стихий via the
Earth Mote from
Бушующие стихии. We can theoretically sacrifice
Буря с градом to instead take
Кольцо огня and free up one point, but then we're
still over-specializing in one area. What happens at the end of a
Totemic build is you're forced into picking
2 of the following
6 talents (highlighted in
blue) due to the pinch created:
With the structure of
Totemic, all of these are relatively core though some are
much more damaging than others to lose from a feeling perspective rather than a performance one. This leads to a situation where you're asked to give up not only a smooth playstyle, but also the one thing that gave Enhancement an edge - flexibility - in exchange for a muddled mess of specialized parts to cater to Totemic.
Storm AoE
Storm has always had the problem after Season 2 of needing to over-specialize in either single-target or AoE. You can see in the above chart, all of the nodes highlighted in
red are almost entirely single-target nodes (and powerful ones at that) while ones that provide AoE throughput are instead in
yellow. We've already seen how much of an effect the talent point squeeze can have on one build on live servers - the mere addition of one point extra required for
Первозданная волна due to the set bonus broke this apart and effectively made it non-viable.
Were the changes to happen, it would allow for a much more granular degree of single-target and AoE tool matching, rather than the all-or-nothing investments into AoE or single target.
I have looked through our tree over and over, and without considering major rework territory I cannot find any other way to alleviate these critical problems that exist in our tree right now today, that are made much worse with the Hero Talents being added. Every other solution involves fundamentally altering something either on the hero talents themselves, or the abilities it relates to, which seems like a significantly bigger ask to solve a problem done by just trimming these two talents. This point reduction covers this so broadly and so swiftly that it gives them all the time in the world to come up with a better solution should they need that time. This is quite simply the highest impact change that can be made without needing actual involved work done to alter the spec - something I don't think we desperately need nor does Blizzard realistically have the time to do in the stated timeframe. I also have to note briefly,
Удар духов стихий seeing a targeted nerf when the offender is the excessively powerful
4-piece bonus didn't really help matters either.
That's why I need to emphasize again what I said at the start - Enhancement players weren't asking for much, just the
bare minimum to keep things functioning as they were. No-one wants to see their spec get worse with changes that were supposed to be positive, but that's what this build felt like and there wasn't any upside.
It Wasn't All Bad Though
On the side of the positives, I do think some people are bundling everything in as negative because some of it was. The class tree added in some extra defense which we've been harping on about for an entire expansion, which while not showstopping levels are power is definitely more than we've had before. It still has
a lot of bloat on some things that are almost legacy effects, but it at least looks a bit fresher than what we've been working with since Dragonflight
alpha. There's a couple of notes though that added to the spec sentiment:
Aside from these points, without getting too lost over power levels or tuning that can always be adjusted, I'm a lot more positive about these changes and while there are definitely a few problems that could be made better, very little of the distaste of what the patch notes brought really lie here.
Closing Thoughts
To end I'd like to just apologise on behalf of the Enhancement players if we got a bit rowdy and impassioned over the changes, it came from a place of frustration due to the excitement built around the patch notes, and I was absolutely not helpful in calming it down at the time. This is an earnest explanation much like
my feedback post of exactly why, point by point, people were frustrated and to put into focus just how little was being asked. There was no fury over a lack of a rework, there's no big anger of losing a raid buff, and people don't care what the numbers look like. This isn't about stealing the limelight or making our problems sound bigger than other specs, Enhancement players just wanted to see the tree keep its structure and open up a little to ease the problems that came up during Dragonflight, not make them worse.
