Patch 11.0.5 Enhancement Shaman Changes in Review
While only a mid-season patch, 11.0.5 is a pretty major release for Enhancement and comes with a wide range of changes that I suspect may have been left on the cutting room floor in the lead up to expansion release. While the spec has been doing exceptionally well in The War Within so far, some of it almost felt like luck of the draw on a handful of strong effects working out well, so seeing some refinement in places that were lacking is extremely welcome.
The biggest things we're seeing is some additional new talents, refinements to older picks to make them more broadly appealing,
huge quality of life alterations, a second pass on
Stormbringer and a
long overdue rework for
Totemic. That said, there are some
extremely alarming bugs present that need to be addressed before this goes live, otherwise the spec will be dangerously overtuned putting us at risk of kneejerk nerfs when players get their hands on it.
Enhancement Tree Changes
Over the course of the Alpha/Beta cycle, the core of Enhancement saw very few direct changes. The last minute talent point cost reductions did a lot of help to make room for the hero trees, but there was definitely extra space for something with a bit more scope to take advantage of that newly made space, and 11.0.5
mostly delivers that for us.
The Good
The biggest changes to know about relate to three specific talents -
Stormblast,
Deeply Rooted Elements and
Ascendance. The changes made here are positive in almost every way, and do a lot of work in rounding out builds while also sanding off some of the rough edges in the gameplay loop.
- Stormblast - Now also grants Stormstrike a second charge when taken. This makes Ascendance windows much smoother due to the additional backup Windstrike charge, while also adding to our Maelstrom Weapon generating filler pool. Also, Storm builds in particular has a problem needing to have fillers for downtime in single target (increasing button bloat), and this almost single handedly fixes this problem.
- Deeply Rooted Elements - now triggers from lightning Maelstrom Weapon spenders instead of Stormstrike. This change has been asked for so many times in the past few years and it immediately feels better to play with than before. While Stormstrike spam has its charms, switching over to the activator being something we do both in single target and AoE makes it much more universal. It also allows for Elementalist builds to play it as well. However, right now it activates from the spender cast, which may lead to some pretty strange behaviour fishing for procs. Here it would be a good idea to go the Smoldering Heart route and link it to amount of Maelstrom Weapon consumed to avoid dissuading Overflowing Maelstrom entirely.
To highlight more of a reason to shift this over to Maelstrom Weapon spent, due to this being on cast, this means technically Primordial Wave in AoE has up to seven individual triggers per cast, while Arc Discharge is two. These interactions seem unintended, and would be solved by changing the activation method in this way. It would also allow for both Elemental Blast and self-healing spenders to cycle it as an added benefit.
Thorim's Invocation - Has had an additional effect bolted on, increasing
Deeply Rooted Elements proc durations to 8 seconds, and reducing the cooldown of
Ascendance to 2 minutes. This
finally pulls us away from an awkward 3 minute cooldown timer, which is a
huge win considering very few specs operate on that anymore. The flat damage increase, however, has had
Tempest removed from the pool. Whether this is intended or not is unknown, but seems a bit unintuitive.
One problem with both
Ascendance and
Deeply Rooted Elements is that due to
Stormblast changing it to charges, entering into these windows no longer grant a
Stormstrike reset. Likely a bug, but could do with getting fixed from a feel perspective.
Due to the bottom right capstone options being effectively forced into a mainstay pick by both the new hero talents
and the complete destruction of the
Primordial Wave follow-up nodes, having broad improvements here that apply to both
Stormbringer and
Totemic gameplay goals is probably the most significant changes we're seeing on the tree. GIving us a
genuine option between unreliable sustained damage vs. an up front damage cooldown also gives us a lot more room to tailor our damage to the situation.
The Interesting
To go along with the clear winners, there's some other new talents added to make up for the lost points on the tree going into the expansion. These vary in their use cases, but they're definitely interesting places to explore going forward.
- Doom Winds - The very weak single target strike on cast has been replaced by a tornado centered around you that deals uncapped Stormstrike damage to all nearby targets every second while active. While this still isn't an enormous cooldown moment, it's adds a whole lot more value to the button, and scales with Mastery, Nature and Physical damage amps giving it some universal benefit.
- Molten Thunder - Sundering has needed support for a long time, but I'm not entirely sure this was the answer. The baseline ability has been languishing and the edge case was the incapacitate, so this does little to fix that. Its PTR value hinges specifically on Totemic and Earthsurge, making a lot of use out of these resets to make up for the weak baseline value. The problem is, this is a chance-of-a-chance proc that has enormous payoff assuming it's timed well (namely, with Oversurge windows), or very little if it isn't. The amount of RNG potential this has is through the roof, and I really think this would work better if there were either charges, or a trickling cooldown reduction based on Flame Shock ticks instead.
- Voltaic Blaze - Adds a proc to Flame Shock that makes it both AoE and a heavy hitter when we cast Maelstrom Weapon spenders. The question really comes down to if we really need even more ways to spread Flame Shock, though this does give a less commital way of enabling Primordial Wave. It also adds Flame Shock back into the GCD pool with the proc, at a time where bloat is a serious concern. On the other hand, it looks and sounds really cool.
- Unrelenting Storms - An unusual talent that might fly under the radar, but gives Crash Lightning some backup value when forced into single target situations. Specifically for Storm builds, this opens up more options to avoid Lava Lash entirely, relying on this as a flexible filler. Note that the Windfury Weapon proc this triggers is technically not a natural proc, so the cast can potentially trigger it twice.
A clear attempt this patch has also been made to attack the ongoing problem of button bloat. It's no secret Enhancement has
a lot of buttons that overlap, but changing
Ice Strike - something used generally as a reliable
Maelstrom Weapon filler - seems unlikely to really draw people in as a proc alternative by removing that. Pair that with
Voltaic Blaze which goes in the other direction of adding a very low priority filler back into the main stage, and I'm not sure any movement was really made toward fixing the problem.
The Bugged
The big thing to talk about here is
Flowing Spirits. Thematically similar to our
Sepulcher 2-piece bonus, having an off-GCD way of spawning
Feral Spirit wolves compared to the GCD-limited
Witch Doctor's Ancestry has been kind of necessary for a while, and on paper it's a great idea. Right now though, it's riddled with bugs and is a balance
nightmare that has the potential to make us terrifyingly overtuned - upward of a 20%+ gap over live specs. Most importantly:
- It currently seems to be triggered by a whitelist of spells depending on the element of wolf being spawned as a flat chance. This means that the more you can lean into a specific damage school, the higher you can rack up the multiplier for huge damage. This is especially problematic for Physical wolves that can be triggered from Stormstrike and Windfury Weapon.
- The current 4-piece bonus causes it to spawn an additional wolf every time it triggers (making it twice as strong as the bonus is for Witch Doctor's Ancestry). This likely needs to be reduced to every other, or a 50% chance.
- Earthen Weapon Physical Wolves spawned by baseline Feral Spirit last for the full 15 seconds instead of 8, giving it a much longer window to create overlaps with multiple sets.
- The above 3 combined can lead to a massive amount spawned at once (I've seen upward of oh 24 at once personally, an insane multiplier of almost 2900% which sounds like a Diablo 3 number) which is an incredibly big buff to specifically Surging Totem and Earthsurge (with Molten Thunder) which is both very RNG and dangerously powerful, without really being that much fun since it's out of your control.
- Depending on whether you have Glyph of Spirit Raptors or not, the element spawn behaviour changes. We've seen this bug before and it's likely just an oversight, but worth mentioning.
To be clear, this talent design has a strong place on our tree as a competitor to
Witch Doctor's Ancestry, giving a less GCD heavy alternative that also reduces some button bloat. Ideally, this would have its power reigned in by less frequent overlaps, but instead these bugs turn it into a powerhouse as builds using it ignore everything else to force as many overlaps as possible for big RNG moments. If this talent goes live as is, I would bet a lot that the spec will see some brutal nerfs, and it's possible some bystander talents would get hit. I strongly think the activation method needs to be looked at here as it's a big culprit for the disparity, alongside all of the outstanding bugs addressed ASAP.
The Weird
While a bit of a polarizing talent,
Primordial Wave was a
very strong part of our core toolkit in Dragonflight. It's still as strong as ever in The War Within as a one point wonder, and this patch goes even further giving it easier setup support. Unfortunately though, for reasons completely beyond me all follow-up talents have been repeatedly nerfed through Alpha, Beta, and now continuing into live updates.
Primal Maelstrom being reduced to 5
Maelstrom Weapon per cast for 2 points is criminally bad, and
Splintered Elements is nowhere near strong enough to warrant 3 extra points.
While I know not everyone is a fan of this talent, but having an entire capstone leaf abandoned puts us in the exact same situation as before - one side of talents below the 20 gate serves no purpose and choice is removed. If these are going to be repeatedly hit, either add secondary effects to the talents or remove the follow-ups entirely, since right now they may as well not be there.
Lastly, the range
reductions to
Crash Lightning and
Molten Assault seem like an unnecessary walk back when they provided a lot of quality of life entering into the expansion. I'm not really sure what caused this to be reverted, but it feels unnecessary and a bit out of left field.
Hero Trees 2.0 - Stormbringer and Totemic
Enhancement is probably one of the single most polarized Hero Talent specs available in The War Within. On the one hand we have
Stormbringer that succeeds in nearly every possible metric in the system and is
very popular, while on the other we have
Totemic that's a bit of a catastrophe that didn't get the love it needed before hitting live. Both of these have seen significant refinements (and in the latter's case a rework) in Patch 11.0.5 so there's lots to look forward to.
Stormbringer Changes
Starting with
Stormbringer, it's not like the tree was in need of major overhauling considering it's an incredibly strong performer, has engaging gameplay hooks
and is on point in terms of thematics. It is, however, as much as I enjoy it, a tree that hangs on the precipice of multiplying our damage so aggressively at all times that we can get a little out of control (which I suppose is also thematic), and needed a little tempering after seeing it in a live environment. Key changes are:
- Arc Discharge - Reworked as an always-active talent. This now causes the next Lightning Bolt / Chain Lightning cast following Tempest to be instant cast, deal 40% increased damage and echo a second time on targets hit, making it universally useful follow-up to each of our value Tempest procs.
- Storm Swell - Redesigned to be a flat 10% Mastery increase for 6 seconds following Tempest, and placed on a choice node with Supercharge that has also been reduced to a 2 Maelstrom Weapon refund. This generally needed to happen to slow the rate of Maelstrom Weapon cycling possible, though it's definitely a performance hit.
- Electroshock - Removed and replaced with a choice node - either Lightning Conduit or Electroshock. The first is a random 50% movement speed proc (100% in open world) and causes you to release a Thunderstorm (which does work with Thundershock) after using Reincarnation. The second is a 20% movement speed increase following Tempest. These are both pretty simple mobility boosts, but far more useful and less disruptive than what we had.
- Nature's Protection - Instead a flat 3% damage reduction while Lightning Shield is active, rather than the 10% debuff from Tempest casts. While a reduction in potency, it now affects all damage at all times, and is generally more useful.
- Thorim's Invocation now no longer buffs the damage of Tempest. This is definitely a hit to throughput, but considering the damage it does currently it's not surprising something was pulled out of it to make room for the other changes. This just seems like an odd thing to remove considering everything else related to Lightning Bolt also impacts it.
Generally a lot of the changes here are moving in the direction of trying to add more of a focus into each individual
Tempest cast window, while slowing down the rate we obtain them - likely because the sheer speed we cycle on live currently is
very fast for a first season. I'm skeptical about whether or not putting
Supercharge up against another option will ever work out considering the current numbers and playstyle, but we'll see down the line.
Considering certain other talent tree changes as well (in particular
Deeply Rooted Elements), some room needed to be made to avoid the current playstyle getting out of control. I expect in
Stormbringer to generally play out very similar to before in terms of performance, just a little slower in the spend-at-all-costs style it's currently settled into. It also stands to benefit a lot purely from being shifted over to a 2 minute cooldown timer with
Ascendance, and the ability to make use of
Deeply Rooted Elements within its gameplay loop without changing priorities.
Totemic Changes
Up next, and considering the state it's currently in much more importantly, is
Totemic. To say the situation was dire at release is a bit of an understatement, and the play rate is virtually non-existent currently so it's no surprise it's being targeted for quite a large number of changes. It instead refocuses the tree away from the mix/match
Stormstrike and
Lava Lash talents, and toward key procs,
Sundering, and imbuements that make for a more unique direction that's much clearer in what it's trying to do. Key changes are:
These are
massive improvements to the capstone, giving it far more of a direct impact and linking the totem cast back into player power. However, the
Earth Mote serves no real purpose considering the rest of our kit, and could probably stand to affect something more interesting or else it will likely be left unused.
The biggest problem the original
Totemic tree faced was clashing ideas that pulled the player in different directions due to competing GCDs. Now, with more of a focus on enhancing specific windows and abilities that don't have this issue, it's more cohesive and fluid. This is seen in both single target and AoE, giving more broad use cases to buttons that have trouble keeping up when we transition to extra targetes, and as a bonus the tree has a lot more visual flare with a focus on
Sundering (though it looks a little dated).
New Totemic Feedback
Importantly, shifting
Totemic Rebound to instead be activated by
Maelstrom Weapon spenders is significantly healthier, as is giving us a guaranteed method to activate
Hot Hand and a way to leverage it with
Reactivity. The new talent
Molten Thunder also gives extra incentive to pick up
Earthsurge for payoff moments, rounding out the tree quite well. That said, since this is close to a ground up redesign there are few negative points of feedback I'd like to get out there:
- Currently, the Sundering procs triggered by Reactivity don't trigger Windfury Weapon which seems like a missed chance to marry the two sides of the tree together.
- Totemic Rebound has the potential to push us out of Overflowing Maelstrom, encouraging us to spam 5 Maelstrom Weapon spenders as much as possible to cycle Deeply Rooted Elements (to trigger Oversurge), and using the bolts to empower Surging Totem. This isn't necessarily bad, but it leads to a huge amount of resource waste when GCDs get busy. Either link the bolts to Maelstrom Weapon spent (every 10 would equate to a similar RPPM), or an alternative choice node talent to give some overflow kickback would be nice.
- Imbuement Mastery is a massive increase in combat log events (almost double) in AoE. This is a really cool talent idea, but could probably just stand to be a single hit, using the fire tornado animation just for aesthetics to try and avoid us causing input lag both for us and other players.
- Surging Totem itself with some other new changes is a massive contribution to our damage, but it's still cumbersome to position and play around. If we can't return to smart targeting from Alpha/Beta, at least giving it a secondary button press (a la Vesper Totem) that operates like Totemic Projection exclusively for Surging Totem itself.
- Sundering's hitbox is awkward at the best of times, and those that trigger from Reactivity are prone to simply missing targets entirely. It could probably do with an increase to its width if it's going to be more pronounced in our toolkit. It's also likely Sundering needs a look at as a baseline spell due to its weak damage, or the reduction from Reactivity loosened a little.
- Whirling Fire from Whirling Elements can have Hot Hand "munched" if you proc again, sending a 14~ second buff back down to 8 seconds. Whirling Earth is simply very uninspired (especially considering Voltaic Blaze) and doesn't really hit on theming either. We don't have a lot of Earth spells other than Sundering, which, while it has a lot of hooks already, might still be the best place to park this mote.
Lastly, numbers in general (assuming
certain bugs are addressed) still put it in a somewhat rough position against
Stormbringer, less so in single target but especially in AoE. There's still some talent clashing/lack of cohesion in certain places that could do with a second pass, alongside tuning up some of its effects away from purely amplifying the totem.
TL;DR - What Does This All Mean?
The basic outlook for 11.0.5,
assuming certain outlier bugs are fixed is that
Stormbringer will slow down slightly, but still remain incredibly strong while also being moved over to a 2-minute cooldown timer. It also now has a clear option to switch to a
Flowing Spirits /
Deeply Rooted Elements pairing for higher potential, but lower controlled damage. These talents are roughly
theoretically even over an extended period and present a lower keybind alternative that, again, if bugs are fixed should provide a different way to pilot the tree.
Totemic on the other hand is a bit more complicated. The bugs are
extremely pervasive here due to
Surging Totem scaling so well with
Earthen Weapon, causing us to ignore most of our magic damage and go all in on buffing it to drive our damage. If fixed however, the tree is much more rounded, but the tuning is a bit lacking to bring it up to the level of
Stormbringer, especially in AoE. Pair that with the downside of still having to manage
Surging Totem paired with the RNG factor of
Earthsurge +
Molten Thunder (and worse, potentially
Deeply Rooted Elements +
Oversurge) may leave it still lacking. Ultimately though, it's in a
far better place than it was previously.
Regarding the general changes, the playstyle is a lot less prone to streaks of bad RNG leading to downtime or cycling fillers regardless of build due to
Stormblast in particular.
Ascendance windows are significantly smoother to pilot, and the new talent options in the middle of the tree provide some extra tools to slot into builds, though none of them are revolutionary when it comes to how they integrate our playstyle. Think of them moreso as playstyle enhancers or enablers for loadouts that may show up in the future.
Pair all of this with the new model and animation updates coming, and Enhancement is looking to be more set up for the future. There's a lot of refinement to what's already working, while sanding away the edges of some problematic talents (bugs notwithstanding!), so our gameplay loop remains intact. While there's still definitely room for improvement on things that missed as there always is, it's hard to look at this as anything other than a win for us.