Streamlining Ensmashment

When Warlords was announced, Blizzard talked a lot about cutting down a lot of abilities to make the game a bit more manageable - slicing through the dreaded "button bloat." We saw a lot of specs stripped down to their bare essentials, and in the case of Arms Warriors, way past that to the point where the spec didn't have anything interesting going on and...

Ahem!

With all this cutting - not just from Arms, but from tons of specs across the board, the shocking exception was Enhancement. Enhancement Shamans have a huge number of abilities to juggle, and in this grand 6.0 cull, they lost... basically nothing. A few cooldowns were cut out - we lost Storm Lash Totem, as they really want to make Bloodlust/Heroism and its imitators the only real raid-wide damage cooldown - but rotationally, Enhancement has everything it had in Mists - plus Liquid Magma, if you take that talent. (Ok, technically we lost Earth Shock, but we just put Frost Shock in its place, so it's a wash.)

Enhancement has a special place in my heart, as it's the spec of the first character I really played in WoW - back when Shaman were a Horde-only class. But I'll confess that the old Tauren has slipped a few rungs down on my alt-priority ladder, and so if I get something wrong here, well, this is my disclaimer that something like that might happen.

Also, just a quick note before we get into this - a lot of people love Enhancement because of the craziness of it. And intelligent people can disagree that the spec needs changes. But that said - let's see how we could change it.

Enhancement has a big slew of abilities that could be considered rotational.

You have Stormstrike and Lava Lash as your melee attacks - with Lava Lash getting a reset-cooldown from Flame Shock. And Lava Lash spreads the Flame Shock DoT to additional targets. You have Flame Shock and Frost Shock - the former being mainly used for its DoT, and the latter being a filler when you have next to nothing else to do. You have Unleash Elements (or whatever it's called now) that you need to use to buff Flame Shock) You have Fire Nova, which you use once your Lava Lash has spread your Flame Shock to multiple targets so that they all damage each other (and anyone else in range.) Then of course you have Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightining - to be used on Maelstrom Weapon charges. And finally, of course, you have Searing Totem and Magma Totem, for single-target and AoE, respectively. (And that's not counting Greater Fire Elemental Totem, which is a cooldown, rather than a rotational ability.)

That's 10 abilities to juggle, or 8 for strictly single-target situations. And that's not counting cooldowns or the many utility spells (mostly Totems.)

Compare this to another spec that I'd consider complex - Demonology. Demo has Corruption/Doom, Hand of Gul'dan, Shadow Bolt, Soul Fire, and Hellfire/Immolation Aura. Or if that's cheating because some of the spells do double-duty, consider Feral, which has Shred, Rake, Rip, Savage Roar, and Ferocious Bite (and maybe Tiger's Fury, depending on whether you call that rotational or a cooldown.)

And while it might not seem that big a deal that Enhancement has a couple more abilities to watch for, the other issue is that they're really all used constantly. You almost never hit the same ability twice in a row, and while the effects of the various abilities interact sometimes, their use is rarely governed by the others (except perhaps the Lava Lash/Flame Shock proc.)

Before we talk cuts, let's talk about what the core identity of the Enhancement Shaman is:

In my mind, the main thematic concept of Enhancement is that they are Melee Casters - sort of the opposite of the Ranged Physical hunters who share a lot of their gear.

There are melee classes with magic damage - indeed, every melee class has some source of non-physical damage. But Enhancement Shamans stand out, even in front of Paladins and Death Knights, who are also certainly magic-based melee classes, as really casting-while-smashing. The fact that they use the same "bolt" spell as their ranged brethren really makes them unique (though considering they are one of only two classes that can be both Melee and Ranged DPS, and the other one basically changes classes to perform the Melee role, it's not hard.)

I think the embodiment of this flavor is best represented in Maelstrom Weapon. Yet MW has one downside, which is that it is totally at the whim of RNG. I'd propose making MW something more predictable, or at least easier to manage. To do so, I'd have Stormstrike guarantee at least one stack of the buff.

MW doesn't have to be a clone of Combo Points or Holy Power, so I'd still keep the proc, but allow the Shaman to push things forward a bit.

So far we're keeping MW (and thus Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning,) and Stormstrike. What do we cut?

Thematically, there ought to be some fire damage in there as well. But in what form?

My radical suggestion here would be that we keep Lava Lash, but we get rid of Flame Shock - making it an Elemental-only ability. Lava Lash would keep its proc, but rather than occurring due to Flame Shock ticks, we could make it the result of either melee attacks or Fire Totem hits.

You could sort of merge Lava Lash with Fire Nova - a burst of fire damage that hits anything near the target (with a cool animation to boot - something like a volcanic eruption maybe.) Alternatively, you could make Fire Nova the AoE-equivalent of Lava Lash, sharing a cooldown like a Paladin's Crusader Strike and Hammer of the Righteous.

Unleash Elements is dull, so I'd just mercy-kill it.

This would cut the Enhancement Rotation to Stormstrike, Lava Lash, Searing Totem, Frost Shock, and Lightining Bolt, with Chain Lightning and Magma Totem swapping in for AoE/Cleave situations.

Does this go too far? Possibly. Maintaining Flame Shock while tossing in Frost Shocks does demand a certain degree of attention (it's basically the equivalent of Rupture/Eviscerate for Rogues) without being absurd, but I wonder if it's nearly as exciting gameplay as Maelstrom Weapon. I'll also admit that there's some satisfaction to the feedback-loop nature of Flame Shock, Lava Lash, Fire Nova, and more Lava Lashes because of all those new Flame Shocks up on your enemies.

But I think there's room for a design of Enhancement that doesn't make us track 10 different durations, cooldowns, and procs that nevertheless has a compelling degree of complexity.