As it stands, stormstrike is not really playing well with the shaman weapon enchants, and I thought it a good idea to use that as an opportunity to update these skills.
The shaman class, while cool and iconic, has a slight identity problem when it comes to making choices. You have 4 distinct weapon enchants from 4 elements, but they all boil down to ‘Hit things a bit harder’. Of course, there are slight differences, and that is what I would like to emphasize with the changes. Also, caster-shamans have no real reason to use any of these, since they don’t need to hit things a bit harder, which is a shame.
- Rockbiter: Emphasize its utility as the Tank enchant, reduce its AP bonus and increase its threat bonus. In fact, maybe even go as far as making the threat bonus scale a bit with a statline, so that shamtanks in better gear also generate higher proportional threat. My suggestion would be Intelligence, making that stat interesting for a tankclass but that is up to balancing. DPS shams should be discouraged from using this enchant since its damage bonus is not up to par to the other enchants.
- Flametongue: I like flametongue, I really do. It adds a bit of fire damage that ignores armor, its very sweet. Alas, it can’t compete with Windfury as a pure damage bonus, and maybe it shouldn’t. My proposal is to turn it into a caster enchant. Have it give a bit of Spellpower, this would also give Flametongue-Totem a unique identity, if your party has a lot of spellcasters in it.
- Windfury: Every melee class likes windfury, the shaman likes windfury, little kids called Kevin like windfury. Even paladins prefer it over Blessing of Kings, and thats saying something. With that in mind, I believe that this enchant is in a decent position and can be left as is.
- Frostbrand: The pvp enchant, I think this enchant has a great flavor and use to it. It gives shamans a powerful slow that you can’t use at will, unlike say Hamstring. I believe it’s utility is great, and does not need a revamp.
Elemental weapons talent:
I feel this talent also suffers from the ‘Hit things a bit harder’ symptom. It all just boils down to AP increase or just damage bonus. Again, focus should be put on the enchant differences. I believe the bonuses should increase Rockbiter threat and Frostbrand chance to proc. For Windfury, its AP bonus is fine, since making that enchant proc more could be a slippery slope into OP. Flametongue is a bit awkward, since you don’t go down 20 points into Enhancement tree, only to then cast spells as a main damage source. We could simply leave it out, put a bonus-talent in the Elemental tree, or have it give back its fire-damage on hit to give shamans a hybrid melee-cast build.
Stormstrike:
Finally, the reason why I came up with all of this in the first place. Stormstrike is so cool, its like the warriors Mortal Strike, but bad. If you don’t use the biggest, slowest weapon you can find you feel cheated because of its extreme mana cost. If you dare to cast it in a raidgroup, everyone either laughs at you or kicks you out of your guild. And then it kinda gives you an extra attack, but also kinda not. Does it eat a Flurry stack? Does it proc your weapon enchant? We don’t know, what patch are we using today? Lightning Shield uses its bonus without using a stack, nobody tells you this but its there! It’s so cool!
Here’s my suggestion: First off all, to address the biggest elephant in the room, Stormstrike should NOT be a debuff. It is too situational, too small a bonus, to let it compete with however many debuffs Turtlewow allows on a raidboss. Make Stormstrike bonus be a buff ON THE SHAMAN, let them worry about it whether or not they want it. Second, the whole 2x bonus max seems unnecessary, we are talking about an Enhancement shaman here, they are not going to roflspam Chain Lightning 5 times in that duration. This also stops the problem with overkill, since if you kill something with Stormstrike, you can use its bonus on the next mob. Its clear, clean and buffs the talent only in its practicality.
Second, apparently the talent has some problems with being a white attack, or yellow attack for the purposes of eating Flurry and proccing enchants, or so I heard. Well, here is my suggestion: Make it a yellow attack only, just like Mortal Strike, can’t proc the enchants, gone, forever, for good. Grab a little violin before we move on.
Give Stormstrike a unique bonus based on the enchant the shaman has at that moment! Can’t proc my enchant, don’t care!
- Rockbiter: Again, the tank spec. Since shaman rely on different ranks of Earthshock to hold aggro, maybe throw them a bone and have Rockbiter-stormstrike be the Big-Threat generator. Main target stuff, just like Shield Slam. Someone might suggest making it a true taunt, but I feel that taunts are more emergency based, and Stormstrike should be part of the rotation.
- Flametongue: Again, as a caster enchant it doesn’t really benefit much from the Enhancement tree, but maybe it could give a nice big chunk of mana back. Maybe not instant, but part of the mana/5 could be a cool thing that all types of Enhancement shaman might want to throw out there every once and awhile. Pay mana now, get more mana back later.
Windfury: The wind is everywhere, you cannot contain it, you cannot focus it, it spreads out through the open plains and enclosed alleyways. As such, windfury-stormstrike should deal a AOE version of its base enchant, hitting all enemies near the shaman with sweet sweet damage. Now, I’m not suggesting that the amount of damage should be anywhere near a windfury proc, but a balanced AOE could be very interesting.
Frostbrand: Let’s up the pvp utility even further by giving frostbrand-stormstrike the ability to freeze the enemy in place. Now, we have to be careful here for even Improved Hamstring and Frostbite talents have only a small chance of that happening. So, we could give frostbrand-stormstrike the basic slow, and then a 30-50% to freeze for 5s. The proc chance should probably be playtested, since Stormstrike has quite the CD unlike Hamstring and Chill-effects.
There you have it, my suggestions to improve the choices a shaman player faces when dealing with different jobs. I hope it spurs a discussion among the players and invite all feedback to help make this seen by the developers. I am not a programmer, so I am not aware of any limitations when it comes to coding but hopefully others have thoughts on that as well.
As balancing is a difficult task, requiring vast piles of practical data, I refrained from putting any actual numbers here. Lets first see if there is any enthusiasm for it.