Enhancement Shaman: Midnight Expansion Preview

The Enhancement changes coming in Midnight are far reaching, impacting a lot of our toolkit. That said, the fundamental gameplay loop the spec is built on still remains - and the spec has a clearer focus.

The biggest pain point when it comes to bloat for Enhancement was the sheer number of rotational buttons serving the same purpose: providing a bridge between spender casts. In Midnight, many of these have been consolidated into singular, more focused buttons that combine effects into one. Additionally, Stormstrike and Lava Lash are given a clear purpose regardless of hero tree, and function well even transitioning to AoE now!

An important thing to note however, is that our Mastery: Enhanced Elements has changed - Stormsurge now only procs from Stormstrike, rather than all special attacks. This makes it far less frequent, putting more pressure on you to balance strike GCDs correctly to avoid downtime. Fortunately, a couple of changes and additions support that goal:

• Crash Lightning
  repositioned instead as a primary strike that also provides a maintenance buff. The splash buff now activates regardless of targets hit, and still provides additional damage and Maelstrom Weapon procs from both Stormstrike and Lava Lash.
• Voltaic Blaze
  Combines Ice Strike, Hailstorm and Flame Shock all into one, filling the gap left by a mid-range, flexible filler tool. Generating bulk Maelstrom Weapon, being castable at range, and providing setup for some effects positions it well, and it feels good to press in combat.

The addition of Ride the Lightning also provides immediate AoE value to any Stormstrike or Lava Lash casts whenever additional targets are nearby. This helps a lot with AoE conversion, while also keeping things focused on Chain Lightning as a primary source of AoE damage. There was a casualty though, as Crash Lightning splash damage now splits instead of dealing full AoE damage.

Maelstrom Weapon has been given a much more defined purpose in the tree, and maintains its value between Hero Talents. Elemental Tempo is a standout talent - consolidating many of the overloaded cooldown reduction present on the live tree into a strong effect driven by efficient resource management. This affecting both Stormstrike and Lava Lash allows it to stand as a core mechanic for either Hero Tree - as Stormbringer and Totemic still retain the primary strike split.

With the reduced access to Stormstrike, this becomes an integral tool to make sure we can always fill GCDs. This also fixes one of The War Within's biggest problems - there was very little reason to mix in strikes with less talent point investment when we can access the preferred one so much. Now that we simply cannot, this talent reaffirms the older gameplay loop of balancing a more limited skillset to effectively navigate combat.

Our cooldown suite remains similar, though the number of separated cooldowns that need to be juggled has been drastically reduced. The most important change affects both Doom Winds and Ascendance - the old supporting talents for Ascendance in Static Accumulation and Thorim's Invocation now also activate when Doom Winds is used. This gives us the option to either have shorter, more proc-dependent, but still explosive 1-minute burst, or the powerful 2-minute power spike we have currently on live.

An unfortunate loss however is Feral Spirit. This has been reworked into a passive effect triggered by Doom Winds and/or Sundering, but it received so many reductions both in the power and uptime department that our iconic wolves are far less prominent than before.

The new extra feature for Midnight are Apex Talents, with Enhancement's focusing on Crash Lightning. Up to 4 points can be spent here, and currently accentuate the playstyle well without adding in additional, complex tracking requirements or decision making. Currently, these are arranged in a 1 ➜ 2 ➜ 1 point investment:

1. Storm Unleashed (1 pt)
   Maintains the feel of high-impact ability resets like Stormsurge, but applies it to the sustained value of Crash Lightning. This adds in redundancy by allowing the buffs to stack, allowing it to bypass the viscerally negative feeling of being flooded by procs.
2. Storm Unleashed (2 pts)
   2-point talent tax node that improves both Maelstrom Weapon spenders and Weapon Imbue damage. While points below the 20 gate are premium, this provides broad increases that apply asymmetrically to both Hero Talents, giving it good room to stay relevant.
3. Storm Unleashed (1 pt)
   Causes Crash Lightning to quickly echo the on-cast damage, and adds an attack speed buff to the weapon enhancement. With the change to Stormsurge, attack speed has lost a decent amount of its use cases, so this could probably stand to be something more clearly valuable.

With the other changes to Enhancement, Crash Lightning is already incorporated well into the gameplay loop. These talents just compound that further, and lean into the goal of the new tree without pushing too far into one direction. It works well as a place to re-house some of the quick reaction proc gameplay that was lost, and the selection of Crash Lightning in its new form works out surprisingly well. The choice of attack speed is a little strange though with how much has been pulled out of our auto attacks (even with recent buffs considered), and evaluating its value isn't intuitive.

In Midnight, as per the developer notes, the goal has been to consolidate at least some of our core mechanics and soften the split between Stormbringer and Totemic. This means that some aspects that drastically separated them previously have been trimmed, but they still have distinct loops unique to each. How successful this reorientation was though depends on the tree.

Of the two, Stormbringer has changed the most significantly. It took some heavy hits to core mechanics, and while its design isn't too dissimilar, it didn't make it to Midnight unscathed. There's three key changes that happened:

• Tempest
  No longer triggers from Maelstrom Weapon stacks spent, and is instead a random proc from spenders. This makes them less predictable.
• Rolling Thunder
  Has moved the Feral Spirit spawn to Doom Winds instead of Tempest, which lowers the value of each Tempest cast.
• Awakening Storms
  No longer deals damage or stacks, instead providing 1.1 RPPM proc from Stormstrike that generates a Tempest stack.

There's still a lot of power in each Tempest cast currently, but the push to condense these casts into small windows to overlap Feral Spirit buffs is gone. This means you're under less pressure to carefully manage and deploy your procs, which is a positive. Unfortunately, moving closer toward complete unpredictability with Tempest results in bigger swings in damage with no way to mitigate it. Many small things that made Stormbringer feel the way it did in The War Within have been chipped away, and as Beta has continued it feels more and more like it could do with a second pass to bring it back to the standard previously achieved.

For the three new nodes, while Stormwell is a good addition incorporating Unrelenting Storms into the tree, the other two are less interesting. Natural Gift being a flat Nature damage boost reads like it is - a filler. Descending Skies has a twofold problem: it's both underwhelming and dilutes the cooldown flexibility added by the spec redesign. Sticking with 1-minute Doom Winds means this talent does nothing, which feels like a forced error undoing the good the spec changes did. The situation doesn't feel anywhere close to unfixable though, it's benefitting from the overall improvements to the spec after all. Things like integration with Stormstrike properly, ways to reliably influence Tempest, these could all go a long way toward finding out what " Stormbringer" is in Midnight.

Relative to the rocky implementation on live for Totemic, Midnight appears to have a more clear focus on how it's meant to align with the core loop, and what it brings to the table. The changes come together for an incredibly tight experience (especially compared to its peer), and it's only benefited from the changes. There's a few key changes coming:

• Surging Totem
  Now a 1-minute cooldown with a 25-second duration, rather than a 24-second cooldown maintenance buff. This aligns it with other cooldowns, and is tuned as such.
• Whirling Elements
  Instead boosts the damage of Sundering with Whirling Earth, giving it immediate impact each cast.
• Totemic Momentum
  New to the tree, solidifies the push toward Lava Lash and Hot Hand as a primary strike, while fixing previous issues of Maelstrom Weapon relevance within the gameplay loop.

The biggest issue with Totemic as The War Within progressed was the place of spenders, and the reliance on Hot Hand to deal its damage. The newly added Totemic Momentum addresses both of these, while also adding in a layer of skill expression to managing resources around proc windows. Switching Surging Totem to a burst tool at the same time made room for this to happen, without overloading you every 24 seconds with a checklist of things to set up for each totem. One important thing to note though - the Sundering change to now be the vector for old Primordial Wave effects are not triggered by Reactivity.

Ride the Lightning also now provides a convenient way to stack up Totemic Rebound consistently, meaning that there's less friction between the spender vs. strike GCD economy. For the last two new talents, the first is Elemental Attunement which, similar to Stormbringer, is a filler node for 2% Mastery. The final point adds even more up front burst to your Surging Totem - Surge Catalyst mirrors our live set bonus by causing your next Lava Lash to echo for bonus damage.