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 area with the biggest issue of bloat within the Enhancement toolkit was the sheer number of rotational buttons designed to bridge between our spenders. 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 more of a purpose regardless of hero tree, and function well even when it transitions 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, meaning that we now need to balance our strike GCDs correctly to make sure we always have something available to press. 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, still providing 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 feels good to press in combat.

Ride the Lightning now 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. However, 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 as well. Elemental Tempo is a standout talent - replacing a lot of the overloaded cooldown reduction present on the live tree in exchange for a strong hook that's driven by efficient resource management. This affecting both Stormstrike and Lava Lash allows for it to work as a core component for each Hero Tree as well - as Stormbringer and Totemic still maintain 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 weaving these correctly to maintain flow.

Our cooldown suite remains similar, though the number of separated cooldowns that need to be juggled has been drastically reduced. The most important of these is the updates to 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 shifts it over to the more sustained value of Crash Lightning. This also adds in redundancy by allowing the buffs to stack, meaning that the feeling of getting flooded by procs is far less viscerally negative if you can't spend them all.
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.

In Midnight, as per the developer notes the goal has been to consolidate at least some of our core mechanics between both Stormbringer and Totemic. This means that some of the aspects that drastically separated them have been trimmed down, but they still have distinct loops unique to each.

Of the two, Stormbringer has changed the most significantly. There are three key changes that drive this:

• Tempest
  No longer triggers from Maelstrom Weapon stacks spent, and is instead a random proc from spenders. This makes them far less predictable.
• Rolling Thunder
  Now instead has moved the Feral Spirit to Doom Winds instead of Tempest, which significantly lowers the value of each Tempest cast.
• Awakening Storms
  No longer deals damage or stacks, is instead a frontloaded 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, having them be completely unpredictable does cause much bigger swings in damage if they don't show up when you need them. The flow is distinctly impacted here, but the core feeling of spenders being your primary method of damage delivery is retained.

For the three new nodes, while Stormwell is a good addition incorporating Unrelenting Storms into the tree, the other two are quite bland. Natural Gift being a (low) flat Nature damage boost reads like it is - a filler. Descending Skies has a twofold problem of being both underwhelming and limiting choices by pushing Ascendance, as it doesn't do anything if you opt to stick with base Doom Winds.

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. 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 cooldown options, and its tuned appropriately as a high power damage moment.
• 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. Moving Surging Totem to being a burst tool at the same time also gives room for this to exist, 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 however does provide a convenient way to stack up Totemic Rebound consistently, meaning that there's less friction between the spender vs. strike GCD economy for the tree. 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 though 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.