First off, Ghostcrawler and anyone else who worked on enhancement shamans, thanks for making them a ton of fun to play with the expansion. Having a blast for sure.

But I need to know, why do you feel the need to change mental quickness from a really nice scaling talent to one that doesn't scale nearly as well or easily and has a pretty significant effect on gear choices.

For those who don't know yet:

-Mental Quickness: Reduced the mana cost of instant cast Shaman spells by 2/4/6% and increases spell power by an amount equal to 23/46/70% of your agility.

Considering that for basically all enhancement shamans, 70% of their agility is nowhere near 30% of their buffed attack power, this seems like a pretty significant change.

Unbuffed, I have a little under 700 agility and 3089 attack power.

With the new talent, that 700 agility would equal 490 spellpower.

With the old talent, I get 927.

Now, considering that many raid buffs give AP, as do many trinkets, our AP improves way better than our agility in combat. Moreover, many pieces of gear we pick up have minimal agility on them (trinkets, some rings, weapons).

Basically this is a scaling change in major ways and heavily affects our itemization. Basically we'll be going after agility more now than before.

Also note that the synergy between Mental Quickness and Mental Agility (funny, mental agility has nothing to do with agility...) is gone.

Consequences:
-Vastly changed scaling for enhancement shamans.
-Also, we will probably be tempted to grab druid tanking leather again since the Agi gains from that would be much higher, probably, than a corresponding piece of mail gear.
-This also nerfs the usefulness of flasks as a flask of endless rage no longer provides near the gains it used to. AP, on its own, now does not help enhancement shamans nearly as much as it helps any other melee centered centered class since our damage is split between melee and magic.
-Scaling when entering a raid environment from a 5 man instance or soloing is greatly nerfed. While most other classes get substantial gains in DPS (hundreds to over 1000) when entering a raid, this is largely lost on enhancement shamans as all the AP buffs only benefit a small part of our damage.
-Even fewer shamans around. As you know shamans are the least played class in WoW, and not by a small amount either.

Potential balances to be sure Enhancement Shaman scaling doesn't go the way of Elemental Shaman pre-3.08 patch scaling:

-Have mental agility live up to its name, have mental agility convert intellect into agility at some rate.
-Balance Mental Quickness so that part of our AP and part of our Agility get turned into spellpower.
-Increase the amount of Agility on shaman tier gear in place of attack power.
-Just undo the change completely and reduce the amount of spellpower gain from AP to 25% or something.
-Fix our wolves so they at least scale with attack power. Also... can they get some kind of AoE avoidance stuff like hunter pets? They die way too easily when anything happens at a bosses feet.

In conclusion: Mental quickness was the centric scaling talent for enhancement shamans. Mental agility helps us scale as well, as does elemental devastation and elemental fury, but not much else. The core of what makes enhancement shamans good hybrids is the mental quickness talent, please be careful what you do with it.

Edit: Also, please note that enhancement shamans are not currently overpowered in any way. We can top dps charts at the moment if we heartily outgear others, but all things being equal we get beat by hunters and mages handily (plus we are in melee range... don't know how we do against rogues). With a loss of probably 200-300 dps from this change (being conservative, the DPS loss could be much more massive) we'll fall out of contention for respectable DPS.

Also, I think some of the backlash today is due to the surprise of it all. No one seemed to have said anything regarding the need for changes to enhancement. This was just kind of sprung on us with no warning. The nerfs to hunters and paladins were pretty big (tho pallies still hit way too damn hard along with their bubble and stun) but at least they saw them coming a long way away.

This is a fine post that outlines many concerns that I had as well.

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Q u o t e:
This is a fine post that outlines many concerns that I had as well.

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True... GC?

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Q u o t e:
This is a fine post that outlines many concerns that I had as well.

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Anyone else have more to add? I'd like to see a greater and more expansive conversation on this subject.

Scaling is about the most important subject there is when it comes to the sustained viability of a class or spec in raids. Hate to see my shaman doing well now and have to switch to my warrior or priest later just because they scaled much better, because I really do like my shaman :).

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Q u o t e:


Anyone else have more to add? I'd like to see a greater and more expansive conversation on this subject.

Scaling is about the most important subject there is when it comes to the sustained viability of a class or spec in raids. Hate to see my shaman doing well now and have to switch to my warrior or priest later just because they scaled much better, because I really do like my shaman :).

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If scaling is such a big deal.. then why not change it to 20% of atp gives spell power or something like that ... that stays in line with actually wanting intellect ... it goes against other talents in its own tree... the dumbest change in a long time.

this needs to be bumped (of the 3 threads on it, this one seems to be the most productive so bumping this one)

from gut feeling, i feel like this nerf was made so ele shaman would stop doing 33/38/0 to pick up dual wield and mental quickness.

however, if this is in fact the reason, i don't feel it is necessary at all. Even with the current ele tree, i believe it's been shown that 33/38/0 is an inferior spec. Once shamanism is placed in the ele tree, this will become even more apparent.

all this really does is nerf an already inferior and inviable build, while simultaneously hurting enhancement shaman a lot more. With maelstrom weapon and lava lash (FT on offhand) spells and spell damage became an important part of the rotation. Combined with the changes to enhancement AP stats, hunter gear became extremely desirable for the enh shaman.

if mental quickness is changed to agility, shaman will lose a lot of spell damage on their spells, and the maelstrom/Flametongue portion of their DPS becomse a lot less important. Agility becomes a lot more important than intellect, probably enough so that rogue gear will once again be more desirable than hunter gear, which i don't think is something blizzard wants.

What really grinds my gears about this is Enhancement shaman are dieing for some pvp/utility buffs before season 5 hits.

Looking at Hunters for example, blizzard took the time to add in pvp utility buffs at the same time they added dps nerfs since hunters were topping dmg meters.

Where are enhancement's pvp utility buffs to compensate for the DPS loss? Especially when there were no enhancement shaman even in the top Patchwork kill logs that have been floating around here to show dps descrepencies.

GC you need to comment on this issue.

I can answer this one.

a) Enhancement shaman DPS could stand to be pushed back a touch.

b) Resto and Elemental shamans don't stack agility. This nerfs hybrid builds that take advantage of the intellect -> AP -> spellpower synergies.

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Q u o t e:
I can answer this one.

a) Enhancement shaman DPS could stand to be pushed back a touch.

b) Resto and Elemental shamans don't stack agility. This nerfs hybrid builds that take advantage of the intellect -> AP -> spellpower synergies.

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I have no reason to have intellect on my gear now... YET there are 2 talents that effect intellect.

Are you not seeing the point?... If our dps is too much then say it.. don't hide behind a wall and act like coming in 4-8th on most fights is OP or anything... its a stupid nerf and needs justification.

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Q u o t e:
I can answer this one.

a) Enhancement shaman DPS could stand to be pushed back a touch.

b) Resto and Elemental shamans don't stack agility. This nerfs hybrid builds that take advantage of the intellect -> AP -> spellpower synergies.

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a) What? No. Have you seen a single person complain about enhancement dps?

b) Those hybrid builds were already nerfed early on in WOTLK ptr. They have been nerfed to the point of uselessness.

c) Please do not post in topics you are not informed on.


We are asking for an explanation. This blindsided everyone, especially considering the state of enhancement as it currently stands.

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Q u o t e:



We are asking for an explanation. This blindsided everyone, especially considering the state of enhancement as it currently stands.

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QFT

This nerf to our spell damage is in direct violation of the developer ideal of enhancement shaman utilizing WF/FT as our main weapon buffs. currently flametounge is a viable offand enchant only becuase it scales directly with spellpower, in a way that provides better dps than having the offhand enchanted with windfury.

And not only does it dimish our flamte tongue enchant viablitity, is severely destorys our damage with shocks and spells, and our abllity to heal ourselves. Now this may have been in the best efforts to tone down our dps, but this is our primary scaling talent. as the original poster has stated. After this change, the only raid buff in the game that I will be able to benefit my spell damage from is direct spell damage enchants, kings, and gift of the wild. So how can a caster/melee hybrid be efficient as casting when they cannot deal spell damage properly at all?

But enough from a pve point of view, this nerf is mostly to our pvp effectiveness.

Enhancement shaman are brought for our great burst damage in arena. We're a offensive class that can be easily shut down and destroyed due to weak defenses. In fact, as a healing class our best way to mitigate damage is to constantly heal ourselves. After 3.0.2, our heals became somewhat worthwhile. but with this nerf to spellpower, we will not be able to effectively heal ourselves well enough to survive.

In a nutshell, this attempt at destroying the 33/38 build, which wasn't truly viable to begin with, hurts the spec the talent was made for deeply. I implore you devs to reconsider the talent and place it back to AP. Even a nerf to only 20% AP>SP fully talented would be acceptable.

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Q u o t e:
this needs to be bumped (of the 3 threads on it, this one seems to be the most productive so bumping this one)

from gut feeling, i feel like this nerf was made so ele shaman would stop doing 33/38/0 to pick up dual wield and mental quickness.

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This was some crazy idea that a few people use and most elemental shamans know is not an effective build.

So basically, because elemental shaman were broken, we tried to fix ourselves by using MQ, realizing that it actually sucks, but now enhancement get nerfed because of it.

I guess we are fixing elemental shaman dps by nerfing all other classes (well, except warriors!).

This is terrible.

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Q u o t e:

GC you need to comment on this issue.

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Q u o t e:
First off, Ghostcrawler and anyone else who worked on enhancement shamans, thanks for making them a ton of fun to play with the expansion. Having a blast for sure.

But I need to know, why do you feel the need to change mental quickness from a really nice scaling talent to one that doesn't scale nearly as well or easily and has a pretty significant effect on gear choices.

For those who don't know yet:

-Mental Quickness: Reduced the mana cost of instant cast Shaman spells by 2/4/6% and increases spell power by an amount equal to 23/46/70% of your agility.

Considering that for basically all enhancement shamans, 70% of their agility is nowhere near 30% of their buffed attack power, this seems like a pretty significant change.

Unbuffed, I have a little under 700 agility and 3089 attack power.

With the new talent, that 700 agility would equal 490 spellpower.

With the old talent, I get 927.

Now, considering that many raid buffs give AP, as do many trinkets, our AP improves way better than our agility in combat. Moreover, many pieces of gear we pick up have minimal agility on them (trinkets, some rings, weapons).

Basically this is a scaling change in major ways and heavily affects our itemization. Basically we'll be going after agility more now than before.

Also note that the synergy between Mental Quickness and Mental Agility (funny, mental agility has nothing to do with agility...) is gone.

Consequences:
-Vastly changed scaling for enhancement shamans.
-Also, we will probably be tempted to grab druid tanking leather again since the Agi gains from that would be much higher, probably, than a corresponding piece of mail gear.
-This also nerfs the usefulness of flasks as a flask of endless rage no longer provides near the gains it used to. AP, on its own, now does not help enhancement shamans nearly as much as it helps any other melee centered centered class since our damage is split between melee and magic.
-Scaling when entering a raid environment from a 5 man instance or soloing is greatly nerfed. While most other classes get substantial gains in DPS (hundreds to over 1000) when entering a raid, this is largely lost on enhancement shamans as all the AP buffs only benefit a small part of our damage.
-Even fewer shamans around. As you know shamans are the least played class in WoW, and not by a small amount either.

Potential balances to be sure Enhancement Shaman scaling doesn't go the way of Elemental Shaman pre-3.08 patch scaling:

-Have mental agility live up to its name, have mental agility convert intellect into agility at some rate.
-Balance Mental Quickness so that part of our AP and part of our Agility get turned into spellpower.
-Increase the amount of Agility on shaman tier gear in place of attack power.
-Just undo the change completely and reduce the amount of spellpower gain from AP to 25% or something.
-Fix our wolves so they at least scale with attack power. Also... can they get some kind of AoE avoidance stuff like hunter pets? They die way too easily when anything happens at a bosses feet.

In conclusion: Mental quickness was the centric scaling talent for enhancement shamans. Mental agility helps us scale as well, as does elemental devastation and elemental fury, but not much else. The core of what makes enhancement shamans good hybrids is the mental quickness talent, please be careful what you do with it.

Edit: Also, please note that enhancement shamans are not currently overpowered in any way. We can top dps charts at the moment if we heartily outgear others, but all things being equal we get beat by hunters and mages handily (plus we are in melee range... don't know how we do against rogues). With a loss of probably 200-300 dps from this change (being conservative, the DPS loss could be much more massive) we'll fall out of contention for respectable DPS.

Also, I think some of the backlash today is due to the surprise of it all. No one seemed to have said anything regarding the need for changes to enhancement. This was just kind of sprung on us with no warning. The nerfs to hunters and paladins were pretty big (tho pallies still hit way too damn hard along with their bubble and stun) but at least they saw them coming a long way away.

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http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=13392281359&sid=1

We don't need 2 threads commenting on the same thing. Please continute disscussion here.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=13392281359&sid=1

TH OP pretty much sums up my WTF!? reaction. I'd like to know the reasoning behind this.

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Q u o t e:


I have no reason to have intellect on my gear now... YET there are 2 talents that effect intellect.

Are you not seeing the point?... If our dps is too much then say it.. don't hide behind a wall and act like coming in 4-8th on most fights is OP or anything... its a stupid nerf and needs justification.

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Well, we still need intellect as in anything but a perfect environment (all raid buffs, no redropping totems and no offheals) with elemental focus you can easily run out of mana before shamanistic rage is up if your mana pool isn't large enough.

The big problem here is that it really messes with our ability to min-max without doing crazy amount of math.

Here are our choices with the changes:

-Stack Agility to get half as much attack power as stacking AP alone, but get much needed spell power in the only viable way. This may mean grabbing some druid or rogue leather which has more AGI than your current piece of gear. This means a loss of intellect and also has us going for druid gear again.

-Continue to stack Ap but get no spellpower gains, but you take better advantage of windfury, but your shocks and LBs (the only really big addition to an enhancement shaman's rotation, lava lash is just a filler) will be all but pathetic. In this scenario the player would probably also opt for dual windfury since the damage on flame tongue would go down by quite a bit while the damage from windfury might go up or stay the same.

Just a quick note, here are the abilties that will see a loss in damage because of the change.

-Fire damage from flametonue weapon
-Fire totems
-Shocks
-Lightning bolts
-any offheals
-Lightning shield

These abilities will lose massive damage over the course of a fight. Considering the average well-geared shaman will lose about 400 spelldamage off the bat and fail to gain about 300 more spelldamage in raids, yeah that's a lot of damage. Hundreds of less damage per lightning bolt and earth shock (or two highest activated, as in push a button to make it do damage, abilities we have).

The more I look at this change the more I see how big of a change it really is.

Like many have said, no one has complained about enhancement shaman DPS yet, or loud or often enough to make it a big deal. Yes, enhancement shamans can top the meters from time to time, I do it a couple times a naxx raid. But then again, I was among the first 5 in my guild to 80 and have farmed myriad heroics to get geared up, plus cleared naxx since the first week. I win when I do because I play well, min/max like crazy (e.g. popping fire leafs almost every cooldown), outgear the competition AND the fight lends itself to melee DPS (a more static fight where keeping in contact with the mob is easier).

Hopefully the PTR tests will shed some light on this change, and hopefully it either isn't as bad as we believe (unlikely) or it will be scaled back (more likely) or repealed completely (also unlikely).

With the change to Mental Quickness, it looks like we will need to start stacking agility for our spells to more damage, but at the same time we are doing this the WF/WF combination will become better than WF/FT. WF scales better than FT because Ft only scales off of spell damage while WF scales off of weapon damage, attack power, crit, etc. Also, if our attack power was causing our spell attacks to do so much damage, why not just change the percent amount instead of changing the stat that it affects.

If this is going to stay permanent, why not change the attack power affected by Mental Dexterity, increases your agility by 33/66/100% of your intellect. Have FT scale off of spell power and attack power to keep FT viable on the off-hand. Hopefully, to increase the dps we just lost they allow SS to affect all of our spells not just nature and have Lava Burst in the MSW charge, but all in all no shaman wants this change done to MQ.

Okay, I guess it's as I feared.
Enhancement DPS has been competitive overall, but now will be less competitive.

I.E. in my case I'll be losing 400-600 spell power, this seems to be the case with most shamans around lvl 80.
The amount of spell power lost increases with group/raid buffs.
I have about 2200 AP and 450 Agi unbuffed. Most 80 shammies without a big problem will have 2400 AP unbuffed, which is 800 spell power, to get the same contribution from Agi you'd need something like 1100+ agility.