If anyone asks about Stormbringer, you have to
clarify, have you played it on live?
Because if they have that context, you completely change
how you talk about it. Because if they know what it's
like now, they have a really strong expectation of what it's
going to feel like in the future if they haven't tried it.
Victory for the Forsaken. For Lauderon for.
The Karen tour for. Pandaria.
For. Calendar to the burning region
for Gilnaeus or has not died, for the Lich King, for the
Sindora, for the Alliance, for the Horn for Azeroth.
Hello and welcome back to another episode of For Azeroth.
I am one of the hosts, the Truvilla.
Manny or or just Manny and I am joined by a very special guest.
Word up. Hello.
Word up. How are you?
Hello, I'm good getting in the swing of midnight so.
Yeah. Slowly, sure.
I I wish that it was slow, but sure.
But it just feels like we're running out of track so quickly.
It's just been since Dragon Flight they've had this faster
development schedule and it is breakneck.
I remember, I don't know, I think Legion was the first time
I was really paying attention to development styles because all
of the classes were changing and the speed at which things
developed and we would get updates in that testing cycle
versus now is night and day. But for people who don't know
you, tell us a little bit about yourself.
And of course, you're a De Shaman.
How did you get into World of Warcraft?
I was, I was given the game by a friend in high school or college
actually at the time, and that was 19 years ago.
They don't play anymore, but I still do so.
And honestly the rest is history.
From I I started rating and then I carried on rating the whole
time. I didn't start as a shaman, but
it didn't take very long and then I was just a shaman
forever. I play all the other melee, but
I'm still pretty heavily typecast as the shaman guy, so
I'm happy to take that. And yeah, I, I, I write guides
for enhancement. I have since wall odds of Drano
and I also do a couple of guys further melee specs on icy veins
and I do wildheads enhancement. I occasionally do videos.
I've done quite a few more on midnight because there was very
limited shaman testers for midnight, just tests in general
during the alpha. So I sort of wanted to get the
word out that it wasn't as disastrous as many were saying
from the patch notes, and I otherwise bleeding as positive
as I can with what Blizzard are doing in any other space that
you may find me in, like Twitter or unwaved articles or so on.
Of course, of course. And I, I know you from the Earth
shrine doling out wisdom when you can or trying to like get
calmer heads to prevail. And so with midnight, we're
passing out for we're now in beta.
We've had two weeks worth of ray testing with a week off in
between to sort of digest some things.
And so we've seen not only the changes that have come with the,
I would want to call it streamlining more than pruning.
I feel like they sort of merged a lot of things or crossed over
a number of things to get to where we're at right now with
shaman. But how has shaman been with
this? Like pruning or streamlining?
So there's two sides to that coin for me.
The the first salvo that when I first saw it, my reaction was I
saw it ever so slightly before the notes came out.
So I didn't have the context of playing it.
There were a few things that immediately I was anti and
almost straight away sort of reconciled.
It's actually fine after trying it.
So that was sort of a great lesson in don't overreact to
most people because everyone's guilty of it, myself included.
The I would probably lean towards it being a mixed bag of
a prune and a streamline. There's definitely depending on
which thing you like of the current one or past ones, there
is just some straight pruning that's gone and it's you can
find like a hint of it, but it's not really there anymore.
Things like all the frost spells and so on, they're mostly just
dead, but the streamlining part they I think did.
We were easily one of the specs that needed it the most by the
end of War Within. I think it's quite easy to look
through all of the specs and see some outliers of ones that
really, really needed some genuine attention to just sort
of get rid of all of the baggage or things that are cool, but
they don't need to all be separate.
And they did a really, really good job of I was picking out
the things that they needed that needed to stay and the things
that were kind of second fiddle things that you didn't need or
you can roll them in. And I think it plays
surprisingly similar. Considering the fact that it's
had an enormous list of changes. I'd probably pitch it funnily
enough, like really close to a wall of Drinore play style,
which was one of my my all time favourites.
It's very similar in cadence, but it's got all of the cool
bells and whistles of like modern enhancement.
But the other side of the coin is while they're opening set of
patch notes were really good and they did a really good job.
There was definitely some things that needed a second pass or
someone to sort of take the feedback and think, should we
really stick with this? Is it right, Is it wrong?
Should we at least do something? And despite about, I think we're
closing in on three months since Alva started, I haven't seen
hide nor hair of anything changing for us since there's
still quite a few bugs from week 1.
So that's a little alarming. But that's also the kind of
thing where if they do just sit down for a week or two and sort
of hammer things out, none of them are like massive problems
that are sort of world ending like pre War Within where you
had things where you could clearly see that once it
launched, if it launched like that, it was going to be
horrible. I think we're far away from
that. But it would be nice to have
just a second, second little touch up of we do hear this,
this is probably a good thing to do.
One of the big changes I noticed, or rather that they
referred to, was the effect of hero talents on the rotation and
how when you're playing Totemic versus Stormbringer, you're
playing very different rotations.
And so they brought them closer together so that the rotation is
similar. In my in my playthrough, it
seems to favor leaning more towards a similar rotation of
1:00 than the other. What's your feelings of like,
the way that they've changed it in regards to the hero talents?
Oh, oh, this that that's a question.
That sort of rolls. Not only does it link to the the
streamlining, but it also rolls back to like Dragonfly because
before hero talents came with the 2 split play styles
announcement was basically like the progenitor of a spec that
could do it. Because in Dragonfly we had two
completely separate, completely rotationally isolated builds
that you could play. And then in the War Within, that
sort of is more common now because hero talents do that.
But I was obviously had those same 2 play styles fractured off
and given a hero talent each and they were still completely
different. And what I think they've done
here, it does a lot towards what they were intending to do, which
is to make the spec at least a little bit more approachable.
Because it is absolutely true from all so many conversations
I've had both with like veteran players and from people who just
vaguely interested. The the spec is incredibly
intimidating when you're just handed the notes of, of how it
does it and what you'd need to know and how it how it
functions, what you need to learn to sort of get comfortable
with it. Most people are given a small
list enhancements given not only a long list, but then also a sub
list of all the extra reading that you need to do and like a
textbook list of all these extra chapters that you might need,
but not right now. But at least keep them in mind.
What they have done is definitely consolidated like a
core block of if you know this rule, it applies to both of them
all the time. And I think that's really
important because what is biggest problem is they spend
rules for resources completely changing on their head is a
horrifying like consideration for a lot of people when we have
a such an unusual resource to begin with.
But where they falter in it is that Totemic very clearly has
that that core and a thing on top that you do.
That's like the Totemic thing. That's really cool with the hot
hand extending, which by the way, I think is an incredible
design talent to go with the the tempo in the middle.
I think those two are real highlights.
Whoever designed those. While Stormbringer on the other
hand, feels a lot like you doing the core of Totemic and then not
really anything else. So that's really disappointing
considering I think Storm Ring is really cool just on the face
and it's definitely very complicated alive, but it does
feel like that's the one that lost distinctly between the two
of them. Yeah, just with the changes to
wolves no longer being their own talent.
And also the biggest thing that I felt that separated just Storm
Bringer from like a base shaman was the fact that you had those
wolves that fed into the kind of an ebb and flow of resource.
Like you would suddenly get a bunch of it and be playing at a
different pace. And then your wolves would fade
and you you would slow down in pace trying to get those wolves
again or get back to those wolves again.
But now wolves are no longer an active talent.
They are a passive talent. They no longer generate
resources, so they're just a damage amp based on 2 windows.
I think we've got fire and lightning wolves and nothing
else anymore. Yeah, there's there's the one
that comes from Doomens and the one that comes from Thundering
and then Storm Ring has got its own extra 1 from Doomens as
well. So there's, there's like those,
those 3 avenues of getting them. That one I think is I, I found
it really difficult to talk about this one in a, in an
objective way because I've since I've played enhancement since,
since TBC basically. I remember how cool it was that
you were getting the Warcraft 3 spell as your big cooldown when
you level 280 in Wrath. And I remember all of the times
that they were really good and the even more times that they
were really useless, but they were always there and they
always really cool. They're like very visually,
that's the shaman thing now, that's the enhancement thing
when you see them. And now they're very not good.
They're they're, I don't mind them being a passive.
It is a bit weird the way that they were basically you press
them every 20 seconds. They're not really a cool down
anymore and the whole consolidating all of our Quill
downs back into one or two buttons rather than 5 or 6
launch sequence things that you need to know different orders
for is obviously it's a broad thing they're doing to all specs
and I think it was more than necessary in our case.
But the way that Wolves got hit is just it stings a little bit
more than it probably should. That's one of those ones where I
think the devs did it with all the best intentions, but not
realizing that there's a there's an extra layer to why that
specific thing is really cool to people.
So yeah, I think that's one that people will visually notice
right out the gate. What would you say is more of a
success story for like the consolidation of cooldowns, even
if it is like rotational cooldowns versus the big
two-minute 3 minute buttons? Oh, I think that the the
integration of crash lightning into just being a a button that
you press all the time was a really, really good idea because
it covers it covers 5 or 6 different bases from 5 or 6
different eras of how enhancement is played all in
itself. Like it functions like a
maintenance buff that we had in Legion that have basically been
gone, but it also kind of functions like your mid range
kind of very important, but sets of other things.
But unlike unleash elements from from mop and what and then it
also does the AOE. It does a bit of cleave.
It's also a background resource generator.
It it's one of those buttons that one, it looks really cool,
but two it never really got used that much outside of just the
AOE thing. It's tuning has always been a
bit wonky. So we now will use it all the
time. It still looks really cool and
they're using it to plug a lot of gaps.
That one's a really good one, although that's hard to say
whether that's consolidating. I think the the whole Doom Winds
ascendance thing was a good idea.
Does need some massaging choice. So that's one of the ones that
I'd like someone to to take a second look at.
But that was a really good idea to give us the whole do you want
one minute? Do you want 2 minute and varying
degrees of strength and taking it off the GCD, which took me by
surprise was was quite interesting and something that I
thought would have been in a good idea long ago before the
War Within. I think just cutting primordial
wave, as cool as the button is, but it looks and all of the
advanced stuff that you could do with it, just turning it into
the thing that Sundering does instead, which is equally a
little dated on the animation, but is it equally cool?
Shaman button, but a lot simpler to just press and do was just a
good idea It it stops thundering having that weird go between of
what's this supposed to do in between the specs.
It's very obvious it leads into a cool cool down chain.
So broadly I think that the consolidation of near everything
that they did was the right direction to go.
It's just how far along the path they reached in terms of getting
it to the best spot it could be. But none of them were like
things that I read and thought, Oh my God, what have you?
What have you been thinking? This is this is a terrible idea.
So I think that's a positive. Absolutely.
OK. On the on the flip side, what
are the shortfalls that you feel that need that second pass?
It depends on how how granular it would be in terms of the
feedback that I gave and that we sort of echoed back to them a
few times. Like the top of the list is I
just don't think the tree has enough talents on it right now.
There's there's virtually no tension, especially the
Stormbringer as to like what you pick.
It's very obvious. There's maybe one or two points
that are kind of like, well, I'll put it somewhere, but it
doesn't really matter where I put them.
I'll just throw it over here. And those would be the kind of
things for like even just their passive talent or just something
that would maybe be a bit more simple as well.
This is obviously exactly this good rather than all of the
esoteric ones like attack speed and crit conversion to crit
damage. Like they're they read good, but
are they good at? I don't know, they're very
mathy. I would say that Stormbringer, I
just have to be a bit more critical on all the good things
that happened with Totemic. Stormbringer had its key thing
with Tempest being a tracking thing that you had to tackle,
which is a kind of worms related to the UI that's been going
ongoing for quite a while. But turning that into just a
random proc isn't nearly as as fun or it's not as nearly as
engaging. It doesn't give it that sort of
Stormbringer feeling that you get when you play on live and
taking that out. The tree is fairly skinny to
begin with on live. If you take that and you take
the wolves that spawn from Tempest away, it's not it's not
really a tree that you could write home about.
As to doing anything like you can very clearly point out
Totemic does this and this and it's over going to other specs
across the game with classes like Farrell will do this.
You've got ravage proc so you've got your vines that you bite
with very much a tangent over Demon Hunter with their glaves
and fell scarred with metamorphosis.
But Stormbringer, if someone asked me what's the hook that
you need to know if you're going to play it?
What's like the important new thing?
I'd honestly struggle to tell someone something that very
distinctly changes in your gameplay.
I think you just play exactly the same as how you would if you
didn't have it. So that one's probably the
biggest failure. And I think that's just the tree
as a whole. Little, little more scathing.
But yeah, that's one of the ones that I'm really hung up on.
I wish that someone would go back and look at that.
Between now and midnight release I've been waiting every patch
week for something to show up and someone to just have said
anything about Storm Ringer. I'm not sure if you agree with
me, but I feel that shaman has this very weird class tree where
there are just sections that are not meant for enhancement.
They're just sort of like, we're going to put this here so you
don't have to go through it, but there's no value in it.
And so when you're talking about the skinny trees in the spec
tree, I look at the class tree and I, and I look at things like
Spirit Walker's grace and, and a number of different talents.
And I, I spec into it. And I wonder what I'm doing with
my points like this. There isn't that tension.
There isn't something that I'm like truly passing for.
It's like, I've got the point. So I guess I'm getting getting
this and throwing the rest here. The the class tree has been a
real point of contention for I think.
Every single feedback post or article I've done since
Dragonflight released with these trees, there has always been a
section that says the class tree isn't very good, especially for
us, and I don't like it. Basically, there's it's not Even
so much about the power in it. It is the exactly what you said.
There are sections of the tree that just do nothing for There's
no sort of conceptual point where you'd think I really need
this or this will do something. They're actually fundamentally
useless talents, and it's not to put this any blame on the other
two specs, but I will say that at one point in the past there
were talents like that that were our talents that we got on the
class tree and they would have been eternally useless for the
other two. And they were removed for
explicitly that reason. There is no reason for them to
have Maelstrom weapon or or Flurry.
Or for the reason Pharaoh Lunge showed up in our expect tree
against Yeah. And like, that's fine.
If we don't want them to have maelstrom and flurry because
they're useless to them, then why do we have spirit walks,
grace and nature swiftness? And why have we got talents like
healing stream totem that are tuned to such a degree that we
have no use for it? Why is there so many like open
spaces for things that you could do that are shaman related?
Like I'll throw throw something that'll probably come later, but
our self healing for a hybrid is pretty abominable and the spec
tree does nothing to help that. And the one thing that we did
have, as overpowered as it may have been in certain situations,
got caught very early in the war within with ancestral guidance
and still to this day, a bit of a shame, but I understand why.
But there's there's very little on that the class tree that when
I look at it for other specs, I'm very clearly I see the thing
at the bottom that I really want to get to that I'm going to if I
don't have this distinctly miss. And when I look at my shaman,
what I'll pick like a few things that I'll, I'd quite like to
have and I'll go towards the things that are sort of nice
benefits, but there's nothing that I'm sort of like really
excited. It's on the classroom.
I want to get this. It's sort of more of the, those
are the points. I'm going to go to the spectre
now at least I can pick something that I care about.
And that's a little bit sad, I think.
And we aren't. To make it clear, we definitely
aren't the only class like this, but there's a very clear divide
between classes that have a cool class tree and classes that have
a class tree. So we've now discussed of course
the hero tree and we've discussed the spec tree and now
the class tree. The one thing that we sort of
touched on a little bit, but I would love to to focus on a
little bit more is the new Apex talents because we're every spec
is getting the Apex talent. We just talked a little bit
about about that Crash Lightning is back in play and that's the
focus of our Apex talent. So like I guess they hit it out
of the park with these? I think our this one was one of
those ones where I saw so many people be really skeptical about
it because they were so skeptical about the idea of
Crash not being an AOE button. I think it is a very good,
they're very well designed. The 2 middle points, they are
tax, they're good tax buttons for numbers, but they are quite
uninteresting relative to some of the other ones.
But the opening especially is very, very good.
That's very similar to say for anyone who played in Legion
Storm Surge of previously Stormbringer, but they couldn't
keep it called that with the hero tree.
Those resets were really important all the time and they
felt really good to get a storm Ringer reset on storm strike.
And obviously as time went on, because if you don't give
enhancement enough buttons to press, they end up just sitting
there doing nothing. Storm Ringer or Storm search has
become so common or ways to press Storm Strike that it
doesn't really feel like that good.
No matter how many times you glow the screen with effects to
say you've got the proc, it doesn't make it any more
interesting that you got it. Whereas this one is is limited
enough and it's on a spell that's very clearly important
enough. And then it can stack itself up.
So you get like a a a sort of lingering pay off from doing
from getting the procs afterward for all your next buttons.
And you can really impactfully see how much more damage your
like ancillary proc effects are doing.
I think that's really, really good.
The the proc, the the stacking, the final point is really good.
It's very hard to talk about because half of it is bogged and
you just get it for the first point.
So you don't need to take the last point.
And it has been since the beginning, which is very
strange. And it does make it very hard to
like objectively assess how the bottom of the tree is because
you just don't take that point because you get it for free.
The AOE pool is, well, it looks like Lay Shen's thing.
So it's really cool because Lightning Whip was always really
cool. It does a lot of damage, it
ticks fast enough that you're not really irritated by tanks
moving things around. And it's also got sort of a dual
purpose of you've got the pool for your AOE and you've got the
attack speed for your single target.
Which now, thankfully, when they buffed attack speed a lot is
actually relevant again because the attack speed has been until
then effectively naked off the the face of the spec because it
really doesn't matter. When you take away storm surge
from imbues and just imbue damage in general now the autos
actually hit hard. That becomes a really well
designed talent that's dual function.
And so it's a universal. I can see those four points as a
locked in for like the foreseeable future in a lot of
cases, which is what they want visually.
Cool. So yeah, I'd, I'd rate that,
rate it really high. It's definitely not one of the
ones that I saw and thought, oh, I'm not going to be.
I'm not happy about having to take those.
Yeah, I think that the hidden gem is how it works with the
imbues increasing those and making them stronger.
I was, I wasn't quite sold on it.
I was like, Oh yeah, this is cool.
And I was still using it to like enable my AOE.
And then I believe it was your first video that you you put out
where you're like, Nope, you want to be pressing this on
cooldown and then seeing the change from that actually kind
of pulled the spec, this spec together for me.
Taking all of this and taking it into dungeons and into raids.
How is like the rotation feeling?
How are is enhancement feeling in in play?
With the UI issues aside, because it's impossible to talk
about midnight without mentioning it and it does make
the spec more much more difficult to sort of build a
muscle memory because you're fighting against that.
If you extract that out of it, the the gameplay flow that it
has is really, really strong in terms of like how I have fun.
I find it it's it's got a lot more active decision making than
sort of retailers ended up reaching because we've got so
much gear that the decision making really is just very one
note all the way down. Not like it was the sad
expansion is very good to be clear, but the especially things
like having to decide you want a one minute or a two-minute
cooldown. Both of the hero talents similar
but different in how they approach the damage, how
consistent they are. The 32nd burst window is still
there with thundering and basically power infusion
attached to it. The it's still got quite a few
like mix up moments. You've got your resets from
resources, you've still got hot hand with Totemic, you've got
your crash leash lightning resets and then your cool down
is still. Frankly I think I cooled down.
Design, as complex as it is, is one of the coolest in how it
works across any spec in the game, and it still is.
Oh, what else? Oh, and I also, I'm a huge fan
from a dungeon perspective of of Ride the Lightning.
I think that that that talents been sort of waiting there as a
hero, as a PvP talent for the better part of 10 years.
And I think it may have come up at least 10 times since then of
why don't we just make this a spec talent?
Because it would just work. And it does just work.
It's it's a really good way of making those strikes that we
inevitably have to press in AOE still do a thing that's AOE and
it's cool. The only downside is the the
crash change to make it not AOE now splits.
But that's sort of an aside. I would say that dungeon wise
from a damage perspective, assuming the tuning is like it
is now, it is better than it is in the wall.
Then from a fun factor perspective, the only thing that
I think will bounce people off is I think Totemic is quite
difficult to play properly, maybe harder than it is on live
even to get that right because you have to juggle hot hand and
extend it for such a long period.
And there is a not necessarily aggressive punishment for doing
that wrong. But you do get left in sort of
droughts of being effectively punished that you you let it
fall off and now you have to sit there and wait for it to come
back and then your AOE turns off.
Or if you get it right, it's really good.
But that's just the damage perspective because there's
definitely a second one. I'm sure you're about to mention
that one. Well, I mean, go right into it.
I, I, I feel like this is the natural flow.
Go ahead. On the, the other side of it is
the the defence side and we've never been the best at defence.
Well, we haven't been the best at defence since Legion when
they took away all of our really good defence and expansion sort
of go up and down in terms of how much I feel like it's a
disaster. But it's never been like I'm
really, we're definitely going to be really living this
expansion and this one in the dungeon testing that I've done
and the raids, it is excruciatingly obvious that we
have far less defence than everyone else that I've been
testing with. There's definitely a couple of
specific specs that I didn't play with, but from what I can
tell her. In the same boat as us.
But I can really tangibly feel how fragile I am on so many
encounters so far and in dungeons.
The change to maelstrom weapon so that the healers from after
we spend good from AI don't waste damage for it.
Damage resources bad from A we now have to spend an extra GCD
to get there and the stacks they sort of they change depending on
how much you spent last rather than just accumulating.
So if you spend 10 and then you spend 6, you know 6 of that
we've got the extra GCD there and it heals a lot less than on
live. So on live, if I'm in a panicked
situation and I spend 10 maelstrom on a healing surge,
I'm easily jumping 50% of my health and I'll feel a lot say
more stable in that moment. On the beta, if I deploy a
healing surge that with whatever rage emails from sex I have
because I'm panicking, it might bump my health bar like 15%,
which in the overwhelming majority of cases in especially
the end game in midnight, 15% sort of doesn't tickle the rot
damage that's going on all the time.
So you're immediately in the same danger that you were right
before you pressed it. And we've got one or so we've
got one higher than average defence tool and one much higher
than average, not that good defence tool.
And those are the only other things we can do.
So I definitely feel like when I when I look at the spread of
what happened to others and just the general landscape of how the
game is built, how the balance between classes going to be with
end game content effectively being dictated by who can not
only do the most damage, but also live the most incisive
lethal damage. It's really hard to see how we'd
be anything other than a burden the higher that you go.
And you'd need someone very specifically tailored towards
having the tools to keep you alive because you can't do it
yourself. And that really, really worries
me, more so than it it's ever worried me in the lead up to an
expansion. One of the big defensive changes
that we got, of course, was the stripping away of our one of our
defensive totems. It seems odd that they gave it
to us only to take it away so soon.
Do you do you have any insight into why that happened?
Oh, I couldn't, I couldn't say why they did it.
I, I the, the story of the term itself is it it got added as a
sort of last minute right at the end of development of the war
within testing. Mostly because I would say it
was a combination of one, people were saying the class tree is
really bad and I have nothing that I care about, especially at
the bottom and two, people sort of identifying that yes,
enhancement, sorry, not enhancement shaman in general
are very much lacking in things that they can use to live on
their own. When we compare it to other
specs, because obviously in the context of the war within, this
was before the prune that's happened now on defence that's
been unevenly applied. I have to say.
So back then, when you're competing with most specs that
have got either, two very low cooldown ones are for myriad
length cooldown ones where they've always got something.
You look at Shaman and you've got one that's higher than
average and one that's way higher than average cooldowns
and nothing in between. You will always look at an
encounter's cadence and see well, this, this and this.
We'll be able to cover it on this spec.
But for the shaman, what do they do about the middle one?
Because they've not got anything.
So I think that's why they added it.
And now when they're starting to prune, they think, well, what
does it really do that earth elemental doesn't?
And to someone who and now this. This isn't to say that the the
devs don't play the game, because I absolutely don't
believe that at all. But I think to someone who
hasn't experienced how enhancement or just shaman in
general plays in end game content, it would be very easy
to strip the two spells that look kind of similar as the long
cool down press to live button without realizing what function
it serves of having two of those.
When you go into an encounter relative, how will the specs
handle it? And I think that's like a
misstep generally. But I also would say losing
stone Bullock doesn't really move the needle.
Very. I don't think the stone Bullock
fixed the problem that we had, so removing it it makes it
worse. But even if it didn't still been
there, we'd still have the problem.
And changing earth elemental to now lose the 5% Dr. but not
taunt One, that's great, big fan of it not taunting and get
itself itself killed anymore. But two, it's now a little
weaker in defence, it's a lot shorter, but it's on a lower ish
cooldown. But the question is for three.
Minutes and then a minute duration to 30 seconds now,
Yeah. Yeah, it's basically it's sort
of like stepping in for Stumble Walk.
But the the thing with Earth Elemental is that 15% health is
nice, but is it 3 minute cooldown nice?
I don't know. And what are the situations
where you want 15% more health for 30 seconds and you have to
usually kind of stretch to find those.
You can find the situation where you want the health for a
minute, because then it'll overlap quite a lot of things
that people want. But 30 seconds, it's a that's a
pretty aggressive cadence for dangerous mechanics.
So if if that covers those, then there's a lot, much bigger
problem. Unity raid cooldowns for that
anyway. So our defensive took it in
general just feels like it's from a different game when I
compare it across the board. And like my extreme opinion is
that I don't think that the end game that we have is going to
work long term without frustrations for specific people
unless they just, and this is a the buzzword for people they
don't like. But I think they just need to
homogenize the fences a little bit where there's sort of like a
baseline expectation of what you can live if you play properly.
OK, I had had thought for a longest time since again we're
not blaming other specs. I just feel that when they
introduced Demon Hunter and Demon Hunter was a lot of Leech
and self healing that that's when they decided that shaman
could no longer do a lot of Leech and self healing.
Our dogs used to heal ourselves and I'm not entirely upset about
that because it it was when they started turning into genuine
offensive cooldowns instead of some hybrid defensive offensive
cooldown. But when you're looking at, like
you said, healing stream totem that just over I think the
entire duration does about as much healing as like if you had
just done a healing tied on yourself.
It I wonder where they feel like shaman defenses are supposed to
be strong with these duration things.
Are we supposed to be like the anti rots thing and then we need
spot healing? But with the, with the damage
that you're seeing out in, in dungeons and in, in raids, are
you, is rot healing really the issue or is it more that we're
dealing with, I don't want to say it's close to Dragonflight
spike levels, but are we dealing more with spiky damage?
Obviously with a with a grain of salt, because eventually
everything in keys becomes like lethal spike anyway.
So eventually you run into that problem.
So that's by the by the the like the raid and the dungeons in
general. Rot is definitely relevant.
That's going on. But you, you tie it into like
how the healers are, how having to deal with it right now,
because they've changed a lot of how healers cadence is with just
dealing with a fight in general. And you, you spend now this
maybe a slight on the healers that I played with, but I I'm
hoping it's not. I, I think this is just a
general across the board thing. You spend more time than you
would normally be comfortable with on live, not at full
health. And it's fine.
It's supposed to be fine. And when you're put in bad
situations, you can usually do something to help them out when
they're struggling because something's gone wrong or it's
particularly dangerous mechanic or so on.
In our case, we do spend more time at not Max health, but we
do so little self healing passively relative to every
other spec, 90% of other specs, just in case anyone wants to get
it on my case about that one. But we do so little there that
even though you've got that extra overhead to let self
healing be relevant and sort of trickle in to help the healer.
It doesn't matter because we just sit there getting lower and
lower and lower until we actively do something about it
and it will take us a while to recover that back.
And for respect that's so fast and built on momentum, that's a
really unpleasant thing to have. Be part of it because you don't
want the spec. In the case of say I'm going to
have to use comparisons with this like with Ferrell.
Ferrell self healing isn't great, but they do actively self
heal as well with instant regrowth.
It's not good, but Ferrell has got natural downtime where if
you spend something in that downtime it doesn't matter
because everything still kind of working in the background.
Whereas with enhancement, the way it's built is that when you
do anything other than your main things, everything stops because
it's all in the momentum of you keep rolling things over onto
each other. And you wouldn't want like a
Demon Hunter to when they want to heal, be like, OK, well,
you've just pressed i-beam, you've gone into meta, but you
need to heal. So why don't you stop and cast
this spell to make a soul that you run over and collect?
It's it wouldn't be fun. And that's why they're built in
the way that their healing comes from just being aggressive.
And it didn't, it just doesn't match.
It clashes against everything else that the spec is doing and
it's really jarring. This is a very strange sort of
feel topic, but it's definitely relevant for us.
And I don't, I don't like it. I don't like how they've been
doing it. I think that they really need to
just sort of address Shaman's defensives.
But I've been saying that for 10 years.
So it's sort of like banging a drum.
If you recall, Paladins in their halfway through dragon fight
makes they had nodes that were different for their different
specs. So protection versus retribution
versus holy had different talents in their in their class
tree. We were just talking earlier
about these dead ligaments in the our class tree.
I think there's there's space there.
I don't see why Ancestral guidance doesn't just fit so
easily in for in for enhancement if they are still allowing a
priest to vamp themselves it seems.
It seems in a similar vein, but what would you say would be your
wish list for some enhancement changes?
Oh, do we mean defensive or offensive or both?
Let's say, let's say one offensive, one defensive.
Let's start with defensive because we're talking about that
right now. The the easiest, easiest one on
the list is that you need to give Astro Chef 2 charges
because you've been doing that to all of the specs that have
have got that sort of unusual defence.
And you've even given it to one of the ones that had the already
really good defensive to name no names of anything that double
jumps. So that would just be a complete
freebie you can get. There's so many different
thematic or law ways that you could make us more defending if
you really wanted to. And I could give a laundry list
of ideas that would be kind of cool that would work.
But the easiest, simplest fix would just be give it 2 charges
and and honestly, you drop it's cool down to a minute and you
make us like demon hunters and that would probably take off the
majority of the sting of us struggling to live.
You should go down healing stream told not being bad.
Give us ways to like heal passively when we generate X
like when we generate met raging whales.
So it just sort of naturally diffuses on us rather than
actively doing it. But yeah, the defence is just
such an enormous open space for them to do anything because
we've got so little right now that you you could make ank like
a 3 minute cooldown and it probably wouldn't improve the
situation. That's how far behind we are.
I feel so yeah. Oh man.
I'm hoping you're not getting taxed for Ankh.
It's like you can get up at any point, so you're going to be
more. Every 20 minutes, yeah, that's
that's an entire tangent that I could go on about for easily an
hour about how defenses for offense, it's really hard to
pick one. But the probably the easiest 1
is that I'd I'd really, really, really, really like them to do
something with Stormbringer to give any point of control on
Tempest. I can I can live with Totemic
the whole time like how it is. I think that could just ship and
be fine. There's a lot of things that
they could do to just improve the entire package, but
Stormbreaker anything has just got this one glaring issue that
what they removed wasn't replaced by anything and what
they removed wasn't overbearing to begin with.
So like simple things like the chance for it to trigger is
higher during Doom Winds or ascendance.
That would be really simple. And that would mean that your
cooldowns mean that you have a point of control where you know
it's more likely that you're going to hit Tempest during
this. There's there's one that's
basically copying Ferrell, which would be the like the first time
that you cast crash each time you're into combat, you get
Tempest. So you can guarantee in mythic
plus that you can front load a Tempest without having to do all
the stupid pooling and carrying charges that we've had to do.
That's still going to be relevant, which I don't like of
just the simple thing of make storm strike do anything the
storm bringer, because when they removed awakening storms, it's
just a kind of pointless button on the tree that's definitely
supposed to favorite. This is another one where I have
like my own personal list of. I could rattle these off and
just beg for them, but it will be along with.
Our number one fishing tool now it's how we I hate that it's
sorry. It's one of those things where
they've like really obviously thought, well, Totemic has Lava
Lash and it's so very obviously the Lava Lash tree.
We've been all these things that are related explicitly to Lava
Lash and it shines through where it makes the infrequent button
really frequent and really strong and really versatile.
And then you look at Stormbringer, which I'm not
going to say that it's namesake gives it away, but it's very
obviously supposed to use the storm strike or crash lightning
thing as it's like main leveraging tool to do the thing.
And then you look through the tree and the one talent that had
a mention of storm strike still kind of mentions it, but it's a
talent that's not to say worthless, but it's it's nowhere
near what it used to be. And that feels like it's pulled
away from its sort of identity. It doesn't doesn't feel like
it's got the oomph that Stormbringer had because I, when
I was reviewing these, these hero trees leading up to the
wall within, it was really easy to sell Stormbringer to anyone.
Because the name, the way that it looks, the way that it feels
when you're playing it, it's really, it really captured like
the idea of what it was trying to do.
And then you'd look at Totemic and selling that, especially a
launch was it was really difficult.
OK, wait, wait, wait, wait. We we have to put a disclaimer
here. Totonic at the launch of the War
Within wasn't a tree that was anywhere near what it was even
in the next patch. And I I would say wasn't even
actually fully developed on launch.
It was. That's being quite generous.
I would, I would tentatively say considering it was the middle of
the expansion, it was, it was a miracle how well they brought
together that from what they initially passed because their
first pass of that tree and even their second iteration was
dubious at best. And it was, it was really
fractured. It didn't have like an idea
behind it. It was just sort of throwing
everything at the wall. And I think they almost just
sort of use that as the way of, well, people kind of like this.
So let's just lead really heavy into this now, which is fine
because it worked out in the end.
That's great. Funny to see the situation's
reverse now. But we've now we've completely
inverted were you can sell Stormbringer on the the theme
and the name, but when you get to the gameplay part of it,
there's nothing that you can really sell people other than
Tempest sounds cool and it does a lot of damage.
But the way that it feels to play is my experience with it
has been if anyone asks about Stormbringer, you have to
clarify. Have you played it on Live?
Because if they have that context, you completely change
how you talk about it. Because if they know what it's
like now, they have a really strong expectation of what it's
going to feel like in the future if they haven't tried it.
Whereas if they haven't played it before, you can kind of
compare it to some of the more boring hero talents on other
specs and they'll get the idea. And it's not massively
disappointed or like disheartening, but it really is
for anyone who's experienced it because it's took such a massive
change. So yeah, that's that's the
easiest one where every patch now I'll be watching for a storm
ringer thing, even though there's other stuff that they
could do. That's that's my go to.
Based on where things are right now, like how do you feel that
Shaman's damage profile works in the raids and in the dungeons?
Do you feel like we're like we're too early to say numbers
wise, but in terms of like, hey, now that Totemic is at a minute
and instead of being a maintenance buff, are we going
to have the oomph as we go between packs?
Are we going to have the right damage profile for the bosses
that we've tested? I I think that right now our
damage profile is very, very good from a dungeon point of
view when you've got a one minute huge burst, because I the
spec can play just do wins and do a lot of damage immediately
when a pack starts, no matter how big it is.
And it's it's really, really satisfying to do it.
That's just good. And then you've got the in
between 30 seconds, which primordial storm not as good as
it used to be by a lot, which is kind of sad, but that one is I
think they can just reach in that the the in between of the
thundering plus haste is great too.
And you also are doing quite a lot of priority damage because a
lot of your AOE stuff is coming off the fact that you're
pressing single target buttons on the thing that's important,
which naturally is like a really high value profile to be built
around. It's not quite as good as
funnel, which we've had in the past as well.
It's kind of stupid to say that an enhancement had anything in
the past because it has literally gone through every
single different iteration of what type of damage profile spec
and has have. But it's it's sort of the it's
only just behind funnel in terms of if you do all of your AOE
from hitting a one thing really hard, then you're kind of funnel
in anyway because you're just doing a single target thing.
So that part is really good too. The rate on the other hand is a
complicated discussion because it's down to how the fights are
built, where some of them it's really good.
It's really good to have a one minute or two-minute and you can
ship between them and you can see how the fight would be like
where the pain points would be solved by you changing these
around the size of the arenas. When it comes to Totemic, you
are still dragging at home around and it can be a little
bit irritating. You can lose Hot hand just by
things running away or you having to leave and not being
able to to roll it over. I think we'll eventually be able
to play around it. But the bigger one of all of it
is that there's there's more than one encounter where the the
cooldown timers seem almost intentionally built to get under
the skin of one minute or two-minute people.
Salvador is the easiest example of this in the universe.
He has a damage amp and it comes at 1:48 and last for like 15
seconds. So if at 1:48 you want a 2
minute class, you want them to hold virtually their entire
thing to get there versus like a one minute 1, they're going to
hold for all of that too. And it keeps having this ever so
slight desicc. But if you just so happen to be
one of the unique ones is a 1.5 minute call down, well, that's
perfect. That's exactly what you want for
the damage amp guy. So that part I think is that
that's not just another problem. That's just the there's going to
be that camp of people who think why, why would you do this
intentionally? But I I still think that our
profile in general, it works. We do a lot of cleave.
It's impossible to not be cleaving with the spec, which
given the Raiders has exactly 0 pure single target fights so
far, the disclaimer because two of them haven't been seen.
That's obviously good as well because you never want to be the
spec that has to give something up to do it's AOE and we just
don't give anything up. You still just just do the thing
for free. So I I think across the board
you you'd be hard pressed to not see a reason for enhancement to
work, assuming it's tuned right in the whole raid, whether it
can lift those encounters and whether or not you'll enjoy some
of them for a few reasons. Because there's quite a lot of,
let's say, not so melee friendly design decisions that have been
made and not just the usual. This raid hates melee doom
posting genuinely. This is really not built for a
melee to be able to handle exist in not half, but not far of half
of the encounters so far. So that remains to be seen, but
I, I, it's, it's in a better state than we've launched before
in expansions where we've ended up doing really well.
So I I'm relatively hopeful. Yeah, I'm really glad to hear
that. Obviously, the last thing that I
want to talk about and like I thought we would get to the
sooner, but with the UI, with the cooldown manager and they've
made of course some changes like we were talking about with
accumulating storms for good or for I'll, you no longer need the
cooldown manager to track that. But is Shaman Enhancement Shaman
supported well enough in the cooldown manager?
And what are the things that it's succeeding in?
What are the things that it needs improvement for?
It's show me to be really honest or just kind of.
I think, I think we have to be honest at this point.
Like I, I know, I know there's a lot of doom and gloom, but I
think that being honest about it, I guess just as I phrase the
question like they're what, what's the parts that they've
improved on? What are the parts that still
have the gaps? So there's definitely things
that they've removed that for better or worse, I think we're
exclusively so that they didn't have to worry about it in the
cooldown manager. And that's fine.
The the the whole Tempest spending 40 to get there.
I understand that. That's not that complicated.
Even like for the most like very casual player, it's not
complicated to understand. The more I spend I eventually
get the thing, but representing that on the cooldown manager is
difficult to do and also blockading anyone from finding
some elaborate work around that definitely doesn't exist right
now. Honest.
To work out how you would have like calculated the the rate to
the next one would have been a massive advantage over somebody
who didn't have it. So that's fair.
I understand them removing those things, but, and it's quite a
large but the cooldown manager is, but it's the only word that
I can use for it. Is is not up to standard for
what enhancement needs? Because enhancement is almost
entirely built around you keeping the extreme control over
knowing the state of multiple buttons that overlap with each
other and you need to make decisions based on that.
There's not like a resource bar that can dictate how you do
everything. You have multiple plates
spinning and the cool down manager doesn't sufficiently let
you customize the layout or display the information well
enough that I think that the average person could build
something that's comfortable for them on a case by case.
And I think that enhancement is one of those specs were it is
case by case. The how you process information
when you're playing from the very, very, very top end players
to the most casual person is completely different.
And anything that you need to restrict that level of
customization will hurt someone. So I would say that we
definitely got hurt by that. And then the the biggest
elephant in the room is that no matter what, I would personally
recommend that everyone will need at least one add on to play
enhancement in midnight. And you will require an add on
to do Maelstrom because Blizzard aren't going to get that in
before the expansion. I can, I can't guarantee it, but
I can give a very heavy promise that there will not be a
conversion to a resource that they very clearly intend to do
between now and launch. It'll come later, at which point
you need an add on to confirm, convert that buff that's been
made on secret into a bar, combo points, whatever.
Like bells and whistles you want because an aura with a stack
counter or an inaccurate Blizzard overlay isn't nearly as
useful as having the thing that's accurate showing that.
So that is a minimum requirement that is completely separate to
any other spec. No other spec is going to be in
this situation where you require an add on to do a function that
the CDM will never do and then the CDM itself.
This is a much broader criticism of it, but I am incredibly
worried about the fact that there has to be someone curating
what spells are in those track lists and need to make sure it
works. Because right now there are at
least 80,000 entries in the call down manager across all the
classes and specs because every single one of them's got an ID
and so each one of those IDs is something that has had someone
going to call the manager and configure it and.
Having one person, because this is important enough that you
would need someone always looking at these each patch.
Having one person go through all of those and make sure that it
works is a pretty, pretty daunting task to assume they're
going to get it right every time.
Because if it's not right on live, if something's not
working, you can make a weak car and you can fix it.
You can you can make up for any mistake or slip up and it'll be
fine. You can carry on playing and
then it'll eventually fix it. You won't need any more.
That's fine. But in this case, like we've got
some prime examples, forceful wins is in the cooldown manager
that doesn't do anything anymore.
It's just leftover from the War Within.
Crash Lightning doesn't work anymore if you take the Apex
talent because it changes the spell ID and no one's going to
change the spell ID to make it work with both hot hands.
If you don't have the talent, but you play Totemic when you
proc it from the totem doesn't track it because it doesn't work
because it doesn't think you have it.
There's a it's a lot of like little minor things that will
get under the skin of people who want to make it work.
I'll like want to work with it because it's not working with
us. And then because every add on
has to draw from the cooldown manager, you're preventing
anybody from being able to rectify it until they get around
to it. Yeah, like the the situation
with the add-ons is that if if we were in a world where I could
100% trust the cooldown manager and I think that it had covered
everything, you can reskin it to some degree and get a extremely
deep level of customization that is not far removed from most non
computational live setups. But the cooldown manager is very
fragile. It can break itself.
It's not wholly trustworthy and some parts of it just don't work
like in in enhancements case, no one's got into add sound alerts
because you so you can't do sound alerts if you want to play
enhancement right now. Obviously that will be fixed,
but it's sort of a sign of how easily something can slip
through and impact the call down manager and then by extension
your entire gameplay experience. And because the call down
manager is the be all end all source of calibrating your own
add-ons to be incorrect. Not to say that there aren't
other ways of doing it for certain things, like there are
other UI methods of getting certain spells, but there are a
few where it explicitly has to come from the call down manager.
So if that's not working, if it breaks the like link between
whatever add on container yours is doing with the call down
manager, it completely breaks and it shuts down entirely.
And the call down manager breaks your add on breaks and so on.
Because there's like 1 hiccup in it.
These are all things that Adam developers will probably
eventually get right, but it would be a whole lot easier if
it wasn't. There wasn't this much friction
on something that they're very obviously trying to indicate
should be skinned if you want it to look a different way.
Because they said and in most cases have followed through with
letting you customize the entire UI.
Anything not related to combat in my opinion sounds a few
things that are going to be fixed eventually.
I think as they iterate is wholly customized.
You can make it look exactly like LVUI or your own UI or
anything you do everything with like a chat, your damage meter,
almost their damage meter, your buffs, buff frame in the corner.
You can make them look a certain way a new unit frames, but you
can't do it effectively and consistently would be single
most important part of the UI for anyone who's doing combat
content, which is your information display.
And I think that's come down to the restrictions they put in.
Some of its philosophical, but some of it is just a case of I
can't quite reconcile why they're being so stubborn on
certain specific things and it and it hurts enhancement more so
than not all but some specs. And when you've got a design for
Midnight, that's I would say a distinct improvement for getting
people to give it a try. It's a crying shame that they're
almost definitely going to bounce into the UI and be
playing in spite of it, not alongside it.
And that's really sad because there's, there's definitely been
some really serious work that's gone into making the spec
approachable but still feel like the same and fun and good.
And they're going to be indirectly impacted by the UI
work making it less coherent and less smooth.
So yeah, that's my soapbox on the UII don't think it's as bad
as everyone says it is, but I, I, I do distinctly feel for for
our spec on this one. OK.
No, I think that that is a great, great place to leave
this. Thank you so much for taking the
time to talk with me here. This has been our amazing
conversation when people want to hear more about Enhancement
Shaman. Where can we find your work?
The best place to find mine is is I do the wild hedge
enhancement guides and I do the ice veins and enhancement guide
too. And I've also been doing video
at which I intend to at least at least do right up until midnight
launch. We'll see how it goes after
because guide work becomes very time consuming, but that's on a
word. Wow on YouTube.
Now it's changed over. Thankfully, I've not got a bunch
of numbers anymore and that's the best place to find me.
Or you can find me on Earth shrine.
It's very easy to go in there and ping me and most of the time
I'll see it or I'll I'll respond to it.
Sometimes I forget or on Twitter I'll I'll probably like
commented something innocuous or complaining on them.
But it's it's not difficult to find me if you go searching.
OK, I will try all of those spots.
Thank you again so much. Word up and we will talk to all
of you later for the prime episode, which will be out
Thursday. Till next time guys, may all
your hits be crit.