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Enhancement Shaman: First Impression of the New Shaman Talent Trees in Dragonflight
Dragonflight
Publié
27/08/2022 à 10:00
par
wordup
With the reveal of the Dragonflight Shaman talent trees, our Enhancement Shaman writer Wordup provides initial reactions and thoughts on this revamped system. We break down the Enhancement Shaman talent trees, discussing the new talents and providing some sample builds. Join us as we predict how this class could play in Dragonflight!
To learn about the best PvE talent builds in Dragonflight for this class, and export these builds into the game, please check out our Elemental, Enhancement, and Restoration Shaman class guides:
Elemental Shaman Talent BuildsEnhancement Shaman Talent BuildsRestoration Shaman Talent Builds
Shaman Dragonflight Class Tree
Disclaimer:
While the Class tree is mostly functional, there are some speculative things in here due to related bugs elsewhere in the spec that haven't been fully implemented yet, so
some
things may end up not functioning as assumed when the entire class is implemented.
The recent build released on the 24th of August did fix a lot of things, but some still remain so we're working with some assumptions
.
Shaman Dragonflight Talents - What's New?
Dragonflight's release will bring a complete overhaul to everything related to talents, much akin to the original system from all the way back before the release of
Mists of Pandaria
. Instead of selecting a single talent from a row of three options every (
roughly
) 10 levels, we have two completely separate trees shared between the
Class
tree available to all specializations, and an
Enhancement specific
tree tailored to us, each with different focuses and have a separate allocation of points that can be spent between them. We gain one point in each tree every other level starting after 10, alternating between
Class
and
Spec
, with a total of
31 Class points
, and
30 Spec points
.
Slightly different to some of the other Class trees that have been released, the
Shaman
tree is significantly lighter on DPS throughput and much heavier on utility and specific use case tools. This is a double-edged sword for some, but
personally
I think it's a really interesting space to carve out allowing us to tailor a swiss army knife of specific (but
extremely
useful!) utility without worrying that we're losing out on damage in the process. In comparison, the
Enhancement
tree is virtually devoid of utility nodes and entirely focused on building your damage profile, putting those points at a higher premium.
Most of the Class tree structure is freeform, seeing different types of tools spread throughout different sections of the tree with a
huge
number of links to enable pathing. The handful of throughput nodes that do exist are also elegantly placed to open up the majority of other nodes around it, making it very easy to access the majority of niche tools without too much investment.
A wide array of new utility totems are present on the tree, including
Totem de peau de pierre
for
party
-wide Physical
damage reduction,
Fontaine de mana
for
party
-wide
Mana regeneration and
Totem de purification du poison
for Poison dispels; and are all on low to mid cooldowns.
Soutien ancestral
returns as raidwide off-healing utility which has been sorely missing since
Warlords of Draenor
.
Orage
has been given to us as a knockback (or knock-up with
Coup de tonnerre
) tool, alongside the
Lasso de foudre
PvP talent for a single target stun.
Bourrasque
shows up as a choice node against our tried and true
Marche de l'esprit
movement tool, giving us a reliable displacement choice.
A large number of passive defensive traits (
Défense ancestrale
,
Défense élémentaire
,
Débordant de vie
) are on the tree making us a bit more robust compared to previous expansions alongside us not really losing anything we have right now, and even get a stronger
Transfert astral
with
Rempart astral
as a choice node.
Explosion de lave
is now accessible and (
theoretically
) will work with
Arme du Maelström
as a spender.
Rafale
makes its return giving us a consistent auto attack speed boost from
ability
Crits.
Projection totémique
is also back giving us an
off-GCD
way to move totems around with us, making
Totem Furie-des-vents
maintenance less annoying and letting us carry
Totem de bouffée de vent
with us.
Shaman Dragonflight Class Tree - First Impressions
The first thing to note is that
structurally
the tree is pretty hard to criticize. It's extremely open and broad, allowing for lots of different pathways and routes to access what you want from any point on the tree, making combinations flexible rather than fixed, which is
excellent
. While compared to some of the earlier trees there is a distinct lack of big throughput, I
personally
consider that a big advantage for letting us pick up utility here without worrying about losing performance, and that the two trees have had their intents carved out very distinctly makes them marry well with each other.
When it comes to how this may change future gameplay, we've gained a reasonable amount of defensive strength.
Défense ancestrale
,
Défense élémentaire
and
Débordant de vie
are all passive survival boosts, and
Élémentaire de terre
has had the
Accrétion vitale
Conduit rolled into it baseline. When you add in some of the extra healing tools via
Courants tourbillonnants
being accessible and the returning
Inspiration concentrée
, while they do cost resources to use it provides a lot of snap healing if you're looking for it. This also extends to the return of
Soutien ancestral
as a group healing tool - how good this is ultimately depends on the DPS vs. player Health ratio but historically this has been really useful when timed correctly, and is a welcome return.
We've also probably been the biggest beneficiaries of
being able to
not
take
certain talents. Because
Shaman
has always had a fairly bloated (but niche) utility toolkit that very much fits the "rarely useful, but when it's good it's
really good
" mantra, being able to pick and choose which of them we want on a given encounter is appreciated. Pair that with newly accessible tools for
Enhancement
(a personal favourite is
Orage
paired with
Coup de tonnerre
as an AoE stop, and
Casse-tête du gardien
for more AoE control from
Totem condensateur
) gives a lot of room for combinations depending on a given Boss/Dungeon/PvP scenario. Because we have so many talents left over after grabbing critical throughput points, it's really easy to tailor a build for what you need, and that design is awesome.
Final notes are that there's some new party utility buffs in
Fontaine de mana
and
Totem de peau de pierre
. These both have issues that will be covered in the section under these, but they have some potential benefits that might see use and bring back the utility Totem toolbelt of old.
Totem de purification du poison
fits into this too, and matches with things like
Totem de séisme
that are either useless or incredibly useful, which fits the tree's style.
Projection totémique
is also a nice quality of life option letting us move our totems around off the GCD (and even extend how long we can make use of
Totem de bouffée de vent
, despite the nerf to movement speed). Last, but
absolutely
not least, is that
Explosion de lave
is accessible now to
Enhancement
for the first time in years and even more, for the first time since
Wrath
Beta
, it works with
Arme du Maelström
! (or well, kind of for now).
The primary throughput nodes are the only things we need to rush to - those being
Horion de givre
,
Explosion de lave
(
presumably
),
Feu et glace
,
Rafale
,
Fureur de la nature
and
Éclair amélioré
. We'd also very likely path through
Marche de l'esprit
/
Bourrasque
for some needed mobility, and after that the tree is all yours. These also conveniently open up the majority of the tree, allowing you to go in any direction you want for your desired utility tools.
Treat this as a template of what you'd likely
need
to pick for
Enhancement's
performance, and the remaining 14 points can be spent in any combination for more survival, control, group tools or niche utility without fear of losing anything.
View in Dragonflight Talent Calculator
Potential Issues with the Shaman Class Tree
A lot of the issues that could be found here are less strong criticisms or serious problems, and more minor nitpicks that could elevate the tree to being "feature complete", but there are a handful of things that are worth thinking about.
This is one of the biggest problems because it also pairs with the
Enhancement
tree in tandem. There are
a lot
of buttons that you can (and in some cases have to) take. There's a lot of juggling going on already in the rotation, so all of these extra on-GCD buttons might get a bit extreme.
While all of the Totems having low cooldowns is useful for frequent use and uptime, the low strength and high GCD requirement might simply just make them unappealing. There's probably a limit of how much you can really afford (or want) to constantly keep them active before it starts getting in the way of playing the spec,
especially
because they aren't very punchy effects.
Totem de peau de pierre
could likely stand to be made into something more immediately impactful on a much longer cooldown, as an example fix.
Similarly there's a bit of a strange clash with all of the different totems much like
Totem Furie-des-vents
being party locked, which
might
cause friction or deter picking them depending on which group you're in, but personally with their current relatively low impact, I don't see it being an issue for now.
There's a limited number of fairly redundant talents that are unlikely to be that useful because they simply don't sync up with the rest of the toolkit.
Boucliers déferlants
feels a bit like missed potential because
Bouclier de foudre
has no real hook, and both of the
Noyau de création
choice node options at the bottom right are really hard to find a use case for.
Some of the Totem talents could be made more appealing if we had at a minimum one offensive (or high power) cooldown totem - considering
Elemental
at the very least has
Totem de magma liquide
it would have been nice to marry a little conflict there with the Totem leaning talents, but this is a very specific nitpick.
Enhancement Dragonflight Spec Tree
Disclaimer:
While the build released on the 24th of August did implement
some
key talents so we can get a feel for the flow of gameplay, there are still a number of impactful bugs in the
Enhancement
tree making certain abilities function incorrectly (or not at all). That means that there are some parts of this that are working on good faith interpretations of what the tooltips say, but we can't
know
exactly what the interactions are, just guess. This is a part of why there has been a delay in this article waiting for some fixes to this core, so some of the more speculative things in here may not remain relevant when this settles and the spec is closer to feature complete.
Shaman Dragonflight Enhancement Tree - What's New?
While there isn't a huge amount of
new
things, there's a lot of new
combinations
that were otherwise impossible previously that have a lot of potential. This was kind of expected, as there have been a lot of different iterations of
Enhancement
over the years so there's a huge pool of things to pull from (and are welcome to stay or return). On top of that, a lot of the different experiments over the years have actually been really good or just missed the mark, they've just been lost along the way so having all of those old ideas come back at once is really interesting given that they're tried and tested.
Ascendance
got
incredibly
powerful supporting talents that allow it to both generate and siphon
Arme du Maelström
when active turning it into a powerhouse cooldown.
Accumulation statique
is a guaranteed 30 stacks over its duration, and each
Frappevent
triggering
Invocation de Thorim
is some big extra off-GCD damage that helps with resource waste. It being placed as a choice node against
Éléments profondément enracinés
also opens up the option to grab this as either on demand, or intermittent bursts of huge damage windows.
Épanchement du Maelström
as an option at first glance looks a bit weird, but the main advantage here is condensing GCD requirements to avoid
Arme du Maelström
waste. Spenders are looking to be a big part of the spec in Dragonflight, but there's a lot of buttons to press and not enough time to go around - so dumping extra stacks at once presents a good way to
save GCDs rather than filling them
, something the tree
sorely
needs. This might also lead to some massive
Explosion élémentaire
/
Explosion de lave
casts, and huge
Averse de grêle
hits now that the damage stacks to 10.
Loup alpha
finally returns as a way to give
Esprit farouche
some AoE power, which is greatly appreciated considering the cooldown does virtually nothing in those situations. While it's on a tough choice node,
at least having the option
is great, though personally I would have liked it on a leaf.
The
Vague primordiale
leaf at the bottom is the only returning Covenant spell, and it settled into a good AoE/Funnel niche at the end of Shadowlands so is probably the best mechanically interesting one to return. It also got a glow up with
Maelström primordial
making it guaranteed to prime itself for the follow up
Éclair
on cast, and even supporting
Épanchement du Maelström
to boot. Given that spenders are stronger than ever as well, the on demand burst this generates makes it absolutely worthy of being a capstone style talent.
Explosion orageuse
FINALLY
adds direct Mastery scaling to
Porte-tempête
(the proc chance increase has always been fairly minimal), and even at 25% that's a huge increase to the impact of each proc, which is awesome and might help the issue of stat balances getting weird. Alongside that
Vents funestes
now doesn't give 100% flat proc chance, but instead triples your base
Arme Furie-des-vents
proc chance (Mastery bonus included) so it gained at least a bit of scaling room along the way.
Frappe de glace
was effectively reworked, instead of the fairly useless Shock resets it now doubles the damage of your next
Horion de givre
, which leads to massive
Averse de grêle
hits when banked up as a small package together. The way this plays is night and day (since now it actually does something) and is one to look out for.
Important Returning Effects to note:
On top of these, there are
SIX
total returning Legendary effects that were previously (
mostly!
) unable to be combined from Shadowlands -
Catalyseurs de lave primordiale
,
Vents funestes
,
Héritage de la sorcière du givre
,
Ascendance de féticheur
,
Éléments profondément enracinés
and
Éléments brisés
*
. Some of these were build defining tools, so being able to pair these with other effects that have direct synergy with each other is
really
interesting, and creates a strong decision point as to how much you can actually fit into your rotation at once. These all generate a lot of resources and have high GCD requirements, so they almost balance each other out by pulling against that limited resource of button presses, making for a really engaging decision making process throughout the tree.
Shaman Dragonflight Enhancement Tree - First Impressions and Build Paths
To reiterate the
Disclaimer
from above,
SOME
of these things are non/semi-functional so parts of this is guesswork as to how it all comes together.
One of the biggest things with the
Enhancement
tree is that it's extremely easy to mix and match different segments of the tree. Most of your decisions are going to come down to the type of damage profile you're looking for, and what cooldown profile you want to marry together. The fundamental rule right now though is,
you always want 10 points left
for the bottom section of the tree to build your cooldowns, while the first section is by-and-large locked in. The real question is how you structure the centre, because that defines your rotational gameplay.
Other notes that are going to show up in the below builds - currently the second points of
Héritage de la sorcière du givre
and arguably
Assaut élémentaire
are simply not worth it, a lot of the value comes in the first point. While it may look weird, one of each is going to net more than doubling up points here. This is also why we want 10 points for the bottom to grab one of each of these, and then 4 for your capstone leaf choices.
Compared to some of the other trees and specs, most of your choices come down to the question of what you
want to combine
depending on your encounter requirements rather than excessive compounding synergy - most of the things on the tree actually work well together. The
biggest
decision you need to make when picking things, is
what buttons do you want to press, and how are you going to enhance them in the tree
. Things are mostly clustered into packages between
Frappe-tempête
,
Fouet de lave
and
Arme du Maelström
effects that directly pull at your GCDs that you have available. This creates a really engaging conflict because you have to think less about whether the effects are good (because basically everything is), but instead,
can you even fit the presses into your cycle all at once?
Answering this will probably come down to content type or encounter, but that things plug and play together so well makes for a very flexible design space
The way I personally build the tree right now comes in steps,
but please bear in mind a lot of these things are interchangeable, and what you want to mix together is entirely going to depend on what you're doing
. A lot of this is a case of working out where teh clash is and finding the core ability that's the star of the show, rather than springing to the highest value points - so each of the below will provide different ways to path through:
Starting Point: Building the Core Tree
First things first, the core talents that are almost always going to be taken are worth showing here. The below tree provides a solid central structure to build from, providing access to all 3 capstone paths via
Armes élémentaires
and
Déluge tempétueux
, while also grabbing some of the high value points along the way such as
Épanchement du Maelström
/
Maelström concentré
and
Catalyseurs de lave primordiale
, but some of
these can and are deviated from in some cases which will come up later
:
View in Dragonflight Talent Calculator
Step Two-A: Defining the Build - Focused Single Target
This forgoes a lot of options to specifically take pure single target options, opting for
Explosion élémentaire
while avoiding the
Impact foudroyant
package in the middle. This mirrors some of the other builds available (because of the high crossover), but still grabs as much of the core as possible while having some flex options with
Ascendance
for burst (or
Éléments profondément enracinés
for high variance proc windows), and the
Averse de grêle
package to fill between
Main brûlante
windows (and free cleave to boot).
This is one of the situations that's most difficult to parse though - with
Catalyseurs de lave primordiale
and
Héritage de la sorcière du givre
it does mean there's a resource flood on occasion, but the gameplay style is much more oriented around only pressing buttons that have recently been
enhanced
by other effects, creating a flow style of pressing high value buttons throughout. There's also an argument to be made for a single point in
Assaut élémentaire
here and dropping either
Totem Furie-des-vents
or
Averse de grêle
entirely and grabbing
Vents vigoureux
as well - there's a lot of choice and things to consider.
View in Dragonflight Talent Calculator
Step Two-B: Defining the Build - AoE and Funnel
From here, your decisions are going to be made by what you're focusing on (be that Single Target, Cleave, AoE or Cooldowns). Most of these choices are going to be very high on GCD requirements, and some of the previously taken options are slightly altered to fit them in. To start with, let's take a build that uses
Vague primordiale
and
Esprit farouche
that's similar to the live iteration of
Enhancement
- making sure to grab
Ascendance de féticheur
and
Éléments brisés
along the way with a Cleave/Funnel playstyle. It also sticks to
Épanchement du Maelström
to siphon off the excess
Arme du Maelström
generation this potentially has, and to make use of
Tempêtes foudroyantes
for big
Chaîne d’éclairs
casts.
A big thing of note here is there are a lot of potential options to buff up
Frappe-tempête
, but you won't
necessarily
be pressing it that frequently. That said when you do, it's probably going to have banked up a lot of effects for a big funnelled hit to your primary target. It also leverages a lot of
Impact foudroyant
trigger point availability (with
Frappe-tempête
and
Fouet de lave
frequency), adding extra
Arme du Maelström
Generation for high uptime on
Esprit farouche
(and by extension
Loup alpha
) for AoE, so there's a lot of room to fish for CDR from
Ascendance de féticheur
.
View in Dragonflight Talent Calculator
Step Two-C: Defining the Build - Burst and Cleave
Alternatively, making use of the extra burst window of
Vents funestes
paired with
Ascendance
, and the high cleave AoE of
Averse de grêle
mixed with Ice Strike creates a good AoE pairing that, while it does cost a number of premium points is such a high impact that it's worth the pick for periods between these windows. Grabbing
Vents funestes
does put you in a point limited situation though, meaning that a point in
Armes élémentaires
needs to be sacrificed to get the extra generation from
Assaut élémentaire
for those windows and to feed
Ascendance de féticheur
. This is a question mark as to whether it's worth it though - the higher leaning toward Physical damage will dictate which wins, but that there's even a competition against a
5% Magic damage increase
is a testament to just how well balanced the structure and point allocation is here.
This also comes with a lot of
Arme du Maelström
generation to sustain
Épanchement du Maelström
and get resets on
Esprit farouche
, with a mixture of high impact burst cooldowns and sustained rotational cleave tools. On top of that it can flex between either
Ascendance
or
Éléments profondément enracinés
(depending on on demand vs. RNG) to feed off the extra generation provided by
Accumulation statique
- though it sacrifices some of the synergy between it and Doom Winds to do so.
View in Dragonflight Talent Calculator
The primary structure of the tree is mostly made up of clusters of talents and packages that pair together centered around a cooldown or key ability. There's a lot of these throughout the tree that come together to enhance a portion of the toolkit, and most of them can be built together like lego to solve the puzzle and build your gameplay loop, which I can't praise enough. Before getting into specifics about spells as well, one of my personal desires has largely made it through in the early iterations -
that being a significantly higher focus on
Arme du Maelström
spenders to make them feel extremely impactful on cast
, and this happening I think is one of the main reasons the tree and its structure works so well.
Vague primordiale
returns which is the more low-to-mid range cooldown with its accompanying talents of the new
Maelström primordial
to generate the
Arme du Maelström
charges necessary to use it straight away, alongside the return of
Éléments brisés
which was great for our AoE toolkit at the end of Shadowlands due to the Haste surge. The one issue is, with
Flammes flagellantes
not returning some of that power is lost - we can't set things up before tirggering it, but with spenders being
much
more important, this creates big bursts of 6 target AoE every 45 seconds and is the least rotationally warping of the bottom row talents. The one thing this could use is something to prop it up in single target situations (potentially as a choice node against
Éléments brisés
), because it's not very appealing without extra targets to trigger it from.
The playstyle that dominated the tail end of Shadowlands with
Esprit farouche
is largely returning with
Ascendance de féticheur
being present, and a new tool in
Loup alpha
. This will likely feel pretty familiar to those who have played recently, and slots in with any other build pretty easily. That it also has an AoE tool now (though I
personally
think it could stand to just be a side node rather than an explicit choice against
Esprits élémentaires
) which was one of the biggest flaws of the ability before, given it had no real AoE impact whatsoever. This also pairs really well with the entire tree, and feeds off all the extra
Arme du Maelström
generation we can grab for the CDR. It's also one of the biggest beneficiaries of having other legendaries opened up that it can mix with, due to
just how well
it dovetails into most of our abilities.
Ascendance
got a big glow up with these talents, supercharging it into a
genuinely
impactful cooldown compared to recent expansions where it's either been weak or fallen off quickly. While
Accumulation statique
technically increases the problem it's had in the past of causing resource flood without ways to get rid of it, the follow up with
Invocation de Thorim
fixes that same issue by letting it siphon excess off for free for even more burst which is great design and leads to
massive
, satisfying burst windows. Having the option of
Éléments profondément enracinés
too means that you have a choice between on demand cast or intermittent bursts of extra damage depending on preference or encounter, and even raises the question of how much you want to press
Frappe-tempête
based on what else you take in the tree, creating a compelling push and pull.
Averse de grêle
has extra support now on the tree with the reworked
Frappe de glace
, which is an AoE defining package. That the primary issue with
Épanchement du Maelström
's anti-synergy has been addressed recently is also great, the question is whether or not there's enough generation to support this cycle - something which you need to think about elsewhere on the tree. There is however a lot of overlap with
Nova de feu
that it competes with given they both cap out at 6 targets, the only real distinction is the number of GCDs needed to use them. That
Averse de grêle
has support from
Frappe de glace
means I think here is a point where they could stand to add a choice node to support a
Nova de feu
build here (perhaps
Flammes flagellantes
) to recreate the late Shadowlands playstyle people enjoyed.
The
Arme Furie-des-vents
package on the far left leads to
Vents funestes
which is the earliest to access for
big
cooldowns. This currently is on the GCD and deals direct damage (which can trigger
Arme Furie-des-vents
), and has been changed to triple your
Arme Furie-des-vents
proc chance (so slightly scales with Mastery now) rather than guaranteeing procs. Considering the rest of the tree, this is more of a standalone package you grab for three points which is a pretty low investment for its potential, and could slot in very comfortably regardless of whatever else you pick. Removing the attachment to
Totem Furie-des-vents
as well is probably for the best, giving more control to it. The one thing I think is that considering the design space it landed in during Shadowlands, the on-cast swing could stand to be AoE (triggering a mass
Arme Furie-des-vents
proc) to stay on theme, and
potentially
have some Mastery scaling.
Impact foudroyant
is positioned dead centre of the tree which probably fits, given it's our "core" AoE that has a lot of interactions. The recent build did a lot to improve this, massively buffing
Tempêtes convergentes
and moving its position so (while still niche) it's not a high investment to grab and can be avoided. The newly added
Tempêtes foudroyantes
having a big interaction with
Chaîne d’éclairs
is great as well, adding a high value benefit to our
Arme du Maelström
spender in AoE, and while the base ability could still maybe stand to get a little more love given its our only uncapped tool, I'm much happier where it is now than where it is in Shadowlands. It's also able to be completely avoided if you want to focus on pure single target, so the structure surrounding it allows for great choice.
A couple of last notes:
Explosion élémentaire
is off on the side in the middle of nowhere, but will still likely be a good single target grab - though it does have the potential to clutter
Arme du Maelström
spenders a lot given we can potentially have
four
different ones with everything selected, some with cooldowns and others with specialty use cases.
Totem Furie-des-vents
being an option as well is welcome, given its low general value in M+, while still being extremely easy to access with any build for raid situations. It's also greatly improved in terms of gameplay disruption solely because
Projection totémique
now exists as an off-GCD way of bringing it with you, but it
still
has the issues of varied value depending on class (
in particular it's still weaker for dual wield classes by
a lot
) that isn't communicated well to players.
Current Problems with the Enhancement Spec Tree
While the general sentiment around the tree especially after the most recent build is overwhelmingly positive, there are still some pain points worth mentioning. Obviously, nothing is final since this is Alpha and it's an early pass of the tree, but it is worth bringing up issues that don't seem to make sense and just add friction without much of a reward.
While this may be beating a dead horse
,
I think it's a sorely missed opportunity to bring back
Écho des éléments
to alleviate some of our proc clash issues and GCD juggling (targeted at
Frappe-tempête
and
Fouet de lave
specifically). I think there's room to fit this on here (or even the class tree), just purely from a quality of life standpoint to stop the spec getting too overwhelming with certain talent combinations. It's simply an effect that
felt
good to play with in the past
, rather than a flat performance boost.
One of the primary concerns is the sheer amount of active abilities that can be taken between both the Class and Spec tree. There's not a lot of ways to mitigate this because most of them are pretty important, and sets off alarm bells about being overwhelming to most players when everything is happening all at once. The worst offender is the overload of
Arme du Maelström
spenders between
Éclair
,
Explosion de lave
,
Explosion élémentaire
and
Chaîne d’éclairs
that could stand to have some consolidation.
The placement of
Frappe de glace
blockading
Maelström tourbillonnant
when you take
Nova de feu
that has no real synergy is a bit odd, and could stand to just be flipped to immediately alleviate the issue - or alternatively give
Frappe de glace
a meaningful choice node that might be more appealing without taking
Averse de grêle
.
At the bottom of the tree all 3 of the abilities massively incentivise a full 4 point investment without much mix and match, creating a pretty deterministic build path. That's fine in general but specifically
Esprit farouche
could maybe stand to have a little more power in its initial point, and by extension
Vague primordiale
could maybe get a little love in its capstones for situations where it isn't mass AoE so there's a bit more conflict in
what
you want and
when
- otherwise this section is great.
Impact foudroyant
is still fairly weak (though this is
technically
a tuning issue). Given this is the
only
option we have for uncapped AoE on the tree, that it's has a low impact makes a bad problem worse for an AoE capped spec.
At the bottom of the tree
Héritage de la sorcière du givre
's second point is effectively a trap - all of the value comes from the initial point here for the
Frappe-tempête
reset. It also has negative synergy with
Épanchement du Maelström
(something which
Écho des éléments
would probably alleviate).
Similar to the above, we have a very carved out 5-6 target AoE niche, without options to deal good uncapped AoE.
Nova de feu
being double capped (number of
Horion de flammes
s & targets hit at once) seems a bit off in particular here and maybe one could stand to be lifted. The situation kind of mirrors the live situation where, despite us being
"specialists"
at this target count, we still get outshined by specs that can do
real
AoE - which might be a problem.
The most egregious RNG talents are still present and completely unchanged - those being
Esprits élémentaires
and
Main brûlante
. Both of these have compounding scaling and create win/lose situations that can feel really bad depending on when they happen or how they overlap, and could maybe stand to get some love.
How Strong is Enhancement in Dragonflight?
To start, it's
very
difficult to predict how good something is going to be this early without even seeing the raids, or what damage profiles are desirable in Mythic+, so this is entirely speculative.
The tree itself comes with a significant amount of different tools and damage delivery methods alongside letting us specialize heavily into various damage profiles, something that is absolutely at a premium for classes when it comes to PvE encounters. Flexibility is one of the greatest strengths a class can have, so being able to switch things up so much means I would tentatively say the
Enhancement
tree is one of, if not the best examples of actually taking advantage of the talent system.
That we have a variety of options for cooldown windows between
Vague primordiale
,
Esprit farouche
,
Ascendance
and
Vents funestes
that we can even potentially take all at once (to a degree) could mean a lot of potential burst, while we can opt to more sustained options elsewhere in the tree if a fight doesn't align with it. There's also a number of varied AoE tools on the tree that - while some could use some love - may open up better profiles for certain encounters which is also extremely useful to have as an option.
The
one and only
big
issue
that remains is that we simply don't have good uncapped AoE, which could hinder us depending on how things play out in some content. That said, given that we can pick and choose our damage profile without worrying about sacrificing points for utility is a big benefit. We can also pick and choose a lot of different lower target Cleave/AoE options, which might make up the difference
assuming
it's tuned to the point where in these scenarios we excel.
Final Thoughts on Enhancement Shaman Talent Trees
Just from the Class tree alone it's pretty hard to be critical of what we got, given there's such a wealth of options for different scenarios with a reasonable power level throughout without being forced down certain paths. The potential to tailor your utility to the encounter without feeling like you're losing out on damage makes for the (in my opinion) perfect design philosophy for the new trees, something that some of the other trees could probably learn a lesson from.
That the Spec tree also comes with incredibly versatile damage options to boot that lets you build your damage profile means there are genuine questions as to what you want to play, and how you want to deal damage.
We do however still have
the same versions of the two most egregious RNG talents that existed in Shadowlands - those being
Main brûlante
and
Esprits élémentaires
- which could probably stand to change a little given just how large the swing in output between pulls was based on these procs alone.
There are definitely some small tweaks that could bring this to a 10/10 tree in terms of design, but there's not a huge amount there so given this came out the gates this good is a really good sign for
Enhancement
going into Dragonflight. Considering just how rounded the tree is and the excellent structural placement of things with only two iterations,
AND
that the "biggest" issues are more surrounding a handful of specific ability tuning points and mechanical designs, it gives me a lot of hope that the spec might be in for the best expansion in a long time.
Interested in playing Enhancement Shaman now? Check our out live guide for this spec!
Enhancement Shaman Guide
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