Don’t you love Enhancement Shaman now? The past weeks before Cataclysm were pretty much a downer for us. Very low dps – compared to other classes – and lots of breaks ibetween abilities. I saw a good bunch of players abandon the class, despite pinting out that Unleash Elements would give us a lot more of the TBC glory back.
Some Preparations for the Launch
Cataclysm will be launched within a few hours, most players wait with anticipation for midnight. But what can you do till then?
Cataclysm Digital Download
There are currently a lot of rumors about the Digital Download for Cataclysm. When I first heard about it at Blizzcon I thought it was a great idea. Even though I am German I live as far away as you can imagine from anything like a midnight sale or let alone have DHL (our german parcel service) have improtant delivieries on time.
Also my connection speed is no option to be able to compete for Realm First Level 85 Shaman, etc with Patches and downlaod being part of the Installation.
This is why I decided to preorder the digital download.
Patch 4.0.1 Feedback
It has been a good 2 resets that we could test the new 4.0 content and one thing has become clear. Enhancement DPS definitely went down. During the first reset I was a bit disappointed to see, despite the new abilities and the new hard hitting Lava Lash, tha tI lost a good 1-2k DPS. At first I blamed screwed up rotaion and similar silly mistakes for it, but with this weeks reset and a lot more practice it has become evident that we indeed lost a good chunk of dps.
I recall Blizzard promises when they first announced the changes for 4.0 – „Your DPS will NOT GO DOWN“, but in fact all Melee classes took a big hit the first 1-2 days.
We had our Warriors, who did 18-20k DPS prepatch, doing less 10k dps and then 1 day later after a massive uproar in the Forum were back to their prepatch dps, maybe even a bit higher. This Fix also gave Retribution Paladins and Feral Cats, who are at 22-23k DPS in their BIS gear now btw, some buffs. Leaving us pretty alone at the lower end of the DPS Meter.
The Enhancement Shaman 4.0 Guide
While Deathwing is going to break lose and tearing Azeroth apart the coming Cataclysm will bring many improvements for us Enhancement Shamans. Patch 4.0.1 will include many class changes while the world changes – the actual cataclysm will come live with patch 4.0.3 at a later date.
In a nutshell we get to choose more utility, get some glyph and ui enhancements which make the class more fun to play. Many changes are also coming statwise, many buffs get spread to more classes and we will get many changes to our Totems.
Many Shaman improvements in build 12857
Holy! They for sure polished up Enhancement Shaman with the latest build. The issues I mentioned in previous posts have been mostly fixed and playing shaman turned out to be quite fun!
Hidden Build (12857 Codename Ninja) – Thoughts
MMO-Champion has just released Information about a so far hidden build, codenamed Ninja. Boubouile claims that it appeared out fo nowhere and I can confirm that it is not on the Beta Servers atm.
It contains a lot of Guild and Archeology Achievements. You can look at the changes here.
„Hidden Build (12857 Codename Ninja) – Thoughts“ weiterlesen
Cataclysm: Enhancement Shaman, Mana Pool
Finally I got invited to Cataclysm Beta and leveled my Enhancement Shaman Myrddin to level 83. One of the first changes I noticed was the very low mana pool.
Cataclysm: Planned Stat Changes
Eyonix made an interesting post about the coming stat changes in Cataclysm. Personally I am not sure if I like all these changes, since Shaman seems to ge go away even further fromt eh fun class it used to be. Basically they will remove all AP/Spellpower/Intelligence from our gear and design some way to emulate this. I fear we might end up like Retribution Paladins with no Mana Pool and give us some weird mana regeneration mechanic like example improved Stormstrike. This would limit our flexibility, which is what I like most on the shaman, even more. But well it is too early to judge about things.
World of Logs DPS Rankings
The most motivation I have gotten from raiding in the past was Topping Class DPS Meters. In TBC The WWScoreboard was the best website to display Rankings, per Boss, per Class and an average Total.
World of Logs has a similar feature, the Ranking Page here. It is a very nice list, but it does not include any kind of filters, yet. As Enhancement Shaman it is often tedious to find the proper page and thus I created and easy way to access the pages. Just select class, fight, difficulty and get directed to the proper Ranking Page.
http://www.myrddin.de/world-of-warcraft/world-of-logs-ranking-links/