With 6.0.2 arriving soon, here’s a quick overview of the changes you need to know without the noise that you don’t.
Before Warlords release:
Ability removals
- Earth Shock is gone. Use Frost Shock in its place.
- Weapon imbues are now a passive in your spellbook. You’ll never have to cast them again. Rockbiter is gone. Frostbrand is now a glyph.
- Searing Flames is gone. This makes the choice between Searing and Magma much easier. Lava Lash hits harder on its own as well.
- Stormlash Totem is gone.
- Healing Tide Totem, Chain Heal and Spiritwalker’s Grace are gone. We still have Healing Rain, Healing Stream Totem and Healing Surge for heals.
- Each school of totem no longer has its own drop down menu. They are all listed alphabetically among all of your other abilities.
Ability and talent changes
- Unleash Elements no longer does damage. Its other effects were buffed making it more effective, but you can’t use it to tag mobs anymore.
- Stormstrike, Lava Lash, Shocks, Fire Nova and Unleash Elements all have their cooldowns reduced by haste, making the play style a bit faster.
- Lightning Bolt can’t be cast on the move anymore.
- Ascendance and Fire Elemental are a lot weaker. Feral Spirits are a lot stronger.
- Echo of the Elements talent is no longer passive. It gives a chance when you deal any damage for your next Stormstrike, Lava Lash or Fire Nova to not trigger a cooldown. It has a visual effect around the Shaman and a “spell alert” to go along with it now.
- Earth Elemental’s damage has been lowered by 90% so you won’t really want to use it for damage anymore.
- Hex can no longer be made instant cast by any means.
- Healing Storm glyph is now passive.
Rotation and gear changes
- Hit and Expertise no longer exist as stats. You’re capped on both automatically. Bosses can still parry if you attack from the front.
- Reforging is gone.
- Versatility and Multistrike are new stats. Versatility lowers damage taken and increases damage and healing done. Multistrike gives all attacks and heals a chance to hit for 30% extra.
- Due to affecting ability cooldowns, Haste is the stat you’ll want to focus on. Mastery will continue to be strong, but should stay behind Haste from now on. Don’t ignore any stat, though, they are all decent.
- Aside from using Frost Shock in Earth Shock’s place, your rotation shouldn’t change too much at level 90.
- Elemental Blast is the only truly weak DPS talent. Avoid it for now.
Looking forward to Warlords:
Leveling Perks
As you level in Draenor, you’ll gain a perk every even level you reach. There are 5 bonuses total, and you’ll earn them in a random order. These bonuses are:
- Improved Reincarnate – Reincarnate grants 50% more health and mana. This means your health will be at 70% after using Reincarnate.
- Empowered Lava Lash – Lava Lash spreads Flame Shock to two more targets than before.
- Improved Flame Shock – All Flame Shock ticks have a 15% chance to reset the cooldown of Lava Lash. This is a much stronger version of our Tier 16 4-piece set bonus, and is very powerful in large-scale AoE.
- Enhanced Unleash – Unleash Elements grants you 30% movement speed for 4 seconds.
- Improved Maelstrom Weapon – Offensive spell casts gain 10% damage per stack. This makes Lightning Bolt much higher priority.
Level 100 talents:
- Elemental Fusion – Lava Lash increases the damage of your next Shock by 40%, stacking up to 2 times. The bonus to Flame Shock is not spread to other targets.
- Storm Elemental Totem – Summons a powerful Greater Storm Elemental that deals damage from range and heals near its target. 5 minute cooldown, lasts for 1 minute. This has priority over Fire Elemental if you choose the talent.
- Liquid Magma – Your current fire totem spews globs of lava at nearby random enemies for 10 seconds. Each glob can hit things within 4 yards of the target. 45 second cooldown. Your fire totem will need to have a remaining duration over 10 seconds to get full benefit of the ability. There is no way to control what it attacks, but it provides burst damage and AoE damage so it can still be very valuable.
New glyphs:
Major
- Emphemeral Spirits – Duration and cooldown of Feral Spirit is reduced by 50%. This works the same as the Fire Elemental glyph. Cannot be used with Feral Spirit glyph.
- Frostbrand Weapon – Your off-hand weapon attacks also slow the target’s movement speed by 50% for 3 seconds.
- Grounding – Lowers the cooldown on Grounding Totem by 3 sec. Cannot be used with Grounding Totem glyph.
- Lava Spread – Lava Lash spreads Flame Shock up to 8 yards further away (for a total of 20 yards). Cannot be used with Lava Lash glyph.
- Reactive Shielding – Lightning Shield damage can trigger once every 1.5 seconds instead of 3 seconds. Cannot be used with Lightning Shield glyph.
- Shamanistic Resolve – Doubles the effect and cooldown of Shamanistic Rage. Cannot be used with Shamanistic Rage glyph.
- Shocks – The range of Shock and Wind Shear spells is increased by 5 yards. This is convenient for tagging creatures.
Minor
- Ghostly Speed – If cast out of combat, Ghost Wolf is 60% stronger, bringing it up to 90%. This doesn’t stack with anything. Cannot be used with Ghost Wolf glyph.
Wind Lashed 
Hello Ashunera
I know you are a PvE focused Enhancement shaman and my concerns are more related to PvP were us enhancement got thrown in the dumpster tbh.
My question is how you see on the fact that us as a melee-spec have had our damage focused on range abilities and totems. LB is our hardest hitting ability and fire totem hits harder than a WF proc.
For me the definition of enhancement shaman is the WF proc, that was the reason i fell in love with the spec, and in some extent SS. In a PvP perspective the revert damage to LB hurt us immensely, in PvP you often use the maelstrom proc for healing (probably 90% of the time). And i also feel the idea of the class have disappeared when WF hits like wet noodles.
If let say the damage form LB and fire totem were toned down and put in to the WF and SS, would direct put enhancement in a better position and also imo follow the definition of the melee enhancement. How do you as a PvE focused shaman feel about changes like that?
I also feel they should revert ascended so it instead of being a fart of wind more give us like, more maelstrom procs or/and higher WF proc rate. How do you feel about that?
I think the balance team should try to accommodate both PvE and PvP. I feel like damage wise they accommodated PvE and trashed PvP. But in a concept point of view I feel they dident do any of the part of the game any good.
what’s your opinion?
Cya
Makota
I’ve been meaning to reply to this for a while, I’ve just been busy.
As far as a PvE rotation goes, having Lightning Bolt be your heaviest attack makes a lot of sense. Stormstrike is just simply pressed on cooldown, and Lava Lash on CD or when it lights up. There’s not erally much thought to it. Lightning Bolt hitting hard actually adds a lot of depth to the rotation, incentivizing hard-casting and using your abilities in a way that wastes as few Maelstrom charges as possible while keeping generation as high as possible. The stronger Lightning Bolt is, the more interesting the rotation is historically.
It’s obviously a less efficient way of doing it in PvP, but that may very well be the intent. With the removal of Hex from Maelstrom, basically all you would do with it is heal if nothing else changed. Maelstrom is basically our resource, so having options to spend it on is ideal, and buffing Lightning Bolt to a point where dealing damage or healing is a legitimate choice rather than automatically being spent on healing might be what they want. Add enough damage to Lightning Bolt and that will be what happens. If Enhancement is balanced around using a lot less MW Healing Surges, there isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with that design. Forcing a choice between damage or healing is a stronger design than just having both.
Ascendance is an interesting case. The current version is something like a 30% DPS increase in PvE, and in PvP it’s almost entirely dependent on your target’s armor. Against a Mage it might only be around 15%, but against a shield-wearing Holy Paladin it’ll be much closer to 70 or 80%, making it a pretty potent cooldown, and comparable to something like Avenging Wrath on average. It just depends on the target.
The burst from Ascendance in MoP with the above damage increases further amplified by Mastery (which obviously scaled up with gear) is what made Enhancement deadly. In a PvP landscape that relies a little less on burst, it’s probably not a bad idea on their part to make the spec a little more well rounded relative to MoP. I don’t pretend to know what balance is like at 100 and I doubt many have a very clear idea of it yet with tuning not being finished, but I don’t see why the spec can’t be balanced in a PvP setting with all of the changes that have already been made.
First thx for you´r informative answere.
One thing i still have doubt about is: “With the removal of Hex from Maelstrom, basically all you would do with it is heal if nothing else changed. Maelstrom is basically our resource, so having options to spend it on is ideal, and buffing Lightning Bolt to a point where dealing damage or healing is a legitimate choice rather than automatically being spent on healing might be what they want.”
The problem is wha´t i see from a PvP perspectiv is that in arena enhancement is often the target to “train”. And with the presure on us we will need to heal alot of our procs and there for gimp our damage alot. If you compare to a paladin that in some intent is our mirrorclass they have a heal that dont infect on the damage (judgment talent).
And my big worrie is that it dosen´t mather how much they buff the LB dmg or rather how more they buff it the worse the situation gets.
And on another question what do you say about our lvl 100 masterys?
cya
Makota
Is this list up-to-date with patch 6.0.3 changes and recent (16 Jan 2015) hotfixes?