However, parts of the application did get finished, and I'm posting them here so they don't languish away on a forgotten corner of my hard drive. If you play Enhancement Shaman, you'll probably get a decent kick out of it. If you don't... well, it'll all probably sound like gibberish.
But it's awesome gibberish.
“How to Play an Enhancement Shaman in Cataclysm”
If you were raiding as an enhancement shaman after the big Cataclysm system changes, you may have noticed things just weren’t happening as quickly as they used to. Our main abilities were taking longer to come off cooldown, we had to wait for new procs to reach their five-stack, everything just seemed to happen much… slower.
DON’T PANIC. We’re enhancement shaman. Slow can be good for us, like big slow-speed one-handers, or Frost Shocking a fleeing flag carrier, or slow-cooked BBQ while listening to Canadian Brass.
Don’t judge me. I used to play a mean euphonium.
What it all boils down to is that enhancement shaman now have more time to weigh their options and make a more thought-out choice with regards to the situation. We’re no longer bouncing like Taz from proc to proc, cooldown to cooldown; we can actually take a second to line up our next move without sacrificing DPS.
In that way, we wind up with a playing style that times out much more like a Death Knight’s, with occasional lulls in our rotation but a few big abilities you want to keep an eye out for the entire fight.
The Waiting Game
The biggest slowdown came for our off-hand strike, Lava Lash. Before, Lava Lash was a little bit of extra damage that came up every six seconds, usually in a rather inconvenient moment of your rotation. Now it’s a much slower, but much harder-hitting, addition to the arsenal; and with a ten-second cooldown you want to make sure each time you hit it you’re getting the most bang for your buck.
Improved Lava Lash increases the damage the spell does by 20% per stack of Searing Flames on the target, basically doubling the damage on a five-stack. Searing Flames will stack to its max in the time it takes Lava Lash to come off cooldown, so it’s important you keep that little fire totem going full-throttle between Lava Lash’s. That means paying more attention to keeping Flame Shock up the entire time (since the totem won’t shoot unless Flame Shock is up) and refreshing the totem every minute (since it only has a one-minute duration).
Another change that gives us more time to work with is the removal of Fire Nova from our single-target rotation. It only works when a Flametongue, Magma or Fire Elemental totem is down, not with the Searing Totem. That means you only need to worry about spamming it during big, multi-mob AOE situations, or as an extra damage boost while your Fire Elemental is running loose and making a big, flaming mess, assuming whatever it’s attacking is even close enough to the totem to be affected by Fire Nova.
The way fights go now, there are occasional lulls in the rotation where you’re waiting for Maelstrom Weapon to hit five, Lava Lash to come off cooldown, and/or a shock to finish cooling down. In pre-Cata raiding, that meant a tough decision between hitting Fire Nova, refresh your Lightning Shield to keep Static Shock going (no longer an issue with the new Static Shock), or try to fit a trinket/Shamanistic Rage/Spirit Wolves into the mix.
Now, that lull instead feels much more leisurely, like you have a moment to sit back and sip some tea while thinking about what’s going to happen next instead of frantically trying to find what part of your rotation you forgot to hit.
So take some time, savor that moment, and then go back to bringing the noise.
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