WoW Forever: Enhancement shamans pushed back towards Windfury

Blizzard has reworked Enhancement shamans in WoW Forever with hotfixes dated 10 November. The beta changes, together with the Shock and Lightning Bolt changes aimed at Elemental, had made Enhancement favour spell power and Intellect gear too heavily and pushed it away from Windfury, which Blizzard says should stay at the heart of the specialisation. Many of the new changes reverse those beta adjustments, and they go well beyond the Strength focus announced last week.

Stormstrike now deals 100% weapon damage instead of 150%, and its cooldown goes up from 6 to 8 seconds. Mental Dexterity turns less Intellect into attack power: 33, 66 and 100% across its ranks, down from 50, 100 and 150%. Maelstrom Weapon now gives 20% reduced cast time and mana cost per application at every rank, where it used to scale from 4 to 20%, but it no longer goes off 20 times a minute at any rank: it now triggers 6, 7, 8, 9 or 10 times a minute depending on rank. Its tooltip shows the chance per swing based on main hand weapon speed, for example 60% with 5 points in the talent and a 3.6 speed weapon, against 33% with a 2.0 speed weapon.

Every shaman gets something in return: weapon imbues and weapon totems can now be used at the same time. A shaman can have Windfury Weapon and Windfury Totem running together, with each attack able to trigger both. Blizzard explains the timing with the raid. The change matters a lot for gearing there, and making it before the raid opens should stop players chasing and winning highly contested items that could lose much of their value after a later change.

Hunters get a fix in the same list. Because of a bug, pets had 150% of their normal health, and this is now corrected to 115%. The Beast Mastery hawk pet deals about 80% more melee damage. Warlock demons go the other way: the Imp, Voidwalker, Incubus and Succubus all get about 15% more base health.