Why the change to Mental Quickness?

#0 - Dec. 11, 2008, 7:47 p.m.

First off, Ghostcrawler and anyone else who worked on enhancement shamans, thanks for making them a ton of fun to play with the expansion. Having a blast for sure.

But I need to know, why do you feel the need to change mental quickness from a really nice scaling talent to one that doesn't scale nearly as well or easily and has a pretty significant effect on gear choices.

For those who don't know yet:

-Mental Quickness: Reduced the mana cost of instant cast Shaman spells by 2/4/6% and increases spell power by an amount equal to 23/46/70% of your agility.

Considering that for basically all enhancement shamans, 70% of their agility is nowhere near 30% of their buffed attack power, this seems like a pretty significant change.

Unbuffed, I have a little under 700 agility and 3089 attack power.

With the new talent, that 700 agility would equal 490 spellpower.

With the old talent, I get 927.

Now, considering that many raid buffs give AP, as do many trinkets, our AP improves way better than our agility in combat. Moreover, many pieces of gear we pick up have minimal agility on them (trinkets, some rings, weapons).

Basically this is a scaling change in major ways and heavily affects our itemization. Basically we'll be going after agility more now than before.

Also note that the synergy between Mental Quickness and Mental Agility (funny, mental agility has nothing to do with agility...) is gone.

Consequences:
-Vastly changed scaling for enhancement shamans.
-Also, we will probably be tempted to grab druid tanking leather again since the Agi gains from that would be much higher, probably, than a corresponding piece of mail gear.
-This also nerfs the usefulness of flasks as a flask of endless rage no longer provides near the gains it used to. AP, on its own, now does not help enhancement shamans nearly as much as it helps any other melee centered centered class since our damage is split between melee and magic.
-Scaling when entering a raid environment from a 5 man instance or soloing is greatly nerfed. While most other classes get substantial gains in DPS (hundreds to over 1000) when entering a raid, this is largely lost on enhancement shamans as all the AP buffs only benefit a small part of our damage.
-Even fewer shamans around. As you know shamans are the least played class in WoW, and not by a small amount either.

Potential balances to be sure Enhancement Shaman scaling doesn't go the way of Elemental Shaman pre-3.08 patch scaling:

-Have mental agility live up to its name, have mental agility convert intellect into agility at some rate.
-Balance Mental Quickness so that part of our AP and part of our Agility get turned into spellpower.
-Increase the amount of Agility on shaman tier gear in place of attack power.
-Just undo the change completely and reduce the amount of spellpower gain from AP to 25% or something.
-Fix our wolves so they at least scale with attack power. Also... can they get some kind of AoE avoidance stuff like hunter pets? They die way too easily when anything happens at a bosses feet.

In conclusion: Mental quickness was the centric scaling talent for enhancement shamans. Mental agility helps us scale as well, as does elemental devastation and elemental fury, but not much else. The core of what makes enhancement shamans good hybrids is the mental quickness talent, please be careful what you do with it.

Edit: Also, please note that enhancement shamans are not currently overpowered in any way. We can top dps charts at the moment if we heartily outgear others, but all things being equal we get beat by hunters and mages handily (plus we are in melee range... don't know how we do against rogues). With a loss of probably 200-300 dps from this change (being conservative, the DPS loss could be much more massive) we'll fall out of contention for respectable DPS.

Also, I think some of the backlash today is due to the surprise of it all. No one seemed to have said anything regarding the need for changes to enhancement. This was just kind of sprung on us with no warning. The nerfs to hunters and paladins were pretty big (tho pallies still hit way too damn hard along with their bubble and stun) but at least they saw them coming a long way away.

Ghostcrawler

#18 - Dec. 11, 2008, 9:09 p.m.

Mental Quickness was a talent designed to let a spec without a lot of spellpower (Enhancement) get a little more. As sometimes happens with talents like this, it looked very attractive to a spec with A LOT of spellpower (Elemental) as a way to get A LOT more. We had a very similar problem with Holy paladins wanting a Ret talent.

This is one of the reasons why you can't directly compare talents across the board. What is a small buff for one character can be a huge, huge buff to another.

While some amount of venturing into other trees is a good thing, in this case it was basically Elemental abandoning their own tree and able to do more damage playing as an Elemental (meaning casting spells) with someone else's tree, all because of one talent. This was not because the Elemental tree has bad talents. It was because Mental Quickness was not intended for characters with a lot of spellpower. Unfortunately in this case, we couldn't push the talent deep enough to prevent caster shamans from reaching it. While we do want to juice Elemental's dps, we don't want to do it this way.

Enhancement dps has been competitive overall. There are a lot of AP buffs in the game, so with this change unbuffed shamans will do a little more damage and buffed shamans might do a little less. It's also possible dps could actually go up in the long term depending on just how good Agility is for Enhancement with this change. It might change e.g. how you want to socket your gear.

EDIT: Deep down in this post I announced that we are reverting this change. Mental Quickness will still use AP to convert to spellpower.

Ghostcrawler

#42 - Dec. 11, 2008, 9:22 p.m.

I guess some people are having trouble reading so I will have to post the same response again.

While we do want to juice Elemental's dps, we don't want to do it this way.

Ghostcrawler

#213 - Dec. 11, 2008, 10:26 p.m.

Also, to be fair, the intent of this talent and other talents like it is to let shamans benefit from the fact that they can melee and cast spells without having to build a single gear set that supports all of those stats neeeded. The intent is not to let Enhancement get crazy amounts of spellpower when a warrior Battle Shouts. Really it is these buffs that are the problem. The basic amount of AP you have on your gear wouldn't be an issue.

Ghostcrawler

#257 - Dec. 11, 2008, 10:37 p.m.

We didn't do this change with the intent of massively nerfing Enhancement dps. My point was that we weren't trying to design the talent as a way of making AP raid buffs uber for shamans.

We like the change to Agility, but we can look at the actual percent of which Agility converts to spellpower and possibly bring that up if it looks like Enhancement dps would drop enormously.

Ghostcrawler

#433 - Dec. 12, 2008, 12:27 a.m.

I want to thank everyone for all of their thoughts and analyses and for staying (for the most part) rational.

After looking at the numbers some more, we're not convinced we can inflate the Agility bonus to get Enhancement back to where it was before this change without leading to some pretty weird situations where Agility was valued above all else. We also hate losing the synergy with Mental Dexterity's AP boost.

Long story short, after reading your feedback and thinking about it some more, we no longer like this change and are going to revert it.

We will likely swap the positions of Mental Quickness and Static Shock as some of you have suggested.

Bottom line: Mental Quickness will still convert attack power to spell power.