After waiting through p3 and up to announcements of p4 I was expecting to see some attempt to make adjustments to 2h enhancements. After seeing nothing about it with the news of P4 I figured I’d make some suggestions to bring it somewhat closer to the level of DW in terms of viability.
Many of the problems 2h enh is having is needing to borrow from elemental runes to patch the holes left by lack of lava lash. Which are not really cohesive with the playstyle of how enhance is supposed to work. dedicating lava burst to MSW procs does not take advantage of the stormstrike debuff, and tying up shocks in pvp by needing to use flameshock on CD to use lava burst is seriously debilitating for utility. that and the ridiculously underperforming PPM of MSW with a 2 hander.
I propose either adding a second melee attack for 2 handers or at the very least putting shocks in different cds when a 2 hander is equipped as well as upping the proc chance of MSW when a 2her is equipped.
There are various ways to go about this. you could remove the restriction from lava lash to be useable by 2hers but nerf its damage to 75% weapon damage. you could also split the difference of these suggestions and make either frost or earth shock a melee attack on a seperate CD from the rest of your shocks(something like change earth shock to “lightning crash” when the 2h weapon specialization is equipped.
The devs say they’re making legendaries useful to more classes, however for the most Iconic sulfuras user(shaman), sulfuras is effective nonviable compared to dual wielding. 2 handed enhance doesn’t need to be on par with DW performance, but a little adjustment could at least bring it within the ball park.
2h enhancement would benefit most from keeping the unpredictability in place but increase it’s potency and chance to occur.
A flat 20-35% damage increase with an additional 20% chance to proc windfury weapon per swing.
Rune could look something like this… Change the current 2h rune to…
Two Handed Scary Wind Fury: 30% increased swing speed while wielding a two handed weapon, 25% increased AP to windfury weapon buff, 10% increased chance to hit with spells and melee attacks, 30% increased damage with melee and adds an additional 20% chance per swing to trigger windfury weapon.
Thanks for giving the 2h shamans a voice. Been 2h in vanilla, era and now sod. You raise some solid points and hoping the devs see this thread.
Definitely feels bad to have to share lavaburst when it has an 8sec cd (understandable if you’re ele but for enh feels bad trying to time msw stacks if you get 5 and have to wait for burst cd) when lava lash is sitting at 6 sec.
Msw generation is definitely lacking so a bump to that would be very welcome.
Triggering mental dex based on storm strike or lava lash doing damage feels so bad for 2h cuz if your first one misses you have to wait 6 seconds before you can actually start doing your real damage.
Looking at logs dw is dealing twice the dps at the top end of users and easily hundreds more at the mid tier.
Would be nice to have another melee swing thrown into the 2h kit, lower the cd of storm strike if you have 2h mastery rune on, or cause storm strike to increase 2h chance to proc WF.
2h has always been the fun gamble spec and it would be nice to see them give us more tools to lean into the wf proccing burst play-style.
No matter what they do (and hopefully they are play testing it themselves since they even gave us the arcanite reaper in the ptr to start out) I’ll still be holding up the 2h flag and will be proudly wielding Hand of Rag
Just pointing this out. THIS ATTACK already exists in the class fantasy and in retail.
It’s called ice strike. And it works with 2hander.
You strike with your weapon doing 125% AP but likely converted to weapon damage for sod instead and snare the attacker and empower your next frost shock.
It also isn’t imbue dependent so enhance can use windfury and not feel gimped using it. It also has a fun hook to frost shock!
I think the shortest route for them would be to have Lava Lash use Off Hand OR 2H weapon.
(And to increase the WF/MSW Proc chance by 50-100% when using 2H)
It’s so late into the dev cycle for P4 that trying to introduce something they don’t already have instead of tweaking what they do would be non-viable.
I mean if there’s already a second 2h attack coded into a version of WoW i’m all for it. Ice strike sounds great to me. would be cool to get some combo interactions going with frost shock as well.
Ice strike + MSW scaling could def bring it within a 75-80% range of dual wielding in terms of performance without being OP for pvp, Which I think is good enough for the 2h enh enjoyers. I don’t think anybody is expecting to be exactly 1-1 on par with DW performance wise, but just be a viable alternative.
totally agree I dont care to have it be DW level viable. If I want good DW enhance ill play retail or cata. I already have that and a better version of it. Classic was suppose to be about 2h enhance…
They made hand of rag the FERAL WEAPON LMFAOOOOOOOOOO
Give 2h shamans an instant attack that is embued with whatever shock you used first and modifies it so.
Call it “Elemental slash”
Ie.
No shocks: 110% weapon damage and hits two enemies.
Earth shock: Increase damage by 100%,but reduce to a single target
Flame shock: allow it to cleave 3 targets and increase its critical strike chance on targets hit with flameshock on them.
Frost shock: Deal 85% weapon damage, cause a 10% increase to frost shocks slow and cause frozen surge
Frozen Surge: Each time you hit the enemy they gain a frozen surge stack,(max 3) the next time you frost shock or your elemental slash crits while under the effect of frost shock, consume all stacks, increase the damage taken by the target by 5% per stack consumed.
