Was looking at the 2H maces/axes section of the appearances tab and it made me really sad that I can’t use them on my shaman. 3 classes use these and I hate all of them. Tell me that the BRF axe doesn’t look like a shaman weapon.
Lots of small issues like this is why people are leaving your game Blizzard, start doing something about it. Open up more customization, take the classes off the rails, let the kids play.
Bump for 2h Enhancement, yes please! Give us the options. Pretty pretty please :3
Agree, bring back 2h. You all did for frost DK. Hmph…
How can they deny an orc his big shiny axe?
They really can do some many things with it. I truly hope sometime in the future that they will bring it back.
It does feel kinda unfair that they gave Frost DK back the option to use 2h or dual-wield… while enh has been asking for 2h since the dawn of time.
It’d be tricky to make work though. It should be relatively easy to tune Stormstrike so it hits the same whether you’re dual wielding or 2h-ing… but both windfury and maelstrom generation is a problem for a (theoretical) 2h build.
Generating fewer windfury hits that do more damage wouldn’t (necessarily) impact our overall dps, but as much fun as the huge windfury crits that could 1-shot a player were for the brief window they existed, obviously, Blizz doesn’t want to bring that back. So we’d need some way to generate more windfury hits with fewer strikes… or 2h-ing would need some other way to generate damage to make up for the “missing” windfury strikes.
Maybe… right now, the talents that build around lava lash and flame strike are dead talents. So… maybe a 2h build could be built around replacing damage from windfury with flame damge… like… when 2h-ing, lava lash becomes a strike with the haft of the weapon (the animation is just sooo cool in my mind, you guys!), and lashing flames could make flame shock ticks have a chance of proccing a stack of maelstrom while 2h-ing. Meanwhile, hot hand reduces the cd of lava lash, and makes it spread AoE, but only while 2h-ing. And then fire nova could be viable as well. In order to get it from getting too crazy, fire nova would probably have to detonate the flame shocks, removing them from the targets and requiring them to be re-applied during hot hand windows…
Ha ha. Obviously, this is all filed in the “never gonna happen” folder but… it’s nice to dream sometimes…
What about increasing the proc rate for 2H windfury from 25% to 33% and making the windfury attacks hit a third time?
Yeah, I think something like that could work. There’s currently overlap with the Unruly Winds conduit there… I’m not sure how the 2h-windfury has a chance to hit a 3rd time would play with that.
Judging by how garbage 2H Frost is, I’d rather… not get 2H, at least until we know they can get FDK to work with either set up.
Blizz just need to stop sucking the fun out of the game. The real reason people want 2h back is because of massive wf hits.
This would be the goto for pvp.
We don’t need more wf hits, that’s the same as making it more powerful. The thing is, with 2h we have a slower attack speed, so we generate less maelstrom. But separately, our burst window would be insane, and ot would actually make us competitive on huntsman, sludgefist, and probably more.
Yes, we’d likely 1 shot people in pvp, but that’s only an issue for people in low brackets. Anyone in full 226 with 35% vers is not going to have an issue with 4 massive wf hits.
Don’t forget, we wouldn’t be hitting with the dozens of flametongue hits that we do, and lava lash would do less damage too.
Be careful what you wish for…2H Frost and 1H Fury are back and they’re balancing nightmares. And in the case of 2H Frost… it’s just a poorly performing spec outside of specific arena comps.
A transmog option might be best.
Balancing wouldn’t be so much an issue. 2H would likely be massively underpowered in PvE content, because less hits = less msw generation & less procs = less stormstrikes = less windfuries = less damage, even if the WF that do proc do twice as much damage.
In PvP however… being able to run up to someone drop doom winds and hit with a 2H for 4x windfury doing double the damage as currently… that would literally delete people, and with ascendance up this would be the go to spec for Enhancement in PvP, as it used to be.
The problem is, they don’t want people just falling over to 1 hit… yet they allow convoke, they allow monks to kill you during leg sweep, and rogues to kill you during cheap shot. This would be akin to that, and most of us are really looking forward to the day that melee are scared to attack the Enhancement Shaman for fear that we might 1 shot them.
Im not defending the rogue and druid, but seek to add potential insight into why blizzard doesn’t want the windfury issue to be a thing.
Disregarding the work put into flametongue, lava lash, and getting dual wield to work properly…
Convoke is still a spellcast that can be interupter.
A rogue still needs to stun you, which can be trinketed. Even then. It’s still 3-4 gcds before you die and can be outhealed.
There is counterplay to both of these. Even if it requires fast reaction time and teamplay.
Whereas double windfury and doom winds had no counterplay. It’s legit a one shot 100-0 that can’t be avoided providing you hit the target. This is unlike convoke because it can’t be interupter, and unlike rogue because it doesn’t require a stun setup. Furthermore it can be done as a cleave to multiple targets if you have the crash lightning buff up.
I think these are potential reasons why they broke it, aside from just wanted the class to use flametongue and lava lash.
We just had the equivalent of a hard-hitting classic windfury with the double windfury glitch. They made it not work. Nuff said.
All valid points, and for those reasons it probably won’t ever happen, however, they can make it happen with a little effort.
In TBC duel wield was a welcomed option, and it was actually the ‘better’ option (mostly because of double wf glitches). I would be perfectly ok with no having 2h back as long as we had options on our playstyle.
Such as, double windfury or wf/frostbrand for pvp, or some version of rockbiter that perhaps reduces the armor of the target, or applies a bleed, or something.
If we actually had rockbiter/frostbrand and used that in pvp; it could potentially be better than windfury because of the slow + whatever effect rb would give.
That being said, they could definitely make 2h work in PvE. I don’t know how they would stop the 1 shot with 2h wf in PvP, but that might only be an issue in early expansion. Once people have more hp, more armor, more versatility, 1 shotting someone with a 2h wf crit might be extremely hard to do anyway, but this early on, sure, I can see that it would be a problem - I don’t have an answer for how to solve that potential problem.
Maybe I’m missing something but… windfury keys off attack power, not weapon damage, so assuming equal ilevel between dual wielding and 2H-ing, wouldn’t windfury hits also be equal? In which case, the big windfury hits that delete a player in PvP wouldn’t be a thing.
If I’m right… 2H-ing would need a proc increase to account for the slower weapon speed (but windfury damage would remain the same over all). This would devalue Doomwinds slightly (because an increase of a 25% chance to hit to a 100% chance to hit is better than an increase from 33% to 100% and because you’d have fewer white hits during the burst window), but would drive up the value of Frost Witch (because more Stormstrikes means more main hand hits off the weapon attack timer means more chances to proc that windfury).
Anyway, this is just… back of the envelope thinking, but if Doomwinds is devalued for 2H-ing, that would make dual wielding the more attractive option for PvP (which would render concerns about PvP windfury hits moot), while leaving a 2H option for folks who want it in PvE.
Of course, some folks who want the 2H shaman back want those days of one-shotting a player with a lucky windfury crit back… but… that’s just not gonna happen.
Okay… thinking about it some more, forget what I said up thread about making 2Hing the flame build. Keep lava lash as the dual wielding option (lava lash, flame tongue, flame shock and the talents that key off of those abilities are a joke right now and need re-tooling, but imagine they can be tuned to usefulness).
In addition to seeing “we want a 2H shaman” threads, I’ve seen a number of “bring back rockbiter” threads. As an “old school” shaman, I kinda hate rockbiter and the builder/spender playstyle that shamans had in Legion and to an extent BFA… but… what if they also bring back rockbiter and a sort of half builder/spender thing for 2Hing?
Rockbiter comes back with 2 charges. Just as lava lash only works with an off-hand, rockbiter only works with a 2H. It hits like a wet noodle, but gives a guaranteed 1-2 stacks of maelstrom every hit. You run with a 2H weapon and Frost Witch so that spending that maelstrom resets your stormstrike. More stormstrikes gives you more chances to proc windfury… and you profit.
Of course… there is a problem in requiring a specific legendary for a 2H build, since players don’t have access to that leggo for the first 59 levels while learning the spec, and generating extra maelstrom doesn’t do you a lot of good if your spenders aren’t also resetting stormstrike or reducing the CD on your wolves or whatever…
Maybe… bring back earth shock as well as rockbiter, and earth shock puts up a debuff that’s called something like “grounded” so that targets take more damage from nature spells. Making lightning bolt/chain lightning more valuable. Oh… no wait… we already have that with earthen spike. But that’s a level 50 talent and waiting until level 50 for a playstyle to come online isn’t ideal either. Plus you can’t keep the earthen spike debuff up 100%, although maybe that’s not a problem if the goal is a builder/spender playstyle. Build the maelstrom. Dump it during earthen spike windows…?
I’ll have to check. But…
It used to be that windfury (and rockbiter) were based off of weapon damage. They increased your weapon dmg via attack power, but the actual melee hit was based on your weapon damage. So getting a slower heavier weappn meant bigger damage.
I know it says something like hits for x attack power. But I’m sure that’s “additional” to your original swing damage. So the bigger your white hits, the bigger your windfury. As a result 2h windfury would hit harder.
Be nice to also get back the old wf proc animation. Because at least then we knew when it was htting.
Right. That makes sense. It’d be nice if tooltips were a little more clear on where damage was coming from.