If you played BFA enhancement shaman and enjoyed it like I did then this is for you.
I know xpac has been out for a while and I have tried numerous builds, but the best is by far legacy legendary with necrolord covy.
Enjoy
hated bfa enhancement, freaking poor mans fury warrior i am happy blizzard ditched that version.
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I kind of enjoyed how BFA enhance played but the numbers just were not there man. Like you can focus down and nail rotations and do garbage and then I would hop on arms warrior and half afk and blow enhance numbers out of the water.
Running around chucking free BS lightning was fun
Yeah. But what made it great was the utility. Personally enjoyed BFA enhance because of the playstyle. I was pushing 17-18 keys as enh pug in BFA. It was also really great in bgs.
The new burst meta is just weird to me. I enjoy longer games where mistakes in play don’t immediately kill you but instead have a snowball effect.
Shaman design doesn’t dictate the meta. Maelstrom weapon stack enh was around since WotLk and has seen every type of meta. They will eventually slow pvp down (next xpac) due to the whining and the spec will be back to where you enjoyed. None of the utility has gone anywhere from BFA.
Yeah but you just need to understand that enh healing as been buffed since BFA. The only thing enh was missing in BFA was defense.
Blizzard just decided to add a burst meta to the game. People complained about games lasting to long. For as long as I have played the game designed around pve, and you need healers in pve. No one wants to play some boring healing spec, so to compensate healers have always been overpowered. Weird situation they have on their hands. Pvp will never be balanced and the reason is healers because they have to make them enticing to play and able to correct players mistakes.
All burst builds need to be addressed and healing needs to be nerfed in pvp. Game might actually be more engaging when that happens
I too prefer most of BFA’s enhancement.
I don’t like flame/frost shock, especially since they both share a gcd and cooldown, and that flame shock is a stupid dot, i hate dots.
I don’t like the doom winds legendary and how it works.
Enhancement is fun to play before you reach level 50.
If they made flame shock be an offgcd and decouple the cooldown from frost shock it would be OK.
and having stormstrike/lava lash generate guaranteed stacks of maelstrom would be nice too.
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I would’ve preferred Blizzard iterating on the Legion/BfA playstyle rather than ditching it entirely. There’s plenty that could’ve been done rather than reverting us to WoD-but-slightly-different.
Off the top of my head, SS could’ve been changed to a generator (while keeping its damage similar), and had the weapon buffs be the spenders. Some would be better for ST, some for AoE, and talents/legendaries could’ve synergized with others or introduced new ones entirely (Windfury buff? Or maybe that attack speed talent from Legion) . The idea would be stacking as many weapon buffs as possible while never dropping uptime on your most important ones; reintroducing decision making to the rotation while keeping the SS proc chain mashing, not to mention actively enhancing your weapons being the spenders of the spec being incredibly thematic.
We’re back to being Ele sham that have to melee, when the Legion/BfA version, for all the flaws Enh had then, actually was about enhancing.
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They did iterate on it.
They literally took the part that worked (Stormstrike spamming) and uncoupled it from the build/dump resource generation that people disliked.
By removing that, there was no longer a need for rockbiter.
The current Enhance we have is combination of BFA and pre-Legion.
Maelstrom Weapon stacks are returned — and Flametongue and Frostbrand were always just a combination of Flame Shock + Flametongue weapon and Frost shock + frostbrand weapon.
Frostbrand weapon got removed — Flametongue weapon was brought back to passive, with the instant ranged damage portion reappearing as flame shock.
So…are you just missing not having an ability to spam at range constantly?
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They returned us to pre legion playstyle with some of the stupid decisions on the class staying like not returning Shamanistic rage, earth shock, and totems like we had in mop and wrath. A lot of people and I mean A lot hated the blue rage bar that blizzard forced onto us for legion and bfa. We were never meant to be full melee we have always been a hybrid of ranged spell dps and melee. Some people look at is as a Battle Mage.
If you want the old rage bar I hate it when people say this but at this point it has to be said seems like warrior is the place for you.
Personally I think it was a certain game director that wanted Enhancement to be full melee. But that’s just my own thoughts.
Enhancement has returned to its roots mostly we are missing some key abilities to be fully what we used to be. I have no problem with changing the class trying new stuff out. But a lot of people thought the decision to make Enhancement 99% melee was bad at best. Playing Enhancement Shaman in TBCC is like I remembered and it was so much better with what we could bring to the table and offer. We were not tops dps but in pve we could drop a grounding totem to help with spells, We could drop a totem that reduced physical damage taken for the group. We had mana totem we could place. We had so much to help our group not just WF totem and that is gone until blizz decides t return it.
Sorry for the wall of text but I miss my Enhancement Shaman having utility more than just wf to help the melee. We had brought something for everyone that was helpful.
I miss the fantasy of actually enhancing my weapons with the elements being the core focus of the enhancement spec. I thought it was a great direction to give the spec which, since the removal of buff totems, hadn’t really lived up to its namesake. Also the interaction between abilities had much more potential for iteration than we have now. Shocks are entirely disconnected from the rest of the spec aside from a few talents, only one of which changes the way you play. In my opinion, Lightning Bolt feels really bad as something that you have to build up to, especially since it’s basically relegated to be filler for when you’re starved for Stormstrike procs. Outside of Hot Hand, Lava Lash feels just as useless and out of place as it did in Legion/BfA.
If the ST rotation felt like more than a collection of buttons which barely have anything to do with each other maybe my opinion would differ, but I honestly prefer Legion/BfA enhancement for all the interactions between abilities, no matter how subtle (like each Flametongue Attack applied by hits counting for Maelstrom and proc generation). Hell, I’d even prefer WoD to what we have now, if only because we had better baseline abilities like Shamanistic Rage, Ascendance not being a talent, Feral Spirits healing you, Stone Bulwark Totem (technically a talent, but it saved my life so many times in the Pit I had to give it a shoutout), etc.
To be honest, I don’t hate the direction they’ve gone, but it needs improvement for me to say I prefer this over what could’ve been had they taken a different path after BfA.
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This is what we have right now. We Enhance our weapons with wind and fire.
This could have been helped if they had returned the SS debuff proc.
Lighting Bolt is ok if your casting with 5 msw and not hard casting it. Chain Lighting is needs a number tune imo.
I say no to this return us to Wrath or Cata version of enhancement. Wod, Legion and bfa Enhancement needs to stay gone imo. Again this is all my opinion
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Hailstorm changes that, and while I agree, they are disconnected…they are also iconic. We are a shaman, not just an enhancement shaman. Losing them made me feel less of a shaman.
What? This was the core of 2 expansions out of 9. Clicking imbues was always maintenance, and when buffing totems disappeared, we were fully in the playstyle of enhancing ourselves to unleash a massive lightning bolt. I would argue enhancing our weapons was never core to the kit, and not even during Legion/BFA. Rockbiter was an attack just like Earth shock, except spammable. Flametongue was a combination of flame shock and flametongue weapon imbue. Frostbrand was just frost shock, renamed.
There was no interaction. Rockbiter didn’t empower anything. Lava Lash didn’t empower anything. Stormstrike didn’t empower anything. Flametongue weapon imbue had always increased lava lash damage since the first addition of lava lash to try and prevent double windfury. The interaction that existed between abilities was building and dumping a resource…which just prevented you from doing actual damage when you needed to…because if you didn’t have the maelstrom and weren’t getting procs, Stormstrike was nowhere to be found. If you enjoy that type of playstyle, you should be on warrior…they still operate under that mechanic. Its much nicer having abilities that actually deal dmg that you can use when you need them, rather than having a spammable crap button that you have to use to build your resource before you can start dealing damage.
Legion didn’t feel like a shaman anymore. Lightning bolt became useless and iconic shaman abilities all disappeared. I am a shaman first, then an enhancement shaman. The spec is just how we choose to commune with the elements. The idea of building up to a massive Lightning Bolt was always great, both thematically and mechanically. It was also unique how Elemental and Enh shared very similar toolkits, but used their abilities entirely different.
There are definitely a lot of QoL things missing from WoD, but that’s in part due to scrapping something that no one had any problems with, trying to recreate the wheel, and it being met with a lot of hostility and vitriol. As it stands, the flametongue weapon you enjoyed so much from BFA still exists. They just changed it from an activated effect on a short cooldown/duration, to a long cooldown/duration. It still buffs both of your weapon attacks to deal fire damage, rather than the original flametongue weapon that buffed a single weapon.
And imagine how good it could have been if they just had kept iterating on the spec they had spent from TBC up til WoD creating, instead of copying Fury Warrior. I’m not saying your wrong to like Legion/BFA enhancement. I’m just saying, you’re wrong to like Legion/BFA enhancement. ;] (I honestly didn’t have many issues with it in BFA, but the change was unnecessary…unasked for…and the spec is overall hurting because of it — don’t forget, it was Legion/BFA that gutted all the things you enjoyed from WoD).
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You seem to have missed my point. I understand that Legion and BfA were a change from the norm of previous expansions with regards to weapon enhancing being an active part in the rotation. What I’m saying is that I think that actively enhancing yourself and your weapons is much more thematic for the enhancement shaman.
Flametongue weapon now might as well be a passive (another QoL from WoD we didn’t get back). The version in Legion/BfA, as you said, was much more reminiscent of Flame Shock, but themed around weapon enhancing rather than lighting an enemy on fire. I’m confused as to how you can say that they were essentially the same thing and also say that it doesn’t feel like shaman. It was the enhancement parallel to elemental’s flame shock, and that made sense. If the only thing that makes it “feel like shaman” is the name and icon, then perhaps give us a passive called “Enhancing Shocks” or something, and make Flame Shock give us Flametongue, and Frost Shock give us Icebrand. Because as it is, Flametongue is just a button that you have to click every hour or you miss out on 5% of your damage (not including the Lava Lash damage because that’s just a shoe-horned way to make it necessary to run different enhancements).
I don’t understand the constant comparisons to fury warrior. I’ve played fury warrior, and it feels similar in that it’s a melee spec that prioritizes haste. Aside from that, the specs have entirely different themes and focuses. Fury is about building up to 80 rage asap then hitting their big damage button; enhancement was about maintaining weapon buffs and hitting your big damage button as much as possible while it’s proccing. There was room to make the weapon buffs more varied and add genuine decision making to the rotation, but I digress.
I agree that Legion could (and probably should) have iterated on WoD enhancement, because we were so close to perfect. Baseline Echo of the Elements, and maybe few talent tiers getting redesigned. Now we need a lot more work to get back to WoD, let alone surpass it. I’ve seen your ideas on various threads, and you seem to have a lot of good ideas. I’d be very happy with the spec if Blizzard took your example. However, I also think that we were on the verge of something great with Legion/BfA, and had I had the reins, I would’ve iterated on those. Overall, I guess I just don’t like this awkward in-between of WoD and Legion/BfA that we’re at now.
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BFA with stacked-haste corruptions was the only time enh got close to original-version. For those that remember - it was pretty glorious to revisit that again, if only for a short time. SL is like the TBC-castration-burst-management all over again.
Then sign me up because I enjoyed enh with haste stacked. It was fluid and the rotation was meaningful. It had great burst, compared to most other specs. It suffered from uptime management, but that could be mitigated with utility and swaps. It also had awful defense, but was still viable in content not involving the highest pushing of content.
Now I can find this fluidity in SL and can enjoy the game, but am at a huge disadvantage if I don’t play a burst build
I will say I am glad the poormans fury warrior is gone for Enhancement. I like what we are now. But I would perfer cata version of Enhancement.
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More thematic than what?
I am still enhancing my weapons currently. It’s just passive rather than active. I’m further enhancing myself even more with Maelstrom Weapon stacks building into a massive lightning bolt.
Because enhancement’s parallel to elemental’s flame shock has always been flame shock. You can use it at range and not lose any dmg. If you flametongue at range and weren’t on target, you lost a siginifcant portion of flametongue’s dmg as you waited for its cooldown. It was bad.
Stormstrike /Rampage if at >90 Maelstram/ >90 rage or enrage not active
Lava Lash/Bloodthirst when Stormstrike/Rampage is on cooldown
Rockbiter/Raging Blow when at 2 charges, and to build Rage
It’s legit the same set up. They mechanically feel nearly identical — the variation being using whirlwhind as filler as opposed to pressing flametongue/frostbrand.
I can respect this. I just can’t agree — I understand people enjoyed Legion/BFA but it was too far of a deviation from previous xpacs for me to personally enjoy. I don’t mind where we have landed, but recognize there is still way more work to be done. Legendaries currently prop up the class design.
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Is that why you always post on the same druid. You just admitted to not giving BFA/Legion a real shot. You come across as a FoTM player. Hard to take anything you say seriously if that is the case
Feel free to look at my post history if you think so.
I didn’t play Legion as shaman…and I played BFA from 8.1 to the end as shaman. The reason I didn’t play Legion as shaman is because it was such a gross departure from the class that I had come to love from WotLK until WoD, the duration of maelstrom weapons existence that saw and the evolution of things like:
- stoneclaw totem glyph turning into stone bulwark totem
- fire nova allowing for 25 man heroic firelands solo trash farming (https://youtu.be/62qBw8rqm5E - sorry for my old pc’s crap quality, not sorry for the music)
- WotLK’s dual-wielding with spellpower weapons and flametongue weapon imbue for ridiculously OP damage
- The addition of THREAT REDUCTION to our parry talent so that enhancement stopped pulling aggro on Malygos when standing in more than one power node
- racial totem art introduction in WotLK
- weaving 4 x MWS LBs to min/max damage
- Cataclysm whiner threads when they tried to bring back Purge removing 2 buffs in a single cast
- Ascendance and MoP’s Lightning Octopus
- having infinite mana with uptime thanks to Mental Quickness/Primal Wisdom
- straight chunking people with instant Ele Blasts and Stormblasts in MoP
- fire nova breaking rated bgs in Wod with the appropriate glyph setup: Flame Shock duration extension, Flame Shock % healing and the fact that Fire Nova had a 100 yard range, meaning you could literally sit at a base in EotS and be popping it off at the flag in middle of the map
- Frozen Power going from Enhance only in WotLK to a class-wide talent
- WotLK’s Totem Bar UI and buff totems being replaced by more cooldown based totems
- Never having to deal with an actual resource for 6 versions of the game (Classic, TBC, WotLK, Cata, MoP, WoD)
Legion destroyed the fantasy of building up to a massive Lightning Bolt ( essentially the reverse elemental — elemental using lb as filler as they waited to proc big lava surges), took away a large portion of our ability to play at the mid-range, and gated Stormstrike behind a resource that meant you couldn’t necessarily use it when it was off cooldown.
It also destroyed Wolves as a cooldown.
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