We’re a sustain DPS spec with builder spender-centric rotation that can performed in a variety of way based on encounter demands while being the only class have 2 different funnel damage profiles (sustain and bust) with the ability to perform significant cleave with our single target build. That’s our identity.
Being beholden to having a spec have no growth or flexibility purely for “muh lore” is on par with Ion saying Convanents is a meaningful choice that players will appreciate the fact you are locked into them.
I unironically mixed you up with some other person that makes “pwave bad” takes. All “pwave bad” takes are shallow in nature so yall blend together.
While performance is always valued, the class/spec is more than just what it appears to do on a spreadsheet. I’d ask you, why play an Enhancement Shaman over a Mage or Warlock? For most people damage profile isn’t on the list. Most people play for optics. Elemental class, that class that did that cool bs Windfury thing, the hydro-healer. You can’t just dismiss their input, it’s their class as well.
Perception of fun at the low and mid ends of the skill spectrum matters quite a lot as that is where the vast majority of players are at. You can’t design only for the highest skill tier, that is how you get overdesigned, convoluted bs like Arcane Mage has been for some time.
Only thing I’ve ever said is that I don’t like Pwave but I understand it’s a strong ability. I would have preferred something else but I’m not going to deny the people who do like it.
Quick q, how long have you played Shaman, Enhancement or otherwise? Not saying it matters, just curious.
While I am happy with some changes, shaman getting a raid buff is great and feral lunge baseline is also a nice change.
Why take what made enhancement unique and give it to the other shaman and give us nothing as compensation? We are still locked into the same two playstyles and there no ankh changes. Why?
This expac is the first time I’ve gained Enhance but I’ve dabbled in others. I still have my priest and hunter from when I played in vanilla but I could care less about the supposed “identity” they have lost provided their gameplay and viability is good, fun, and make you feel cool. Elementalist Enhance is in my opinion the coolest and most engaging spec I have ever played in WoW and the best DPS I’ve ever played in an MMO.
And then you have the massive exodus of DK players who left because of what happened to Frost DK when 2 hand was introduced in SL and the nerfs they had to do to the whole spec to not have it murder plate classes in the arena with 2 Obliterates. But the thing is that you can play arcane suboptimally and still clear heroic, some mythic bosses, and probably get KSM.
And I’ll also throw this out there: a lot of my feedback is aimed at preserving Elementalist but making it more appealing to others.
So, you, a relative newcomer to the spec, are demanding it be reworked to fit your vision of the spec better. That’s quite narcissistic by definition. You are fine to advocate for what you find fun, but you tear others down for doing the same. What the heck?
When people say they want Chain Harvest, Fae Transfusion, or 2h back, they aren’t saying to reinstate it as it was. That would be terrible. What they are saying is that they want that design element taken and given time and iteration to allow it to become better design. We understand fully the drawbacks each of those things had, we just don’t think the right thing was to just throw them out.
If I had to say why I don’t like Pwave, I’d say I do like it, on Elemental. It is a caster ability through and through. I like Enhancement as a melee spec, not a pseudo-caster thus I am going to be drawn more toward the Storm build. I don’t like the way Storm is, but I still prefer it over the Elementalist build.
The more I read over the Totemic tree the more I want to actually play it. It seems to be trying to add value to the melee strikes of the spec instead of the spellcasts that Stormbringer does. I’m not expecting it to be the spec’s meta at any point in TWW but seems like it could be fun to play around with.
The thing is because of what they did to preserve Storm you’re only going to play half of it. Storm build existing throttles the talent tree to have 2 points nodes so it cannot.
Elemental is functionally bad given the gameplay loop.
The quite literally best version of Pwave is Elementalist build’s synergy.
I’m starting to think you’re a contrarian troll or you quite literally consume information about WoW from this forum alone.
Quite literally the people you rely on to even understand the spec when it changes agree with most of my sentiments. Hate to say this as well, class perception is 10000000000% decided by how a spec performs in high end content rather than feely crafty things.
None of you do. If you wanna know what that process is actually like Go watch footage from the Shadowlands Beta regarding Frost DK. Look at every single build iteration, every single discussion about during its development, go look at everyone’s reaction to the changes they made, go look in Discord, the forms, and every source you can find over the past 3-4 years and read every single page, watch every single video of people quitting the game because they were kicked from their guild, they can’t play arena, they can’t do mythic plus because their spec that they fell in love with is completely at odds with the rest of the game. After all, some rats want to swing a stick. Go consume all that information and if you don’t have the drive to do that to understand how that could affect the whole of the player base (this forum is not at all representative of the player base).
If anybody is narcissistic, it’s the guy whose take is that its ok to ruin a spec and make it miserable for people who do more for this game than you do because “well it feels weird for a melee to fire a bolt and i care if its literally unplayable”.
You’re quite literally saying “F@#K everyone else, big stick go bonk”.
Doom Winds is much more fun imo.
Elementalist build is also fun, but my arthritis forces me to play ele after 2 keys of it.
Also, why am I not surprised someone from edict is being a tool.
Never met a good person from that guild.
How about this. My very first character I ever rolled in WoW back in 2005 was an Enhancement shaman. I rerolled him to a different server in BC and went Resto, but rolled this orc shortly after to be my dedicated Enhancement shaman instead, and routinely kept her as my second-most-played character right behind my Resto shaman until she eventually usurped his place as my main in WoD.
I quit in Legion in no small part due to the absolute butchery they did to the spec with that trashfire of an expac, before coming back partway through BFA. I have been playing Enhancement my entire WoW career and in every expansion to varying degrees of expertise and levels of content, from strictly questing and running queue content in WoD to having a weekly key group running 20+ keys in DF.
DF Elementalist Enhancement is the best the spec has ever played, and feels like the natural continuation of the spec’s evolution from Vanilla through WoD, before Legion turned us into half-assed Fury clones in a blue coat of paint, only to gradually walk us back over BFA and SL. And as part of that, DF Primordial Wave is one of the best tools ever added to the spec’s kit, and that’s coming from someone who played Necrolord Enhancement all of SL for RP reasons (I RP a Frostwolf and the Necrolords had Drakka) and absolutely loathed the spell through the first two seasons.
While I certainly dislike Stormstrike having been reduced to such a pitiful state as to be mere filler in our rotation and would love to see it get some of its glory days back by being converted to stormstrike-type damage, the idea that Stormstrike and Windfury are the only things that make Enhancement, Enhancement, is as obsolete as totem twisting.
I don’t know about you but seeing StormStrike reset when I got my other builds on CD while playing Elementalist still got me spitting “Ah, you were at my side all along. My true mentor. My guiding moonlight.” like I’m Ludwig the Accursed transitioning to Ludwig the Holy Blade.
Honestly, one of my biggest struggles with Elementalist all expac is that I have such a hard time not reflexively hitting Stormstrike every time it lights up, even when I have higher priority spells available. Stormstrike being my powerhouse melee attack is so embedded into my brain by all my years of Enhancement, and only further entrenched by it easily being the most aesthetically satisfying attack in our kit with our most distinct attack animation and an ear-pleasing audio smash.
While I never want to go to the Storm extreme of it being the only button worth hitting, I do wish it packed the punch for Elementalist to match that satisfaction.
God forbid you make storm build not degenerate spam and suddenly it has the complexity of an arcane mage
Because 98% of the ideas are dogwater and not grounded in reality, would ruin the spec, or are attached to dead pipe dreams that people who play the spec for 2 WQs a season want added in for their nostalgia hit
Bruh, I want a Storm rework. I don’t like what DRE/Thorim’s did to it. I just don’t want the alternative to the Elementalist build deleted.
Ok, the same thing goes for most posts on the forums, 98% ideas that don’t ever get taken seriously. The rational response is to either post why you disagree or just ignore it. Even when you do post why you disagree, that doesn’t mean your reason was enough to change the mind of the person who is simply stating what they think would be fun for the spec. It’s their class as well, they get just as much access to input as you whether they mythic raid or whether they just do world content and t-mog farm. They still play the spec and are allowed to give their feedback.
You are right, all feedback is open to critisism. However the toxicity and abrasiveness with which people coat said critisism in unwarranted in any capacity. People actually blaming the 2H Enhancement posts for lack of Blizzard’s support of the spec is actually insane.
At this point, I actively don’t want to try mythic raiding. At one point it seemed like something I could eventually work my way up to it but seeing how the community around mythic raiding and high-end M+ is, I don’t want any part of that toxic part of the game that I am now convinced, thanks to people in this forum, that focus on this type of content is holding the rest of the game back from being better. Too many resources devoted to a group of people that actively discourage others from playing the game and getting involved in the community. These people are why the social aspect of the game died and why the game will never be as much of a cultural presence as it once was despite the fact that it has the potential to be bigger and better.
I member when Shaman was supposed to be a “chill” class with a rather easygoing community. Y’all ruined that.
My god man do yeasty or I look like the elected president of shamans, this is dramatic as hell.
You’re not going to find any enh main right now that’s in the mood to coddle or pat the head of any idiotic suggestions when this spec is in the shape it’s in, you just aren’t.
If you’re more obsessed with gimmicky nostalgia builds and “optics” than making a spec actually function, that’s your own issue.