Some classes have more of it then others. Mages for the longest time had the equivalent complaints aimed at removing rune of power which was actually a good change to make, enh shaman has a weirdly loud segment that is always asking for 4th spec, 2h enh, enh becoming a support spec and removing good mechanics like pwave instead of providing feedback that would lead to an effective and fun enhancement. Also its one of many specs that get crippled utility and scalings because pvp has to exist in the same space and ruin things.
Other examples I would say are frost dk which has a lot of politics around whether breath of sindragosa should exist, 2h and dw existing, and obliterate not being allowed to be good enough for pve because pvp exists and survival hunters who will never live down becoming melee even if the beta just somehow turned them into one of the most interesting melee specs in the game.
From the take of a player who last played enh at the end of shadowlands and had a blast with it, I am heavily biased toward the elementalist build and if stormstrike 1 button spam is the build I just won’t level my shaman. From an outside perspective though enh was clearly the most usable of the shaman specs for competitive content for a while now it just suffers from its target cap and not being bis for the “meta comp” of shadowpriest augvoker+class that uses pi well with uncapped or close enough aoe.
The reality is when looking at other DPS trees you should have multiple types of builds with something at the core. The core for ENH is wolves, that what blizz decided to be the core. You can argue the merits of that but it is what it is.
If you like elementalist build then play it. If you like DRE then play it. Don’t try to get the other removed though, that makes 0 sense. I like both builds, but I prefer storm build. I like fishing for DRE procs, it feels good when I get that proc. Is it simple, yes. Do I care, no. If it’s too simple for you, play the elementalist build.
The funniest thing is that no one has mentioned the 3 deciding factors on which build will be played the most during any given season:
Balance
Hero Talents
Tier sets/ borrowed power.
How the build feels and what people like to play makes 0 difference in what’s actually played. Do you really think all those people that were DRE in S2 all of sudden hated it and preferred Elementalist for season 3? Or could it be the fact that tier set forced you drop cdr wolves for prim wave in DRE and prim wave just felt better in elementalist?
The spec should have both builds. Everyone supporting the multiple builds existing. Whether you struggle with modernity or not, and believe me saying only elementalist build should exist is struggling with modern wow where you have some choice in your build, see classic talent trees.
We should be focusing with them actually making good ENH talents that benefit either or both builds that only cost 1 point… And bringing back Shamanistic Rage.
I don’t argue for anything being removed other than Overflowing Maelstrom and the way DRE is overbearing part of Storm’s success or failure. I’d rather some of that damage be put back into Stormstrike itself or into Doomwinds. I like RNG burst, I just think the balance is off between DRE and the rest of your abilities.
I still think the return of talent trees was a massive waste of time. If they wanted to redesign talents, fine, but they tore down the entire kit to do it. I think talents should enhance a well-designed base kit, not pick it apart so you need to put it back together but with less of the pieces you had before.
Gonna tell you this right now: If we had gotten the Season 2 set bonuses in Season 4 Elementalist would still be miles better than Storm in Single Target because Elementalist had its issues with MSW fixed. It will always be better in Cleave, it was better than Storm on multiple bosses. And every storm build was garbage in M+. Sims in Sesaon 2 looking at the dps increase you’d get from going from 0 tier pieces to 4 tier pieces showed Season 2 Elementlaist (before talent and primordial wave change) and Storm got similar damage gain from it.
gl barring a miracle next week (lol) I’ll be over playing healthstone bot or that one spec that does spinkicks cause I cba with this spec propped up on popsicle sticks
They still made worse spec and class trees than retail is amazed. They removed many 2 points nodes and won’t do that to enhancement shaman is hilarious. We have zero talent diversity and are forced to take either Storm’s Wrath or Crash Lightning to progress toward Elemental Weapons. Shaman ‘rework’ is a negative net for enh.
I play Rogue and DH alts this expansion and they are terrible (havoc is horrible). so I am looking at monk / DK / hunter / locks for main + alts. I haven’t decided on this yet
Enhance is the best it’s even been. Just needs a few improvements.
1: Primal maelstrom baseline interaction for primordial wave, in place of primal, put the current tier set, but the cdr is based on msw gen, not wolves, and also, make the pwave gen 2 every second for 5 seconds, or 1 every second for 10, to cut down on waste.
2: less 2 talent points
3: static accumulation baseline, in it’s place put a cdr node for ascendance, or an increase in proc rate for dre, also make dre proc based on msw SPENT. Not stormstrike.
4: chain to 6 targets, crash buff applies for the whole duration, not just the first hit, remove the soft cap on crash completely.
5: Certain talents should probably be removed, like crashing storms
6: Flurry in spec tree??? Who the hell thought of this??
7: wolves off gcd
The literal issue is that the spec tree prevents you from getting everything you would need to play Totemic for either build. Elementalist only works with Strombring because of shenanigans with the tier set which they just nerfed EB and just saw somebody (Stankie) in Earthshrine say that EB only scales with 3 wolfs now on beta so if that’s the case Elementalist + Stormbringer is dead now. Storm + Stormbringer has to choose between good single-target dam/dog water cleave or nonexistent single-target/middle-of-the-pack cleave damage. And part of the reason we were goated in raid is because Elementalist just did a bunch of cleave naturally in its pure single target build and could funnel.
Like go look up the TWW talent calculator and try and make an elemenatalist build with Totemic and try make a single target and cleave build with Storm + Stormbringer and you’ll understand why we’re pissed.
What is fun about it? Seriously, I’m curious because I keep seeing people say this and I need to understand their point of view. Is it because you always have button to press? Is it the spender big number?
I’ve played Enhance elementalist build all of DF, done M+ ksm and heroic raids, and it’s not fun. I’m by no means a great player, but I’d say average or slightly above average. It has way too many keybinds required for competitive play, making it frustrating to even fit everything needed onto bars or into the number of keybinds I can handle. The rotation is based on priority and that priority makes it really clunky. What’s that? you got a hot hands proc? Better stop “rotation”, spam lava lash, and cycle through targets. That’s clunky. Same goes for the AOE setup. Feral sprit first, primordial wave for the flame shock, then crash lightning(extra damage from the lava lash), lava lash to spread the flame shock, then finally lightning bolt to finish the primordial wave. Of course because of primordial waves talent,10msw, you’ve potentially overcapped MSW by 1-3. That’s ultra clunky and convoluted. Ice strike just to buff frost shock when we already have hailstorm? Unnecessary clunk!
The new hero talents make things even more clunky. Stormbringer you’re going to be tab targeting your chain lightning to get the most out of conductive energy, clunk. Tempest as a whole is just kinda clunky since it’s not easy to figure out when it’s going to pop up and it’s not instant cast, one more proc to watch. Totemic is just clunk city if you’re trying to play it and use all of the talents, it’s just disjointed by, poor, design. Even if you’re not the surging totem now needing to be placed is clunky and you’ll need to do it every 24s, yay…
The easiest way I can describe that enhancement isn’t great right now is, can a normal person play it to even say 90% efficiency without weakauras? How many weakauras are you using right now on yours? Personally, without popping in game to count, it’s MSW stacks, flame shock missing reminder(cause target cap clunk), Primordial wave CD, hot hands, hailstorm, crash lightning reminder, earthshield reminder, and wind fury reminder(if I’m running it). Probably missing some but call it 8-10. Without those this spec would feel AWFUL because there is already too much to pay attention to in modern fights and you can’t be staring at your bars.
I want you to point to a class that parse a 90 in mythic with no addons/weakauras, I’ll wait. Every spec in this game requires WAs (it’s kinda dumb tho)
Quite literally a skill issue given others can do it.
Quite literally the worst way to do the opener on AoE assuming its a 5 or less target pull. You’d probably be overcapping by like 5-8 MSW doing that and waste 5 seconds on wolves. Also this opener with the current Tier bonus would be even more of a grief because Pwave CDR > Wolves CDR. 5 target pull you just do Pwave > Wolves > LL > LB and then continue through the priority list.
All three of those in combination is one of the reason we’re able to do good cleave damage in single target build and combo is your most prominate source of MSW generation outside of CDs. The spec would literally die if it was removed.
You should try and make a build with either hero talent tree:
Elementalist + totemic for ST and AoE / m+,
Storm cleave + Stormbringer
More
We should discuss all class, enhancement and hero talent trees for TWW. You make a tough decision and lose something major in talent trees. It’s frustrating to load up the trees and try to make builds. All class talent, specs talent and hero talent trees have the biggest issues. Hence I am looking at DK / Hunter / Monk / Warlock for main and alts on TWW.
i agree enhancement is in a bad spot. it’s so bad i need an addon to properly manage the rotation. like demonology warlock in legion. it’s awful. horrid. send it back.
Literally Ret Paladin, our far better counterpart. There are few things you can WA for convenience, but holy power is easy to track without a WA and that’s basically it for DPS.
There is literally no way to track MSW stacks from 5-10 without trying to find it in your buff bar and reading the small number.
I didn’t say others couldn’t do it. What I’m saying is that MOST others can’t. That’s the problem. Your average player cannot handle the number of keybinds on enhancement, it’s constantly brought up and one of the reasons the spec is relatively unpopular.
I’m guessing I explained that portion poorly. If you do one thing to synergize with another then your wasting something else, that’s clunk. You give up crash lightning and it’s lava lash damage because it’s clunky to that rotation. There is literally multiple clunks right there in that rotation Flame shock spreading being one but overcapping MSW being the other. That’s why people hate primordial wave.
I didn’t say they didn’t do good damage. What I’m saying is ice strike is unnecessary given we have hailstorm that already does something similar. Ice strike is literally just another button we have to push to make another one do more damage, it doesn’t need to be there. It could be a passive or just baked into hailstorm. That’s why it’s clunky, it’s own damage is meh. The spec won’t die without ice strike, iirc swirling maelstrom was completely different and didn’t include ice strike and the spec was still alive and kicking. Plus that can just be offset if it is an issue by just including frost shock instead of ice strike in it.
Brother…ICE STRIKE AND FROST SHOCK HAVE ALWAYS BEEN APART OF IT WHAT ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT?
What you said is that you don’t know how it plays because you’re assuming that x & y synergy = a & b synergy. It seems like you are putting a heavy amount of emphasis about overcapping MSW. You want to avoid if you can but you will overcap on MSW in some situations because using certain CDs or Procs pretty much makes overcapping a non issue because how the spec works. If Hot Hands procs just as Pwave comes off CD and wolves has 10 seconds on its CD, you just do Pwave > Wolves > Lava Lash > LB. Did it overcapp MSW? Probably but you’re still getting the CDR on Wolves, you don’t waste a potential . Now can it be hectic that procs can switch up what you need to do in the moment? Sure, but that’s again a skill issue with being able to adapt and having a poor understanding of how the kit fully works.
Quite literally the majority of people who hate pwave are mad they can’t just hit 1 button and be done with it because they can’t handle doing a setup, let alone being able to adjust based on fight demands and other variables. There are stinky things with the whole Lava Lash only spreading Flameshock to 4 targets instead of 5 resulting in shenanigans with getting 6 Flameshocks out but they still hate it even if it was removed.
Storm would also get wrecked from it from not having Ice strike since you don’t have another button to do a main hand attack if SS doesn’t reset and you can’t trigger legacy, you’d literally have just Lava Lash; even more important during doomwinds since if SS doesn’t reset you’d rather hit Ice Strike than spend Lightning Bolt to reset it on the off chance that Stormbringer procs during that GCD and Lava Lash doesn’t trigger WF weapon.
Elementalists is played around the fact that because a lot of effects are not fired immediately like Ice Strike priming Frost Shock and Pwave and associated effects being fired off Lighting Bolt means you rarely have to hold CDs provided you can play around it.
Just seems like your gripes with the spec boil down to not understanding the spec fully, and deciding to not use WAs to track stuff. It’s dumb you have to use weakauras but complaining a spec is hard while actively choosing to not use WA given the current design of WoW is the equivalent of complaining that your feet hurt after a 30 minute walk to work in 100-degree weather with no shoes on. What did you expect?