C Tier Specs
Enhancement Shaman
Wordup said:
Overall Rating: C (B)*
Note on B grade: Enhancement is somewhat unique in that its performance hinges on the strength of the OTHER players in your group (specifically melee) that you’re playing with due to 
Windfury Totem. Big winners are Rogues and Arms Warriors, and the amount of extra damage can bump you up to be worthwhile. However, it is something that you only want one Enhancement player for, is exclusive to single target situations, and any second Enhancement player will bring nothing desirable on top of that. Therefore, it sits at an B grade rank if you can make use of this effect, but is relegated to a C rank if it has to stand on its own. Nothing that 9.1.5 brings interferes with this for us.While Enhancement has a very large amount of different builds and options within the kit, as 9.1 continued and the full package of systems were unlocked we fell starkly behind. Unfortunately, this means that things such as 
Doom Winds that propped us up in AoE have fell firmly behind, and we simply are unable to interact with that fight style. Our best strength leading into the tier was flexibility of builds and damage profiles, but due to a number of talent issues and stats having no direct scaling with certain builds, we are relegated to being a purely single target boss turret. This is coupled with 9.1.5 bringing no changes to improve this, and a number of the specs that we benefit with Windfury Totem seeing no real changes either, ergo we firmly fall in the rankings.
As it stands in a retrospective of Sanctum of Domination, the handful of fights we are acceptable on output wise, we never excel, and pair that with some where we are dead last and unable to adjust to improve that, it makes it a hard sell. Our damage profile now stands as a low burst sustained DPS with heavy reliance on RNG (thanks to the combination of 
Hot Hand, 
Elemental Spirits and 
Witch Doctor’s Wolf Bones) which makes it hard to guess what your output will be pull to pull. This extends to whether you can even deal with a mechanic compared to alternative specs that can hold cooldowns for it and do it reliably, which is not appealing.
Our mobility isn’t incredible, but it’s extremely reliable thanks to 
Ghost Wolf and 
Spirit Walk (and even 
Feral Lunge) and you’ll rarely find yourself unable to navigate a boss arena in Sanctum unless it explicitly requires displacement tools. Defense on the other hand comes with a lot of very strong tools on paper (
Astral Shift and 
Vital Accretion especially), but they’re attached to such long cooldowns that we can run into issues if a fights damage pattern is more frequent than we have tools to deal with. We also have the added benefit of being able to counteract the rot damage present on certain fights by aggressively using 
Healing Surge.
Utility for Enhancement is somewhat lacking in a “this breaks a fight” kind of way, but the most obvious benefit is Windfury Totem referenced at the top which is quite literally free damage on top of your own output for your melee group - the thing is you need to be doing enough combined with that to justify the spot in your melee comp. Outside of that there’s a lot of low priority utility like 
Capacitor Totem and a lower cooldown interrupt in 
Wind Shear, and we can also cover the raidwide mobility cooldown requirements some fights have with 
Wind Rush Totem. Given that at least half of the encounters within Sanctum of Domination have huge boss arenas, this is significantly more valuable than it ever has been to avoid telegraphed lethal mechanics, and is a factor if you can’t get it elsewhere in your raid.
