Enhance easily countered and easily kited

PVP Arenas
1

Far too many counters for things enhance can do right now. Want to give some feedback about this, even though I think enh is fun ideally it gets a bit of help in one of these departments.

-Purges counter healing builds because Earth shield gets removed every time purge is pressed and we cant spend every 4 globals reapplying it yet it gives 20% extra healing from the shaman so we need it if we want to play Stormweaver+Refreshing waters. Having to reapply Earth shield on top of skyfury often is pretty annoying.

-Enh mobility has fallen behind hard in TWW. Mobile classes get more mobility and less mobile melee also got more mobility this expac outside of Enh. It is easily kited and enh requires constant uptime to do damage. Static field totem nerf hurt the anti-mobility enhance had as well.

-Disarm hard counters enhance (rogues, monks, warriors, surv hunter) as it lines up with our main go every minute, on top of getting kited/slowed constantly+CC it is quite annoying to get damage out into a lot of comps as enh.

-Dispel counters flame shock/prim wave too often now that Pwave no longer applies flame shock. Volcanic eruption does 300k damage and a small knock up for dispelling flame shock, so basically no punishment for doing so.

-Defensives aren’t great. Long CDs (Astral shift 1m30, Stone bulwark 3m, Burrow 2m, Earth ele 5m) and burrow takes up an honor talent. Wind barrier for totemic enhance is purgable/stealable as well (lol). Losing Ancestral guidance made our self healing and team healing far worse.

-No MS (not a counter, just something very powerful we do not have as a melee spec).

-CC is bad. Hex is much harder to get off as enh than the other specs as we are in melee most of the time, most good enhances only have a few hex casts. Cap is okay but DRs with lasso, and lasso is a channel so we cant do anything during it. Cap is 54s cd, lasso 1m, hex 15s if talented into short hex. So we don’t have a lot to offer on the cc front.

Just want to point out some of the issues, have heard Saul talk about a lot of this if you want a much better enh shamans pov on this stuff. Not every single one of these issues needs to be resolved, but definitely 1 or 2 of them need some help. Enh utility with tremor/grounding/earthgrab is great, esp grounding, but it is not so far ahead of other classes that it needs so many counters/downsides, and some utility has been nerfed over time (poison cleansing, wind rush increased cds). Every spec has its issues of course, but I think enhs issues are starting to pile up a bit. Feels like we could use some way to stop disarm on ourselves or have some brief cc immunity (maybe via pvp talent for spiritwalkers?) or just something resolving a couple of these issues.

3 Likes
2

So many times I’ll have doom winds up with my target being 2 yards away and I can’t hit them because I’m in a root or slowed.

The spec is so horribly designed.

1 Like
3

this is all melee that get kited. enh is doing exceptionally well actually on the ladder

1 Like
4

Eh not really as most melee have more consistent burst damage than enh or have some form of cc immunity during their burst (demolish, conduit, etc) or have better overall defensives to keep themselves offensive. I think enh doing well depends on what it faces ie if you can have a ton of uptime it feels very good, but if you cant it is awful, and yeah warrior does suffer from similar issues but warrior can do more consistent damage than enh and does have better mobility too and requires far less set up.

Wait until the ladder settles and see how it ends up looking. There are always a few good enhances that make it work, and while i’m not as good as them I will too, that does not mean the issues are not stacking up a bit too much rn.

5

Yeah but eventually you will connect with your stun too and get your damage off. Same with dh ww dk rogue feral ret

Enchantment shaman doesn’t really have this.

Would be cool if they buffed cap stun to 4 seconds(for enhance only), made spiritwalk make u immune to slows and roots for its entire duration, and make feral lunge a 15 sec cd.

2 Likes
6

I wouldn’t say its horribly designed I really enjoy the way we do damage and the set up it requires, its just that disarm is way too strong into it and so are roots/slows/knocks and all other CC.

My suggestion was to remove Burrow entirely, give shamans 2 charges of Astral Shift (PvE enh shamans have defensive issues as well) and then add a pvp talent that gives Spiritwalkers Grace disarm/stun immunity for x seconds to enh honor talents.

I also like what bubblebuddy said, thats a good suggestion. Spirit walk being a 1 min cd root break that you can just immediately get re slowed or re rooted on feels terrible lol, feral lunge 15s along with spirit walk giving movement impairing immunity would help a ton.

7

theyd have to take some things away to give them all that… lol

8

this is how avatar works also… except 1.5m cd. Arms doesnt burst in bladestorm either. no cc/movement immunity unless ur losing control of your character. they could give enhance some sort of trance where they can only use 1 button or something and are immune to slows/roots for 6s… lol

9

Right but most warriors just play gnome and have another root break on top of that, and like I said, warriors deal with similar issues except you guys have 2 charges+leap and CDR on them if you play the hero talent, along with really good CC so you can actually stop your targets often and get to them to get your damage off. Enh can be kited far too easily and far too often because it doesn’t have its own set up outside of cap which isn’t great, warrior mostly only has trouble connecting into mage (and maybe a very good bdruid)?whereas enh has trouble connecting into just about anything that wants to kite it including other melee.

10

another thing i would suggest, is trying out the 2x +25% to primal gem embelishment, with the movement speed meta gem… it makes a significant difference on sticking to your target.

you can reach 128% perma base movement speed iirc just from the gem and enchants

11

I have tried it, I think Bigdam used it last season as well, it just doesn’t matter too much. Like it doesnt solve the issues, it sounds good on paper but realistically its the fact enh cant lock anyone down for any decent amt of time to actually get there unless its certain melee (ret/dk) or certain ranged (lock, spriest) and thats where lack of mobility+lack of slow/root removal+lack of cc comes in. We also lose 5% DR on CC if we go speed gem and the DR gem got fixed this patch so it works with all cc now, and losing that kinda sucks when our survivability got hit this patch already.

This is also on top of other issues mentioned too, this isnt isolated. It would be okay if we maybe had better survivability but that went down this patch with the loss of AG, our healing build also sucks because earth shield is purged often so we dont even have good direct off heals, and our 1 min burst is countered by literally any mobility or any cc and also disarm (whereas other melee do have built in CC immunity or slow/root immunity to important abilities or cds as i listed before) its just a pile up of issues mostly.

12

What if they gave enhance fire whirl from plunderstorm and made you unable to be rooted or slowed during it (combined with the 70% move speed increase)? I feel like that would be pretty sweet.

13

I have actually asked for Fire Whirl for shaman in the shaman forums before, it would be amazing and really thematic imo. Its like a fire cyclone, similar to what primalists had in DF. It would probably have to go in the class tree though but it could work like Slicing winds for monk where it went in WWs spec tree potentially, though our spec tree just got a really nice rework im not sure how well it would fit in there. But im sure they can find a way to do it. They could put it in the class tree right under Gust/Spirit walk though possibly, but if not maybe in enhance tree would work.

However if they dont want to add anything new since they just did 2 major enhance reworks back to back, I would be completely fine with an update to Feral Lunge (15s cd and maybe 30y range) and Spirit walk (full root/slow immunity for its duration). DKs, pallies, Windwalkers all have ways to consistently stay out of roots/slows, and WWs/DKs/Warriors have CC immunity/knockback immunity built into things like Demolish, Conduit, Death charger, etc so they can keep uptime. Enh utility is great but overtime other specs have gotten very good utility too and enh already trades cc/survivability for the utility, we don’t also need to trade mobility.