After the 20% nerf to Healing Surge and 50% nerf to Raging Maelstrom, Enhance healing has felt really bad in PvP. These nerfs were PvE changes that also applied to PvP, and I will admit Enhance offhealing was a bit too good in PvE. But in PvP we have Dampening and MS effects that all lower healing by a pretty huge amount. It felt bad on beta after these changes in full conquest gear and it feels bad now on live even in full honor gear.
The defensive buffs we got closer to the end of beta helped a tiny bit, but not nearly enough to make up for the massive loss in healing for Enhance. The changes helped Ele a lot more as it has access to Farseer to further buff Natures Guardian and is naturally tankier due to using a shield. Enhancements main way of surviving in PvP was Healing Surge which got nerfed considerably hard due to PvE.
Enhance needs more defensive help in PvP badly. Suggestions/ideas/asks:
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Maybe PvP specific buffs to its healing. Bring Raging Maelstrom back up to 100% in PvP, that way we have instant cast healing surges below 10 stacks again and 10 stack Healing surges are good.
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Maybe reduce the CD of Astral Shift by 30 seconds baseline in PvP so we can talent into 1 min Astral Shift or strong 1.5min Astral Shift via the class tree and make it useable in stuns.
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Maybe consider moving Burrow to the class tree as a capstone in 12.0.5 especially if we get a class tree rework.
Enhance has no damage reduction into physical classes so we just get blown up (as per usual) by wars/wws/rogues/ferals. We dont have a single defensive useable in CC. We have very bad mobility as Totemic which is now better than Stormbringer due to Ascendance+Thorims nerfs. Our utility is heavily nerfed, we have far less stops and disruptive capability than we did previously due to Totemic Recall being removed and Totem CDs were not updated to reflect that/help compensate for that. It needs survivability help right now or its just going to get run over by physical classes while struggling to catch casters like Lock (which got more mobility and instant cc this expac), Mage, Dev evoker.
I know people tend to complain regardless, but right now it does feel kinda bad to be an Enhance shaman main. We lost so much from the prune. Our heals got nuked which was our main form of survivability in PvP, We lost active survivability buttons to press (which I understand is the point of the prune, but it doesn’t line up with other classes like ret/hunter that lost no defensives at all despite having a lot), we lost CC via Lasso going to honor talents which made it very hard to get, we lost a ton of utility and disruption via Totemic Recall going away and we gained no mobility so we still have uptime issues into highly mobile casters (boomy, devoker, mage, hunter, lock) who all have constant snares as well. And to top it off we didn’t gain any form of physical damage reduction so we still get blown up by physical melee specs which all happen to be more mobile than Enhance as well and they all have MS. Enhance has no unique spec specific honor talents as well, where is a Doom Winds honor talent? Crash Lightning honor talent? Anything here? What is the upside to playing Enhance over any other melee or even over Ele?