Yep It’s not a defensive. It’s a freaking self rez, only really impactful as resto …
a six year old clip of anything isnt relevant. at all. shaman needs a little help, only a little, but the real problem is just melee in general.
Hah! Big disagree there. Rogue needs nothing to help with their defensives, nor do DH’s. Nor do paladins, nor do warriors, or DK’s. This thread is not because melee need more defensive budget, but specifically enhancement shaman. PVE is why I made this, but it seems the PVP Enh also have problems.
For Enhance in PVP, the defensives situation is pretty dire, but it’s made a lot worse by some strange design choices. Many other melee classes can continue to power through when it comes to damage while also healing themselves, coupled with their CC mostly being fire and forget. They also don’t need to sacrifice pressure to stay alive, while Enhance is forced to sacrifice Maelstrom stacks to self-heal, and even then, will go OOM quickly doing that. And while I might be able to heal myself for a large percentage, mail wearers seem to be so inherently squishy that I lose anything I gained very quickly.
My experience with Enhancement shammy now that people are more geared, as opposed to at the start of the xpac, is that other melee have time to think when they get focused, while I don’t. Being unable to use Astral Shift while CC’ed means that I’m often forced to trinket even a small CC, or be killed inside of it. And then I’m just immediately CCed and killed anyway. The burst is there, certainly, but that’s been nerfed from launch, and was only really effective/scary when people were still getting their PVP gear.
This is in addition to a lot of weird outliers, with Astral Shift not being usable while CC’ed as only one of them. Maelstrom stacks not reducing the cost of healing spells is another, having no reliable way to passively gain mana, Tremor Totem not being usable while Feared (really not sure why this is, you need to be either lucky or psychic to have it be effective at all, it seems). Totems in general being on the GCD is clunky as hell.
I’m no meta chaser, I’m not going to run to Warrior or DH or anything, I do like the playstyle this expansion for Enhance, it just gets frustrating to see other melee do more, defensive and CC-wise, with seemingly less.
1 Like
It’s because we are not a melee class.
We are a caster class with a melee spec.
The best way I can show what the difference is is look at paladin.
The base ability they get is crusader strike. They are meant to be a melee class.
The base ability shaman gets is lightning bolt. We are meant to be a caster class.
Blizzard decided it’s be cool to have a melee spec but then never went through with giving that spec the tools melee actually need to do well.
Enhance has a lot of kiting potential, which is great for resto and ele. But kiting means diddly squat when all my dmg needs to be done in melee range and I do not have the ability to stand in melee without being severely punished.
A great fix would be to give enhance a 10 to 15 yard range on all their strikes and melee attacks, chalked up to some wind element ability. This would give us survivability in that we don’t need to be on top of people to do dmg, and make use of our kiting toolkit to keep them away from us.
It would also solve a lot of uptime issues in pvp. Rogues and feral already get extended melee range for whatever reason. And part of why ascendance has been historically strong is that we are able to dps from range while it’s up.
1 Like