Enhancement in M+ experience

Classes Shaman
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I am a long time gamer and have played many games at a high level. These are my general thoughts on enhancement(currently 2181 on 9/29). This is not intended to be a holier than thou thread, quite the opposite.

Pros

  1. It’s extremely engaging and fun/satisfying when played well. Never a dull moment.

  2. You bring a ton of utility (CC, lust, buff) and are highly desirable in groups generally

  3. Enhance is ~mid-upper tier in damage amongst specs generally which never hurts.

Cons

  1. It’s melee
    Many dungeons have huge AoE ground effects and in some cases you can actually be zoned off from doing any melee damage at all. If the tank happens to drop agro (which happens often) you’re likely the first to die.

  2. Skill bloat
    I actively use 5 different abilities to generate maelstrom. I may take up piano given my recent practice.

  3. Reactive play
    This build is extremely reactive and highly punishing for pushing the wrong skill at any given time. The difference between a few misplaced key strokes and perfectly placed keystrokes can easily end up in the millions of DPS.

  4. Lack of uncapped AoE - this often makes damage numbers skew massively in the direction of classes like ret paladin which is frankly annoying.

Overall this is a very cool class. I would not recommend it to anyone playing M+ unless you are a hardcore player as you will likely get more bang for your buck in various other classes. It takes pretty solid mechanics (hello starcraft) to play a reactive character, dodge all mechanics, and be on the top of the interrupt charts. Or maybe I’m just bad! hopefully this is helpful to someone out there struggling with the same stuff or trying to decide. Cheers.

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My problem with enhancement is that it’s typically been something of a dime store version of rogue. Of course you can say the same thing about elemental and mage.

Specifically the comparative lack of survivability compared to those classes has always been their achilles heel.

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Right now, my biggest complaint about Enhancement is that I feel I have next to no agency whatsoever about my damage, which was one of the biggest things I hated about Storm in DF, and made me love Elementalist’s profile instead.

Our burst with Stormbringer is utterly dependent on hitting proc streaks of Static Accumulation and Awakening Storms to crank as many back-to-back Tempests as possible. It feels absolutely awful because without those streaks I’m inevitably lowest of my group’s DPS, but even when it does happen and I pop off doing as much damage as the other two DPS combined, I can’t even take credit for it because it’s just the game randomly deciding I can be effective.

I’m oscillating between feeling like all my effort is unrewarded, and feeling like my results are entirely unearned.

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That’s a really interesting way to look at it. Honestly I’ve found that if your play is consistent throughout the dungeon you’ll generally get a similar overall dps number.

I do see a major issue with the general difficulty of the spec combined with the actual damage spenders being heavily RNG. The RNG does tend to even out more in fights as M+ levels raise.

I’m honestly still astounded that I can pick up elementalist and run a similarly effective dungeon dps wise in…. 2 hours.(1.1-1.2)