Just another person on the outside doing some planning for Classic before I actually sit down and get into it.
I only played a Warlock in Vanilla back in the day, so I wanted to change things up when going into Classic. Decided to go for Shaman as a shoutout to my dad (got me into the game, and he was a hardcore Shaman player all the way to MoP when he finally retired) but I really wanted to roll as DPS.
I’ve heard great things about Enhancement as a leveling spec, but when looking into stuff like BiS gear and endgame raiding, it seems like you’re pretty much only meant to be Resto? All the tier set bonuses favor Resto Shamans, and even the passive stats on the gear is all tuned towards spirit/int/spell power/etc.
Is Enhancement just meant for leveling and nothing else? I’d really like to give the spec a try, but I don’t want to commit to leveling if my only option for lategame is just swap to healing.
It’s also find for 5-man content and UBRS. It depends on what your aim for endgame is - casual enough guilds might let you just heal in an enhancement spec in raids, so long as you keep the 2 sets of armor.
Raiding is honestly pretty boring and relegates every class to doing one thing. The main draw of it is just having a bunch of folks together all in the same place working towards a common goal, but it ain’t the same draw as the current ‘play your class as you like!’ of modern servers. That crops in around TBC.
I guess it’s a bit hard to say rn when my endgame goal is. I’ve always been fairly PVE oriented, with a little PVP on the side if my main class isn’t bottom tier useless in PVP settings. Raiding is something I enjoy but I’ve never been a hardcore pusher for (in a modern setting) full Mythic clears and top of the server status.
At least going into Classic as of now, I’ll be playing solo at the start and will need to find a guild somewhere down the line.
Spiritulheal mentioned that Enhance is good for PVP, which is something I’ve heard before, so I’m not entirely opposed to giving that a try. I’ve just always been more about PVE content than PVP.
Enhance is useless in raiding purely because you have no aggro dump, you can’t use Stormstrike, and there’s no benefit in the original game for being a damage-oriented hybrid in a raid of 40 people. Even when it was crimped down to 25 in TBC, the ability to start throwing off-heals in emergency situations was at least somewhat useful. In here, any buffs you do bring (imp windfury totem) can be grabbed by a healer without much fuss. Or you can be made to heal despite the inefficient spec and still be of more use than dealing damage.
For all other PVE content in the game, enhancement is fine. Its lack of CC will make some people reluctant to bring you if they desperately need some, but a group that needs that crutch less won’t be damaged by it. Tanks enjoy having windfury weapon and you can actually use your other abilities profitably. Most 2-handed weapons are PVP weapons for warriors, and you don’t compete with paladins.
That is the attitude of a lot of the elite/meta players, but not of everyone…
You can certainly raid enhancement if you want to. Improved Windfury talent is lovely. I will never argue as a rogue or warrior if a ehanc shaman was in my group.
Unfortunately classic has a community of people that want’s metagame everything…
Casual/semi-casual guilds typically will accept any spec as long as you are a good player.
Yea like I said, I’ve never really been one to aim for “best of the best” raiding as my endgame goal. Casual raiding (though that’s much more doable in modern WoW compared to classic) and 5man content + solo content has always been my preferred. And if Enhancement is solid in PVP (I’ve heard a lot about Windfury procs in PVP just annihilating someone) maybe that’ll turn into something I enjoy as well.
doesn’t matter what nobody says, play the game have fun, play what you want
me? oh, my top tier raiding guild will be needing a nice enh shaman with Nightfall, oh look here, i just so happen to be shaman…
There are a lot of guilds out there that know you don’t need 40 players all playing at their best with high end dps specs to clear raids.
As long as YOU are ok not topping the meters, and just having fun with it, you will be fine. My guild would gladly have you if it weren’t for the fact yous will be an evil horde.
Enhance shamans are one of my first targets because they go down easy, have virtually no defence or way to escape, and can sometimes get lucky if you ignore them. So, if you enjoy being killed a lot, go enhancement pvp. For PVP consistency, Ele is the better damage spec.
1 per raid, with the axe isnt a bad idea. You could probably have 2, depending on how many melee you have. But you definitely wont stack them. But with more info we have now, and depending on what class patch they use, who knows.
That said, those who have tier sets built for them will have a much easier time.
Suboptimal, the thought is very much appreciated, you horrid little lawn ornament.
But thanks for all the replies, everyone. I’ve always been someone who just plays whatever class/spec I enjoy the most at the time, rather than what’s top tier, so I think as long as I’m not doing myself a considerable disservice by playing Enhancement, I think I might go for it. The thought of being an orc woman swinging around an element-enhanced twohanded axe has a lot of appeal to it.
enh is super strong don’t let people say otherwise. an enh/ele build is amazing early level tank also. since they produce a LOT of threat and have pretty decent mitigation.
It’s usually better to throw NF on an off-tank and have the enhancement shaman throw on a healing set to heal. There’s very little incentive to deviate from that, because raiding isn’t really about having ‘fun’ in the original game.
That said, it is true that for MC/Ony especially, it’s really not going to matter what your exact raid composition is. So if those entry-level raids are the goal, yeah, enhancement’s probably fine. You can beef it up a little with consumables.
Offtank would be better off being a druid if we are talking min maxing. We will see what actually works and doesnt. I’m assuming we will have a raidbots for classic and we can actually see the real results then. Alot of assumptions happened back in the day, which had feral gear wrong for years.
If we go too far down the minmax slide, we introduce a shot-weaving wingclip-spamming hunter with NF into the equation as well.
All of this is more in the realm of the top 5% of players, though. I have to imagine there will be a lot of raids that don’t even bother with NF or dark iron… devastator? The 1H axe thing.
You could be the Nightfall person in the raid. Even if your personal damage isn’t that great, you can provide Windfury to the melee group and Nightfall to all the DPS casters.