The general talent tree was solid. The healing and survival was pretty solid. The damage profiles were pretty solid.
The pruning made this class unrecognizable. If the development team made change just for the sake to say “Hey look, it is very different from what it was, its a new expansion, can you tell?” This is not a good change, don’t fix something that isn’t broken.
Why not just do something spicy like change the way windfury weapon works with a capstone passive damage node? Call it Stormfury, hurdle two free 5 charged maelstrom lightning bolts at your target, 20% chance with an internal cooldown of 3sec. This would be fun and identify with the class identity way back to Classic and TBC era.
These changes feel 1/8 baked and simple not pre-cooked AT ALL.
Bring things back like Thunderstorm and Stone Bulwark totem at least for defensives OR drastically increase the healing capacity and baseline for Earth Shield, Healing Surge and Chain Heal, Healing Stream Totem too, just too WEAK!
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I posted this on reddit with the prepatch:
Enhancement Shamans are becoming squishier expansion after expansion. At least we had decent self-healing before Midnight, but now what do we have? No healing, no proper defensives, nor passive defensives.
I know there was a pruning, but come on…
• A fully stacked heal with TEN Maelstrom doesn’t even restore 50% of our HP.
• Astral Shift on a 2-minute cooldown. For God’s sake, bring back Shamanistic Rage. This defensive is pure BS. You basically get stunned (PvP or PvE) and you’re dead.
• Earth Shield and Healing Stream Totem: the former is better than the latter, but it requires way too many talents to be effective, and it no longer increases healing done. Healing Stream Totem is straight-up BS, yet it’s mandatory just to access better talents for some reason… • They force us to take chain heal for some reason if you want to take healing talents A hybrid class that can’t heal itself or others and has terrible defensives in 2026? Come on. Either give us proper defensives or let us heal ourselves again. And I’m talking about PvE environments, not even PvP. This is just stupid.
And sorry for the rant, but the game isn’t just raiding. I honestly can’t believe that no beta tester noticed this huge problem which has been part of the class for a long time, by the way.
EDIT: I also don’t agree with how Shaman was at certain points, where it felt unkillable and could just heal itself nonstop. But if the goal is to normalize DPS roles, then give it proper DPS-level defensives, on par with Rogues, Mages, or Hunters, and keep self-healing as something situational and marginal, like it is for Monks. It’s honestly unbelievable that a whole development team still can’t resolve this issue in BIG 2026
EDIT 2: With the update at 26/02/10 now raging maelstrom just take the 50% of the benefits of maelstrom weapon to healing, what means that now we need 10 stacks to make an instant heal. Great work blizzard! instead of make people powerful, you nerf them!
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Yeah they could do a lot better with survivability for Shaman. If they wanted to nuke Enhancements healing so much, that would’ve been fine if they were going to compensate the class with survivability buffs in general.
Why do hunters get x2 wall (Wall being a free point in ther class tree), Exhileration (baseline with points to improve it in the class tree), Aspect of the Turtle (baseline with points to improve it in the class tree), Feign death (baseline with points to improve it in the class tree and honor talents)? They also get a 15% DR they can use on teammates or a 3% DR for themselves at all times, they get a stam increase in their class tree, they have insanely good mobility, have the best snare in the game and have great cc even after the prune.
Meanwhile we have to talent into literally every single defensive we have and we barely have anything. Astral Shift requires 2 points, Brimming with life is a 2 point node, Earth Ele requires 2 points to make it a semi decent defensive, then we have Burrow in honor talents, and then Chain heal/Earth Shield/Healing stream totem and magic DR.
Maybe Astral Shift could be a 1 minute cd instead and we can opt for 2 charges or opt to make it stronger? Or maybe Burrow could be moved to the class tree? Maybe Healing Surge could get another talent in the class tree that has it grant physical damage reduction so Enhance/Ele can have a way to get some physical DR especially for themselves.
Or maybe follow through on what the prune was supposed to do and remove defensives from classes that still have too many. Remove a wall from hunter, remove something from Ret paladin as well like Blessing of Spellwarding in PvP or maybe increase their wall to a 1.5min cd? How did Shaman lose a major defensive and a decent passive defensive when classes like Hunter and Ret that were already tankier than us lost no survivability at all? And to top it off we lost more utility than ret and just as much CC despite rets utility being just as good as ours if not better in some cases. Same with their cc, it’s just better.
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