Fresh perspective on Enh Shaman and suggestions

I stopped playing enh. shaman in cataclysm. I am following the fire build.

So far, as I can tell, and I have not watched any rotation videos, to get the best dps you need to do the following:

Lead Elemental blast to get the bonus and enter your 10 second window
Then, you cast chain lightening
SO
you get your max Crash lightening buff
SO
either stormstrike, lavalash or ice strike gets bonus damage
But
If you cast ice strike then you need to do frost shock
OR
you cast flame shock and then follow up with lava lash
But
try to do both in some kind of order while managing your stormstrike procs

That is a whole lot of ramp up time that has to be done in a 10 second elemental blast buff window.

AND

i get better dps not following the buff train…

My suggestions are, so far, and keep in mind, i am only level 42.

combine chain lightening and crash lightening somehow. Crash lightening feels weak and very underwhelming and ramping up with chain lightening and elemental blast is… awful.

Enhancement should have more dps and buffing totems as baseline, in line with melee combat.

Ice Strike should also hit multiple targets with frost shock and/or lava lash should hit multiple targets with flame shock. That way you can follow the chain of attack with the other one.

Every shaman should get some sort of permanent elemental or assume an elemental form within their spec. Not ascendance.
Enhancement could be feral spirits.

there is way too much going on and way too many choices in combat for enhancement. Although I do like being able to hit abilities often.

you should probably play the spec before talking about it

3 Likes

No offense, but you genuinely have no idea how to play the spec.

Get to max level, get 4 set, watch videos and read guides and play the spec in the content that it’s being designed around (end game pvp, raids, and m+) before you start cooking takes. Nobody cares about the opinions or takes of someone only level 42 who pieced together their rotation from a cursory glance at skills without accounting for any actual numbers or end game talents, tier, at mechanics.

There’s alot of key aspects you may be missing not being max level, you are likely missing a whole host of talents interactions, especially missing Feral Spirits and Pwave along with their associated talents. Enhance doesn’t function until you hit max level when you are able to spend your talents on everything you need which is a poor aspect about our humble spec. Once you hit max level things fall a little bit more in place but deff requires outside research to pull it together given the larget amount of procs and large rotation priority considerations. Once it does come together, it deff can be enjoyable as you get mastery over the spec and can intuitively react to all the procs during raids and M+.

The biggest thing I will say is that the buff you get from casting Elemental Blast is a complete non-issue and you do not track it at all. Nothing in the rotation cares about the buff it gives, it’s a complete after thought and is not tracked in any capacity. Its just an “ok whatever” type thing. Elemental Blast is just your big single target spender for MSW on 3+ targets.

1 Like

I apologize for the reaction you’ve received.

While the previous posters are technically correct, right now is not the time for people chiming in who haven’t invested a large portion of their life (for some, it could be months of /played, for others it could be years) commenting on the state of the class when they haven’t even capped out. This is an unhappy place, that is beginning to feel by design - as if there’s an embargo on disseminating any information what-so-ever to us.

I am glad you are finding interest in the class, and I hope you can find enjoyment in it. It’s a great aesthetic and the lore is something special to a lot of people. Ancestors watch over you.

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Your rotation isn’t very on point, but as others said, enhancement is an end game spec, it was not designed around leveling at all, so don’t worry about rotation until then, especially until after your tier set, cuz this will show you what build you should use.

You touched on a few points that shamans have been begging Blizz for years to do, some of them have been requested since vanilla. Blizz has continued to ignore us most likely because we don’t have the player numbers to demand their attention, which only further drives down our numbers, so their neglect to the class has really only made our problems worse.

We were the last class to get our hero talent trees, with one of them only being implemented 1 week before alpha ended. Over the alpha, shaman only got 2 bullet points about healing tide totem for resto shaman. So no communication was ever given about our hero talent trees except that Blizz thinks they’re all good and will now only be doing minor changes, not reworks.

This is not a class to start right now, not until Blizz fixes it. You’ll just get frustrated by how unkept and clunky it is and nobody at Blizz is doing anything about it.

To those with actual comments, thank you. The point of this post was to point out inefficiencies at the current time, help validate some issues and get some feedback.

to those that hate posted.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

way to hate. love it