Wf would be talented, not baseline. You may actually go resto affinity for the heals, so enhancement would still have a place. But it would be dependant on the fight. Affinities are also good for mixed content, enhance for melee heavy dungeon, resto if you’re carrying a healer or running grievious, elemental if you’re over geared and wanna just blow stuff up.
But i see the concern. I think it highlights that enhancement just don’t have anything good going for them raid wide currently.
Perhaps if they have a stronger windfury baseline, and could talent it to be even stronger, then you could have both in a raid and they’d both bring different utility.
Yeah, my idea here was that with Shaman being so squishy, we could actually be setup around the fact that we just proc Ankh a lot. Having our health drop to 0% would be the norm, and we’d just roll with it. I think it could be an interesting way to play. Obviously it would have to only come off cooldown once every 3 minutes or so, otherwise it might be a bit too OP, but DK already have a 4 minute cheat death, giving a class that is “expected” to die a 3 minute one is probably fine.
I do like the idea and I think it would work just fine. I’m just gonna call it now though, someone somewhere will have a meme about shaman tanks dying and rezzing every 3 minutes lol it will be funny. I wish it would actually come to fruition.
It would be triggering ankh as a cheat death, you wouldn’t actually be dying (because you’d lose threat + totems + buffs too if you did).
Improved Reincarnation
If your Reincarnation ability is off cooldown when you would take damage that would kill you, the cooldown is consumed and you are restored to 60% hp and mana.
You take 30% less damage for 4 seconds.
Unless there is an expansion where the gimmick is a new spec for each class this will never happen. Blizzard will never have a stretch of time where it is worth it for their employees to add another spec to one specific class for no real reason.
Yes, because if they decided to add it, it would require reworks of the other specs. Resto would probably need the least, and Enhance would need the most out of that scenario, so it would be a win across the board for Shaman.
I think, because I already mentioned a rework to get tanking as a spec as well, it would require having certain talents be on certain specs.
My thinking is Lust and WF Totem would have to be Enhance only. I realize that would upset some people, but I think that would have to be a sacrifice in order to keep Enhance a viable spec and still making tanking be a thing.
As I said above, they would need to focus the specs closer to one of the four elements, so WF might not be something an Earth Shaman would necessarily have available to them.
You’d have to think of Shaman more in the terms of “benders” from Avatar.
Reworks dont always make classes better, or more fun. It’s a huge hit or miss and I dont think I want to chance changing resto in any way. If a fourth/tank spec ever happens Im sure they can make it work without an overhaul. ( i dont play ele or enh so meh there )
I love a lot of what you have in here. I would argue the one big strike against it is the lack of a resource/special mechanic to set apart the Tanking style.
Example: Monks with Stagger and damage delaying, DKs with Powerful Self-Healing and Runes, Demon Hunters with Dual-Wielding and Strong mobility/self-healing, Warriors with heavy focus on block damage, Druids with heavy focus on high armor mitigation, Paladins with Holy Power, Strong self-heals, and utility
I think it would be neat to further refine the ideas in here around a tank mechanic.
Throwing out a random idea:
Stoneskin - The shaman’s skin is wrapped in earth reducing incoming damage by X%. Incoming damage reduces the amount of stoneskin a shaman has.
Then you could have certain abilities that restore Stoneskin, and have the playstyle be about maintaining your stoneskin to have some control over the damage you take.
Shamans were actually originally designed to be tanks, the hordes paladin. Go look up the enhancement tree for early vanilla wow. Earth shock was intended to be our primary generator, they had armor and block talents. There are even a few classic players who tank on a shaman, there biggest issue is mana, and being crit.
At this point they would have to give us another spec for it to work, like druids. I’d be down for it, so long as it’s designed well
I was actually thinking something along these lines, as a replacement for the Earth Elemental.
i.e., Elemental Earth, you take the form of an Earth Elemental (or your skin is wrap in massive clumps of rock) reducing your damage taken and increasing your threat generated… Abilities that apply to your Earth Elemental (like always earthquake) are applied to you while you have Elemental Earth.
Personally we need them to remove lust from hunters and mages, I would not restrict it to enhance spec. I just think each class should have its own buff that it brings like the monk with the extra melee dmg debuff and the dh with the extra magic dmg debuff. Each class should have something that they bring that should make it where people want them in groups and raids.
I was a mage main long before I was a Shaman main (though Shaman was my first choice WAAAAAAY back in Vanilla).
I personally think Time Warp should be only for Arcane Mages. Only Beast Masters should have access through their pets (being the one who can get “the most” out of their pets). Then having Enhance being the only other spec with it would get Bloodlust because they are melee and would be more likely to going into a “bloodlust” while fighting.
I know they are trying to get away from the “bring the spec” idea, but in the process they are making it so certain specs (and the people that love to play them) will end up being benched or only brought for one thing (in the absence of anyone else that can do it).
No, thematically Bloodlust fits Enhance. It doesn’t fit Ele or Resto.
You listed off all three specs mashed into one unit. I’m not at all surprised they had the abilities of all three specs. If they made a generic Shaman with no specs in WoW, I would expect the same. We have the luxury of not having that here.