I am curious. I resubbed to play 8.2, and the class does play the same. To be honest, thats to be expected since Blizzard has not really promised any more class or mechanic changes.
How are you feeling about the new essences? How are you doing dps wise in pve? Are you still feeling super squishy in pvp?
I am on the fence about my Enhancement Shaman, and having played the last 6 months, I dont want to dedicate anymore time if its still feels lackluster.
My Ret Paladin and Unholy DK are sitting on the sidelines ready to tap in.
I’ve played enhancement shaman for 6 years now I can can say officially that this is the worst it’s been. PvP is impossible due to lack of defensives and utility, totems are completely gone, the spec feels pruned and gutted so badly. Ion has come out about class design and 8.3 or 9.0 could tell a different story about enhancement. Until then, I recommend switching to elemental, it’s very fun and significant less pruned. I believe enhancement will see the light of day again in the near future but for now it’s unplayable(for me at least)
Im not knocking you just pointing out an interesting fact; though I may be misunderstanding you.
You’ve been playing for 6 years and you think enhance is over pruned and yet there were recent comments about how enhance is to bloated and maybe spells should be combined or removed.
Definitely pruned to hell. My basic rotation involves 4 buttons, 5 if there is more than one mob, and I only have maybe 1 or 2 cooldowns depending on the build I choose. It’s really really bad, and is only slightly satisfying when you get a long string of Stormbringers. Doesn’t even feel remotely like Enhancement anymore.
I’ve been playing this character for a long time and the current iteration of Enhancement is the worst it’s ever been.
The mechanics for our weapon enhancements are clunky and really quite illogical. They should be abilities you cast on yourself not targets.
We use a WEAK Stormstrike too often to the point that it’s bordering on annoying. I’d rather use it less and it do much more damage.
Lava Lash is COMPLETE garbage. Unless you talent specifically for it and have azerite traits supporting it then it is mediocre. The only time I even use it is if Primal Primer is stacked to 10, I have loads of maelstrom and I have nothing better to press. It needs to be better.
Even our BIG nuke spell Overcharge LB doesn’t even hit that hard. It does less damage than our Stormstrike most of the time. It needs to scale better.
Our ramp up is horrible.
Astral Shift as a defensive cooldown is garbage.
Terrible crowd control (only melee in the game without an instant cc)
We’ve lost most of our utility. We can’t peel for others and both CC have extremely long cooldowns and can both fail to do anything. Hex can break immediately and Capacitor Totem can miss and only lasts 3 seconds even if it does hit. We have no roots anymore and our off-healing has been nerfed into uselessness.
Very weak self healing (In pvp you need to crit heal 8 times to reach full hp and you go oom in 5 casts sometimes without any crits…
I really hope Blizzard listens to people who actually play the class.
The totems is what gets me. I tried a primal primer build just to use the totem talent, but i didn’t like the playstyle and micro tracking. Then I tried the WF azerite trait, which had a bunch of other bad traits paired with it, just so totems would be used sometimes. Lost a lot of DPS, so i went back to the standard SS spam build. I do wish totems were a viable option through useful talents, without losing out on DPS. I really don’t understand why there aren’t more defensive totems, like we had way back in the day.
It’s insane. I only see these changes happening in a complete vaccuum. I cannot possibly imagine they had veteran shamans testing these changes and approving the gutting of our class. Its sad because its been so long that I’ve started forgetting what enh used to feel like. RIP Shamanistic Rage T_T
I generally like how enhance plays post legion revamp. I think we just need a better defensive toolkit.
Sham rage gave us 15 seconds of 30% damage reduction on a 1 minute CD and was useable while stunned. Maybe that’s too much today but astral shift could use improvements like useable while stunned and maybe a 1 min CD or 10 sec duration or a strong heal over time when cast like we had in legion from the artifact. Another option would be adding a second charge like survival instincts and, if necessary, lengthening the CD or shortening the duration.
What would also help is making hex instant if you spend enough maelstrom. Someone previously suggested 50 which sounds good to me.
Feral lunge baseline and replacing it with another defensive talent would help too. Maybe a talent that gives one or more of the above enhancements to astral shift. (e.g., allows astral shift to be used while stunned and lowers its CD to 1 min).
Was actually thinking why not make elemental spirits baseline and replace it with primal elementalist.
This would give you a def in EE and you can use FB/FT/LB to empower each wolf to the dmg you want. It would be complex and take a little set up and GCDs but might be worth it.
Granted I have only dabbled with enhance though i have tried to stay current on their issues which appears to be more complexity, this talent baseline, an additional defensive.
Number of Buttons and useless abilities doesn’t determine class complexion. Pruning is present in removal of totems, removing maelstrom weapon and adding a stupid blue rage bar, and pruning our cool downs. If you enjoy modern enhancement more power to you, but it’s just so bland compared to mop and wod, and even to a slight extent legion
This gave me a good laugh. Technically your sentence is correct, but i think the word you were looking for here was complexity.
But yes number of buttons does not determine your classes complexion either.
Topping meters in M+ consistently while grouped with other dps 10-15 ilvls higher than me. Yea defensives are weak in PvP but that just trains you to adjust your play style and be more strategic about how you choose to encounter other players. It’s REALLY not as bad as everyone claims. If I made it work for me I’m sure everyone else can
You playing with bad people does not address the class issues. No, the sky isn’t falling. However, your highest key is an 8 and you don’t raid. I doubt you grasp the points about the dps issues compared to other melee dps.
Im hopeful that I will do well but looking back on BoD the only fights i shined on with the freezerburn build was single target fights. My guild literally dosent bring my shaman for any other fight but the ones with one target I can hit. The other fights I have a shadow priest for if they need me. With recent shadow priest nerfs ill have to be looking to try ele out now.
Decent in pve. Worst pvp spec in game imo. In pvp It was not very good before patch and now since essences have boosted all dps, the lack of defense makes the class unplayable. Lucid dreams will allow decent players to one shot you much easier.
Undoing the nerf to healing surge in pvp would be awesome. I’ve tried asking for it repeatedly before though to no avail so I left it off my list this time.
![:joy:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/joy.png?v=6" ":joy:")