I’m not the best pvper. I’m not even really good. I typically push up to about 1800 or so on a few toons each season then call it. That said, I’ve been playing this game since launch, and I know most of the specs in this game pretty well.
Recently I decided to try pvp on my enhance shaman. Y’all, I have no idea how I’m supposed to be helpful. In solo shuffle, I’m immediately targeted, cc’d, and blown up. I pop cds, and I even added burrow to my loadout, but nothing is working. There’s really not much the healer can do for me. I’m cc’d and globaled. If I trinket the cc, I’m re-cc’d and globaled.
This is in full honor gear. I’ve tried the storm and the elemental builds that are suggested. This is easily the hardest time I’ve had on a toon in pvp. My healing spells don’t seem to be worth the gcd even if I use stormweaver to give me the free procs after spending maelstrom.
I’m really hoping that I’m just bad and that I can learn, but I don’t stay alive long enough in encounters to actually practice. On top of that, I’m catching massive “lolenhance” crap in the chatlog. That’s fine on its own, but feeling like I’m not getting better every time I lose all the while getting mocked for trying this spec is making me just want to table the whole idea.
Am I missing something? Is anyone having a great experience that can share with me how they are managing to stay alive?
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my highest damaging ability in solo shuffle is counterstrike totem
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I do some PVP not a lot. Yet the times I have PVPed yeah I felt like I was lost and confused. The only advice I could possible give is do your best and hope for the best.
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Honestly, swap to ele. Enh is just too squish. I main enhance for PvE because I enjoy it in that realm, I try pvp but it just doesn’t have the staying power especially against classes like warr and DH and ret where they cleave you to death passively. Ele is leagues better simply because it’s not in melee lol. Plus the 4 set on ele makes you a meatball turret.
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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, enhancement is far more dependent on our healers abilities than any other melee. If i get a lobby with 2 good healers, I can go 6-0, give me the same lobby with new/bad healers and I will go 0-6.
I’ve gone 6-0 at 2k, last night at 1600 I went 0-6 and then 2-4, and I had to play super sweaty to get those 2 wins…I was dying with having out healed my healer in some of the matches.
They need to get rid of placement MMR. If you are on a new toon, mmr starts at the bottom and you work your way up. This becomes even more important later on in the season as the average mmr moves higher. I find quite often the healers are 0 or low rated with a high mmr and have no place being in a 2k lobby.
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Saul (best pvp enh in the game) is hard stuck 2k and says the same as every other r1/glad enh. It’s just bad and unplayable. We have no tankiness and we have less individual sustain than almost any other spec. You can do top damage in an arena and outplay every cd and then just flop over.
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Counterstrike Totem vs. other melee
and learn to kite…and learn to kite really well
You will be the main target in your group because Enhance is a caster class trying to be melee, you don’t have the entire melee toolkit to survive constantkly in melee vs other melee classes.
Once you understand this, it’s easier to wrap your head around how to play.
Other side of the coin is that you can be very aggressive with the right partner, and you have really good burst dmg with almost zero ramp up — so sometimes you can pop off like a grenade faster than the enemy team expects.
But largely, its just learning matchups.
Some specs will stick to you regardless what you do (Windwalker monk is a strong example)…but the more you play, the better you will get at knowing what you can and cannot grounding totem, how to move people with static field totem, when to earthgrasp someone so they’ve wasted their mobility, etc.
Tips like popping wolves as soon as the match starts so you can autogenerate maelstrom weapon stacks before even getting into actual combat are also small things to learn. I know some people that will pop Earth Elemental at the start of the match as well, just to have the extra HP buffer for openers.
That said, Enh is an uphill battle and always has been. But once you get good with it, you will be able to outplay a lot of people and know its 100% skill based and that you aren’t carried by your class.
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CS totem is the worst talent into any real team. The moment you pass 1600 it’s insta killed and even if it isn’t it only gets value into ret/x.
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I’ve seen a lot of melee comps in solo shuffle, so I’ve been running with stoneskin totem. I also have the totem cd reset talent as well and it resets two totems. Whenever I’m getting bursted, I’ll place down stone skin and healing stream, reset their cooldowns and place them again. This has been a great help when I’m on defense and don’t have astral shift. I’ve been topping dmg by a couple million per round and I’m not a great player, so enhance can really pump. I also have the poison cleansing totem in my build for rogues.
Burrow is a last resort for me, you should be using ghost wolf with thunderous paws to get out of slowed areas, such as the smoke clouds made by rogues and demon hunters, and spirit walk as an offensive ability to keep up with opponents trying to flee and heal up. I try only to use it if I don’t have any defensives or heals and I use it to get back to my healer. You could attach a macro to burrow where you tell your team to cc dmg when you burrow so you can get back to healer and back in the match.
Have a ranged opponent build where you roll feral lunge. Feral lunge is better than spirit walk when you want to get out of a ring of ice.
I think it’s called Ancestral Guidance, whatever ability it is that turns 25% of your dmg and healing into healing for you and 3 others. This ability should really only be used when you want to keep on offense without worrying about staying healthy.
I use weak auras to tell me when I have 10 stacks of MW and to tell me when I am low on earth shield stacks just to make sure I’m efficient with those.
There’s a lot more I would love to write, but it would be too long haha. Blizz has pushed us into the 10 MW stack build, so try not to use any stacks until you have 10. Also, you shouldn’t use frost shock unless you have recently used 10 MW stacks and ice strike. That way, it should be doing at least %300 dmg and %600 if it crits.
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If I’m being 100% honest, I’d advise to shelve your enhance for pvp and never look back. Invest your time in a spec that Activism-Blizzard puts thought and effort into. Traditionally they look at the top streamers and the most popular classes they play. Making those classes strong season after season helps ensure they receive a lot of FREE promotion/marketing for the game.
Yes, but more often than not, solo shuffle is not real teams. OP was speaking about their experience in solo shuffle, where you can still find value in CS totem.
That said, don’t shelve your shaman like other people are suggesting.
You can always swap to Elemental which is a lot of fun in pvp, because you are constantly moving and very rarely have to hard cast things. If you are absolutely dead set against a ranged dps and just like the melee portion of shaman, then I would agree — but honestly, I love all 3 specs, even though Enhance is my go to more often than not.
That way you can use one toon for all your activities. And you already understand how your utility works because it is shared between specs.
Yeah I can still snag kills with CS totem, but I don’t rely on it. I find I have the most luck when I’ve got a teammate the other teams dps can not ignore. If I’m paired with a MM, destro, mage, anything like that where they have to be focused or they will kill you, I do really well.
Like its been said before, enhance is a caster forced to fight in melee. We don’t have the tools to go toe to toe with other melee.
Try to kite out their burst cd’s, if you get caught use your wall. Try to keep ES up and Healing stream down.
Our self healing is poor in shuffle, with rapid dampening and MS in almost every lobby, our heals start off doing like -70% of their power so our “defensives” are severely hampered right out of the gate and only get worse the longer we live.
I agree with you about Ele. But you really have to @#$ing hate yourself to want to play enhance shaman against this sweat sea of DKs and DHs in 10.2. The devs have zero idea how to tune enhance and it changes completely every other season. Specs like hunter as we both know stay relatively the same and always have a solid spot on the ladder.
Anytime Enhance is actually in the top 4 melee? They nerf it into the ground every time. I’ve seen that happen xpac after xpac over the years. It’s hands down the funnest but most frustrating spec in the game imo.
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Yes, because the people who die-hard enhance at PvP are just better players at the game. Enhance punishes you for mistakes more than any other class.
I have no doubt that the top Enhance pvpers could hop to something else and easily trounce nearly everyone they come against, simply because you have to have such a strong understanding of pvp and pvp encounters to play Enhance at the highest level.
So when they do make Enhance viable, it skews against other people because they aren’t carried by their class and the skill difference between players shows itself.
/removestinfoilhat
All joking aside, for solo queue — yeah, Enhance is rough. But if you find people you enjoy playing with that you trust, you can make 3v3 work — its just gonna be hard. But some people like that challenge.
My biggest gripe is that I like battlegrounds significantly more than arena, but Enhance -really- has no place in RBGs ( though classic Cata is coming so maaaaaaybe the glory days of fire nova nonsense return). That, and I wish there was a serious rated PvEvP scene with maps like Korrak’s being taken seriously…but that’s just the style I enjoy the most. To this day, I have never had more fun in pvp than two pre-mades going at it in AV, using all the NPCs and resources available to try and win. Arena to me just doesn’t capture the idea of WAR(craft).
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this is wrong im bad at everything that isnt enh
I run this horde sham and another on alliance both as enhance. I can manage ok in solo but as you can see my rating isn’t anything special. My experience in bgs is even worse. The class really lacks any real defensives, and desperately needs better passive defense or large buffs to the active stuff. We get no chance to be offensive cuz our hp bars are always easily tanked to 0.
Ill be shelving this class for the rest of the season most likely and just rolling all the popular flavors like war and pally.
Its a shame and totally dumb but its what the masses accept. Everytime blizz gives enhance an angle to shine everyone cries about em and right back down to c tier we go.
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