I usually try and main an enhance shaman at the start of each xpac then give up because nobody wants an enhance shaman because they are usually given a back seat to a almost every other melee class
We have already played this iteration of enhance in a previous in legion.
If I remember correctly it need tons of haste to play wack-a-mole with stormstrike and maelstorm/lightning bolt while waiting for other abilities to come off CD.
Maybe it gets more fluid with whatever abilities shadowlands provides. IMO the spec went from boring garbage to meh imo.
The spec probably is not the worst and will probably be solid middle of the road B tier until the second half of the expansion when you see an uptick in damage after you hit the optimal amount of haste.
Nothing about the changes have made me excited to play enhance again. I have a love/hate relationship with my shaman and I think its best if I pick a different class to main. The end of the first tier guild implosion / consolidation process is not fun when you are not playing the FOTHM dps or a healer.
1 Like
The downtime definitely doesnt feel good, but I’d imagine once we have legendaries and soulbinds/conduits maybe (hopefully) some of that will change.
I will say all of our top tier talents feel underwhelming to me right now. Ascendance doesnt feel as good without the chained stormbringer procs, damage output vs uptime feels off to me. Earth Spike is ok but boring and Elemental Spirits needs a buff (along with Feral Spirits in general).
It’s definitely a weird place to be in right now. Seems like they brought back some older aspects of the spec to mesh with where things were in BFA but are relying on SL systems to marry the 2 together which just doesn’t feel good.
Update: I just got killed in two attacks by a Ret paladin in arena despite having Astral Shift active. The spec itself plays OK. More fun than Legion/BFA. Still clunky and anemic though… and there is definitely a good amount of down time.
1 Like
So i’ve also been playing as enh for a couple hours and I don’t really notice any downtime. Are you sure these videos aren’t exaggerating? Personally I think the spec is playing fine.
Ya, I really hate the redesign. It doesn’t feel as much of a redesign as a reversion back to the end of Wrath/beginning of Cata. But back then my wolves healed me and I didn’t feel so squishy. I don’t mind them trying to get away from stormstrike one button playing but they could have done better then subtract 10 years. I don’t particularly like Lightning Bolt as a finisher, and I sorely miss the instant cast version of it (even though I can pull with Flame Shock, unless I want more than one mob/group). Maybe create a new finisher or give us back earth shock for that? Having us build maelstrom past 5 is a nice change to this outdated and old formula but it is at least something. But too many things seem to share this resource. Maybe if it made to heal instant cast, mana free, and empowered then it would be worth the 5 maelstrom. Or leave it as is and make the instant cast part only cost 2? Could they have maybe left our maelstrom resource bar in instead of making it a buff with only the power aura? The BFA (and legion) versions just seem both more polished and more fluid.
Maybe they could have made crash lightning better so it didn’t feel like you have to press it because there is simply nothing else to do?
I have seem a lot of peeps saying it will get better with covenants/legendries but shouldn’t it work before adding what should be spice? They are having a hard time balancing each talent tier why make covenants/legendries integral so they can have a hard time balancing those as well.
I am willing to consider that part of my issue is the squish, as I felt a lot more powerful before the patch than after. I think the squish is a good thing end the end. But I think they could have done it without making it feel like I had lost a lot of power. If there was some new content for me to go do I probably would have just accepted how it felt, but since only stuff I had done before was an option I had to spend time think about how much power I had lost.
1 Like