I second that. Back in my college days, I played Wrath on private servers. Yes yes, not identical to retail, but Classic is a joke in terms of difficulty comparing to the private scene.
ANYWAY. Enha is not S tier IIRC but 100% viable. At least it was in 3.3.5
I mained as Feral druid and I was topping meters.
Enha is easier than Feral. I played them both.
Weâre competitive only with other average to above average DPS, though. Weâre already being outscaled by Fury/Combat and we donât come close to Hunter/Mage/Warlock. In Wrath weâre much better in PvP but we lose our unique utility, and get outscaled fairly quickly by Frost who bring the same utility.
Fire Nova is still strong on single target, especially if youâre going Spellhance. Time will tell if itâs a private server thing or if itâs actually viable on live servers, but it brings Fire Nova down to a very short CD and you use it very regularly.
Pure physical Enhance wouldnât use it as much, and have a much longer CD.
The main issue is that Enhancement isnât overly difficult it just has a lot of abilities to hit on CD and you have to react very quickly to Maelstrom hitting 5 stacks.
you can always be the token shaman
How is being above average bad? We were expected to be bad dps, but needed for lust and WF, but it turns out the dps is actually very good. We will never be the top, but near the top is just fine with me.
How do we lose our unique utility in both PVE and PvP? Sure with the windfury change the buff is not longer what it was in TBC, but we are still the only class with Lust and for PvP we now have a CC and lust and totems which is our utility.
Enhance will be just fine in LK, people just wonât need 5 shamans in the raid anymore.
Canât this also be applied to Vanilla WoW and even TBC? Vanilla even more so since people have had +15years of research on pserver making Vanilla as a whole easier.
Unfortunately no. There are firm memespecs in classic and to a lesser extent in TBC.
Elemental and Shadow can be shoehorned into working with proper gearing, proper consumables and an accommodating raid in Classic. Enhancement doesnât so much âworkâ as it does âSwing nightfall while trying not to die.â
Ret, Feral, Protadin and Boomkins all have issues that prevent them from being functional in a raid environment. Thatâs not to say you wonât find people playing them but theyâre not exactly raiding so much as they are being a 100 lb anchor around the necks of 39 other people and forcing those 39 people to drag them across the finish line.
Any spec will work for PvP to varying degrees but for PvE, some specs just lack core mechanics or are tied to core mechanics that kneecap them beyond the ability to cobble together a functional DPS or Tank spec.
Mind you, this says nothing of Season of Mastery. Protadin, Feral, Boomkin, Elemental and Shadow are flat out nonviable in SoM for raiding due to the bosses being bullet sponges.
A singular Ret or Enh get to tag along because someone needs to swing the Nightfall.
umm when is the last time you played? This has been debunked as not optimal ~1 month after the Vanilla Classic WoW release.
Are you saying 1 person going Ret, feral, etc seriously impedes a raid run? that must be a very very casual guild filled with new people.
Protadin is viable, optimal no. I will admit SoM made it harder for protadin since less chances for Tfury. But any serious player has multiple lvl60 paladins or accounts for more chances to get Tfury.
Boomkin, Elemental, etc⌠are all viable. They all meet the minimum DPS viability threshold for each content phase. Iâm gonna ignore that Feral comment.
If a guild is organized enough to the point where each individual characterâs weapon is scrutinized, i.e. a serious guild, then they would ask the Resto Shaman/Holy Paladins to run in and weave in Nightfall hits when convenient. Extra easy for Holy Paladins because they can stay in melee longer with Bubbles.
Do you play in a top 50 world speed running guild?
No? Then all classes and specs are perfectly viable. Play whatever you want. And of course shaman are viable in speed running guilds too, but thatâs not really the point that matters here. The point is most guilds arenât performing at the level you should care what classes youâre using.
WOTLK is even more friendly than TBC is when it comes to class viability.
This is all you need to know. Ignore the metasheep. There are always guilds out there who will take dedicated players, regardless of their class.
2H Enh is super fun to level in WoTLK!
I was a rogue main in wrath but we had an enhancement shaman in our guild and he was consistently a top 5 dps, at least in beginning of the xpac.
I was enhance back in WotLK - by no means the best player, but definitely a good player. My enhance shaman brought about 12-13k dps on some ICC rights, whereas top warriors in my guild brought about 16-17k. I remember always being in the top half of dps in raid, and on numerous occasions had players comment how beast enhance could be. Is it complicated to play? Compared to other classes I would say yes, but not complicated enough to disuade me from playing it. You have lots of addons to manage things nowadays anyways. Good luck! I will be playign resto shaman once WotLK Classic drops!
I played and raided as a shaman back in the WOTLK days as all three specs throughout the expansion. The sad answer is that while shamans are still viable especially resto they are almost totally gutted of their unique utility compared to TBC. Resto is the only spec that brought anything significant to the table, my memory was enhancement and elemental were mediocre DPS at best comparative to other classes and didnât justify their utility and a lot of shamans like myself were made to go resto if we wanted to keep raiding in Ulduar and ICC.
I used to believe classic was still a largely âplay what you wantâ experience because of how easy the raid content was. Then I realized how insane people are about clear times and parses and that in reality itâs often best to go a class people will always want. But you donât have to be a meta slave.
I played shaman back in WotLK - TL;DR theyâre OK through most of the expansion, but in end game, they are super strong. Thus begins the gear-dependent shaman journey. There are a lot of caps that need to be made before they become really strong because we scale really well. For example, ele is kinda meh until ICC when they start hitting haste caps. At that point, youâll be melting everything.
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