Lmao don’t listen to any of these people saying shamans are bad, willfully ignorant bad meta slaves
Ele will be topping meters in 1st phase, and be the kings of PVP in every aspect in every season of wrath if played well. Enhance will be good every season and competitive in PVE till ICC when fury warriors/ferals take lead cause they scale incredibly well.
So this is where I have my questions, isn’t the last phase the most important phase?
I only ask cause every time i’ve played Classic from Vanilla to TBC I noticed that the people who picked the specs that were mediocre early but were BiS at the end ended up overall having a much better experience when it came to groups/etc.
Ele is def. insane in PvP though but i’m leaning more towards Feral atm.
If you have a raid spot for it, do it. Feral quality of life is peak in Wrath.
Arena? High skill cap and very fun.
1v1? OP and very fun.
Dungeons? Absurd AoE (Swipe is one of the top AOE in Wrath) and very fun.
Dungeon but need to tank? Bear is rather braindead and largely shared the same spec as cat and gear (At least enough gear to easily tank dungeons)
Among other things.
You will not regret Feral in Wrath, I promise that.
BUT Enhance Sham is fun af too. I’d suggest trying a psever and see what you like
Yeah I mean what motivated me to give Shaman a try was honestly just watching WoTLK Ele PvP and Enhance looks super fun too with WF procs and everything.
I think I do prefer something with a high skill cap though.
good
oh noes
good
good
oh noes
Both Enhance and Feral Cat are the known specs for being the hardest in PvE, so you’re fine with any option there
It’s generally considered difficulty-wise:
Feral > Afflic > Enhance
Fun-wise
Enhance > Feral > Afflic
Consequence for messing up your rotation
Feral > Afflic > Enhance
Regardless, I highly suggest trying them out. Almost all Wrath specs are fun, but you are asking about some of the most fun ones so I’d highly suggest testing Enhance/Feral on a pserver when you have time
Yeah i’ll try both of them out, my only hang up on Enhance is honestly relying too much on the RNG Procs to do the bulk of my damage. I almost like the control and versatility I get with Feral in terms of that.
But this part:
Does have me a little nervous, everyone keeps saying Feral is like this absurdly hard class with 20+ buttons lol
It’s a commonly shown graph of the Wotlk EJ guide. It’s a priority system, thus the technical rotation is long, but really it’s “This is about to expire so I renew it before I’m allowed to consider Ferocious Bite”
As long as you get a weakaura for it, you’ll be golden and have a blast.
my only hang up on Enhance is honestly relying too much on the RNG Procs
Don’t worry about that. Get a weakaura sound effect for your maelstrom proc, aside from that overall you’ll have a good amount of consistency. Maelstrom is fun af as long as you are prepped to deal with it, and it scaled with haste, effectively making the class feel different over the course of the expac
imagine an aff warlock but to keep up you dots you use combo points
thats a feral druid
The reason you likely see such difference in the way people rank them is because of the way that Shaman dps isn’t consistant across the raid tiers as people get access to more gear.
Ele has horrible scaling with gear compared to the other specs. However, they do start with some of the highest base stats due to their talent trees. What this means is that in pre-raid gear and even in Tier 7, Ele can very well be No.1 Dps on most encounters. However as the other specs get access to higher levels of gear in T8 and onwards, ele will fall hopelessly behind as the other specs just get more powerful.
Enhance also suffers from a similar scaling problem (though they are still better than ele). Enhance also can be played in 2 different ways, spellhance or melee. Spellhance has a higher dps floor, making it really strong in the early tiers as well T7/T8. However, once you hit TotGC melee focused enhance catches up and starts to out scale Spellhance in ICC. That said, it still doesn’t perform extremely well after T8, so expect to struggle finding raid spots in pug raids.
So to answer your final question. Both specs can be very competitive in Tier 7 (Naxx). But they (Mages, Rogues, Warriors) will eventually out scale you and leave you in the dirt the closer we get to the end of the expansion
How does Feral do in TBC? I’m trying to get this guy 70 soon and will probably aim to either get some of the free PvP gear or snag some tier sets before Wrath drop to help with leveling and dungeons.
That’s a pretty interesting way of looking at it but also kinda makes Feral seem more complicated haha
Yep, that was my worst fear with Shaman.
feral is not reliant on arpen but once it starts rolling arpen your single target explodes
enh is a great pumper that still pumps on icc but falls behind rpen rogues and warriors there
ele starts great and falls quite hard but still viable just not at the top
What about Boomy?
Boomy boasts the highest AoE burst damage in the game, which can be critical on some encounters. They also are generally the ONLY class that will bring the 5% spell crit buff, since most raids won’t run an ele shaman.
This means that you are almost guaranteed to see 1 in every raid comp, but probably not more than one since their single target dps isn’t particularly strong (at least towards the end of the expansion).
You’re mainly wanted as a tank and your meta is cheesing a level 40 blue helmet and spamming shapeshift to exploit Furour/Wolfshead energy gains. It’s going to be a bit awkard getting to 70 and wanting to learn the Wrath meta but be stuck in their TBC meta.
Sorry, there’s not much good news there unless you’re happy to bear tank until the Wrath pre-patch
aim to either get some of the free PvP gear or snag some tier sets
If you want gear for the Wrath launch, join a Yolo 5s team to do 3-10 games per week, and do your Hellfire/Terrokar PvP dailies every day. This will get you incredible gear extremely quickly.
Really though, you’ll replace almost all gear in the first few hours of wrath, and if you get Brutal/Sunwell gear it’ll still be replaced in a couple days.
Up to you to measure your time spending weeks getting it now, or days getting it on Wrath launch
pretty straightfoward decent scaling stupid good and deliciously dangerous to use aoe
mages/warlocks>boom/ele is the common list by the time ulduar or toc are on full swing
but thats by the final patch of the expansion… if you raided with your guild from the start who cares, once arthas is dead is all over
Interesting, I def gotta try that out in a Pserver and see how high I can go on trash packs haha, ty.
Ah that sucks.
I was low key hoping to go Bear tank to spam easy groups and then take the Feral gear haha but if I wanted to seriously dedicate to like Feral Raid DPS and am trying to get a spot with a fresh P1/P2 guild, can I keep up on meters with just spamming the Powershift meta?
Sorry mate, I know Wrath due to playing over 5 years of it on W*rmane. I don’t know TBC like I know wrath, don’t wanna steer you wrong.
No worries, ty for the help so far.