No one knows what Enhancement Shaman is

Community General Discussion
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Just an opinion. I’m not trying to get you to agree, I just wanted to get this off of my chest. The only change I’m suggesting is an overhaul.

If you look at all the melee specs, I think all of them occupy some class/spec fantasy. Certainly some are better than others, but I don’t find confussion around when a spec is supposed to be quite like Enhancement. For example:

If you’re a warrior, you’re a berserker going nuts and shredding your enemies. If you’re Arms, you’re a battle tactician, swinging a big weapon and bleeding your enemy to death with your martial prowess.

The spec that comes closest to Enhancement Shaman’s “What is this supposed to be” identity problem is probably Frost Death Knight, but even then the lore of the Death Knight is so strong that it carries. An undead killing machine from the frozen reaches of Northrend come to drag others to the grave with them.

Maybe it’s GoTs White Walkers. Maybe it’s Kel’thuzad’s “Minions, servants…soldiers of the cold dark…” line, but Frost DK, as uninspired as the spec is, still makes sense to me. You know what the player might want to inhabit as a character as they play it.

Even spec I don’t play seem obvious to me. Subtlety is a ninja. Outlaw is a pirate. and Assassination is an assassin. Enhancement on the other hand is the junk drawer of scraps thrown together for what Shaman used to be back when the developers gave a crap about them. Is it a tribal leader? Is it an elemental ascended? Is it a spiritual leader?

When you play enhancement, you use the elements on your weapons, and you summon ghost wolves, and you manage maelstrom weapon well. Why do you do any of this? It’s unclear.

A big part of the issue is that Blizzard hasn’t really fleshed out the Elements, so it’s hard to understand them the way we might the Burning Legion, the Void, the Light, or the Titans. The Elements are on the cosmological chart, but they don’t seem to occupy one area, have one goal, or serve a clear purpose.

In early iterations of the new Cosmos, the plan was for the Elements to be the building blocks of each school of magic. A sort of mystical primary colors that made up each school of magic, but that seems to have been scrapped.

Recently, it was revealed that the Elements are on every planet, not just Azeroth, a gimmick drawn up prior because the spirit had been sapped from the world by the Worldsoul. I’m guess that’s been scrapped, too, so god know what or where the elements are.

We fight some elemental lords, so they’re not fully with us. And they must have some agenda, but it’s not really clear why. And what do Shaman do with these elements? It’s long been said that Shaman have to ask permission to use the elements on each cast [editors note, this is stupid and ruins the class], so are Enhancement shaman asking for each windfury cast?

And if they are asking for each ability on each swing, why is the Elemental giving it to us? Why do they want us to do? There’s no fantasy in Enhancement shaman because it never really got its due in TBC when they made specs useful.

And the wolves, I mean to me its very clearly a holdover from when Shaman were Horde only, and the Orcs were associated with wolves. But why, for example, does a Pandaren Shaman turn into a ghost wolf? Why do they summon ghost wolves? What is the realtionship between the Pandaren and wolves?

Look, if you enjoy Enhancement Shaman, I’m happy for you, and I hope you stay happy. But the lack of Spec identity for Enhancement has bothered me for a long time, and I had to say something. I’m sure I didn’t even get all my points in here that I wanted, but I’m getting this out there so I can focus on other Warcraft things.

I hope they call a story team meeting to get this stuff hammered out so we have a good reason to swing some axes.

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"Adepts of the Elements

Shaman are spiritual guides and practitioners, not of the divine, but of the very elements. Unlike some other mystics, shaman commune with forces that are not strictly benevolent. The elements are chaotic, and left to their own devices, they rage against one another in unending primal fury. It is the call of the shaman to bring balance to this chaos. Acting as moderators among earth, fire, water, and air, shaman summon totems that focus the elements to support the shaman’s allies or punish those who threaten them."

“A totemic warrior who strikes foes with weapons imbued with elemental power.”

I hope this helps lol.

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Enhancement shamans are like Elemental shamans but instead of casting spells they just punch things with said elements.

Also they sometimes turn into a windy guy and you smash that stormstrike button alot.

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The spec is basically capturing oldschool wizards who use

Imbuing an axe with fire and hacking you to pieces with it. Spec fantasy works fine. Slightly different flavor than a wizard but it’s still melee fighter + magic-empowered weapons & attacks.

“Enhancement” as a name for that, is awful though. Get somebody a thesaurus to come up with a better name.

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It’s all a matter of how the elements and spirits are invoked. Whether you want to summon them to destroy enemies, to become stronger, or to heal.

Elemental: Harness the elements to destroy your enemies.
Enhancement: Imbue yourself and your weapons to destroy your enemies.
Restoration: Use restorative waters and ancestral spirits to heal and support allies.

The only “complaint” I have regarding Shaman fantasy is the wolf thing.
Wolves in WoW shamanism are an Orc thing; other shaman races don’t have that connection to wolves, but oh well.

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Enhancement Shaman is one of the few specs I have never tried, despite playing Resto Shaman a ton.

Crazy huh?

But I love my Shammy! :two_hearts:

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Even though they didn’t exist back when I first heard of the Enhancement Shaman, I thought they’d play out as a melee version of what the Augmentation Evoker does. It is an a unfortunate thing they don’t play out how I had hoped because if they did play like our Augmentation spec does I’d have loved the Enhancement Shaman play style far more. I still think it could be fun but any time I try to play it I quickly end up converting back to elemental since it never plays how I feel it should play like.

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It’s Thor!

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Just going to say I stopped playing Enhancement a long time ago. I agree that it doesn’t feel like you’re playing what the name of the spec should be anymore. At least when we had buff totems like Strength of Earth Totem it actually felt like we were enhancing our group members. Now just tossing some buffs on my weapons and a group buff just doesn’t feel as good.

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You are who you want to be! You decide your identity! If you identify as a tank u r a tank, if u identify yourself as a mage shaman u r a mage shaman!

But ya, what is an enhancement shaman? My guess is some sort of rural spell caster warrior hybrid?

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Honestly no one even knows what a shaman is
It doesnt fit into the very mythology that it now so commonly appears in, except as a mysterious, primitive antagonist, calling on voodoo-adjacent powers and naturalism that is opposing (or at best, complementing) the ideal of divine purity
With warcraft being disneyfied, that means good guys can be shamans now. Which means the original warcraft shaman, spooky cultural leaders bossing around a pack of grunting muscle towers are now…? That’s the question.

I would say the enhancement shaman is actually the only one that fits the archetype, at least as far as warcraft goes. A glowing eyed, fanatical madman slinging around weapons and rocks and lightning bolts. So what it needs is a new name, not a new identity.

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The problem comes down to Enhancement not actually being a niche. Enhancement is from a bygone era where Shamans would mostly utilize buffs. They got melee weapons because their primary intention was to sit in melee dropping totems and contributing a bit of damage.

As the years went on, Enhancement turned into a weird hodgepodge melee spec because the support role had gone away. It looks more and more like a Warrior got a spiritual awakening (which is actually kinda cool ngl).

Given the addition of the Augmentation Evoker, perhaps they could rework Enhancement into a DPS/Support similar to them.

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The only evil Shaman is Ner’zhul. Shamanism fell away in favor of fel magic. What are you effing talking about?

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Dark shamans are a thing. The ones in Siege of Orgrimmar used the element of decay with their elemental magic.

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Well you’re not wrong, but my introduction broadened the topic a bit by explaining where shamans fit in all types of settings, not just this one. That was why I implied shamans fit the antagonist archetype by default.

And the horde was definitely ‘evil,’ with Warcraft 3 being the first time that a shaman (raised by humans) began to spread his cultural leadership in a way that wasn’t expansionistic and warlike.

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nah bruh just you.
enchant your gear.
no one likes a hard carry.

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Don’t let the Bloodlust fool you. They commune with the elements. That takes calm and discipline.

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You know shaman are like… real, right? Shamans are a real thing. They don’t fit the antagonist archetype by default.

Now PRIESTS, they get up to some gruesome stuff.

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Nooobdy knows what trouble theyve seen

nooooobooody knows, their sorrows.

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enhancement was cool when it could use a 2hander. it’s been a while