Mainly referring to Storm bringer, but it’s been really sad seeing other classes slapping and enhance is like hey guys, every 2 min I can keep up with you. Meanwhile frost mages have that level of damage up for everything, every pull, and every boss.
Kind of unfair, but here is hoping enhance (storm bringer) gets some love and some buffs. It’s been echoed before here in the forums and on the shaman discord, the spenders are too weak. Enhance was heavily ignored during the beta cycle in terms of tuning, please do the right thing and give us a proper buff to be close to the top performers.
Dont agree with that at all. Enhance feels very fun to play, both SB and Totemic, its just a bit undertuned in pve. It probably will see some buffs, depends on how they plan on doing tuning though. If they specifically nerf the classes that are overperforming than enh wouldn’t really need any buffs as it isn’t on the lowest end (as totemic at least). Stormbringer itself could use buffs though so it can compete with Totemic.
Anyway though, TWW was a great time to be dps shaman, and they’ve recently put a lot of effort into reworking both ele and enh (in tww) which have improved both a lot imo. Ele in Midnight is close to feeling really fun, its just boring in single target mostly, a proc like Icefury would help the gameplay feel less stale. Enh is fun though.
It seems they keep doing what they started doing in S2 TWW. Nerf enhance and then just dont touch it anymore until the next expansion. There was one balance tuning in early midnight beta. And ever since absolutely nothing but mostly nerfs because some interactions didnt work properly and gave enhance more damage than intended.
Blizz balancing rn seems the be the worse since years and years. Especially when it comes to enhance.
? S1 I would agree., S2 enhance was still somewhat okay. And utterly garbage in S3.
Ele was meh in S1, very mediocre in S2 and then in S3 had a little time to shine. But overall Shaman DPS specss over the whole expansion was very mediocre. especially if you only played enhance or ele.
Dragonflight was a good expansion for enhancement true.
All 3 seasons had either ele or enhance close to meta if not meta. One or both specs were in the RWF all 3 seasons for the entire raid, enhance had a big presence in high m+ in s1 and s2, ele had a big presence in s3. You are downplaying how good shaman was, but you can just look at m+ stats and raid stats to see how they were doing objectively.
in PvP though that is different. Its been a while since dps shaman has actually been meta or used in the highest level of PvP (awc). It did get close in TWW a few times, enh at the start of s2 and ele in s2 or 3 i believe as well but thats about it.
Yea. But many many people dont like ele or dont like enhance. And rather just do 1 of them and the other doesnt exist. I for one only play enhance. I despise caster gameplay. so ele was never an option for me.
And I am not the only one thinking this way.
I refused to play ele it was never fun, mage was always a better pick for caster, yes enhance was always one of the funnest, but its either super strong or hits like a wet noodle, . They never stay one way or the other, got 3weeks strong then 5 month garbage its a never ending cycle.
Just giving back Awakening storms as it was in TWW (every 4 procs giving 1 tempest) and the main talent of SB being every 40 stacks of MSW spended again. I don’t get it why they changed it…
Sure but that doesn’t matter really when we’re discussing the viability of dps shaman overall. We still look at both dps specs. I dont really play ele too often either but realistically if you have 1 meta dps spec and 1 mid tier dps spec, it is up to you to play the meta dps spec if you prefer. That is the beauty of having multiple dps specs, ie if you play a hunter and care about being meta, you will just pick whatever spec is meta. Its what you do if you care about hardcore content, and if you arent doing hardcore content then it doesnt matter nearly as much.
My statement was that TWW was a great time for dps shaman, I did not specify ele or enhance, it was just a good time to be a dps shaman overall because both of our specs were meta at different points throughout the expac meaning you could at least stick with dps shaman as a main throughout the entire expac. For a lot of players, they care far more about being able to play their main class. Of course I’d rather have enh be meta or more viable but as long as dps shaman is good/fun ill play either spec. Plenty of people are like that too.
I was eating so good as a shaman in TWW. I like all 3 specs so I just vibed on whatever was best and smashed the meters. I hope enhance gets a time to shine again since we’re coming right off of ele being best spec.
yeah I wasn’t arguing that, was arguing against the entire class feeling outdated and clunky because enhance feels very good overall. however resto and ele definitely need help, I think ele being simple is okay but it could use a rotational proc like Icefury to shake up the rotation a bit. Resto is just…not it right now.
I do agree that some other things for shaman in general feel outdated, largely our defensives ie reincarnation being treated by the devs as a defensive (it isn’t) which should be reworked into a cheat death so it’s an actual defensive, literally the same thing anyway but you get the 2nd life/chance before you actually die and it usually has a 5 min cd instead of a 30. We cant use any of our defensives in stuns or any cc at all, not a single one. Earth ele feels like it could do a bit more like provide 10% physical DR from primordial bond on top of the hp increase. Things like Burrow should be in the class tree, etc
So, we got some buffs. 8% aura buff, and 10% on light bolt and chain light. Thoughts, feelings, concerns?
My opinion is this, 10% of a billion dollars is a lot of money right, 100 million dollars. 10% of a dollar being only a dime isn’t enough to buy anything. Our damage on our spenders for stormbringer has and is so pathetic that buffing it by 10%, or excuse me 18% technically is laughable.
BM hunters had issues with cobra shot (blizzard damage increased by 100%) but for enhance we really don’t need to tune it, hell we know nobody will play it in the race to world first so we can just not do our jobs and leave it in the dumpster where it belongs.
I mean look at their reworks, frost mage (pumping) will be brought to the race, devourer dh, will be brought to the race. Every spec that blizzard wants to showcase they purposely make it better than the others for their massive ego. Meanwhile, you like playing x or z? hah, not going to happen.
