What’s the variance of those rotational choices? Does it span 15 key binds? Every single spell and ability of your spec? No its like 7 buttons of your core rotation. In most cases that’s just for optimal play so it’s not even necessary for anything below mythic raiding and maybe like plus 10 keys. You can time keys just by doing Pw > Wolves > Lava Lash > LB and completely skip the extra LB and 4% is perfectly fine if you wanted to. And WoW rotation choices are easy. So again, if you’re somebody complaining about a spec having 7 rotational buttons the issue is with themselves.
To preface: I haven’t mained Shaman since WoD entirely because the dev team for the class keeps making these decisions that result in an unfun (and often literally painful) play-style.
PW is the worst offender that I’ve had access to (I don’t have beta so no experience with any of that). For Ele it’s extremely clunky (for previously noted reasons). For Enhancement it’s Less Clunky, but it’s still gunks up the action bars and rotation. It’s just as clunky for Resto as it is for Ele on paper.
For as long as PW is part of the class in its current implementation, and “expected” gameplay, I will likely avoid playing my shaman except for getting to level cap and trade skills. Which is a shame because even with its problems on “Beta” Stormbringer had me very interested.
PW doesn’t feel clunky at all for resto
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That’s good to read at least.
I don’t really heal on my shaman so I was going based on wording (hence the [on paper]).
Yea, riptide and flame shock have the same cd, and are on the target for the same amount of time before talents but play out entirely different, since riptide has the supporting talents to easily keep riptide rolling on 3+ people by just playing normally. For resto PW is pretty much set up naturally.
Why?
How is it clunky? It works well within all 3 specs…
You understand it is a buff, right? How does it interrupt the flow of the specs? I really don’t get the hate for Primordial Wave here.
Agreed. I’m beginning to realize a ton of Shamans here have played one spec for 6 weeks and that is the extent of their personal knowledge of the class.
People don’t need multiple years of playing a video game to have an opinion, gatekeeping grievances is crazy but that should be expected from the WoW community
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It really doesn’t mean 
Since vanilla actually…
Pw only really feels great with resto. For enhance and ele it’s a big divergence on how the specs used to play and really isn’t that great feeling.
It’s mostly just that people will kick and scream if anything is changed but at the same time want whole specs reworked. Part of it as well is that people don’t want to think at all but also expect to be top damage all the time. Part of the reason people like Chain Harvest and Fae Transfusion was that they were so low impact and simply you just hit it when it’s up.
As is people who primarily do easy content which requires no proper gameplay skill to clear trying to make suggestions about game design, class abilities, and rotations. A tale as old as time.
Largely subjective seeing as this has been the most viable enhancement in M+ and Raid and its due to the damage profile that Pwave provides. Most players prefer Elementalist over any iteration of Enhancem with pretty much most high end players enjoying its rotation (but still wanting adjustments and damage tuning). However the spec as a whole needs some changes to lower the skill floor for playing. Any experienced player asking what melee to play I’ve been suggesting Enhance the whole expansion but I’d never have a completely green player try it until they’ve played for a bit until they have general concepts down.
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Pwave was the lowest impact convenant ability back in SL thats why no one was using it. Someone used it because of the conduit from necrolord not the spell
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Low impact refers to the amount of cognitive load required to gain max value not damage value. You could actively sniff gasoline during a key and not mess up Chain Harvest and Fae Transfusion in most cases (Unless you were a DPS player holding Chain Harvest as an off heal CD for 20+ seconds). Lot of Enhance players just hate Pwave because it isn’t fire and forget. And most Enhance players on the forums long for the days when the only requirement for doing damage was just being in melee and hitting one button every 6 seconds.
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In isolation it’s not, but when taken in combination with all the other setup abilities Resto has in it’s kit, it’s easy to see where it becomes a backbreaker straw.
Personally, I’d love to see Resto’s Primordial Wave combined with Wellspring into a single ability that applies Riptide to multiple allies hit by the Wellspring arc, then has a couple different follow up effects on a choice node like the wave returning for a second round of healing after a few seconds, extending the duration of Riptide on all allies healed, or setting up the current Healing Wave cleave.
%#@$ Primordial wave. I wouldn’t be bothered by it if it was optional but they are trying to design the whole class fantasy around a $%&# expac ability.
It should be optional not required for this class to function. I hope the person who thought of this gets burned by their seatbelt buckle and their AC in their car fails.
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Only if you want to be taken seriously.
Someone has never seen inside an arena.
Why?
Entirely subjective. The few people I know playing enhancement strongly dislike it. Including myself. Seems like a fair few in the thread too.
I dunno… It doesn’t feel that much more complex than some melee out there. Maybe upper middle of the pack for difficulty?
I’ll state again, this is all purely from a gameplay feel and icon/history of enhance shaman. Enhance has always been about wf/stormstrike while buffing the melee in the group. We are so far from that now and I really don’t enjoy it.
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Because Resto is loaded with setup abilities, interaction procs, and multiple low-impact spells that need to be managed to reach the throughput it’s designed around, but frequently make the spec feels like it’s straddling a line between reactive and ramp healing with the weaknesses of both and the strengths of neither.
Primordial Wave is a good example of this, as it’s a spell whose most dramatic impact is a burst of reactive cleave healing, but requires the player to maintain a HoT with a cooldown across multiple targets in advance of the need for the burst. It is also heavily encouraged to be comboed with either Unleash Life, which is an additional keybind and GCD, or Undulation, which requires its own tracking and may require additional spellcasts to cycle in before PWave, but that’s okay because you can make up some of the lost time by spending another talent point and keybind to have Nature’s Swiftness.
All that said, PWave is still a worthwhile ability in the Resto kit because it can do its job even without the additional cooldowns spent supporting it, even if it’s not as potent, but it’s still balanced around being able to be comboed like that. It’s hardly the worst thing Resto’s got going for it, but it can often be the most visible hiccup for any player who is struggling with the spec.
That was literally only Vanilla and BC. As soon as the Wrath pre-patch hit, we got Lava Lash and Maelstrom Weapon, and our design philosophy shifted into pulling our own weight as a full fledged DPS as our buff totems faded out of focus along with the prominence of raid buffs in general.
Elementalist is the logical throughline of Enhancement’s evolution over the course of the game, minus the blight of Legion Enhancement and the time we spent slowly clawing our way out of that pit through BFA and SL.
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It’s stuff centered around easing pain points. Particularly with the choice between Lashing Flames vs LotFW in M+: one is way more complicated but feels better in single target because of Elemental Assult whereas LotFW is easier to play but because you don’t have Elemental Assault you can end up feeling starved on MSW. Setup for Pwave is a bit borked in needing to Flameshock a mob in addition to Lava Lash spread due to Lava Lash only spreading to 4 targets instead of 5 (which is a large issue people have with Pwave).
What level of content do they do I’m curious. In my experience most people who complain about Pwave on the fourms don’t touch anything above Heroic Raids and don’t push keys (this thread is pretty consistent with that). The forums tend to be a very specific subsection of the player base with it mostly being casual players. Which tracks, casuals prefer fire and forget gameplay and a lot of casual Shaman players prefer Storm because it is vastly simplistic (and are beholden to lore and thematic even though you’re not paying attention to that while doing group content I hope). I think I’ve seen 1 CE raider complain about not liking Pwave.
This point is important. If you look at SL, Enhancement saw an increase in viability once it began to shift towards a proto-elementalist style gameplay in the later parts of SL because that style is more consistent in its damage profile. Previous iterations of Enhance suffer from their profiles being unpredictable which while neat is absolutely not what you want when trying to do content that requires a lot of work.
DF changes shifted it forward, but big reason Enhance was favored by Raid Leaders all throughout DF is because Pwave’s form of the funnel only needs for adds to be alive for just the Lightning Bolt cleave to get its value. Whereas most funnel classes lose value as tiers go on due to adds they were using to funnel damage into bosses (Larodar, Tindral, Fyrakk) die faster. Enhance managed to not suffer from it too much because of its funnel profile. Last season we saw 9/10 WF guilds run double Enhance and it was not just because of Windfury Totem.
What do you mean by class fantasy?
Which was only really relevant during TBC since nobody brought Enhance to raid in Vanilla and Resto was perfectly capable of providing WFT. Pvp sure, but Enhance also got outplayed to hell unless they were going aginst somebody dumb enough to just sit melee with them which would be like a Mage just hard casting at 8+ yards on a hunter. And TBC classic turned off a lot of Shaman players who liked vanilla-style Enhance because it turned out that optimal damage actually required a hella of a lot of skill to pull off instead of hitting Stormstrike and RNGing WFT. Post TBC your statement doesn’t hold true even in the slightest. And to top it all of SoD proves beyond a doubt that RNG WF and Stromstrike does not hold a candle to modern Enhance in terms of design and popularity.
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I don’t see the problem with this mechanic. I prefer Rshaman to be more in depth and at least in arena, Resto Shaman is considered universally one of the harder healers to perform on since you don’t have ways to catch up once you are behind in healing.
I also think PWave is a good mechanic for all Shaman specs. What was the alternative anyways? Vesper was degenerate gameplay and Chain Harvest was nice for Enhancement only. I like PWave interactions, it makes the specs feel alive. I’ll never understand the complaints.
NS should be baseline, but again I don’t have a problem with this mechanic. Primordial Wave is certainly best used with NS, especially in 3s arena healing. If you want to make the case that we shouldn’t need like 7 globals to make a save, fair enough. PvE healing is substantially easier on Shaman, especially if you know the content (something I haven’t cared to learn this expansion in general).
In essence, Resto Shaman is just a harder healer to master and I prefer that. But I don’t like rerolling and want some depth to what I am doing.
I appreciate your response, we may not agree on all of it, but thanks for the answer.