Know what’s a completely optional talent for Enhancement atm?
Windfury Weapon
Know what’s the most known thing Enhancement has?
Windfury.
Would you say Windfury isn’t a key part of Enhancement’s Identity, if it’s a “completely optional talent” atm?
Absolutely, yes, I would say that. Windfury doesn’t enable Enhancement shaman to function. If you deleted the spell from the game Enhancement would functionally remain the same and it’s core rotation would be unaffected.
Is it a helpful buff for melee? Absolutely. So is Darkness from Demon Hunter or AMZ from Death Knight. You could delete those from the game and all their associated specs would retain their core functionality, albeit squishier.
If you removed Atonement from Disc it would cease to function. If you removed Echo Preservation would cease to function.
You can remove Cloudburst totem and Resto Shaman would function just fine. After the buffs to HST it’s being dropped more frequently. Thus it is not a key part of Resto’s identity.
Now do what you called the “non core” spell, that is the flavorful button, chain heal?
That definitely isnt a part of resto’s identity?
No one ever thinks of “chain heal” when talking about shaman healing, right?
I would love to see a resto shaman talent out of chain heal.
Oh then yea, you’re definitely here to argue despite everyone disagreeing with you.
Windfury has been Enhancement since the inception of the game.
It’s a talent NOW because blizz decided, but it’s still THE Enhancement thing.
Just as Cloudburst is THE Resto Shaman thing.
Those interactions dont count because of goal-post-moving reasons
What’s funny is no one has been able to really refute my original point. Even your post doesn’t address a single point I made.
Sure, windfury is impactful. An enhance player would be seen as trolling if they didn’t take it.
You cannot say the same about cloudburst totem! Thus it is not the spec defining ability you all keep claiming it is. It’s a weak argument and does not disprove my point.
Its been refuted multiple times.
You just move the goal posts.
I duno man, all the totems giving me utility that other healers don’t have, ankh, lust, and a super short CD kick is the identity that made me fall in love with the spec way back when.
I’m kind out of stuff to do minus running a few keys for vault and waiting on my raid night on Mondays, I’ve even been doing stuff (like farming this purple mog, still waiting for the kilt to drop lol) that feels shammy-centric.
But either or, I definitely feel like a very unique, specific healer–more so than when I play any other healing class minus Rdruid who also feels very unique and cool.
Shamans thing is stacking/layering healing modifiers and smart healing.
Heal people at low HP, heal people with riptide/healing rain on them, unleash life, earth shield, all multiply healing for big bursts of healing.
Ancestral procs, ag, cloudburst/hst, chain heal all smart target and there’s not a whole lot of triage you need to do as a shaman. You just aim at lowest health people and profit.
I am not really sure I’d say shaman is a stacked healer anymore. The only stacked healing we really do is healing rain, which is a fairly small portion of healing. Its more for acid rain than anything.
Tier 2 was a heavily stacked raid, and it didnt really benefit r sham at all. With Tidebringer, chain heal is no longer limited to its output by range.
With smart healing, there are 2 tiers of it. “Healing a person that is injured” and “healing the lowest health person”. I believe the only thing we still have that does straight up smart healing is HST. Ancestral got its smart healing nerfed and now just heals someone injured.
I’m pretty sure Resto has been using the Tidal Waves mechanic since Cata
I wish our totems were cooler. I’ve been whining and moaning the whole expansion about how fumbled the shaman talents have been. We have access to so many totems and a lot of them are either niche in the way that they only come out in specific dungeons/M+ weeks or they don’t even go on your bar cuz they suck.
They could do practically anything and I’d be happy to see it. Let healing stream totem tick on more than one person. Let us fire nova as resto to spread flame shocks. Give us back more shadowlands powers. Earthquake elemental was awesome. What’s it for now, other than a lame 5% max health and getting in your way if you ever press it? We could have vesper totem, chain harvest, the tierset that had instant chain heals on totem placement as a keystone, any of that instead of force feeding us prim wave riptide builds
Windfury. None of the other specs have access to it. Maelstorm Weapons is just a resource. Windfury is what defines Enhancement. IMO
I don’t think they meant current Enh so much as “Enhancement historically”
To which yes, it’s Windfury, not Maelstrom Weapons, that defines Enh.
Also I think Blizz did the math to make Windfury taken with all builds, due to both buffing it and changing Elemental Weapons to require two buffs, and double flametongue doesn’t out perform Windfury.
Modern enhance is pretty bland. Theres so much numbers puke that the anticipation and satisfaction of windfury doesnt exist anymore.
Definitely in the minority with that opinion
It’s the most fun and engaging I’ve found it ever.
Alright, devil’s advocate time again, it seems.
So I think the discussion on totems as identity has a degree of talking past each other going on here. The point trying to be made is that while totems are flavorfully distinct from other classes, they aren’t functionally distinct. Every totem we have could function perfectly fine with virtually no changes if they threw the little totem model in the middle of it out the window. Tons of classes have targeted ground effects that are functionally identical to totems except that they can’t be dispelled by cherry tapping a stick in the ground, including other healers.
Cloudburst is certainly something resto has to play around at the high end, but it’s not something the spec is designed around the same way other specs interact with their core mechanical gimmicks. Holy priests have loads of interactions with their Holy Words in their spec design, ditto Disc priests and Atonement. You can’t play those specs at any but the barest level without leaning into those mechanics. Cloudburst just doesn’t have that kind of support. You drop it, you heal exactly like you would if wasn’t there, and eventually it goes off and hopefully isn’t just overhealing. It’s so unsupported by the rest of the spec’s design that it’s on a choice node, and its alternative got buffed this season.
Cloudburst could be a really fun, interesting, and defining mechanic for resto, but it would need major redesign to be a centerpiece of the spec, starting with the player needing finer control over when it unleashes. As it is, it’s mostly just a frustration until you put in a crapload of time on the spec to learn how to use it effectively for a payoff that’s hard to actually feel unless you’ve likewise put a crapload of time into the spec, and are doing content hard enough that you’re not wasting healing either in the charge up or the burst. It’s very uncompelling in its current form.
Ditto the idea that resto’s niche is “utility,” when plenty of other specs bring loads of utility, too. A healing niche that can be covered by your dps comp is not a fun healing niche.
I said stacking healing modifiers
It’s a greater-than-its-parts kind of situation. The thing that makes classes feel distinct isn’t individual abilities, it’s how they interact with each other as a whole. Enhancement feels different from Fury despite both being DW melee with a building resource because Enhancement is juggling a dozen balls in terms of abilities and procs that frequently rearrange its priority list while building randomly generated stacks, while Fury’s rotation flows from static-value builders to mashing its big spender every 3rd GCD or so. Sure, the different aesthetics of the specs also play a big role, but as Legion definitively taught us, that can only carry the feeling of distinction so far.
While all healers work around the same central mechanic of “click on friends to make their bars go up,” they each have very distinct mechanics to doing that which differentiate them. Holy priests cast and cycle their Power Words with cooldown reduction from their other spells. Holy paladins have a combo point system they need to manage. Druids roll HoTs in a volume that no one else touches. Monks have fistweaving, Disc has atonement, Prevoker… has range issues? IDK, I played my evoker just enough to hit 60 so she could join my legion of pocket-fishing soup alts and still haven’t even bothered to respend her talent points since they got reset in some patch.
Resto doesn’t really have any kind of mechanic like that which makes it feel really distinct until you’ve put in a ton of time and effort on the spec to be able to actually feel the difference in keeping your Riptides rolling and timing your Cloudbursts right. And while there’s certainly something to be said for a class becoming more rewarding the deeper you get into it, people are a lot less likely to enjoy a class enough to reach that point if their initial impression is, “Why am I playing this instead of (X)?”
Did other classes have that onslaught of random aoe short cd heal that shaman seem to have been getting since legion?
I remember when it was just healing rain and chain heal.
Now its like wellspring, cloudburst, not-healing-rain but I cant remember what its called.