Title says it all. PvE Shaman DPS specs have miserably bad numbers. This may get better next phase but I think that’s gonna depend on what runes everyone gets. For right now they suck and could use a quick tune up. Please don’t let them be irrelevantly poor in the next phase as well.
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Ya it’s odd how Shamans best role is Tanking in SOD after not ever being a real tank spec. Seems like all other roles are really meh, and dual wield instead of 2h in classic for enhance is EXTREMELY mehhhhhhhhhhhhh.
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Yeah welcome to Blizzard Entertainment where shamans are the worst class in the game in vanilla. Unless you want to tank because sod gave us some good stuff for that. I played shaman for years. Its straight up underdog and they dont care.
Agreed, it’s incredibly disappointing that they don’t support 2h enhance this phase. 2h enhance was the 2004 original, until they forced dual wielding into enhance. If I wanted to dual wield, I would have rolled a Rogue or Warrior.
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I absolutely adored 2H enhance when it was a thing… never cared about this dual wielding non-sense they added. Not many things felt better than the stars aligning, criting with a windfury proc… mmmm.
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DW is part of the equation for why Shamans are the best tanks in the game right now, and may very well continue to be in Phase 2. Double Rockbiter is additive for both the AP and the extra threat generated so your group’s DPS can pump without any regard. No other tank can compete with this threat.
What this basically means is that the best Enh DPS build is… An OT build. Enh is the new Fury-Prot.
Edit:
Since the idea of Shaman DW seems to be unpopular, I’m gonna add I have a massive bias for DW tanking. I loved Fury-Prot in Era, I loved DW Frost Tank in Wrath, and I’m loving it in SoD as a Shaman before we can even spec into Parry. There’s no playstyle like this in retail anymore aside from Demon Hunters.
When I made this toon and thought about the type of build I wanted to do with all the new runes we got, DWing with Way of Earth seemed the most fun for me, I’ve already tanked all these dungeons with a shield on Era.
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I haven’t done DW tanking yet as I’m still farming out the chest rune for DW spec, but fury prot is so cool. I’m glad DW is in the game for Furyhance tanking but I’m definitely a 2h player at heart and as soon as I pick up runes for it that’s how I’m gonna DPS.
Fun fact windfury wont make it any better. All the imbues are statistically pretty similar. I guess you won’t get threat but , you will go oom faster.
The imbues are pretty similar, with the exception that Windfury does scale better than any of the others for Enhancement. Rockbiter only scales with crit, Flametongue and Frost only scale with spell power so they don’t scale with any enhancement stats unless we get AP->SP conversions, then they scale with AP. Windfury gets better with both as the extra attacks can crit and do more damage with AP. But that won’t matter enough in phase 2, it’ll be notably worse than Rockbiter because of Shamanistic Rage but obviously helps the threat issue.
The only thing that will seriously help will be powerful new runes, or at least serious buffs to the ones we have.
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yeah pretty odd considering all shamans do is roll on rogues leather gear, and they do crap DPS vs letting a rogue have his normal gear to actually do dmg.
How many times do I have to tell you, elementals do not have the cast time reduction in the talents. Enhancement do not have stormstrike yet nor do they have windfury imbue. Though I hope they have some ap/str—>spellpower rune.
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at least a million more times, nobody seems to care that we’re only level 25. The devs were never going to do massive class balancing in order t keep every bracket perfectly even
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Elementals definitely get more than Enhancement. Enhancement get Stormstrike, which is a lot less powerful than most melee classes get as a top tier talent, and Windfury, which is a pretty lateral move from RB this early in the game. They actually don’t get almost anything else baseline. Not even Grace of Air. The runes are what we’ll be looking at. And unless they’re a lot, lot better than what everyone else gets, they’ll still be bad.
Ele gets the aforementioned cast time reduction, Chain Lightning, as well was more crit scaling. That will help a lot. I do not think that alone will be enough, given how far behind they are. I’ll be glad to be wrong about this.
I agree. Give Shaman 2H enhance and OG stormstrike…lets delete some clothies.
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They don’t need to make it even. I didn’t ask for massive changes. I asked for a quick tune up. I think being half as good as other classes warrants attention.
Elementals weakness in era was always mana. Enhance was a complete meme, the best you could do was being the Nightfall guy
Stormstrike is a very bad ability by itself. It resets the autoswing timer iirc, so it’s just another white hit that delays your auto attack unless you use a specific macro. For the vast majority of vanilla, no one took it. It was only with macro shenanigans later in the lifespan of vanilla that the ability saw use.
Wf alone is not going to be enough for enhance to be competitive, despite what a lot seem to believe. The spec does need some deeper thought put into it via whatever new runes are added. I’m skeptical but still hopeful
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they already did a quick tune up, the spec is playable. You’re not going to be as good as a rogue, hunter or warrior right now. That’s just what it is. Once we get closer to our max level I’d start to think about balance.
They aren’t going to turbo buff low level specs and kinda just wait and see how they scale going forward. They know where enhance sits at level 40 and the runes they’re introducing should hopefully even things out. If they don’t? who cares! Play one of the strong specs for a couple months and wait and see what the new phase does to enhance
They were doing weekly class updates. No reason to believe they’ll stop. They didn’t this week but I think that was because of the holidays.
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the updates and tunings have steadily gotten smaller as times gone on. I don’t think there’s reason to think they’ll do a massive, meta shifting buff at this point.
I say again, who cares? This is one of those “just deal with it” moments. If not being meta is a problem for you, its very easy to reroll