After extensive testing in ICC ptr (around 50+ hours). I can confidently say that enhancement shaman is in the worst state it’s ever been.
In terms of defensives we are the equivalent of a wet noodle. We have the lowest stamina of all of the melee specs with one defensive cooldown. Not only that but with the enhancement tier set bonus our ONLY defensive cooldown turns into a dps cd. We will have to use shamanistic rage for the damage buff and not survivability because of how bad we perform on more than 60% of the fights in ICC. I have tried to put points into toughness/ele warding. This forces us to the bottom of the pack after taking talent points out of dps increasing abilities.
With the amount of movement there is in ICC mechanics, it makes the whole spec feel extremely clunky. Having to use a gcd to refresh our totem every time the boss moves out of totem range feels bad.
The only way enhance was able to compete in TOGC was because we used a spell power pre-proc set to stack as much spell power as we could before combat to snap a big fire ele. This set included items from tbc and felt ridiculous to use just to be middle of the pack.
Our spec is restricted to a 10 minute cooldown (fire elemental) and requires the boss to have minimal movement to get decent value from it. Now with the changes to wild growth, our fire elemental dies more often. It has a 100% death rate on a handful of bosses(marrowgar/blood queen) and gets very little value on others (putricide, blood council, deathwhisper, valithria).
There was a blue post in original wrath saying the devs were looking to increase flurry by 5% haste and increasing survivability. It seems the idea has fallen through the cracks and we are now in this state because of it.
We are not asking for much, maybe a slight stamina boost, a change to the way our fire nova works or a way to be less reliant on fire elemental. If you made it this far thanks for reading and I hope to see some sort of change soon!
As a former enhance main it is laughable that so many other specs were tinkered with as enhance rots away. Hunters recently get a trap launcher yet enhance largest CD gets completely neutered once the boss gets moved 10yds. The lack of survivability is also disturbing. Just this phase their health pool is 7k health less than some other dps.
Theres 2 enh and an ele in the top 200 for us/eu logs for togc, 1 of those is even top hundred. no warriors til about 210, no hunters spriests or druids til like 270. mages dk rogue and warlock have the top hogged like they have all xpac, but enhance at least has some representation earlier then most other dps.
My two cents - Any positive change at all to our survivability or scaleability would be great. There are some excellent windfury options (Black Bruise) in ICC that are gimped by lack of end-game(277 ilvl) offpiece options that are actually itemized for us.
In my opinion, buffing the windfury playstyle would also alleviate the feeling that we are tied to the success and survivability of our Fire elemental alone.
Its pretty clear to anyone who actually thinks about ICC content that using numbers from TOGC is pointless. Both from a fight mechanics/surviability standpoint and a gearing/scaling standpoint.
Have shamanistic rage provide 10% damage reduction while on cooldown and exclude this reduction from PVP. That’ll give us a couple thousand more effective HP without having any impact on PVP and would be pretty easy to implement. Reducing the ICD on Windfury procs by .5 seconds or something to make the spec more viable (and less reliant on fire totems) would be good too.
Even the one fight in ICC where melee have 100% uptime, enhancement gets extra gimped because you don’t want Saurfangs blood beasts to agro you / your totem on spawn and get a melee attack in.
I forgot how god awful totems are in classic expansions. Stopped playing shaman and never looked back. I think the breaking point was my fire ele going insane on Sarth one time.
Agreed, if we were this squishy but also had higher damage potential I could live with it (classic glass cannon tech) but being this flimsy while also being a middle of the pack spec DPS-wise this tier feels pretty awful.
The state of shaman has been in a laughable state, requiring the use of macros to sync weapons, switching from ap/sp items. It was a shame that we only got fire ele to reset on bosses as a change, but it really seemed to just circumvent the ability to queue into arena matches since it has the ability to reset out cooldowns. We still have to wait for ankh cd between bossess.
The state of shaman has been in a laughable state, requiring the use of macros to sync weapons, switching from ap/sp items. It was a shame that we only got fire ele to reset on bosses as a change, but it really seemed to just circumvent the ability to queue into arena matches since it has the ability to reset out cooldowns. We still have to wait for ankh cd between bossess.
There’s no more disheartening sensation than capturing a perfect snapshot of the beefiest fire elemental, only for the tank to mistakenly reposition the boss.
Besides awful star wars memes, enhance was never meant to be a DPS power house, nor have notable survivability. Enhance has been a support spec since vanilla, and the philosophy of the spec didn’t change until way later on.
This isn’t to say you’re wrong tho. From what I hear, a decent amount of people share the same mentality that enhance needs a more rounded experience. You’d see a lot more enhance if it was a spec everyone found fun.
Not every spec is meant to be in a perfect comp, and that’s the failure of the game/balancing; not enhance.
A support spec that does less dmg than frost dks and brings 0 unique buffs aside from a 15% increase over horn of winter which can be speccd into by any shaman spec. Nice
You know what, after hearing some of the suggestions from others, hello no; just leave us the way we are, we don’t need to cry for buffs like pallys, we’re shaman. Have some pride in the way of the storm.
Worst state it’s ever been? Did you even play the class in classic or crusade? When I raided as shaman we had to drop each totem 1 at a time, and juggle 1 slot every 10 seconds.
