The squish feels real

Classes Shaman
1

I’m really trying to get back into my enhance shaman but whenever I die I can’t help but think “any of my other melee classes would have survived that”
Frost DK - Auto attacks give an absorb shield, death strike, Ice bound Fort, AMS, Lichborn, death pact.

Pally - Crusaders Reprieve, bubble, shield, flash heal that’s instant and free plus having the range bonus means you can stay further back and a bit safer.

Feral - Frenzied Regen, Bark skin, storing up large (free and instant) regrowths, same range bonus as pallies

Rogue - Combo finishes give a heal/shield, crimson flask, feint, cloak, evasion, leech, soothing shadows (heal 24% life when using shadow dance), 30% HP shield from vanish, and range bonus

Shaman - Healing totem that may or may not heal you, Astral Shift 40% DR which is quite nice, but then we have to chose between using our malestorm stacks to heal or dps.

I know you can’t dps dead, so if you’re low it should be the obvious choice to make, but it doesn’t feel good as no other melee has to choose between survivability and damage in this way.

An idea to fix this: Merge the surging shields talent and elemental orbit talents.
Make it so that your lightening shield inherits the effects of earth shield.
No charges, no having to recast it, no feeling clunky.
It just goes on top of your lightning shield and gives some decent(?) survivability.

Or make it so that your lightning shield damage procs give an actual shield, it can be small but stack. Call it “Protection of the elements” or something.
If a DK can get an absorb shield from melee, I see no reason why our proc based damage from our SHIELD can’t give a shield.

I don’t know, I feel like shaman is really missing something.
Also P.wave bad, bring back chain harvest.

Thoughts?

2 Likes
2

Lightning Shield only procs from direct attacks, so basing any DR on it being procced won’t help us in anything but solo questing and PvP.

3

Ah, so it does. I remember at some point we had a way of triggering it without getting hit. I don’t know how long ago that was, but thanks for letting me know!

Maybe a shield based on windfury procs or something, call it windwall.
Just something that keeps us in the fight, I feel like enhance shamans are the worst at staying alive out of all the melee.

4

I believe the problem with dps shamans overall is that we are heavily balanced around our utility. Unfortunately, our utility is either too weak to be useful (healing and mana streams) or so niche/situational (poison cleanse and tremor totems) that most of the time we essentially bring nothing.

A class like DK has very high survivability, but they bring very little utility. Their survivability IS their utility.

Blizzard needs to decide on their vision for this class. If we are to be a squishy utility class then our utility needs to be stronger and less situational. If we are to continue with utility as it currently is then we need something else to compensate.

5

Self healing is good but it doesn’t help with the constant high damage one shots that happen in high end dungeon content. For that you need higher effective health, mitigation, or preemptive absorb shields. Cheat death mechanics also help a lot cough rework reincarnation cough

1 Like
6

I wish we had some passive DR like this. An absorb shield would be the thing to really enhance our survivability. We have less situations to burn MSW on rot damage.

I really dig this since it would save GCDs. I also just wish earth shield came with a passive DR if its gonna be something we have to apply. Even if its like 2 or 3%. I actually will run double Earth Sheild in keys to throw on a healer or a squisher DPS and having that DR ontop of the heal for another play would make Enhance more attractive for keys.

Elaborate since Pwave is quite literally one of the reasons Enhance’s damage profile is even considered for raid content and M+. Though I’d be ok if Chain Harvest gave you Splintered Elements, say 20% flat and then 3% for each target hit (allies and enemies included) for a total of 50% haste on a big pull so the funnel aspect is still there. Also, have it generate a stack of MSW per target hit so we get the CDR loop on Wolves.

7

I don’t like the playstyle honestly, and I like it even less when we’re forced to use it through our tier set. What’s the point of having it as a talent choice when you’re essentially forced to use it to be competitive?

8

I get it, especially for Ele. I think it’s a dope ability with some cool tech for Enhance if you can learn how to game it well. There are still things some changes to make it more fluid and easier to play (MAKE LAVA LASH SPREAD FLAMESHOCK TO 5 TARGETS OR PWAVE APPLIES FLAMESHOCK TO 5 NEARBY TARGETS IN ADDITION TO APPLYING TO YOUR TARGET THANKS BLIZZARD GG NO REE). Forced talent choice I get as well since I think absolutely nothing should be tied to Sundering and we should be able to just decide to want to play it for an extra stop when needed and I fumed at the Season 2 set for this.

And Nature’s Guardian. There is no reason not to have something a la Will of the Necropolis built into it if its only healing us for 1/5th of our health pool.

9

We used to have a talent or ability (Static Shock, I think) that gave part of our melee kit (forget if it was only Stormstrike or if was just melee in general) a chance to proc a Lightning Shield charge to damage our target. I believe we had that from Cata through WoD, but it was lost along with damn near everything else but our spell names when Legion deleted Enhancement and copy/pasted Fury in its place.

I mean. You basically just summed up the entire illusion of tree-style talents right there.

Bring back MoP-style talent tiers.

10

make elemental shields give passive DR 5% per shield on you. bake that into the elemental orbit talent. U can now have a passive 10% dr with lightning shield and earth shield active.

Give feral spirit leech back or “we dont want sham to be a pet class” make it give the USER like 10% leech or something when active.

Make brimming with life 15% hp when reincarnation is on cd

Make reincarnation 60% health when used

Make having msw stacks give .5% DR per stack spent for 5 seconds. Can be refreshed

Im no game designer. Not all of these have to be in game at once. But they can easily take some of these ideas straight from the forums that are being posted on the daily

11

I like all these.
Also something like windfury procs grant an absorb that stacks up to 15% of your health. Just anything to make us feel less squishy, we’re melee, we’re right up in there, give us some of the survival of other classes.