So what are your thoughts of the upcoming changes to Shamans.
Anyone notice the change to Storm Strike?
Gameplay and builds are some of the best and most fun to date, maybe a little bloated but I do appreciate the effort being put into enhance as of recently.
The main focus moving forward for enhance should really revolve around fantasy and visual clarity. I feel like there are so many vastly different animations, procs, and spell interactions that we have kind of become a “kitchen sink” of a ton of shaman abilities and lack a cohesive fantasy. Just my two cents of course, but I do think we need a stronger fantasy (and a new name honestly), to better distinguish enhance from elemental in terms of fantasy.
…wut? Enhancement is the Thrall spec and he is the Shaman.
Thrall is like barely enhancement. He’s been a warrior and I guess hes a shaman again in SL? He uses a two-handed axe, wears plate, and never uses any “enhancement” abilities, primarily sticking to earth spells.
So I guess what I mean is Thrall’s fantasy isn’t well defined either lol.
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Enhancement is a warrior/shaman hybrid that only exists because it let players be a Thrall-like Shaman from WC3. Not discounting the spec, Enhancement Shaman is badass. He’s been going through his emo phase but he has been shown to still be a Shaman. He has to take some pills to overcome his ED. (elemental dysfunction)
I think his story went that way mostly so that the character would be “retired” at the time because of Metzen leaving the company. Possible also because he had been pretty prominent in the story for a while and they felt other characters needed to tell some stories. Looking at what we got (BFA, SL, DF) maybe they shoulda just kept the green Jesus stuff around.
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I knew part of it was to give us the doomhammer back in legion, so obviously he needed to lose it without dying. But I really can’t remember the last time I ever saw thrall even cast a spell (sepulcher maybe?).
Either way it would be cool if enhance had a fantasy that stood more on its own rather than just the melee ele. The name comes from back when weapon imbues were the prominent feature of spec, but now it is more about slinging spells as a melee. A name like “stormcaller, storm herald, etc” would do more to represent what enhance is currently, as well as define a fantasy going forward. Where “elemental” uses all the elements kinda equally, enhance could focus more on storm (much like resto focuses in on water).
“Enhancement” sounds like “Augmentation” in a way that makes it seem like its a support spec.
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They just need to make these a core part of the gameplay again rather than set-and-forget passives. I’d give examples but then this would just go down the “the spec should be like this” rabbit hole where no 2 people can agree with each other except those who think the game is perfect as it is all the time. (They are the most wrong.)
We aren’t Mages and this idea doesn’t really fit well with Shaman lore especially where the player character is concerned. Weaving elements should be core to every Shaman kit and it somewhat is, if anything the Stormbringer hero talents are bad at representing what a Shaman is. I don’t really like the system at all from both lore and gameplay perspectives.
Makes sense, Enhancement was the OG support spec. It just went from being about bringing “enhancements” for your group to pretty much just for yourself as they phased out “support” gameplay.
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All valid points.
I mean is a resto shaman a mage? I never said to exclusively use storm I just said focus in on. We would still have imbues, totems, spirits, watery-heals, etc that weren’t storm focused much like resto has, but it would make use more than just “Elemental but melee”.
Druid is a top 3 class in terms of fantasy, where feral and balance are completely different in terms of playstyle. Enhance play-style is great, I just think from a fantasy perspective it would be better if it was more cohesive and fit the world better. We see all types of classes represented in the world like paladin, druids, warriors, mages, etc, but when was the last time we ran into a group of “enhancement shaman”?
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Need to make our melee abilities higher priority then. I’d rather our “spells” have some sort of enhancing effect on our next Stormstrike and maybe they get rid of proc resets so it can be tuned to hit harder.
They were around for a while but unfortunately the story from SL and DF that should have prominently shown Shaman have completely left them out and Shaman lore at the moment has a lot of holes in it that Blizzard hasn’t taken the time to fill. Shaman is also more of a Horde-involved class and for the most part Horde hasn’t had much involvement in the story since BFA. Blizzard doesn’t really use Shamans much anymore.
It’s a cycle that feeds into itself. They don’t involve Shamans in the story so their lore slowly erodes as new lore about the world is written and because it would take more effort to fix that they’d rather leave it alone and slap mages or druids in a place in the story that should have featured a Shaman. Now they are at a point where they may not know how to properly portray them anymore and it is only going to get worse the longer the issue persists.
As for why no Enhancement Shamans specifically, probably because Thrall exists and had been so prominent in past expansions. I’d imagine they feel that base is covered. (Nevermind the 1000 different “really important” mage characters)
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Yeah I think this is the crux of my issue. I feel like blizz doesn’t have any direction with enhancement fantasy and are hesitant to establish any new fantasy (even though it desperately needs it) and therefore we never see them.
I mean we just had expansion dealing with elements and a storm dragon, a perfect time to revamp enhancement to something that can present in the modern game an expansion to come. I understand thrall had some prominence, but an entire spec’s fantasy cannot come from one retired Warchief.
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I mean this is the case for a lot of specs. Havoc is Illidan, Frost DK is Arthas, Fire Mage is Kael’thas, Rexxar got split into Survival and Beastmaster, Brewmaster is Chen, Resto/Ele Shaman is Rehgar, Marksman is any of the Windrunners, Druid overall is Malfurion.
A lot of these characters haven’t been very active. (many have been dead for over a decade.)
I don’t think there is any problem with Enh lorewise. They are Shaman in all ways. If anything I wish we had some offensive water spell options and more “Spirit” representation. We’ve had more than the other specs for a long time but it wouldn’t hurt to see a little more.
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New LB visual is absolute garbage. The blue cloud around it and all the tiny sparks make it look like a static bolt, not lightning.
But, all the classic players wanted us to have a terrible, slow electric ball again, and we simply gotta appease people stuck in 2004 game design.
I actually like the casting animation, but the bolt is really off putting.
The bolt should come down from the sky like dare I say, a lightning bolt?
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This would’ve been sick.
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I think enhance is extremely fun. Both Totemic and Stormbringer had some amazing improvements to them, and enhance in general had some great changes. I’m mostly concerned with how providing off healing will feel after losing AG and how survivability will feel, I don’t think it will feel great (for ele or enh) but other than that I love the gameplay.
For ele though, gameplay is basically the same but prim wave got an awful change and never got a single update after that first week of PTR. They copy pasted the change for enhance over to Ele to keep prim wave the same across both specs, which was a terrible idea. It completely nuked prim wave for ele and now it feels horrible. So I’d say ele will be less fun which is sad because 11.0.5 and 11.0.7 is the most fun I’ve had on Ele since MoP, and 11.1 would’ve been the same if not for prim wave change.
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Yeah…pwave is dead unfortunately. A certain subsection of people got their wish.
How is pwave different in 11.1 than it has been?
It can now only be cast on targets with flame shock and acts as AOE much like when you use ascendance on ele.
For enhance it has the option to become this aoe combo ability (which is just a warriors whirlwind with colors tbh). Feels okay but I think chain harvest fit the enhancement kit much more than pwave.
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It works like fire nova where the pwave itself just hits every target with a flame shock and no longer gives you the maelstrom you would normally get for casting 1-6 lava bursts. For ele the change is straight up dreadful to the point where if it’s not outright trolling I’ll just play stormbringer for all content this patch…and if it is I’ll consider a different caster for my dps character.
I agree I would prefer to have Chain harvest over pwave