So I am curious… I recall Preacher talking about how Enh shammies were starting to pop up around Naxx because of the gear it gave them, is this true? If it is how good did they perfrom in PvP and PvE? I don’t personally care if they didn’t do a ton of dmg I just want to know if they did enough so that people won’t immediately sigh upon seeing one lol. Also I don’t personally care if they aren’t as good as he says as I am fine being resto I just want to know if it can be an option rather than having to reroll into another class that is dps and start leveling all over again.
It’s pretty common around here for any thread asking “Will I be accepted as a hybrid DPS?” to have very mixed responses of people assuring you both that you will be able to find a raid group willing to accept you, or that everybody will shun you until you reroll or respec healer.
The reality is that you are going to have people who will sigh upon seeing that you’re not Restoration as a Shaman. The stigma is so strong against hybrids in Vanilla that regardless of them being good or bad to have in a raid, there’s going to be a group of people against having them.
That said there will be people accepting of them as well. If you seek out the right people, you’ll find a spot but you wont be as widely accepted as a pure DPS or a Fury Warrior. You will have to put up with some people telling you “lol, go and heal. Shamans can’t do anything else”
With Enhancement Shamans, one of the biggest assets you bring to a raid is not your damage but Totem Twisting. With the way that Windfury Totem works, you can actually swap between Windfury and Tranquil Air effectively giving both of them to the melee group.
I can respect that, I do acknowledge that shamans are more of a support class at heart which I’m assuming means that they focus more on buffs that than being the best at healing or dmg so I guess that while they might not do a ton of dmg or healing at least they also have more group utility going for them.
The issue boils down to the fact that Blizzard when making hyrbids did not make their hybrid-ness a good enough bonus to make up for the loss of dps they are charged as hybrid tax. For the first several years Blizzard was afraid of making a hybrid class too good… so they intentionally kept them poor.
when your gear gets really good, you can do some pretty good damage
but when other people get really good gear, they can do even better damage, and with less threat
First is holding Nightfall axe and trying to do damage with a single totem up… You are a waste of a raid spot better spent on something else.
Second method is gearing for MP5 and totem twisting while holding nightfall. This is the only way you’ll have the mana to be able to totem twist full time, and it cuts your already pathetic damage output in half to do (via your gear)… You are an even bigger waste of a raid slot mathematically, but might be able to trick people incapable of math into think you are valuable for the buffs you provide.
It was ELEMENTAL that starts scaling to be solid around the Naxx level, because it has pretty beast scaling… Any enhancements in a Naxx raid where merely there to soak extra 2handers for pvp… Also of note, like most classes/specs that are primarily PvP based, Naxx offers you very little in actual upgrades to be worth doing as a PvPer. If you want to Enhancement Shaman your way to glory, the AQ40 Set (or HWL set) + Hand of Rag is probably about your peak, with potential for maybe getting a shot at a Dark Edge of Insanity, if your guild is actually killing C’Thun also.
Contrary to popular belief, most people won’t mind any spec raiding as long as they put in effort to the raid. I’d say go for it, outside of major progression guilds there’ll always be a place. My guild was always heavy on paladins, we once did a BWL raid with 14 of us.
I played enhancement shaman in vanilla (I also played resto a significant amount). There is nothing wrong with being enhancement in vanilla; it’s not optimal, but that’s not the same thing as being useless.
I’ll put it this way in numbers. Keep in mind that no matter what spec you are, you’re still a shaman, and as a shaman, we are primarily a support class. In a group, our buffs and healing (even if it’s just a little bit of off-healing) are always going to be a valuable thing that we bring, and any consideration of how effective we are needs to include those. Similarly, no matter what spec you are, you need to actually use those support tools; if all you do is DPS, you will not be nearly as effective as you could be.
But that said, overall, let’s say that 10/10 is the most effective possible group member and 1/10 is the average night elf hunter. My ratings for enhancement shaman in various content would be:
Solo: 5/10 - About average. Nothing super special here.
5-mans: 8/10 - Powerful utility, ability to off-heal, ability to off-tank, ability to do damage, enhancement shamans are fantastic in 5-mans.
PVP - 8/10 - Just like 5-mans, PVP allows an enhancement shaman to show off our entire kit and it’s about so much more than big WF crits (though that’s definitely a part of it).
Raids - 4/10 - Below average, but hardly useless. Even a 0/0/0 shaman who’s willing to use their whole kit can contribute meaningfully to a raid.
Sulfuras wielding enhancement shaman were PVP terrors. If I recall enhance did strong damage. It had massive threat issues if geared properly. They would faceplant twice on bosses sometimes just due to uncontrollable windfury crits.
Honestly Enhance was crazy scary in PvP. If WF procced on your SS it chunked a good amount of HP out of the enemy even if it was a non-crit.
A lot of the hybrids have their place in raids, just not to the extent of regular classes. Filling a raid with 5-6 Dps Shamans or Paladins would simply be ineffective. But bringing 1 or 2 that know what theyre doing and gear accordingly (Nightfall, cough cough), are a huge asset to any raid. Biggest issue with Hybrids in Vanilla was that the game was new and people were very narrow-minded towards the meta. A lot has changed since then and there’s a good bunch of hybrid dps raiders in the private-realm community that do a decent job and made guides etc. that will be very valuable once Classic hits. The most important is that you don’t see yourself as a pure dps class.
A ret will always have to add-heal/dispel when necessary,
and a Enhancer will always have to keep rotating totems, dispel diseases/poisons and add-heal when necessary. That alone gets reflected in the fact that both classes’ damage rotations have a lot less APM than pure dps classes rotations. A hybrid that keeps it’s APM high, is a hybrid that understands his job.
I played enhance in vanilla, strictly pvp, i had 3 blues and the epic 2 hander from av rep and rest greens, i was able to kill any class usually with ease, it was the best time i ever had playing wow,cant waite for vanilla release
![:slight_smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")
I just want to know if it can be an option rather than having to reroll into another class that is dps and start leveling all over again.