We spent the entire first season being one of, if not the WORST class choice.
And with another season about to roll out and almost no changes being made, it looks pretty grim.
I keep waiting for the Mage Dev to wake up and realise that they have other responsiblities after giving mage endless treatment and high performance in the early season.
Everytime I look at class adjustments, its other classes who are already outperforming others that are recieving further adjustments and improvements.
You need only look at the Mythic+ leaderboads or raid tuning to see how badly we’ve consistently performed. I say all this as someone who was participating in mythic raiding and high keys.
Destruction is only real viable spec in high end content, since its giving the freedom of movement, but its numbers haven’t ever competed with the constant tunings of S+ tier specs.
Demonology is a clunky unituitive long cast time spec that doesn’t fit into a movement centric modern WoW and you rarely get to play optimally and line up your summons with constant CC/movement taking priority.
Affliction is completely undertuned and unfun (you need only glance at the myriad of legitimate forum posts about this).
We have a myriad of dead talents and lack of customisation etc etc.
Thematically, the class is brillaint, but its held back by tuning, still existing bugs, talents and lack of choice and variety. Evertyime i watch a Kalamazi video, I can see him losing further hope, fighting the impulsion to sigh and lose patience as things really just don’t get any better.
This class needs a serious examination and shouldn’t have to wait until the final season before any meaningful changes come through. How long does a class need to be dumpstier tier with only healthstones and gateways to offer before its brought up to par? We have a long standing history of either being overpowered (which is usually quick to be adjusted) and what we have now with no meaningful middle ground.
If this was a more popular class like paladin or mage, people would be a lot more outspoken about the current state of things.
In high end content in THIS game… damage output is important. and this DPS spec doesnt have the AOE burst time to compete with tanks consistently on anything between m+2 and +9.
It doesnt have the AOE burst to deal with raid adds, it doesnt have the ST to compete either.
Atleast in DF we did bad AOE but our ST in AOE was solid enough for justified M+ invites…
Now if it wasnt for Soulstone or healthstone in mythic raids - you’d just take a better DPS class. Right now… we are literally HEalthstone vendors and Wipe Recovery bots, although next week we lose the wipe recovery uniqueness.
Pugging was a nightamre for me but I managed to get KSH. I’ve had groups where I’m criticized for lacking dps when I’m following my rotation flawlessly while an enhance sham or mage is facerolling and outdpsing me.
This isn’t the worst we have been but it definitely sucks being middle of the table. Since getting KSH I have rerolled enhance Shaman and have been loving it, doing 1 million dps at 620 ilvl when it took me on my lock 630 ilvl to do the same.
I’d like to counter and point out that Demo has gotten back almost all of its core proc generation and the dreadstalker proc is getting buffed. Demo won’t be S tier but it will be just fine. In fact, looking at Kalamazi’s key tests Demo is on par with damage with Destro. The big problem Demo is gonna have this upcoming season is a lack of utility. There will be a lot of magic dispels and Demo doesn’t have an answer to.
Everything else I agree with. Devs are too busy worshipping Mages to notice Aff problems or our clunky class tree.
i also manage to get KSH, was hell to get group invites the entire season, when your class can only do dps but you lack in that department you just dont get invites.
I think everyone here has experienced the sting of pugging Mythic+ as a dps class that hits weaker than all the other higher dmg classes with heroism (part of a much larger class design problem).
Thanks for the reply! Honestly it sounds more like Shaman’s Reincarnation to me and I am so glad it’s not something they’re giving another class indefinitely.
