I started playing WoW since the beta in 2004, with the expansion Mists of Pandaria I switched to play on Vanilla Private Servers, Blizzards Classic Wow and now Turtle Wow.
After spending hundreds of hours in forums and discord, discussing with the active community, here are my thoughts on the current state of Enhancement Shamans and some suggestions. I want to mention, that I love vanilla wow and my aim is to conserve the Vanilla experience as much as possible:
What is the current situation?
Shamans provide huge raid/party support in terms of Windfury Totem (WF) , regardless of the talent specialization.
WF and other totems are reasons, why every raid wants to get as much shamans as possible (1 in every group).
Because Restoration Shamans have an awful talent tree, they often put 31 talent points in the enhancement tree to get Bloodlust, so they can buff other players even more.
Therefore, Enhancement Shamans don‘t provide anything else than Restoration Shamans to the raid.
As a spiritual (magic) warrior-like melee class, Enhancement Shamans mainly auto attack their opponents.
Attack power(strength), hit chance, critical hit chance (agility) and haste are the stats Shamans need to get to improve their dps.
Enhancers also can cast a shock every 6 seconds, which needs spell power, spell hit and spell critical chance, to become useful.
The problem here is, that even when a Shaman has all those stats, he will run out of mana quickly.
The only one melee ability for Enhancement Shamans is Stormstrike, which is just an additional attack with a buff for the next 2 nature damaging abilities, which is Earth Shock (if no one else „steals“ the buff).
So our DPS mainly results from auto attacking, 1 physical and 1 magical ability. (and fire totem)
The most iconic class thing (besides totems), in my opinion, are the weapon imbues.
The problem is, we only can use Windfury Weapon competitively.
Our DPS?
As a hybrid class, we must stay behind „pure“ dps classes (rogues, mages, locks, hunters …) but somewhere at 75%. (different opinions on how much % here).
Reality?
Look logs from classic and Turtle WoW. Look at the Top parses… compare them to the casuals….
Enhancement Shamans underperform tremendously.
To summarize the current situation of Enhancement Shamans:
* Auto attacking class
* 1 offensive melee ability
* 1 offensive spell cast (Shock)
* Nearly all stats needed: hit, crit, attack power, spell hit, spell crit, spell power, intellect/mp5 for mana
* Dps: you can check logs, but its about 20-30% of the top dps class.
What do Enhancement Shamans need:
First of all, we should try to conserve as much as possible and change as little as necessary!
Therefore, the biggest part of the Shaman community wants to stay as a two-hand-wielding class, with more synergies between attack power and spell power and better mana sustain.
Suggestions for solutions:
There are many great ideas on discord:
One idea is a talent, that allows Shamans two weapon imbues on a 2h weapon simultaneously (one physical, and one magical for instance).
Another suggestion is a new melee ability (in addition to Stormstrike or as a rework), which causes different effects, depending on the current main weapon imbue.
For example:
* Rockbiter: taunt the target
* Windfury: Stormstrike
* Flametongue: some kind of a mages „Living Bomb“ or „Dragon Breath“ from later expansions.
* Frostbrand: instant freeze
So with this, other playstyles (like Spellhancer) become competitive and also the current (very bad) state in PvP gets buffed! (Different issue, but which also should be taken in consideration)
Other than those, a very important and missing thing are synergies, which got implemented back in tbc.
A talent, which provides Spellpower of some % of your AP.
* Mental Quickness: Reduces the mana cost of your instant cast spells by 2/4/6% and increase your spell damage and healing by an amount equal to 10/20/30% of your Attack Power.
A talent, which returns you some mana.
* Shamanistic Rage: Reduces all damage taken by 30% and gives your successful melee attacks a chance to regenerate mana equal to 30% of your attack power. Lasts 15 sec.
![Image](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/810850759658831903/1180957507519262780/Enh_Shaman_talents_by_Iracundo.jpg?ex=658889e2&is=657614e2&hm=c54298a989b4247c0160aa3b48aa4dc58428a2c5c476ffeb575721ccf6e572da&)
(Thanks to Iracundo)
And please, put the talent „Nature’s Guidance in the Elemental Tree, so that every kind of Shaman spec can have access to it (Classic Enhancement, Spellhancement, Classic Elemental, Restoration)
Other life-friendly improvements:
* Please, remove the 5 min cooldown of weapon imbues completely. It is just a pain in the ass. (Paladins have their auras, and they’re short ally buffs. Shamans should have their weapon imbues (like auras) and totems.
* Make 2/2 Ghostwolf an nstant cast.
There is a lot of work for all of us, (PvP Balance, Resto Talents rework, ...) and I hope, that the player community and the developers pull together.
Thank you very much, if you have read through all this text!
STORM, EARTH AND FIRE, HEED MY CALL!