Enhance shaman

[Williamson75]

This is really just my ideas for boosting enhancement shaman dps. Some of these were posted ages ago and other ideas that people added over time. I am under the impression your looking at ideas for class changes to help buff heavily under preforming spec so people are a bit more even. Some of these ideas are from having played V+.

ability changes
Flametongue/Frostbrand
I would like to see something that rewards spellhance and to improve the core of it i think it requires a buff to Flametongue and Frost brand. They suffer from a rather low scaling and a bit of a weak base line damage. i think boosting the scaling up to 20% on flametounge and 30% on frostbrand because it is not every single hit.

Rockbiter/Windfury
The next thing to look at would be rockbiter and windfury. if we could rework rockbiters threat to only function when using a shield that would open it as something to be used more often. Right now using it is a very bad idea when you have to watch your threat.

Windfury has been a consistent problem for shamans because of how wild the damage can be and how much they are held back for the sheer rng of it. We need to make this more consistent. The major issue with this increasing the proc rate puts it so far ahead of all other options with 2 extra attacks. If we follow the rule that totems are weaker versions of the skill we can change how it functions. The imbue is 20% proc 2 extra attacks while to the totem is 20% proc 1 extra attack with more ap. To improve it I would look at increasing the proc rate to 40/50% and making it 1 extra attack with a slightly buff ap buff. This would reduce the crazy burst they have while also keeping the power and reducing the absolutely insane dips between bad dps with no procs and the dopamine highs of chunking elites. it also helps with the massive spiking threat.

Earthshock
Earthshock is another issue. The inbuilt threat is wonderful for shaman tanks. Its damn near a taunt from the amount of threat generated. Its is also a huge nerf to the dps side. Doing the same as rockbiter would vastly help. Tying it to having a shield would allow enhance to make use of stormstrike. As it is elemental shamans and rogues stuck using poisons are the ones who get to use it. Ele loves it and rogues are feels bad for not having wf.

Stormstrike
Stormstrike feels really slow and clunky. A 12s cd is brutal when its your only melee skill but we can agree that constant spam is bad. Changing the cd to 16s at rank 1 and 8-10s for rank 2 would be a step to the right direction. The clunky part is how the debuff is rarely used by enhance. Changing it to a self buff that increases the damage of your next frost, fire or nature spell by 10% which is less than it does now. If you can make sure that only you use it reducing the amount and it having wider options your shocks should increase your damage. It also keeps the ability to swap your shocks based on what you are fighting. Looking at doing mc, you not really using flame shock on bosses and frost shock is just the better choice. Same as aq40 you would seemingly use flame shock fairly frequently.

Lightning shield
Lightning shield/thunder head is a rather odd place. If you use it on a tank you have to reapply mid fight often and applying prepull can lead to you suddenly stealing aggro and wiping raids with it. Its rather okay for leveling but end game it has poor use. For this we have a few options but we can ultimately ignore this. A static talent that throws an orb on a crit and increasing the number of orbs. We could also rework this to improve shaman tanking. Buff threat gen or even reducing the damage they take by 5% or so.

Bloodlust
Bloodlust is strong but also a pain. As an enhancement shaman you are not the target of this ability. leaning in to the support side having it be group wide with a longer cd would both increase the support side of battle and also let us use it partly on ourselves. also having it be a slightly weaker version wouldnt be a bad idea.
New ability ideas
I would like to preface this with of course adding a ton of new ability would lead to massive bloat.

Primal strike: the concept of this is to give another melee skill to enhancement. They are people who put down a staff and took up a weapon to fight on the frontline. To this end I would like to see a second melee ability. Something to show them having learned from the warriors around them. Another instant attack is just too much and slam seems like a rather strong choice. We don't need the talented version of slam we are not talented warriors of supreme skill. Not hyper trained beasts who mastered the pinnacle weapons.

Taking the basic version and adding a cd to reflect the lack of our natural talents who both be lore worthy and good balance considering we are not limited with rage gen but have mana. The basic idea is an attack with your weapon damage that has the same rate to proc your imbues as a normal attack. so 6s or 8 cd with a 1.5 or 2.0 cast time and a mana cost. Adds more to the rotation than totem twisting which would still be valuable. Could also act as a short 1-3s taunt when using a shield with rockbiter (tldr 6-8s cd 1.5-2.0 cast and mana)

Defense totems
Changing stone skin and wind wall to apply after other reduction of options would be greatly useful.

Talents
We need some better shaman mitigation talents for tanking but I am not the one to talk to about that. You would need to talk to Shockwarden, Ironfodase and a few other prominent shaman tanks. They are in the best place to give advice on what shaman tanks need the most to improve the viability of them lead tanking different raids past bwl. I do have some ideas but like I said there are better to listen to. I highly recommend talking to them when you can to get opinions.

We also need a deep dive into resto talents. Once again I just dont know enough to recommend anything for them. I do know that once geared well enough they tend to take the enhancement tree to buff their team and take blood lust.

Now what I can talk on is 2h dps or spellhance. I have researched it heavily and have raided in classic as one despite push back. I wont claim I am a beast or anything that silly but enhance has had the same kind of issues for ages.

Imbues need talents that improve the element ones. Increasing the proc of frostbrand or doing a bit of extra Flametongue damage. Swapping the early mana talent for increase frostbrand proc and extra burn damage on flametongue would increase the early power of enhancement. There is the option for a third talent in the first row. There is a few for several other classes so it would not be something absolutely crazy to do.

Having guardian totems lead into a tank talent that increase your dodge/damage redux by 1% up to 5% per talent point if you have windwall or stoneskin. Also the option to have stone skin add 30% to armor. To do this we need to move enhancing totems down a tier.

Having two tank talents in tier 3 we should also move ancestral guardian down one more tier. Opening up a tier spot to add a new talent. Now at this tier we could move primal strke here or just have it be a level ability. Adding some extra spell hit on crits maybe 3 talent points for 5% spell hit on a physical crit. This would benefit all forms of enhance because getting your shock resisted due to not having spell hits hurts alot of your dps. seeing a hybrid spellhance this would drastically buff them and still help normal 2h enhance.

Closing
I would like to end this by saying you have a great game with some issues. I am not trying to tear you down or degrade the work the team has put in but enhancement shaman is neglected. Right now they get into raids with close friends or are only brought for totems. We are a support spec but our own personal dps is lack luster to the extreme. I hope going forward to see the class brought from the absolute bottom to around a mid tier level. Also I cannot wait for the new patch and it will be awesome. So thank you for the passion you put into development and the quality of the game you make.

[Jstansberry]

I really like the idea of a Slam-like ability for enhancement shamans. Wouldn't really be useable in pvp as you have to stand still in melee range to cast it, but would allow for more dps in pve. I think it should replace Bloodlust as the capstone enhancement talent. Would be neat if it had a longer cast time than Slam, maybe 2.5-3seconds, but either guaranteed a WF proc or did nature damage instead of physical so it could benefit from the Stormstrike debuff - although it being resistable in pve would be pretty bad.

I don't think too much consideration should be given to shaman tanking, to be honest. Too many tools need to be given to shamans that the entire enhancement tree would have to be revamped and gutted of any chance of being a decent melee dps. I know some people have fun trying to make it work but I don't think it's possible for it to work out the way anyone wants it to.

Enhancement as a spec already has a seemingly insurmountable amount of issues to overcome even as a dps spec to become viable - itemization (both due to lack of items made for enhancement and due to stats being spread thin), poor scaling, bad talent placement, over-reliance on RNG, and serious threat issues. There is not enough real estate in the enhancement tree to support both a tank and dps spec. In the feral tree for druids where most talents simply affect both cat and bear form it works because they have to choose between the tank form and dps form, whereas enhancement shamans would be receiving both the tank and dps benefits at once.

Making enhancement the "support" spec as the devs seem to be intending is also just not going to work. There's no reason to give an enhancement shaman gear because Bloodlust and totems don't get any stronger if you give them better gear and their dps scales incredibly poorly compared to other classes. The talents to make totems stronger are also such marginal buffs that an ele/resto shaman's totems are pretty much the same while being an entire class instead of being a totem twisting Bloodlust bot that does negative dps. Even with the AQ20 books for rank 3 Grace of Air and rank 5 Strength of Earth, the talent to make them stronger only gives you 11 more agility/strength. The Improved Weapon Totems talent that causes WF totem proc attacks to give 30% more ap is less than 0.5% increase in dps for those benefiting from it. These support talents are just such minor increases from the baseline that they aren't worth it in comparison to being elemental or resto and being able to do useful things other than totems. Bloodlust is strong but the spec should be more than a cooldown that they will never benefit from themselves. Again, Bloodlust doesn't get any better with gear and it's the only thing enhancement offers over other specs that is of any real value.

The solution would not be to make the totem buff talents stronger, as the totems are already so strong as baseline. Making totem buffs any stronger could make raid content trivialized. Enhancement should just be given the ability to do dps comparable to cat druids and ret paladins. Replace the incredibly underwhelming totem buff talents with useful dps talents. Put the hit rating talent from resto in the enhancement or elemental tree. Make the Totemic Mastery talent from resto the baseline for totem range so Tremor totem isn't so awful without that talent. Let enhancement shamans go deep enough into elemental that they can at least get Elemental Devastation. Feral and ret/shockadin have become so strong on turtle yet enhancement has been left in the dust. I will donate my firstborn if the devs give enhancement as much attention as they've given melee dps/tank paladins and druids.

[Williamson75]

I see the benefit of hit being moved from the healing tree. It's honestly worthless to healers. The otherside of shaman tanking I think can be done. I mean looking at other v+ even if a lot less lore accurate have decided to make talents apply when using a shield. For example with weapon mastery having another talent add 10% block or buffing the power of existing talents would help with mitigation. From what I have seen it's the greatest weakness of shaman tanks. They just can't take the damage despite pretty solid threat.

[Panzerenhancer]

i see you finally wisened up and buffed enhancement shaman.

too little too late. should have been quicker. i was literally giving what shamans needed on a silver platter on your discord and you banned me because i disagreed with your trash devs.

now blizzard has done pretty much everything i suggested you do, and their game is stealing your shaman playerbase causing pvp imbalance in your server.

good riddance, maybe next time you'll listen when someone makes a 4 pager explaining what a class needs and why it needs it based on 20 years of experience.

in hindsight you did me a huge favor, avoided wasting my time on a server ran by biased devs who play alliance and thus have an interest in keeping shaman, specifically, in a state of gimpdom.

[Koronisz]

i see you finally wisened up and buffed enhancement shaman.

too little too late. should have been quicker. i was literally giving what shamans needed on a silver platter on your discord and you banned me because i disagreed with your trash devs.

now blizzard has done pretty much everything i suggested you do, and their game is stealing your shaman playerbase causing pvp imbalance in your server.

good riddance, maybe next time you'll listen when someone makes a 4 pager explaining what a class needs and why it needs it based on 20 years of experience.

in hindsight you did me a huge favor, avoided wasting my time on a server ran by biased devs who play alliance and thus have an interest in keeping shaman, specifically, in a state of gimpdom.

Rent free

[987004590]

Is it possible that dual wielding is more suitable for shamans while two-handed is more suitable for warriors? dps can improve by triggering windfury with the off-hand and hitting two extra main-hand attacks.

[Bigsmerf]

i see you finally wisened up and buffed enhancement shaman.

too little too late. should have been quicker. i was literally giving what shamans needed on a silver platter on your discord and you banned me because i disagreed with your trash devs.

now blizzard has done pretty much everything i suggested you do, and their game is stealing your shaman playerbase causing pvp imbalance in your server.

good riddance, maybe next time you'll listen when someone makes a 4 pager explaining what a class needs and why it needs it based on 20 years of experience.

in hindsight you did me a huge favor, avoided wasting my time on a server ran by biased devs who play alliance and thus have an interest in keeping shaman, specifically, in a state of gimpdom.

Lemme just go through this real quick

1) These first few sentences alone give me the impression you said some stupid or offensive shit (so against the rules) and were rightfully banned for harassing turtle's workforce... Or not. That could just be speculation. I've never heard of "disagreements" being the cause of a ban though, so it does raise some questions.

2) We're not blizzard. This isn't a blizzard project, and the team here isn't going to cater or listen to some keyboard warrior generously providing the de-facto best most efficient method of fixing a class, nor will they follow the design philosophy of a company that sexually harasses women and steals breast milk... Not to mention most of the runes are just skills from later expansions. Rehashed, unimaginative and reused assets.

3) You're welcome to post four pages worth of suggestions here. No, really. I'd love to see some more ideas.

4) Jesus christ you're petty...

[Imonobor]

i see you finally wisened up and buffed enhancement shaman.

too little too late. should have been quicker. i was literally giving what shamans needed on a silver platter on your discord and you banned me because i disagreed with your trash devs.

now blizzard has done pretty much everything i suggested you do, and their game is stealing your shaman playerbase causing pvp imbalance in your server.

good riddance, maybe next time you'll listen when someone makes a 4 pager explaining what a class needs and why it needs it based on 20 years of experience.

in hindsight you did me a huge favor, avoided wasting my time on a server ran by biased devs who play alliance and thus have an interest in keeping shaman, specifically, in a state of gimpdom.

I had a real heartfelt laugh. Thanks for the entertainment. Have you considered a career in standup comedy?

[Tanasa]

Playing shaman driving players slowly insane is a tale as old as WoW. I can't imagine what twenty years of shaman "experience" does to the human mind.

[Ninjerk]

Playing shaman driving players slowly insane is a tale as old as WoW. I can't imagine what twenty years of shaman "experience" does to the human mind.

Just ask Tseric.

[Charanko]

i see you finally wisened up and buffed enhancement shaman.

too little too late. should have been quicker. i was literally giving what shamans needed on a silver platter on your discord and you banned me because i disagreed with your trash devs.

now blizzard has done pretty much everything i suggested you do, and their game is stealing your shaman playerbase causing pvp imbalance in your server.

good riddance, maybe next time you'll listen when someone makes a 4 pager explaining what a class needs and why it needs it based on 20 years of experience.

in hindsight you did me a huge favor, avoided wasting my time on a server ran by biased devs who play alliance and thus have an interest in keeping shaman, specifically, in a state of gimpdom.

can you send me the 4 pager? I rly want to read it