Feel free to check. Characters are public and you can check the achievements to understand at what level I played and what activities I participated.
Storm strike was close to lava lash depending to build/expansion and were the main ways to build MSW. Only difference now is that with ice strike being introduced and LL being more important, SS dropped in significance but is still used for the same reason (just lower priority).
Yeah because earth shock was filling that gap until like wod.
they serve the same purpose as a filler and they removed earth shock in order to just have the slow functionality in the rotation.
Correct for ice strike. On the other hand EB when used as a talent was mostly used on cd rotationally.
I hope you can understand my point where we can actually go ability by ability and most of them are still the same (even their functionality). If you try that with most other specs, it is not only most of their abilities that changed, but also their main playstyle/playloop.
Now for the legion rework I could write paragraphs but I wanna spare you form that. My opinion is that it had promises, they built some nice playstyle loops, but by bfa they dropped the ball and instead of committing to it, they reverted to wod playstyle and added the liked legion mechanics (CrL aoe, stormbringer, etc).
Yea you are clearly a higher tier player and entitled to enjoy your own style of play. That absoloutley fine. But enhancement doesnāt feel the same to play any more.its this weird alien hybrid melee range thing that doesnāt look impressive or feel good to play. Iāve switched to evoker and monk for the last two expansions and i alway convince myself to come back to shaman mid expansion to this class because iāve invested a stupid amount of time in to it. It doesnāt feel great come a new expansion that we are again back to square one. Even though iāve tried to adapt to the mess that is elementalist. Now iām a tiny bit optomistic that with the removal of the tier set and totemic the totemic build will have to change and maybe fire nova can come back into play and maybe say buy to two button bind icestrike hailstorm frost shock but i can only hope
Look as I said numerous times, I totally respect when people have the position that THEY do not like the spec for x,y,z.
If we go point by point, I also agree with you on most things:
ice strike and hailstorm could get the icefury treatment from ele. No reason to have an extra keybind if we can remove it and put that interaction somewhere else.
Fire nova should be a better spell. At the moment with the cap it feels redundant and is contested by hailstorm, which is clearly superior. No reason to have a cap on the nova when we already have a cap on FS.
I think that a big percentage of the community agrees on small targeted changes like those, and IS good feedback to give.
The more i think about it, post like the original post here are due to players feel like the top 5% have to much control over the game and donāt take into considering the rest of the player base.
Which through no fault of their own they totally do without even realising it. Causal players donāt need to follow a meta but iāve played enough warhammer to know that what people do in tournaments is pretty much what everyone else does. This tents to create bad blood in situations like this one as the top players are just playing the best builds they can find they donāt necessarily mean for everyone to copy them doing it
builds like the current enhancement shaman builds are far to full on for most casual players but if you go to places like wowhead and icy veins thats how you are gettibg told to play. Like I said iāve played Shaman a very long time and i struggled in Df season 3 trying to pick up these new builds, especially with the pace of the gameplay. It also doesnāt help that shamans are already massively bloated with a lot of situational abilities that most players wont use.
Yeah thatās a common perception problem, especially in multiplayer games if you do not have a set premade that you can say āscrew the metaā and play what you want.
Now for the top x%, I also think that this is a misconception, since most of the time the top % is those I hear saying to choose what you want to play. Sure you will be told that āchoosing x over y is 2,5% lossā but it is also implied that it is a trade off you can make if you prefer that playstyle.
Especially in high end where you understand your limitations and how rng works with pulls, if a talent is a 2% loss but makes the playstyle more enjoyable for me, I am taking that.
Just keep in mind that this is kind of a fallacy. Because the top of the player base not only interacts between themselves (through making guides, theorycrafting, videos, etc) but with a really big portion of the community (through discord, streams, comments).
So when an average player sees that blizzard took the feedback of X or Y top player to heart, it was not really HIS feedback alone, but also the sum of the feedback he gathered through his interactions.
This is the reason threads like those are kind of weird. If you see the interactions of wordup in the channel, you can see how satisfied/dissatisfied he is with the changes and what he believes. But this is different to what can be written in a wowhead article that will reach both blizzard and the vast majority of players.
Iām one of those people. I main Retribution, but I try out other classes for their transmogs. Enhancement is one of the most ability-bloated, clunky, and proc-dependent specs Iāve played so far. My journey to 1.8k rating with Shaman was just painful, granted Iām far from being as good as other people at PvP. But even while doing World Quests, it makes me want to quit every time.
Which is also kinda weird considering Enhancement is garbage in both PvE and PvP compared to other classes, people gatekeeping the current Shaman just want to be special , they do max mythic +10 keys and call themselfs the elite of players.
Funny thing itās more Blizzard who is forcing this playstyle , tuning our sets around a CAPSTONE talent gotta be the most [funny word] idea iāve ever seen.
Big truer here , it is really RNG dependant most bloated spec in game with x2 sometimes even x3 of core rotational dps abillities that you use which reset randomlyā¦ its messy to track or look at it when doing pvp/pve mechanics or reacting to anything (I am 2.3k enhance exp player).
it feels like i put x5 times the effort in arenas when playing enhance to even be 2.1-2.2k rating i lvled a lock qued only for 2 days into arena and i am 2.1kā¦ without touching my lock since MoP .
Sorry but as a long time enhancement shaman i dont declare losing identity by removing lightning bolt /chain lightning spamming from the rotation. Dunno why certain people define enhancement shaman as āinstant lightning bolt bruhā. In my opinion, legion started going a good way to make a melee spec, actually a melee focused spec. Not some mongo who cast buffed spells as instant, instead of casting. I agree that the legion and bfa versions also had many issues, but they should stayed that path and working on it.
I dont think enhancement shaman should be a spec thats main power is casting instant lightning bolts in a melee range.
Also from blizzard note on enhancement shaman: āA totemic warrior who strikes foes with weapons imbued with elemental powersā. Nowhere says its a lightning bolt spammer. Elemental can have that thx.
I also hope that we will once again see a more melee focused enhancement shaman in a future, maybe as a new hero talent which change certain abilites.
And good for you, this is why I am talking in percentages, because there are no absolutes.
They are not. I can speak about myself, and from what I remember from vanilla to wod enh was the ābattlemageā spec.
Meaning they shared most of their abilities with resto and ele and their niche was using melee attacks to empower/enable powerful spells. I can understand some people did not like this, but that was its identity.
During Legion they tried moving away from that and building it from the bottom up, although that iteration did not work so well (playstyle was deemed abit too similar to fury warrior). Maybe if they had a good vision for the spec things would have been different.
At the end of the day, with the feedback from the community they decided to move the spec to its roots instead of trying another rework from the ground up.
Having said all that, which is just observations about what happened, my opinion is that I do not care that much. Sure I like the āgishā (to steal a term from dnd) aesthetic, but the most important things is how it plays.
Agreed. I first started the game in WotLK. I chose enhance shaman because it was the clear ābattlemageā type mostly focused on melee. Similar to paladin but I didnt wanna be a paladinā¦
Since then, expansion after expansion enhance is become less of a melee mage and more just a caster that requires melee range. It has the neither the strengths but both the weakness. Requires melee range but is squishier than many casters at the same time.
Shaman is the only class where 2 dps spec share moderate amount of damage abilities. No idea why blizz dont make enhancement more elemental themed melee (or close ranged eg 25 yard) abilites for a melee class, and drop out the entire maelstrom weapon system to the trashcan. Its not about root or fantasy of the shaman class, its just lazy design.
Strangely for other classes where u have 2 or 3 dps spec, its not a problem that they dont use the same abilities for dmgā¦