When was the best expansion to be a DPS shaman?

[garonne]

i was playing pve as enh shaman in whole wotlk, in bis gear from icc you were 1st in tables all the time, or, very close to bis with legendary warriors, during ulduar on aoe fights like kologarn, there was no one better then good aoe enh, builded up for fire nova(with 3sec cd andless).

the tidbit about kologarn is completely false, ret paladins were the best class on kologarn bc of divine storm and it wasnt even close by any margin.

[Zirhark]

I personally loved playing Enh at the start of TBC. Towards the top in Kara and very competitive in t5. It was even fun in the final tier though the damage had fallen off a bit, knowing I was there totem twisting to get the most out of the melee group was a great time. I loved when shaman was more of a support class but that is a relic of the past at this point.

[Nyoken]

I was in 40 mam HM guild during WotLK as Ele, and me and another Ele shaman did okay. Then I quit raiding after Cho'gall and I read that's when Ele got REALLY good.

- - - Updated - - -



Lol, see! I should have stuck it out for one more tier!

Yea man... T12 was crazy, our set bonuses was so good they had to redesign them after the tier was over... like 3 times if I don't recall wrong. Basically I think it was our 4 set that made it so the cd on our fire ele could reset.... so you had perma fire ele up through an entire fight. Which was ridiculous considering fire ele did so much dmg back then. I was one of the lucky few to get the legendary staff as well, so the dmg was through the roof. Fun owning those mages on the dps meters ^.^

[Huggykaze]

Enhancers AOE in Legion is completely different. So we don't know how this will turn out. In the end, PVE wise, it's a numbers thing. And even PVP wise, they could tune a lot via gear premades and pvp specific talents.

I suppose, we will be 20+% behind those pures (rogues, mages, locks) - like in WOD. Don't expect us to top meters in highend raiding. I just hope they aren't screwing us like in 7.0.

Being 20+% behind top DPS is being screwed... Enh currently sims 30% below Arcane Mages on Patchwerk fight with 735 gear. The scaling is utterly broken, as at 705 and 720 the differences are ~10%, and Enh DPS was already considered low. Even if we compare to Frost mage, the difference is still over 20% at 735 and around 10% at lower gear levels.

Obviously, there's just 1 pure ST fight in whole HFC, so there are a lot of plays you can use to increase your DPS, but if Enh ends up being tuned the same it's now? We're fucked anyway. A lot of mid-tier guilds don't want Enh shamans, I had to fight for 3 months to be allowed to reroll, even after we started clearing HFC in 1 day, I still had to bring my Hunter to Archi and Manno for quite a while.

I don't expect the spec to be OP, I'd play a mage or a warlock if I wanted to play a faceroll machine, but being around middle of the pack with some unique utility would be great!

[Zerovii]

Man, a lot of that is depressing..especially compared to how well some other classes seem to do but I still like the class a lot. I've enjoyed what I've played in WoD and have a hard time going back to my rogue.

That scholar is missing one very dark note from cata though.
That spread mechanic didn't happen until either mid-late firelands or dragon soul's patch.
In firelands, you had flame shock and fire nova and that was it. You had to manually multidot it while it had a CD and watch as everyone else had a lot more fun AoEing (coughfrostdkscough) than you, this lasted until after(from? Forget release order tbh) the ZG/ZA patch as well. We walked into cata with magma totem and fire nova from the totem.

The spread mechanic wasn't even that favorable, due to 1 charge LL and no scaling CD at the time, along with LL being the highest damage source (Could be wrong on that one) and aoe packs in cata generally melting like butter so you couldnt even get to the third gcd to start aoeing. Even when you did the damage was mediocre at best.

[Wolfrick]

Elemental Shaman in CATACLYSM!!!!

All i have to say "MOVING while casting Lightning bolt...." it was amazing and I can`t belive blizzard removed it in MoP

Caster classes should get more Mobility....

WE KNOW HOW TO CAST MAGIC SPELLS, but you do not know how to multi task "CAST AND MOVE"....

[Wolfie of Medivh]

Late Wrath was my favorite time. We had a constant set of good tools, and the gear was very favorable. Of course, that's a very happy time for me playing so maybe its a bit of rose colored glasses.

[snaxattax]

I haven't played during late cata or during mop, but afaik:

everything you said about tbc thru early cata pvp is completely wrong. shaman could bloodlust in arenas and it was extremely strong assuming you had a competent dps partner.

considering enhance is the hands down top spec for cmodes, it's not too shabby now. in terms of average raid performance, shaman were better in the last 2 tiers of mop - and firelands elemental (also spine, but that was for fulminating tentacles and keeping healing rain down... not so much for dps) was beyond OP.

legion elemental looks very strong as far as mechanics go. they have no real gaping holes outside of rng on things like lightning rod for aoe, but target swapping certainly won't be a problem for elemental next expac with flameshock->eote lavabursts->stormcaller->CL or LBx2 giving you 3-4 targets with a 2 second base tick flame shock filling you with lava surges and a full maelstrom earthshock for a focus target. the spec also has strong keystones, and a non keystone Elementalist that could end up as strong as other specs' keystones depending on fire elemental damage after tuning. the spec just has tons of synergies. maybe the only 'problem' is earth shock not directly scaling with mastery, but it indirectly scales from the added resource generation of overload and would be hard to balance a 100 maelstrom earthshock.

of course, like every expac, tuning could fuck the spec in half for a tier or more.

[Elios]

Shamans were never flat out "Bad".

The real answer here in this thread should be "It was never too bad or too good, but in some fights it was fucking amazing... but boy those were rare."

If you compare to the ever viable classes like Warlocks, mages etc, its a pretty big discrepancy.

[Volitar]

BC
PVP: Was okay both specs were alright nothing amazing tho
PVE: Ele and Enh were highly desired for guilds because of the amazing buffs they brought an additional Bloodlust.

Wotlk:
PVP:Beast Cleave was good all expansion and Ele was good in season 7 and 8
PVE:This xpac went horrible for DPS shaman. Unique buffs gone, Demonogy Warlock had a better spellpower buff and did more damage.

Cata:
PVP:Ele was very bad this expansion but Enhance still did okay
PVE:T11 was a very bad start for Shaman but all was fixed in Firelands I think this was the tier lightningbolt while moving was added and Ele had insane tier bonus this tier (Lava Surge and PERMANENT FIRE ELEMENTAL) Enh got a really good caster weapon to use that was BiS before Blizzard put an end to Shenanigans like that. No CD CL was added in during Dragonsoul and was an 'alright' tier Shaman DPS.

MOP
PVP:Enh and Ele just decimated things this expansion. Both had tier 1 comps.
PVE:Ele was middle of the pack which means its pretty balanced for PVE and Enh had a really good expansion. Single target burst rape machine.

[Mueller Greyhound]

MoP and Legion

[Deleted]

Vanilla - LOL, you play DPS shaman? gtfo. Only if you had sulfuras, Enh could be ok. Nice buffs though but WF did cause aggro issues.

TBC - Both pretty decent but Ele fell off towards T6, Enh was pretty solid for end-game in SWP. Couldn't beat rogues, locks and hunters for consistency though. They did bring WF totem, bloodlust which was a big deal.

Wrath - Both sucked hard throughout especially Enh although elemental became the most OP spec in PvP during ICC. Enh was favorable like in WoD for certain comps. At the time, only shamans brought bloodlust and it could be used during arena. I forget when they stopped allowing that.

Cata - Mixed bag. At times Ele was very good, at times Enh was decent but I can't recall Enh being OP. Ele was shit in PvP, I played it during the worst patch ever for ele 4.0. Only Nuvoz got anywhere with the spec, everyone else couldn't get carried by a good LSD.

MoP - Best time for shamans imo. Elemental was crap in the first patch but very good after 5.2 with some considerable buffs making them solid for raiding and kinda OP in PvP and infamous for the only spec at the time that could global people with good procs, I remember 1 shotting a DK at full hp with ele blast and lava burst procs. Both specs were also just very fun to play. Enh also had a reputation for being able to nearly 1 shot you, incredible burst and fun to play.

WoD - Ruined shamans for me, switched to Spriest because of it. Lost the fun factor for me, ele was completely non-viable in PvP and only shined on cleave fights in PvE. Enh was ok all around, good in certain PvP comps but their strength was their absurd AoE. Not much else.

TL;DR - MoP by far.

Legion elemental though looks very interesting. I'm really hyped to see how it plays out in the long term. I'm glad its not dumbed down even further though, seems to be a nice bit of choice and complexity added but not to overbearing.

[Socialhealer]

firelands and mop after the first tier.

[Xcell]

1 million dps burst in siege of org... that was orgasmic ))

[Zirhark]

Ah yeah, the good old BC days. I have the opposite of fondness for them. If you made the awful mistake of picking shaman and not wanting to heal at end game heres what happened. (This is mostly for enhancement though, I never played ele).

- No CC so no one wanted you for heroic dungeons.
- Hybrid tax, so your dps was meaningless.
- Stat priority was too different from hunters so you ended up having to use leather for exp. and hit rating (hunters didnt use exp, and needed half the hit rating and 99% of the agi mail drops where itemised for them so... sucks to be you enh!)
- Rotation: FS, SS, ES and repeat. I actually had a macro that combined FS and ES so I only had to puck 2 buttons.
- Totem twisting was awesome... as long as you managed to convince the rogues to take off the poison from their main hand, which they never did in my experience.
- Raiding: just stay alive and pop hero when we tell you to.
- PvP? Lol. Not counting the fact that if you had the bad judgement to actually go into an arena rogues would stun, stab, staby-stun, stab, staby-stun, staby-kill you like it was nothing. It was sad really. The only way you would live was when no one was doing anything to kill you. You were suceptible to everything (no cc breaks, no real deffensives) and you had no CC and no stuns. And pls don´t ask about totems because those were the days of the "totem stomping macro".

Once you managed to get into a raid group things evened out a bit since you actually contributed in a way. But getting there took a lot of patience and help from friends and guildies. Looking back I guess I should have switched to heals for dungeons then grab enh peaces the other didnt want but back then just didnt feel like healing.

Yeah the no CC for heroics was really tough. Our dps in raids was great early but we didn't scale very well at all, so in t4 I was always near the top but as we progressed I steadily fell down.

The leather gear did bug me, but only a little. Glad they fixed that.

Every classes rotations were super easy back then, Locks just spammed shadow bolt. I found the depth all came in totem management. I did not have that problem with the rouges and their poisons, sorry you experienced that.

Didn't play pvp on my shaman then, I was a dirty frost mage for pvp. Most regrettable time of my life!

[Schattenlied]

IMO early TBC before they fixed the downranking bug (lasted until mid T5 or so IIRC).

If you put max rank on one weapon and down one rank on the other, any time one procced windfury, it would also proc the other, so you got 4 hits instead of 2, and there was no internal cooldown or any of that, it was pretty insane... Also helped that having 2 weapons hitting at reasonably quick speeds meant there were never very large gaps in procs like there was in vanilla when using a 2h weapon.

To clarify, windfury back then did a hell of a lot more damage than it does now.. Right now WF does 3 hits of 42% weapon damage, back in TBC it was 2 hits of 100% weapon damage + a large chunk of extra attack power... so it was a ton of damage.

[shammypie]

Enhancement was great in MoP, especially during ToT.

Best time was literally The MoP pre-patch with all the mechanical changes but before Mop actually dropped when we were all raiding Deathwing. Fully Pvp gear with 1 trinket and 2 heroic deathwing maces was a rofl stomp. Anyone not a tank was instantly destroyed by AA procs with unleash elements and they couldn't get away. You could also 1-2 heal yourself back to full. It was the only time I could remember being able to go even with a hunter.

[Sarevokcz]

firelands and mop after the first tier.

I prefer ToT tbh, firelands were fine dps-wise, BUT the fights themselves were clunky for our mechanics, CL still had CD back then, so the aoe bosses were pain and fire ele had retarded AI, worthless on spider and rhyolith, on Majordomo he didnt get the dmg buff, so less valuable and sometimes he just fucked up and stood around, even if you did open up properly with flameshock and couple of spells before summoning him, the only real good fight was Baleroc, as FE was least likely to not cooperate there...

MoP fixed alot of issues with ele and was probably the best time I had with it, ToT was an amazing raid, second best for me after Ulduar, great bosses, lots of room for enjoyment, good damage, great offhealing CDs when in need, one incredible boss for dps (I loved Durumu so much) even if some mechanics are haunting me today, like the mini rhinos on second boss...

[Deleted]

Been at it since TBC but Patch 5.4 was the best i found Enhancement to play. Worked so beautifully. The changes to Flurry, Unleash Elements and the addition of Echo of the Elements turned it into a spamfest. Legion looks a lot better than WoD (playstyle-wise) but we don't actually look like shaman anymore until we start casting something.

[Deleted]

MoP, for both enha and ele.