Request: Compilation of Enhancement Rotations/Gameplay by Expansion

[suthekb]

I've been reading the posts here, on Reddit, on the official forums and in communities on youtube and it's occurred to me that a huge problem with the discussions has been that the rotation and potentially the identity of enhancement has changed fairly drastically a few times over the 11 years WoW has been out. Older players from WotLK and previous are getting interested because the story of the game is going back to it's roots, but they are remembering a play-style that was actually very different from what the gameplay is like now for enhancement.

I played enhancement in Vanilla/BC and a little in Wrath because the fantasy of the enhancement shaman as a buffer and windfury melee burst dps was really awesome and stopped in late WotLK because I ended up liking frost DK tanking more and started on a path of tanking for the next few expansions.

My goal with this thread is to break down what was iconic about Enhancement during each expansion. What made us choose the class when we did and what was the core rotation/gameplay like. I'll take the responses and edit them into this initial post into categories for each expansion; so when describing something please state when the spec played in that fashion. Hopefully this will not only help the community see where enhancement has come from and where it's gone, but also provide a place for Blizzard to see what we remember and enjoyed about the class over the years

Vanilla

• The only play-style was 2h and relied heavily on WF procs to do crazy burst damage. Keep Flameshock up, Frost shock and Stormstrike on CD was the basic combat rotation.
• A large part of gameplay was keeping totem buffs up and in the right spot. It was clunky and annoying and you needed the simple rotation to be able to keep the totems going. The nice thing about it was that we had an iconic role in raiding. We buffed shit, a lot. Bloodlust was king, and alliance paladin's everywhere were jelly. Raid wide buffs didn't exist, so a shaman was preferred in each dps group with us going in the melee group. Everyone loved you, but mostly just because you made their numbers bigger.

Burning Crusade

• Duel-wield was introduced. Maximizing dps was about knowing how to itemize properly and which weapon enchants to use on which speed weapons. The dps rotation was still simple, but "totem twisting" between windfury and grace of air became mandatory practice. Our personal DPS came secondary but there was room to stand out early in the expansion if you could manage both. Later in the expansion I don't believe our dps was competitive.
• Enhancement provided a spec-specific buff, unleashed rage along with the usual totems: strength of earth, grace of air/windfury and of course bloodlust.
• One of the biggest problems of the spec was stat dependencies on gear. Attack Power still came from strength, but we needed int for mana which was on agility gear. Our resource generation/spending was basically burn down your mana and then use shamanistic rage to generate it again.

Wrath of the Lich King

• Early Wrath was an exciting time for Enhancement as many of our spec issues were actually addressed in an interesting way. The simple rotation was made more dynamic by adding Maelstrom Weapon charges allowing us to cast an instant lightning bolt, chain lightning or off-heal.
• Most totems and Bloodlust went raid-wide, allowing us to reach even more people with our excellent buffs. We remained the premier melee buff class, bringing a strength/agility buff, 20% melee haste, and 10% attack power.
• My favourite Thrall related "spec fantasy" ability Feral Spirit was added to the class as a dps/survival cooldown.
• Itemization was fixed with attack power coming from agil/int and spell hit/melee hit being rolled into one stat.
• The class really felt like a "melee battle mage" for the first time at this point while still retaining the buffing feel of Vanilla/Burning Crusade.
• Unfortunately the spec went from being top dps early in the expansion to near the bottom by 3.2 due to scaling issues with spellpower.
• A large portion of dps came from passives (Windfury Weapon, Flametongue Weapon, Static Shock) and long cooldowns (Feral Spirit, Fire Elemental) instead of from rotation abilities.
• The rotation felt like flailing at someone with a handful of wet spaghetti with lots of buttons to press (LightningBolt, StormStrike, EarthShock, LavaLash) and buffs to maintain (Lightning Shield, Fire/Earth/Air Totems) but the net result being very little dps.
• In 3.2 we got the totem bar allowing us to use 1 GCD instead of 3/4 to drop totems.
• We were given Fire Nova in 3.3 to deal with our lack of aoe damage.
• In a raid environment where mobility was becoming more and more important, we still had no gap-closers.

Cataclysm

• Mobility addressed by allowing Ghost Wolf use indoors
• Searing Totem/Lava Lash synergy made Searing Totem a part of the core rotation. Lava lash also went from being our least damaging filler ability to being our hardest hitting ability on a cooldown.
• This was the first time since Maelstrom Weapon was added that the rotation opened up a little bit and we got a few GCDs here and there to look around, breathe and smell the roses (so to speak).
• Mana was now regenerated passively through melee strikes instead of using Shamanistic Rage, combined with many spells costing less mana we basically didn't have to worry about mana as a resource anymore.
• My experience is somewhat limited, looking for more input

Mists of Pandaria

• My experience is limited, looking for input

Warlord of Draenor

• My experience is limited, looking for input