Enhancement Shaman PvP [WoD]

[Deleted]

Heya guys!

I would like to hear a feedbacks from someone who tried Enh and Elem shamans in PvP during this Warlords beta.
How did you feel? Was is good comparing to other classes?

My experience: damage and survival of enh shamans comparing to other melee classes is *too damn low*. I feel really "odd" when our "top" ability like Lava Lash hits for 6-10k damage, but often it will be parried, dodged or blocked. Sometimes on arenas, I can't even stack Maelstrom because I'm unable to hit target. I tried retribution paladin and with DK, we did like 25+ win streak. I switched shaman... well... I wasn't that lucky there.

So, your toughs, ideas or tact. sharing. I will really appreciate this!

[Darksoldierr]

Overall we lack mobility, finisher and a good "oh shit" ability. Its not terrible, since our burst is beyond godlike, which kinda balances it out - That is MoP

Going into WoD, i see no huge change so far, so, as usual, i'm pretty skeptical overall.

[Deleted]

I think enhancement shaman burst was nerfed to the ground. While in ascendance, Windstrike hits for 5k+- with main hand, and 2k+- with offhand (non crit). While stormstrike hits for 4k+- with main hand and 2k+- with offhand. Lava Lash hits for 7k+. Those numbers are without trinkets in full PvP 660 gear on raiding target dummy. Well, maybe it's okey, but people having like 300k+ Hp + versatility + avoidance. I will gladly accept those numbers if I could "stop" my opponent and hit him in the stun or any other control, but shamans doesn't have any. 5 stacks of maelstrom no longer applies on hex. Ancestral Swiftness doesn't work with hex either. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but enhancement shaman can't hit hard or hit at all, when it's dying. Right now, shamans are top priority to kill, cuz it's easy, fun and fast. And that's my concern

[Blithe]

Well, we're going to have a lot stronger hits (most of our passive damage was moved into our active damage) and utility-wise, nothing's really changed besides Hex no longer interacting with Maelstrom Weapon so you can't make it instant, but that's about it... Ascendance was normalized over its cooldown, and Fire Elemental's damage was given to the Shaman.

Overall, expect to feel like you personally deal a lot more damage outside of cooldowns as well as while using them. With the changes to crowd control, we've been indirectly buffed so that's a good thing.

[Deleted]

Well, we're going to have a lot stronger hits (most of our passive damage was moved into our active damage) and utility-wise, nothing's really changed besides Hex no longer interacting with Maelstrom Weapon so you can't make it instant, but that's about it... Ascendance was normalized over its cooldown, and Fire Elemental's damage was given to the Shaman.

Overall, expect to feel like you personally deal a lot more damage outside of cooldowns as well as while using them. With the changes to crowd control, we've been indirectly buffed so that's a good thing.

Seems pretty reasonable. Thank you.

Any suggestions how to deal with "burst classes"? right now, there is rouges, DK, Retri Pals, that just blow you away with -30% shamanistic buff... Kiting them won't really help

[Emophia]

Watching a lot of streams, enhance seems really bad, even though melee in general are really strong on beta right now.

Non MW Hex is just silly, especially when every other melee has instant CC.

[Blithe]

Seems pretty reasonable. Thank you.

Any suggestions how to deal with "burst classes"? right now, there is rouges, DK, Retri Pals, that just blow you away with -30% shamanistic buff... Kiting them won't really help

Not really, that's just the nature of the Shaman class. We excel in throughput, burst and utility, but we lack proper defensive immunity's and crowd control and as such become heavily reliant on teammates to peel or heal for us.

If you're speaking in a 1v1 scenario, you're almost always going to lose to the Rogue so there isn't much I can do for you there, but the Death Knight and Paladin are much easier to deal with once you get them to waste their immunity's (Divine Shield, Anti-Magic Shell) and other defensives. You're also able to kite them very easily, while purging any magic effects (Hand of Freedom) that they may use. If you're going to spend a lot of time kiting, use Glyph of Purging for the Maelstrom stacks and extra healing. Outside of that, use Stone Bulwark Totem for the extra survivability (especially against Diseases) and the choice between Primal Elementalist and Elemental Blast is up to you, that really depends on how comfortable you are. Using the Shamanistic Rage glyph is also a no-brainer, being able to dispel the magic effects used on you.

Classes that destroy us: Monks, Rogues, Ferals, Hunters, Balance (basically all the 1v1 kings)
Classes that we destroy: All casters, Paladins, Warriors

Death Knight's are sort of inbetween.

[Omanley]

Watching a lot of streams, enhance seems really bad, even though melee in general are really strong on beta right now.
Non MW Hex is just silly, especially when every other melee has instant CC.

/signed.
Cant wrap my head around that change really, not mentioning increased cast time to 1.7s, and Hex not even friggin' taking control of the target away. Plus there's crappy CPT and Bind Elemental, as niche as it was, got removed. Shaman CC will be beyond bad.

The entire work they did in terms of dealing damage as enh was switched from heavy burst with Ascendence to Ascendence being more of a mobility tool, really (with a very long cooldown), and being more based on applying pressure with lots of uptime, which is a nerf in that enh has the worst mobility as melee.
The fact that blizz replies to concerns about mobility with "You'll have UE sprint and GW ololol" and totem concerns "Totem talent is fine, people use it trolololol" tells you a lot.

Looking at survivability, HST was turned braindead, Healing Tide made resto only, AG nerfed...so big nerfs to selfheal.
In terms of mitigation, shamans were never very strong.
SBT can be insta killed as an 1m cd absorb you'll have to talent, doesn't stack on itself and requires a constant amount of damage taken over it's 30s duration to fully be made of use, and it's possible 50% uptime messes with other earth totems, which would bring us back to totems being bad.
And as Darksoldierr pointed out, we have no combat-reset button, like others have it with vanish, bubble, dispersion, deterrence, ice block, touch of karma or how it's called and whatever else is out there atm.

Soo...nerfed selfheal, unsufficient absorb, no oh-shit! button => questionable survivability. Dont forget for MSW healing we need the uptime we wont have.

Totems are still subpar. Without exception, the majority of our utility consists of immobile short range aoe effects, that have for the most part only 5hp, lock other totems of the same element out, are not useable during silence despite having physical drawbacks and aren't even strong effect-wise. Your run-of-the-mill totem grants either equal or (mostly) worse versions of other, comparable, pvp utility.
To make it short: Totems are the weakest form of utility. Wether in the form of absorbs, stuns, heals, "reflects", cc breakers or what have you.

Summed up:
-Bad/Worst cc
-Bad/Worst mobility
-Bad/Worst survivability
-Flat out worst utility

We made up for the above (the 3rd of which wasn't as bad as it will likely be in WoD) with Ascendence burst, which will be castrated come WoD. Take a guess wether or not number passes will turn this around. They need to friggin adress these issues, or we're screwed.

-Replace totem tier with a mobility one (damned good tools, I'd might add) or improve ours a lot base line (buffing UE sprint to 60-80% speed and removing snares would be a possibility, or adding a leap that transforms into GW, similar to druid talent)
-Redo totems in terms of restrictions. Remove the 1totem/element restriction (Esp with elemental Totems and SBT, totem talents will be a bother to take otherwise), period. Make some totems undestroyable, like EBT or Tremor, buff others health, maybe make ST/MT/Elementals mobile (fire totems could be carried by hot winds, Elementals could have theirs imbedded in their bodies), allow Grounding/Tremor to be used while silenced, etc. They are different-from-each-other tools and need differing balancing, obviously.
-Make LS glyph baseline, GW and CPT as well, and maybe FS (FS to bring some selfheal back that works without uptime)
-Make Hex instant cast and make it take away the target's control, as it already does against npcs.
-PROFIT

[Blithe]

/signed.
Cant wrap my head around that change really, not mentioning increased cast time to 1.7s, and Hex not even friggin' taking control of the target away. Plus there's crappy CPT and Bind Elemental, as niche as it was, got removed. Shaman CC will be beyond bad.

The entire work they did in terms of dealing damage as enh was switched from heavy burst with Ascendence to Ascendence being more of a mobility tool, really (with a very long cooldown), and being more based on applying pressure with lots of uptime, which is a nerf in that enh has the worst mobility as melee.
The fact that blizz replies to concerns about mobility with "You'll have UE sprint and GW ololol" and totem concerns "Totem talent is fine, people use it trolololol" tells you a lot.

Looking at survivability, HST was turned braindead, Healing Tide made resto only, AG nerfed...so big nerfs to selfheal.
In terms of mitigation, shamans were never very strong.
SBT can be insta killed as an 1m cd absorb you'll have to talent, doesn't stack on itself and requires a constant amount of damage taken over it's 30s duration to fully be made of use, and it's possible 50% uptime messes with other earth totems, which would bring us back to totems being bad.
And as Darksoldierr pointed out, we have no combat-reset button, like others have it with vanish, bubble, dispersion, deterrence, ice block, touch of karma or how it's called and whatever else is out there atm.

Soo...nerfed selfheal, unsufficient absorb, no oh-shit! button => questionable survivability. Dont forget for MSW healing we need the uptime we wont have.

Totems are still subpar. Without exception, the majority of our utility consists of immobile short range aoe effects, that have for the most part only 5hp, lock other totems of the same element out, are not useable during silence despite having physical drawbacks and aren't even strong effect-wise. Your run-of-the-mill totem grants either equal or (mostly) worse versions of other, comparable, pvp utility.
To make it short: Totems are the weakest form of utility. Wether in the form of absorbs, stuns, heals, "reflects", cc breakers or what have you.

Summed up:
-Bad/Worst cc
-Bad/Worst mobility
-Bad/Worst survivability
-Flat out worst utility

We made up for the above (the 3rd of which wasn't as bad as it will likely be in WoD) with Ascendence burst, which will be castrated come WoD. Take a guess wether or not number passes will turn this around. They need to friggin adress these issues, or we're screwed.

-Replace totem tier with a mobility one (damned good tools, I'd might add) or improve ours a lot base line (buffing UE sprint to 60-80% speed and removing snares would be a possibility, or adding a leap that transforms into GW, similar to druid talent)
-Redo totems in terms of restrictions. Remove the 1totem/element restriction (Esp with elemental Totems and SBT, totem talents will be a bother to take otherwise), period. Make some totems undestroyable, like EBT or Tremor, buff others health, maybe make ST/MT/Elementals mobile (fire totems could be carried by hot winds, Elementals could have theirs imbedded in their bodies), allow Grounding/Tremor to be used while silenced, etc. They are different-from-each-other tools and need differing balancing, obviously.
-Make LS glyph baseline, GW and CPT as well, and maybe FS (FS to bring some selfheal back that works without uptime)
-Make Hex instant cast and make it take away the target's control, as it already does against npcs.
-PROFIT

I think Enhancement is in a worse off boat than Elemental and is definitely being over exaggerated at some points (Omanley), but all three Shaman specializations are viable and perform very well. I have no doubt this will also be the case come Warlords.

[Omanley]

I think Enhancement is in a worse off boat than Elemental and is definitely being over exaggerated at some points (Omanley), but all three Shaman specializations are viable and perform very well. I have no doubt this will also be the case come Warlords.

On what basis are your reaching this assumption? All I see in analyzing MoP enhancement videos is this: Ascendence is king
Well it wont be in WoD, as it looks.
Our current (live) survivability is okay, but will take multiple nerfs.
Our CC, as bad as it already is, will be hit by the nerfs as well (casted Hex? yuck. Who'll take the glyph in their right mind, or even waste their time casting it?)
Our damage will rely on uptime more than it does now, and we have the lowest uptime except maybe for ret/dk (the reason we can kite them).

All I've seen in terms of status quo and WoD changes points towards us getting weaker overall (IN PVP, obviously).


Dont get me wrong, I like how they changes our way of dealing damage, and I have no fears for pve. For pvp however, there's a severe lack of changes, imo (except for nerfs to make it worse, and an increased focus on uptime, which is already a weakness of enh).

[Darksoldierr]

The sole reason why enhance is a popular spec right now, because we can kill literally any class if it reaches below 50% and the healer gets CCd.

Every utility we had since TBC/Wotlk was nerfed. From purge to ghost wolf trough grounding till interrupt. I'm saying it since forever, if they take away the burst without giving us UNIQUE or better utility, the spec won't have any chance in PvP.
And then in return, in WoD they will buff the burst damage again, since they don't want to give us any utility as seen in the last 6 years. So, as i said, im evry skeptical.

[Deleted]

Just to clarify, I'm talking about WoD beta. I'm perfectly fine with shamans now. Ascendance, I agree, damage is too high, but right now in Pandas, gives in initiative moment, so from defense you can go offence. It's like a switch button to save yourself from pressure and make others go into defensive mode, so you have a time to "reset" combat (or remove pressure from your healer).

Right now, on WoD BETA, ascendance won't deal large amount damage, so you can't force enemy go into defense and make them flee from you. They just hit you in the face without any hesitation. It won't be that bad, if I had a tool to stop this pressure. As mentioned before, for monks - karma, for Wars - retaliation + spell reflect, paladin - bubble etc.

[Darksoldierr]

We are talking about the same thing, just what Omanley and i'm saying is first what we have in MoP and what will be taken away without anything in return. And in this, i agree with home completely, either we will do insanee damage with our short CD spells or the spec won't be able to fight on high lvl pvp. Enhance and shamans has no CC, unique utility or really strong 'turn the game around' spell going into WoD - as it is now

[Omanley]

@Darksoldierr: Exactly. Enh was good during wotlk thanks to Feral Spirits +Bloodlust being overpowered and during MoP because of Ascendence being overpowered. Nerf the overpowered abilities carrying us, and you're left with a class/spec inferior in just about everything.

Elemental will face problems in pvp as well, I'd say. Back to a turret-caster, the dependancy on Lava Surge procs will sky-rocket. With high uptime melees like warriors, monks, rogues and ferals, good luck in racking up those Fulmination charges. Frost Shock will continue to share the cd with Flame Shock, which, constantly dispelled, is pretty much your death, just so btw.

In terms of homogenisation, blizz paid close attention in nerfing our abilities when they were unique/strong, distributed our stuff to others and in those cases we got something back, it would have to be on hex/cpt level obviously. Selfhealing is another such case. Enh being good in getting their life back as a melee in pvp couldn't make it through more than one x-pack. The number of nerfs in just that single area.../sigh. A unique strenght, yet again take apart.

What will enh excel in come WoD, I wonder?

[Blithe]

If I must say, I enjoyed Enhancement the most in Cataclysm. Our wolves were still very strong, but the key thing was the survivability you could talent into in the Restoration tree. Sure we had no Ascendance, but we could literally go toe-to-toe against everyone in 1v1 except for Feral (at least I could).

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@Darksoldierr: Exactly. Enh was good during wotlk thanks to Feral Spirits +Bloodlust being overpowered and during MoP because of Ascendence being overpowered. Nerf the overpowered abilities carrying us, and you're left with a class/spec inferior in just about everything.

Elemental will face problems in pvp as well, I'd say. Back to a turret-caster, the dependancy on Lava Surge procs will sky-rocket. With high uptime melees like warriors, monks, rogues and ferals, good luck in racking up those Fulmination charges. Frost Shock will continue to share the cd with Flame Shock, which, constantly dispelled, is pretty much your death, just so btw.

In terms of homogenisation, blizz paid close attention in nerfing our abilities when they were unique/strong, distributed our stuff to others and in those cases we got something back, it would have to be on hex/cpt level obviously. Selfhealing is another such case. Enh being good in getting their life back as a melee in pvp couldn't make it through more than one x-pack. The number of nerfs in just that single area.../sigh. A unique strenght, yet again take apart.

What will enh excel in come WoD, I wonder?

Enhancement's role is to play offensively as a mobile anti-caster who deals large amounts of burst damage with plenty of utility to support its teammates. It's been like this for years...

When it comes to crowd control, we're indirectly buffed because everybody else has lost much more than we have.

[Deleted]

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When it comes to crowd control, we're indirectly buffed because everybody else has lost much more than we have.

I didn't know what we're buffed. I didn't see any spell to force enemy use trinket or any def. ability. Sorry, if I've missed something.

Can you give me couple of suggestions? I'm going to try them out.

[Blithe]

I didn't know what we're buffed. I didn't see any spell to force enemy use trinket or any def. ability. Sorry, if I've missed something.

Can you give me couple of suggestions? I'm going to try them out.

What I mean is that, if Class A has 2 crowd control's and gets reduced to 1 crowd control, then Class B who has only 1 crowd control ability will "indirectly" have been buffed from that effect.

Hard to force a Trinket as a Shaman in a 1v1 situation, as already stated that we lack crowd control, but you could Earthbind into Capacitor, or Hex into Capacitor, or if you prefer Totemic Projection, use that with Capacitor. You will definitely force defensive cooldowns if you try to use yours against theirs. The trick here is like a game of tug-of-war, you have to trade defensive and offensive abilities for each other, so if you use 1 offensive, the enemy could slip up and use 2 defensives and you're already in the lead.

Just try to keep distance and keep healing yourself and you should be good.

[Nitwit]

If I must say, I enjoyed Enhancement the most in Cataclysm. Our wolves were still very strong, but the key thing was the survivability you could talent into in the Restoration tree.

Err ... Weren't cataclysm wolves the weakest ones we've ever had?

[Omanley]

Enhancement's role is to play offensively as a mobile anti-caster who deals large amounts of burst damage with plenty of utility to support its teammates. It's been like this for years...

When it comes to crowd control, we're indirectly buffed because everybody else has lost much more than we have.

...and times changed. Purge was nerf-raped, as was windshear. And large amounts of burst damage are not traditional. That's limited to wotlk feral spirits and mop Ascendence.

The very thought of "large amounts of burst damage" assumes that we'll have strong burst cooldowns (Ascendence heavy nerf so not so much) or a lot of uptime with strong sustained (horrible uptime/mobility, so not much of that either).
Considering the removal of lock-out granted by interrupts, enhancement got nerfed more than any other melee through that change also, since our interrupt is there to prevent getting cc/snare/root-kited by interrupting and locking out those spells for a brief moment of time, allowing us to close the gap, at least partially. New interrupts are kind of a joke, imo, and enh is hit the hardest by that.

Also, while there have been nerfs going around, it was mostly about the number of stuff they could put out, not about the quality.
Blind, intimidating shout, psychic scream, traps etc etc are all still instant, same as all non shaman/dk stuns. Shamans got hard-nerfed in terms of cc. Make no mistake, we're not buffed in the overall comparisson. We're still the weakest in terms of cc, bar maybe, again, dks (kinda pity those guys, similarly bad as us).

[Lavindar]

Err ... Weren't cataclysm wolves the weakest ones we've ever had?

They were not as much of a damage cooldown, but the heal, stun and speed boost was very good. Between them, 5 seconds of cooldown to Wind Shear, Grounding Totem, and some others thing I could be forgetting, we were very good against casters