• Shinanigans

*Going to work on something more helpful for the class/spec*

 

• Shinanigans

*Reserved*

 

Duilliath

Whilst it's possible to get Gladiator as Enhancement Shaman, it's far from easy. Push on Dark Iron did it, I think, though I can't remember his team components.

You might want to focus on what would make solid companions - and why.

Enhancement Shamans have a major flaw in their design which you need to work around. Basically, pretty much anything that lets you get close is in for a world of hurt. But it's far too easy to prevent that from happening.

I understand the point of your thread is not to go into depth about why Enhancements Shamans "phail" in arenas, but you will need to address the issue and see how it can at least be circumvented somewhat.

I think there's far less of an issue in the regular BGs, as they're less likely to be the focus target there, if at the very least on account of numbers.

 

Dodo

Basically Duilliath says it all. I play with a enhancement shaman in the arena but he pretty much REQUIRES to have BoF all the time and get dispelled. He is useless without it.

 

Herrera

Nice writing, although nothing unknown to shamans. You can sum up the Purge as "removes two magical debuffs", the list on wowwwiki is far from complete and very unnecessary. What I would like to see is a strategy versus various classes in a 1v1 scenario against each class as well as 2v2, 3v3, 5v5 lineups that work well with enhancement. I feel sorry that enhancement is so down the popularity in arena play and I hope Blizzard will fix the talent tree in WotLK. I don't play my shaman a lot, I mainly leech some arena points and do BGs from time to time, but that's mostly because Ehnancement is broken in its current form.

 

Nadagast

Enhancement Shamans really aren't as bad as people think...

 

panny

Don't agree with Glyph of the Outcast as pposed to Glyph of Ferocity (16 int vs 16 hit rating). With Water Shield and Shamanistic Rage, I rarely run out of mana before I die. In the cases that I do, I'm usually being mana burnt, which 160 mana isn't going to help much with. You'd get more mana from one tick of drinking.

You're missing a few things about totems too.

Earthbind pulses constantly, so it's good for catching those that classes that can dispell themselves.

Stoneclaw totem is good for uncontrollable pets such as Treants and Shadowfiend, and even some controllable ones.

Your Shield breakdown is ridiculous. No mage is going to attempt to spellsteal any Elemental Shield off us, and even if they would, it's not that big a deal, especially since you can purge it.

Earth Shock does more damage than Flame Shock if the Stormstrike debuff is up, and it doesn't hurt CC.

I really question the amount of PvP you've done, let alone arena.

Fix Spirit Wolves not responding to commands.
DK/Rogue

 

mad-doc

I think he meant it to protect other buffs like Freedom. Because if you cant steal it, the mage will get the important buff.

The problem with melee shamans and the other hybrid melee classes is that they lack the skills/ablities for that you normally take melee classes.
Unlimited dps (OOM = useless).
Healing debuff.
Stuns/Roots/CC - basicly the ablitiy to keep someone at a place to burst.

Without changes there wont be any hybrid melee classes in the top ranks.
I know there are some that done it, but getting over 2k in 3on3 while playing druid, warlock, melee shaman doesnt shows that melee shamans are viable only that druid warlock are good whatever the 3rd class is.

 

Digreos

There is an enhancement shaman in the current rank 1 5v5 team of Blackout EU, running a 3 healer team.

His 3v3 team is doing pretty well too and I remember facing him at about 2.2k rating in 2v2 last season.

Here is his armory profile: The World of Warcraft Armory

 

YagerMyster

Can you give examples or recommendations for spec? What talents are critical for PvP that aren't used in PvE? [e] Would you recommend a subspec into elemental (for 5s shock cooldown) or resto (for +hit and +totem radius)?

Also, I thought 2.2 or 2.3 changed grounding totem to die as soon as ANY spell was intercepted, no just a direct damage spell. Additionally, the intercepted spell isn't random, it's the next hostile spell targetted at a party member (that is within range of the totem)

My personal frustration with my shaman is ranged classes kite me all over the place, whereas melee classes seem to dps me down faster than I can dps them. Perhaps I'm mostly facing better geared opponents, but its getting to be bad enough that I need an enhancement PvE gearset and an elemental PvP set of gear.

 

Caligula

I'll admit to being a newbie at Shaman-ing, however, why doesn't anyone use a 2h weapon for PvP? I was doing my dailies one day and I was Stormstrike crit and double Windfury crit by a 2h Enh shaman and he honestly did about 6k instant damage followed by a shock for another ~1k. The only other class that can put out this amount of burst is a Pom/Pyro mage and that certainly isn't on a 3s cooldown. I honestly don't understand why a shaman would want to dual wield in PvP. Help me out here.

 

jlavarj

Two handed weapons provide high burst but extremely unreliable damage. For every 6k windfury you see, you'll see 8-10 seconds of white hits. Because of the way windfury is implemented, if you have it on two weapons, you actually see a 38% chance to proc with either hand, but if you only have it on one weapon it drops to 18% chance to proc. Two Handers also provide no pushback against casters and it is harder to keep flurry, unleashed rage and the new enhance focus talent up.

 

• Juice

2h Pros: Huge, huge spike damage when the stars align, able to deliver greater portion of possible DPS during unsustained "touches" with target (not required to stay in melee range 24/7 for dps delivery - once every 4 seconds is enough).
2h Cons: Less sustained dps when compared to DW weapons of similar iLvl, loss of value of shamanistic rage in returning significant mana to the shaman, no spell pushback to speak of on target, can only apply 1 weapon enchant, inconsistent damage output ranging from very low to staggeringly high.

When I played as enhancement, I used a 2h for a long time in pvp. When resilience stacking become the norm, the 2h faded quickly in effectiveness. It needs the big crits combined with the big windfuries to be better than DW (which does more damage based on the way melee attack power impacts bottom line DPS).

Here's what enhancement needs to be very effective in PvP: Ability to remain un-CCed similar to a BM hunter, or ability to deliver healing debuf strike (mortal strike), or ability to CC others. It has all the weaknesses of a warrior or rogue without the DPS focused benefits (poisons, mortal strike, intercept, etc). Enhancement shaman can heal, and that's where the trade off occurs. And if you're going to use the shaman in your arena team for utility and not strictly dps, elemental and resto do it better.

It's a bad pvp spec, simple as that. Just like Feral druids aren't that good, either are enhancement shaman.

 

Caligula

Isn't that what you want in PvP? Burst damage? I know as a shadow priest if I had the option of having Mind Blast do 10% more damage and 0% crit or have a 20% chance to crit (the equivalent @ 150% damage on crits) I'd certainly choose the latter. Burst kills, steady streams of damage are simply healed through. I'd say the only exception here would be a SL lock, but that's only because they are the best at out lasting opponents due to having almost an effective 20k hp pool and 2 forms of life drain.

Anyway, back to shaman. Two handed weapons may not provide pushback but 5s specced cooldowns on ES certainly should make up for that vs. all classes except druid. I'm not trying to be argumentative, I'm just describing my experience in PvP versus a Shaman. Dual wielding ones are pretty much a pushover, but I've fought some Shaman using a 2h weapon that completely smoked me so quickly that I literally had to check my combat log to see what happened.

edit: I should have clicked the submit button earlier. Thanks for the answers Juice.

 

Malan

Your summary suffers from a number of issues. If you feel that you've got a lot of knowledge about shaman in Arena and BGs, I'm not seeing in what you wrote up. I was interested when I saw the thread title and read the first few sentences, a few paragraphs later I realized you weren't really telling us anything we didn't know already.

• We don't need a summary of what our totems do, nobody reading this needs an instruction manual on the basics of the class. If a particular totem has a use specific to the role of an enhancement shaman in pvp thats what we need to hear about. Otherwise, same old story. I don't need to be told that Earthbind slows people downm (No shit, really?) but the comment about stoneclaw getting treants/shadowfiends off was news to me. You mention keeping Frost Resistance totems down but don't talk about the conflict between that and Searing Totem and whether the resistance is better than the DPS or potential CC break.
• A good portion of what you wrote up on gems/enchants is just duplicated out of what is in the PvE enhancement thread.
• What bracket is most viable for enhancement? What teammates are needed to make it viable? Your opening statement says that you will prove the world wrong about enhnacement in PvP particularly in arenas, and yet that is the only time you use the word arena in the rest of the post, where's the info at?
• What targets are best for enhancement to focus on? Should we just assist-train or do we need play in a different style?
• Your section on addons is just pretty sparse in general. Pitbull is a *must have* addon? Why? Other unit frames aren't any good? Why is pitbull the creme de la creme of enhancement pvp? What the hell do eePanels and Skinner have to do with a PvP UI?

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06

 

jlavarj

I mostly play in the 2v2 bracket, and I can give more advice on what doesn't work than what does. Right now I'm playing with a resto shaman real life friend, which has some good synergy but a lot of weakness. Right now we are bouncing around the 1600s (plus or minus 30) depending on the night. Our basic strat is to have the resto shaman go in as dps and get off 2-3 lit bolts/chain lit right off the bat to either force cooldowns (ice block, bubble, nature's swiftness, etc) and then fall back into a more traditional 1 healer/1 dps while we take turns earthshocking the healer.

One thing I've noticed is, in general the rule is to try and kill the healer first in 2's. That is not the case with an enhance specced shaman, at least in the 1500-1600 brackets. We just pose to much burst threat to leave alone, which is good for your healer, but usually limits me from getting to the other healer because of hamstring, crippling poison, etc.

In arena, I break down the teams we run into 3 types of teams.

Junk Teams: I'd throw throw our enhance/resto shaman into this group. These are the teams with two of any one class or off specs like ret pallies, prot warriors, enhance shaman, etc. These are the teams you have to beat to soak up the losses from the next two types of teams.

Killer Combos: These are the teams with great class combinations that can beat most junk teams with a high margin of error. Warrior/Pally, Rogue/Priest, Druid/Warlock, etc are all in this group. Depending on their skill, they can go far, but even unskilled they should be able to hang higher than most of the bad class combos. You need to be able to win half of these fights.

Skilled: These are the teams that either have a good combo or are just great players. An example is a rogue/druid we fought where the rogue would perfectly time his gouge for when he needed a heal, to keep me from purging them, meanwhile the druid would time a cyclone on my partner at the same time to keep me from getting a heal. As soon as the cyclone went off, the druid went to bear form and feral charged the heal my partner tried to get off on me. To beat these teams you have to be equally skilled in your own class, and understanding the counters to the other team's abilities. You are most likely not going to win these unless you have a perfect 2's partner that can compensate for an enhance shaman's weakness (kiteable, no cc, etc).

For us (enhance shaman/resto shaman) we beat most of the junk teams we come up against.

The killer combos we do well against are:
druid/warlock (tremor, earthbind, purge, dual grounding totems)
druid/hunter
resto shaman/warrior
pally/mage (not sure if this is a good combo)
pally/hunter
warlock/shadow priest
rouge/rouge (hopefully this will get better after the prep nerf)
druid/warrior (alternating frost shocks, earthbind totems, and purge to prevent swiftmends.

The combo groups that rock us are:
pally/warlock (curse of tounges and 3 tough targets to take down)
pally/warrior (Have to kill the pally twice because of the bubble before you even start attacking the warrior)
priest/rogue
priest/warrior (mana burn hell and it's hard to keep enough damage on the warrior to prevent the priest from getting burns off)


These are just my observations from several months of mediocrity in arena.

 

Toots Hepcat

Shamans are all about burst damage...windfury, stormstrike and shocks.

Besides doing less overall damage, 2-handers take too long to cycle and no longer do enough damage to one shot any serious opponent. This means if you don't finish off your target with one shot, there's enough time to give him a full heal before you swing again.

You also have decreased flurry & UR uptime, and fewer chances to interrupt spellcasting.

 

Darlal

My shammy partner and I decided to test out Enh. Shammy Rogue and we found it to be about equal to resto-shammy rogue. The major differences were that warrior teams were no longer auto-losses for us (we're exactly 50/50 for the past two weeks, goin 19-2 against warrior/healer teams that plague my BG as resto and 2-19 against everything else). The advantages we gain are a real damage soak (people really seem to focus enh shammies) against physical damage, especially with a shield out, and vastly increased damage. The obvious loss is healing. If we ever manage to push past the enormous chunk of Warrior/pally and warrior/druid teams (hate,hate,hate) I expect us to try this comp again as we start to see more lock/rogue and spriest/rogue teams.

 

• Juice

We all appreciate efforts to bring new information into our community, though I think you've missed the mark with this thread. I didn't see anything new or that could not be found in other PvP/PvE threads dedicated to Enhancement shaman.

Your armory profile shows you on no arena team and with 5749 lifetime kills. Would it surprise to learn that you're posting in a community where some individuals have 10x your experience as enhancement?

A challenge I'd like to present to you: Go find Divide and Push and ask them to come here and join the community of Enhancement dreamers. These guys do it as well as anyone, and have the field credentials and knowledge to shed new light on the pvp capabilities of the spec. For yourself, I'm not sure you're ready to teach us yet.


Push: The World of Warcraft Armory

Push is over 2k rating in 3s and 5s.

Diivide: The World of Warcraft Armory

Diivide has been in the 1900s in previous seasons, and is closing in on 100k honorable kills.

 

Sebudai

I've been pvp'ing a lot as Enhancement lately. It's definitely suboptimal in the arena, but not as terrible as people make it out to be. I was able to go from 1500 rating to 1850 in one evening on my 3v3 team consisting of me, a Holy Paladin and an Arms Warrior. We haven't played anymore games yet, but I'm optimistic. Also, I do very well in BG's. Enhancement does a lot of damage, and can specifically burst a lot of damage upfront due to the mechanics of dual wield, Stormstrike and Windfury.

I don't think we're very far away from being viable in the arena. Shamanistic Rage needs to be immune to dispel and usable while crowd controlled. That change alone could possibly be enough. The other main problem is we can't apply a healing debuff like Warriors, Rogues and Hunters. One idea I had was for them to change Rockbiter weapon to proc a healing debuff of some sort, which I think would be a nice change seeing as Rockbiter Weapon currently has no use whatsoever.

Enhancement isn't that bad. It has some nice advantages. Our dps rotation is very basic and requires very few global cooldowns. Stormstrike every 9 or 10 seconds and maybe a shock and you're pretty much doing max damage. This leaves us a lot of time to do other things, like Purge and drop totems. It is quite easy for me to Purge every single buff on the target while still doing maximum dps. Elemental does not have this same advantage. We can also do a lot more than most classes in the event that we are the focus of the other teams assist train(i.e. 90% of the time.)

Another example of why our basic dps rotation is a huge advantage is that it allows us to reactively cast both Grounding Totem and Tremor Totem, which is very nice. An Enhancement shaman can almost completely lock out certain caster classes via reactive Grounding Totem and Earth Shocks, while still doing good damage on the main target. It's a big advantage.

 

Malan

Here's Push's armory btw. The World of Warcraft Armory

And another guy who posted in the enhance thread awhile back, I think his 5v5 isn't active anymore but it was 2k+ at the time.
The World of Warcraft Armory

Push's 3v3 appears to run as Warrior/Healer[Paladin or Priest]/DPS[Enhance Shaman or Mage]. His 5v5 which is also 2k+ rated (or was last time I checked) doesn't even run with a warrior. My guess is that his 5v5 runs as Shaman/Mage/Warlock/Paladin/Shadow Priest, with a 2nd mage that swaps in for either of the casters. (there's a 2nd paladin on the team with 0 games played). I'm amazed that they can do that with 1 healer with an enhancement shaman on the team.

I'll also point out that Push runs as 0/45/19 and doesn't take the commonly assumed "pvp talents" in elemental. He hasn't placed any extra points in survivability (Toughness/Anticipation) but took 2/2 Ghost Wolf and of course improved grounding totem.

Shitting up every single thread on EJ since '06

 

Bagginses

I think that or Imp Ghost Wolf should be 1.5s/3s reduction. The fact that it is a magic effect and can be dispelled is more than enough to keep it from being OPed (plus, it can help Resto Shamans escape pressure from melee since that is a major weakness of theirs that needs some love). One of those solutions or the other can make Enhancement into a spec to fear in arenas.

 

• Juice

That's what I loved about enhancement. I wasn't at odds with the GCD and was free to be reactive with totems and purges. With elemental, that's much more difficult and it takes a lot more feel to get it right for high end play. Then again, elemental comes with a shield, survival talents, and an on-command 5k burst.

 

Duilliath

I do hope that, despite the somewhat lacklustre start, this will turn into a highly interesting thread though.

My own li'l shaman is rapidly approaching level 70 and is currently bagging 8k honour and 9 EotS marks (31 to go...) after which she'll have to step into the arena for s3 gloves. Any and all info I can get would be useful, but I seriously hope it'd be more than "Earthbind slows people".

 

Nadagast

If Enh Shamans got any of those 3 things you said, I'm pretty sure they would be pretty overpowered. Enh Shamans have one huge advantage that people a lot of the time fail to mention... Purge. Being able to keep your target pretty much completely stripped of buffs is a pretty huge benefit