Enhancement is fun with casino gameplay. Restoration is fun if you don't mind being dependent on one type of heal. Elemental is.

The middle child

I actually really like elemental other than primordial wave. Same thing with enhance, get rid of ice fury and I’d love the spec. Both feel really good with this one ugly red headed ability (and their resulting effects) that ruins them both.

to think they abandoned chain harvest for this shit spell.. what a shame

I wouldve preferred far transfusion honestly, loved it in pvp

Fr I been lvling it and loving it, I get to wave and after a few dungeons, I hated it. How does one skill ruin a class like this?

I think it’s because I mained it from like mid cata to WOD and it feels like they just took away the functionality of fire nova totem and turned it into a more active ability But did so in the clunkiest way possible

I've been playing ele in remix and simply not using primordial wave

Remix is a completely different experience than retail…. I mean we all know that, right?

Elemental has always been the clunkiest spec in the game, imo. Enhancement has often been fun, but I switched to ret Paladin which does literally everything but better.

Wasn't very clunky in Cata or MoP, albeit very boring to play.

give me moving lbs from Cata again >.<

Yea I don't know why they can't add this back.

Imo every caster should have a filler spell to cast while moving

no you see that cant happen because mages are the main character and must be special above all others.

But see scorch is cast from the hips and you don't have to use your mind. That's why you can move while casting. Duh.

Depending on the build, Elemental has meetballs or frost shocks. The problem is that frost shock also has a hook boosting other spells making it a maintenance buff enabler and lava burst is just in about everything of the respective build: builder, maintenance buff enabler, on the move cast, cleave/priority damage spell and I'm pretty sure it is somehow tied to CDR, as well.

Fire build ends up bouncing back and forth between earth shock and lava burst when you have a high enough crit rate. Lava Beam becomes weird to fit in. I copied my retail build over to remix and it’s kind of hilarious

I think boring is good. Something has to be the "two spell spec", not everything has to be a juggle of 20 different moves. Shaman is ranged warrior, and that's a good thing. Simple rotation (could use buffs to chain lightning and earthquake tho), amazingly accurate theme, and probably not gonna change much each expac.

Elemental has not been hard all of DF. There is simplified and then there is "1 button spam spec". People can enjoy it but I think you are being willingly blindfolded if you can see a spec that has been based around weaving in elements and effects, and then having it turned into a 2 button spam rotation where you ignore ressources, procs or anything else. Imagine if they changed fire mage to just press fireball and sometimes they would get a free fireball or get to hard cast pyroblast.

So.. fire mage in PvP? I agree with you though, but I think it's a highlight of what the issue is: ele shaman just needs buffs for talents related to earthquake and chain lightning. Make earthquake good to press on ST or give a ST alternative, then make them press all 3 elements periodically.

Absolutely no issue with some specs being easy (as long as there is also no issue with some specs being hard, but that apparently is something else and every spec I have ever enjoyed is getting pruned to shit every time). Cata ele shaman was something else though on the simplicity level. IMO there should at least be ways to maximize your performance and master the spec, but in Cata and to a degree in MoP that wasn't a thing for shaman. As it is now it's probably fine (I only play enh, which is about to be pruned to shit next).

I enjoyed it in WotLK. Not since.

Restoration Shaman was great in WotLK. Chain Heal worked really well then.

Rsham was my main in wrath and had a blast. Honestly enjoyed a lot of classes way more in that era before they added a ton of defensive/CD clutter to every single class. Now every class needs 25+ keybinds to play optimally, at least in m+

Nah, Legion elemental is the most fun I have ever had in this game

That's more a reflection on Ret paladin than shaman. You could say the same about any other melee

Rogue and DH much closer to Ret than Enh.

I haven't played wow since S3 but no melee dps close to Ret in M+ for me. Survivability so that a toddler can play it and survive mechanics (without doing then), simplest dps rotation since Legion DH, more utility than a some healers (not that the average Ret uses it mind you). Rets are gods in dragonflight. Btw I played enhance as an alt to 3K or 3.1K in S2. It's really not that bad, it's main problem is Survivability, which again, if you compare it to Ret then everyone sucks

Na, it's regularly been fine. Plenty of specs have been much clunkier along the years. It's almost always been the redheaded stepchild spec balance & attention-wise though, competing with feral & ret.

And not to mention ret pally will be stronger in tww

I was decicing on whether to main ret pally or enh shaman back at beginning of DF, and the range on shaman's interrupt compared to paladins melee range only interrupt sold me. So many times on council fight in vault where I wanted to interrupt but couldnt. Did they extend the range for paladins witb rework?

Nice, it is cool to maximize your utility like that, and I’m pretty sure ret still has melee range interrupt. However, *all* of their attacks were given increased range. So you could probably sit on top of the one you wanted to interrupt, while being able to dps the other mobs from a distance.

Right at the start of Shadow lands when doom winds first dropped, with chain harvest, was peak enhance.

Elemental is where you yell “THATS A SPICY MEATBALL” as you chuck the ball of magma. 

Which is a lot lamer when you can shoot meatball on primary target like 30-50% of your globals, and quite a lot of them are also on 3 more targets. I tried ele for S4 (instead of shadow) to see if I wanted to play it for TWW. Holy moly the spec is so bad in so many ways. It's really cool thematically, and visually (although updates for a few spells would be nice), but the tree sucks, and the rotation regardless of chosen talents sucks. edit: just to be a bit less of a downer, I really do enjoy resto. It's my favourite healer spec tied with disc. It's pretty easy, and it's not that crazy on the pre-planning, only downside to me is that cloudburst totem timing is something you have to learn quite well - and as a person who goes on *feel* more than timers I fuck it up routinely lol

The nice thing is that cloudburst doesn't feel mandatory really. They have done a decent job balancing it so that you don't really have to play cloudburst if you don't want to. As long as they don't fuck up that balance where cloudburst becomes required to play around again then it will be fine. Pretty much all they need to do is remove primordial wave and not fuck up making cloudburst OP so it remains a playstyle choice. Primordial wave feels terrible and clunky across every spec though and just needs to die.

Enhance has 2 distinct builds: Storm, or as you called it “the casino” which focuses entirely on Storm Strike. Then there’s Elementalist, which functions more like a traditional spell-sword, you’re weaving your melee abilities and spell casts in with each other, using melee to make some casts stronger and vice versa.

Elementalists builds seem to die in TWW. Currently, both hero specs for enh are centered around storm builds. Stormbringer, which is outperforming totemic by 50%, clashes with elementalist builds, as the talents wont benefit from Elemental blast casts. Althought im not a fan of the single viable spec, I am glad to go back to a storm build, just feels more fun. And the casino aspect waiting for that Ascendence proc is a dopamine hit

This is a pretty good summary as someone that’s been maining Shaman since BC. Enhancement has some of the coolest visuals but it feels so weird to play. The buttons do light up like some casino game haha. Resto has a lot of cooldowns but chain heal still gonna be like 45%+ of your healing which isn’t satisfying, at least to me. While I enjoy playing around cloudburst I don’t think the spell is good for new players. I would like to see shaman get some sort of tank cd rather than just being a throughput monster. Elemental and I have a weird relationship. I’ve been enjoying it in 10s this season but i still prefer the MoP iteration of the spec. Ice fury is a weird spell and I wish primordial wave would go into the grave where it belongs. I’m glad it’s back to the rapid fire lava bursts again but I can really see how people hate seeing one spell be half of your damage. All in all I would like to see shaman get an overall like Paladins did but I’ll always main my shaman because it’s been nearly 20 years.

If you enjoy pressing Lava Burst and doing very little else in terms of damage, Elemental is okay. Sadly it has the most limp-dicked cooldowns I've seen in a spec so you don't really have your big oomph moment. It's not bad just kinda stalem

I always hear people saying ele can pump damage but my lava bursts hit like wet noodles. I feel like a machine gun more than a mortar. Especially with that dumb Primordial Wave we keep getting stuck with.

I'd say Elemental barely is. It would need a bit more for it to even be.

... adopted.

Okay we can end the thread here.

This just makes me want a mod or weakaura that has a slot machine animation and sound constantly running and then it lines up when you proc stormbringer 😂

Enhance is fun to do damage with(though it takes some skill to, what's not fun is constantly being the one to die in keys because you have one defensive while your mage pops one every other pack

A tale as old as time

Same for Delves, having to spend my maelstrom procs on healing surges once Astral Shift and Ancestral Guidance are on CD feels so bad and slows down runs a lot. Thank god I play draenei, gift of the naaru has saved my ass a lot in the beta

That’s one strength of enhance I’d say. I’ve played retail pal. Monk. Shaman. Not Druid ... but I’d say enhancement shaman with a full maelstrom weapon heal is the strongest offheal in the game.

Lowkey saved keys by bringing the tank up from really low health when the healer was down. It the versatility that keeps me playing shaman

Our other defensive it to just die and wait until its safe to come back.... and then immediately die again. But sometimes you dont die! And thats good.

%20 of the time it works every time!

Lol, technically, it works 100% of the time. Its a question of **how long** will it work.

Excuse me as a mage I usually pop 2-3 defensives. As we have 6 defensives there are almost always some on cd.

Bring back Shamanistic Rage!

Not as bad as people are making it out to be, but definitely as **neglected** as people have said.

Elementals design is probably the biggest problem with the class as a whole and it absolutely is as bad as people are making out, the primary build atm is the lava burst build and it has zero gameplay variety, its spam one button over and over, the talents that are meant to synergize and buff it are taken but never actually utilized because of the resource overflow. The alternate build isnt much better, lightning build is very granular, you basically do a 4 button rotation nonstop only changing for dropping CDs, refreshing flame shock or icefury. Its bloat without complexity. These are design problems that will only be changed at this point in the dev cycle, the new hero talents do nothing to fix any of the problems. This isnt to even mention utility problems but im not really in a position to comment on that. Balance is irrelevant at this stage

Given that ele's only defining feature is combining all elements together as opposed to something like a mage, it's puzzling how they managed to completely throw that out of the window with the current iteration of the talent tree where you spec into either fire or lightning. It's like removing rage from fury warrior, or maybe demon pets from warlock. Just.. why? Another hidden problem of ele spec design is the mastery. Given its nature of potentially repeating your casts multiple times in a row, that forces blizz to only give shitty animations and particles to shaman spells to avoid excessive visual clutter. Imagine if lava looked like you actually threw a significant amount of lava at your target and not a limp meatball with a particle effect straight from 2004.

You can take my meatball launcher from my cold dead hands. Multistrike was the silliest stat they ever put in the game and I’m happy it lives on in ele mastery

Let's not blame the visuals on the mastery, Chaos bolt has updated gorgeous visuals, and Blizzard has no problem giving Destro Lock Hero talents that machine gun out Chaos Bolts. Visual Clutter in this game is actually not as big a problem as it is in other MMOs (cough GW2) if you're exposed to how to use the graphic settings.  Spell Density, and Particle Density give you some of control over what is showing up on your screen. 

I actually love lava burst visuals. Giga casting it on all 3 targets in SS is absolutely wicked. Just like chain lightning overflow in large groups is like watching Odin take a dump on the pack. Earthquake is the most whelming of the lot, but just steal some Aug effects for it and we good.

Yeah the weird thing is we already have priests. Warlocks, mages and evokers casting fire spells, we REALLY don't need more fire only specs. People don't like icefury or ice strike but the class should have all 4 elements represented in their trees and it shouldn't be hard to do with all the elemental skills that exist in the game. Every single shaman mechanic has been neglected and none of them really belong in the modern game, shocks, shields, totems etc are all broken components. I could write a full rework for the spec but any rework that actually fixes shaman thematically and functionally would be so far removed from what we currently have it would be purely wishlisting, and you can't fix the class thematically or functionally with changes that fall short of wishlisting. What I can imagine though would be freaking awesome.

They have a talent in the war within that sacrifices your demon to buff your dps as destro and aff.

Much like the state of wf or storm DRE for Enh, this is really more a product of neglect than anything that is outright unplayable. For Ele, I think Icefury and PW harm it more than they'll ever help it, and their removal isn't near enough to get them feeling better, but maybe some hardcore Ele fans have the secret sauce for this, idk. Ultimately my point is that I think the outward perspective of the situation is that Ele and Enh are both in a ruinous state, which is a little disingenuous imo. So I say we're neglected. Plus it stings less, because we're used to neglect, at least.

I have issues with enhancement as well, it feels a bit like 2 classes tacked onto the same spec, im fine with one variation focusing on one side and the other the other side but there is too little overlap or synergy, you go one side you ignore everything on the other, there isnt really much building in that sense. I dont mind icefury as much as others, it adds another element to juggle but it could be far better. Elemental should have multiple elements to use otherwise its a budget frostfire mage. Ideally enh and ele would have 4 main branches that offer storm ice earth or fire elements, its meant to use all 4 but you really dont feel it, you are either all lightning or all fire. But offering more elements into the current rotation solves nothing, there isnt even room for what it currently has, the entire spec needs a full overhaul, not just mechanically but graphically. The 2 builds for enhance both feel decent but both have clunk in it too, i hate crash lightning for example, the spec has a bloated enough single target with garbage low throughput buttons as it is (most of your damage comes from your main strike and spender) adding more extremely low prio buttons is bloat, i think they could do a better job at aoe for enhance than that (id love to see a proper lightning shield like warcraft 3 Wishlisting is about as useful at this point as proper solutions considering how broken the spec is, its not worth patching a few of the issues because every part of the spec as a whole has major issues. The main mechanics of shaman all suck and arent used well too, elemental shields are pathetic, totems are just crappier versions of regular abilities other classes have, elementals are clunky and dont really serve their purpose (well the elemental ones kind of do) and none of the specs really play as elemental masters, they all have builds that focus on one element, which would be fine but we already have multiple fire elemental specs, fire elemental shaman brings nothing new.

I think the part that feels worse for Ele in that comparison with Enh is that WF and Storm Dre build for Enh is honestly way less fun to play than the Elementalist build, and is also ST only. So while yes, that playstyle has been more neglected outside of some tuning to help with the RNG, Enh has been playing the much more fun overall playstyle for most of DF. Especially with the last two Seasons keeping the same Tier Set. Has been amazing. Meanwhile Ele has been stuck with two seasons of Meatball Spam and their most unfun playstyle that ignores the most parts of their kit, so they feel extremely neglected.

I agree Elementalist is more fun... but we've also been playing it since roughly? halfway through Shadowlands, with pretty minimal changes. I could use a bit of variety, personally.

They need to remove ice furry and completely reverse the spec's design paradigm from specializing into one element to combining all of them for increased effects. Make frost shock into a viable standalone spell or make a new rotational cold ability, add buffs for alternating elements and rework the mastery.

Icefury wasn't a bad attempt at that, the shock spells honestly lack identity and I don't think they at this point are really worth keeping. I think having each element feed into another could be a good way to address some issues,  currently a lot of buffs exist to buff lightning bolt and its still underwhelming. Ascendance should probably go, it exemplifies the "master of one element" theme that conflicts with elementals identity. Frankly the shock spells are imo the lowest impact as far as feel goes for shaman and it was always a bad mechanic, I wouldn't care if they were removed but they could easily be reworked. Earth shock as a spender is the most disappointing finisher visually in the game.

Gotta love how they tripled down on "lava or lightning mage" with the hero trees too :')

Is there a utility problem besides the lack of Raid buff? 

I did say I not really in a position to answer that XD I'm not deep in m+ and play mostly casual so I don't often face problems in high end content, personally I think thunderstorm, hex and stasis totem are pretty good utility but they might not be relevant in some areas, I'm not sure. I think a lack of unique buff for 2 specs is a major problem though when lust is now on 3 other classes that provide other buffs, cross spec utility probably needs some looking into but I'm not really interested in having that discussion right now because I'm not really convinced passive group buffs should exist. Windfury totem also being only on one spec and needing to be pressed every 2min is crappy design

Ever since Bus Shock.

I mean yea as long as you're ok being the least survivable spec and literally pressing 1 button to maximise dps.

My tin foil is that there’s a LOT of investment to reworking/updating Shamans compared to any other class. Every spec has their own animations on top of their own weapon enhancements on top of totems and some totems have their own visuals and what have you. I think shamans will get their day in the sun sooner rather than later it’s just a WHOLE lot more investment. I think the complaining shamans do is understandable but I don’t think they took a step back and thought about why it’s probably harder. This could all be cope from me and they really just have no fucking clue what to do with Shamans and have 0 inspiration for their gameplay. Edit: also I think they are going to follow through with bringing Shamans to other races which again brings several new totem designs and animations and all that jazz

Ele has a bunch of spells that are super fucking annoying to use. Lots of rotational mechanics that feel like they're from early expansions. Below average survival. Below average utility. Average dps. No reason you'd want one in your group or raid. Can't comment on the other specs.

Whoa, you lost me on “below average utility.” Shaman get an aoe stun that can hit twice. knock up or knock back. the best interrupt in the game. they can handle incorporeal and afflicted. heroism. can reincarnate. aoe slow. a big healing CD. That’s below average? That beats: any hunter any DK any warrior arguably any rogue dps dh And is on par with: any paladin any priest any warlock any monk arguably any mage I’d concede that they’re behind on utility for druids and maybe mages. with priests, paladins and rogues it depends on what your group needs.

Everything shaman brings others do better. You don't actually want the double stun totem because it stun caps the pull and you rarely want a double stun for anything, because you stun to stop casts. Incorporeal and afflicted aren't a thing in TWW and any other meta class can easily deal with both of those too. AoE slow and root is practically never used for any m+ or raid scenario that other specs also can't handle better. There are now 3 other classes that can lust, all of which have better survivabilty and bring just as much in a better package. And that's not mentioning any of the group/raid buffs which are vastly more important than having a knock up more than someone else. There is this idea of shamans being a jack of all trade, but fundamentally none of that really matters (especially not in raid) because who cares if you can do an affix on your own when the healer and another DPS can easily do it and said classes also bring extra int, 5% magic damage, stamina. There is a reason shamans aren't brought currently and it's not just because they aren't tuned well.

You make fine points, but they’re not relevant here. OP asked about what shaman are like to play currently. OC said they’re below average utility. I’m arguing that that’s objectively not true, they have a ton of useful utility particularly for M+. Others may do what shaman do better, but for 95% of players who do M+, shaman bring more than all the classes I listed above. You think the other lust classes bring what a shaman brings but better? 10/10 I’m taking a shaman over a hunter on afflicted weeks if gear and skill are equal.

>better than any rogue and dps Dh and on par with mage  Nah fam you went too far. Ill give you the other ones though. Shamans utility kit is a bit above average

>Shaman get an aoe stun that can hit twice And that will be heavily nerfed in TWW :^ )

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stuns no longer are going to count as an interrupt. Right now all the stops like stun, KB, silence, etc function as interrupts where they stop the mob from casting anything for 10-30 seconds(it depends on the mob what the recast is) after the stun ends. In TWW they just stop the cast and the mob will cast right away as soon as the stun ends. Once you hit diminishing returns the stops kinda become useless in TWW because of that since they will just cast it right away. You actually will need to interrupt the casts to put them on the recast timer.

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I do think so but it does have some issues. It does likely kill the two caster meta for higher keys and if interrupts become too mandatory we could see a shift back to the melee meta we had back when you had tons of shit to interrupt. Casters could effectively interrupt by using stops but they won't be able to in TWW. The first few weeks are going to be a huge shift because people will need to interrupt again and not just rely on the tank doing it all.

>Shaman get an aoe stun that can hit twice. Double diminishing returns by the way. There is also a delay in it going off so not as good as the instant AOE stops that other classes have that you've listed.

Warriors get instant aoe stun in a cone if they spec into it, but still warrior are nowhere near shaman in utility. Monks have an aoe stun that’s not on a delay, so yeah, that’s better. Warlocks have an aoe stun but that’s also on a delay. I already stated that warlocks and monks are on par with shaman.

Both shaman DPS specs have two modes Mode 1 is Lava Ele.and Lightning Enhance. Absolute brain-off spam literally one button for 90% of your rotation and occasionally spend maelstrom when your 1 button isn't lit up. Your performance is entirely dependant on RNG and not losing a microsecond of uptime because you have absolutely zero burst damage to speak of. Mode 2 is Lightning ele, and Lava Enhance. Extremely unforgiving button bloat where you try 3 times as hard for zero reward. What button am I supposed to push next? I don't know, 6 of them are lit up and I just died to fire because I was looking at my bars and I don't have a defensive. At the end of the day all of these options are exactly the same because either way you got benched for a class that blizzard actually gives a fuck about.

As an avid enhancement player and somebody who considers myself pretty good at the damage rotation at the very least; I have to say that I don't feel elementalist (lava) enhance is bloated. Every button has a purpose and a unique reason to be pressed. And every button feels good to press, just so long as you press it at the right time. Even wet noodle stormstrike feels good as a stack generator when everything better is on CD.

Agreed. It seems like button bloat if you are just looking at the raw number of abilities but they all have their place and many are just used in combos with big payoffs (PW>LL>LB>IS>FS). They arent all part of the core rotation. Plus theres a bunch of utility that you dont need all the time, but make you feel useful whenever a specific scenario presents itself. Id actually be upset if they took some of these abilities away, except totems, I only want Windfury and Cap, the rest are whatever.

Yeah I always roll my eyes when people say "lol casino spec just press procs" It's just a priority system and build/spend. It's really not hard. There's one proc to pay attention to that just makes you cast lava lash every other global. Wow so hard.

Also remember the big gains and dynamic gameplay you get for pressing Fire elemental as any Ele build. It instantly proccing ascendance plus causes flame shock to tick twice as fast while active, giving a ton more LB procs. It is satisfying on aoe and ST. Also it does a ton of damage so you feel great pressing that comparing to ret wings or DH meta. Wait that was a dream I had. It doesnt do anything.

I'm sorry, but I wouldn't describe Lava Enhance as Zero reward, it's been one of the stronger DPS specs/builds for progression because of access to great funnel.  It was one of the high key meta DPS spec in S1 M+. There are more enhance DPS players in the world top 40 keys of both fortified and tyrannical that season than any other spec. Hell the highest keys were timed with Enhance + Resto Shaman, so it wasn't Lust and Shaman Utility bringing them, and their lack of defensives didn't hold them back. In S2 M+, it was in the meta before Augmentation struck, and even post Augmentation if it wasn't because of the Mage Rework giving them Mass Barrier for group survivability, Enhance could have slotted right in its place as the recipient of Aug buffs and PI. In Aberrus it was one of the top DPS specs for Mythic progression, especially Sarkateth and Echo all tier, even post Aug. Teams in Almidrassil even ran double Enhance if they could because of having high ST damage all the time, and high funnel damage when adds came out. They didn't top overall, but they pumped the targets that mattered, on the hardest fights. One of the highest boss damage specs on Mythic Tindral, and Mythic Fyrakk, and the Collosus adds. Have they been squishy all expac? Yes. Is it a problem? Yes. But damage wise, for progression they have been pretty freaking good all expac.

I would give my left nut for Enhance to be viable in high keys... WTF is this 5 and 6 target cap shit?!? LIke its beyond bad.

They'd actually have a great niche in high m+ with their insane funnel damage, I'd argue the devs should lean into that (and they do with the stormbringer hero tree), and then the targetcap is fine. What is not fine is that they die as soon as an enemy looks at them.

And even worse is their survivability. They can self heal pretty big! At the cost of maelstrom... if they manage to not outright die first.

Even worse is definitely the sruvivability. Why bring an Enhance shaman if they're gonna fall over every single pack and cost you timer?

In S1 there were more Enhance Shamans in the top 40 fortified and tyrannical keys, than any other DPS spec.  In S2, before Augmentation struck, they were one of the top DPS specs again. Even after Augmentation struck, if it wasn't for Mages getting Mass Barrier, Enhance would have easily been in the comp in the place of Fire Mage. Unfortunately Aug + Mage rework.has dominated the M+ Meta since, even when Enhance has done more damage than Fire Mage, and even though Enhance has the same strength of funnel damage. The group survivability of Mass Barrier is too damn important in an M+ meta of needing constant defensive cooldowns to survive constant one-shot checks. The fact it's on a class that brings Arcane Intellect, which buffs the Aug who buffs you back, is too strong a synergy.  Aug also brings all the utility shaman brings (lockdown, knockups, dispels, ways to stop Incorporeal, Lust) and more (bleed dispels, soothe).  In a world without Aug, + Mass Barrier you would have Enhance in the meta.

This right here. We are capped at 6 flame shocks, but SP can keep applying VT til kingdom ? What the fuck. I can understand Chain lightning being capped, but why is Crash lightning capped at 6 and not 8?... So many cleaves cap at 8 but noooooo... not enhance. And the cherry on top is the survivability of a wooden fence meeting a nuclear explosion... soooo much fun to fold like lawn chair when a grunt mob BREATHES at you.

Hot take I hope they keep the 6 target cap. It limits how much pressure you feel to spread your lashing flames debuff, and gives the spec something to really shine at. In a group that is playing well in a high key, enhance in its current state (assuming decent tuning) may never appear at the top of the meters; but it arguably contributes most to actually timing the key. Massive funnel damage from ele blast and lava lash and carry level damage on 3-6 targets. plus crash lightning isn't actually capped, so we do keep up on larger pulls. We just cant go nuclear in the same way a some specs can. I'd give my left nut for 1 more active defensive.

Devs said it’s fine in a recent interview. They want specs to have strengths. Excpet other specs can do 5 and 10+ target while enhance can only do 5…

Ive played ele in mythic raid and mediocre keys All DF and it has never played worse. The ST build is a 1 button moron playstyle. Its defensives Arent good, ankh is rarely a better abillity than cheat death and it brings No utility other specs doesnt. If you Are interested in All 3 the class is quite palatable, but if you want to play mainly ele then it is not in a good spot

There is a reason most of the good players and People Who do work in the ele discord Are changing xlass

Right now, ankh = tactical grieftorch.

I love playing Resto. I dont like Elemental feels really clunky as said before. Enhancement sometimes lol

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A few things to clarify. Ankh is not a cheat death at all. Cheat deaths stop you from dying. Ankh does not do this, plus it has a 30 min CD that does not reset on Boss Kill, Wipe or even Dungeon start. This is a "once a Dungeon" button that you're scared to press, as you may need it later. Also, the mobility you mention actually renders you incapable of performing your role for the duration. You cannot DPS or heal in Ghost wolf. No hate. Just clarification.

I mean basically all shaman trees take the "Brimming with life" talent tree so it's way shorter than 30 minutes. Technically you can die and self rez on the first pull and do it again on the last boss of the dungeon.

I used anhk 3 times during the time dungeon. Brimming with life is a must talent.

not just for the cdr but for the 8% health, I still get 1shotted by a few things in tyrannical 10's due to only having 1 charge of astral shift

Oh, I know.

It's also not the viability that is the problem but the design. Current ele is viable but heavily target capped, anti-synergistic secondaries (mastery doesn't do anything for spenders(unless capstoned) crit not for your builder in the current iteration) and you literally press lava burst (builder) over your spenders. Burst is proc based instead of cd based

Can't speak on the other specs but enhance is getting a bit fucked with hero talents going into TWW. We're essentially getting 1.5 trees st best, because Totemic is just a mess. It name-drops like 8 different talents in the spec tree that directly clash with each other. Just one example: The totem that replaces windfury deals physical damage which can be buffed by feral spirit. There's another talent that incentivizes using Elemental Blast, which essentially requires using the Elemental wolves talent which removes the physical damage buff in favor of a random fire, frost or nature damage buff depending on what wolf you get. This is because no matter what wolf you roll you always get s damage boost for ele blast since it deals elemental damage. So essentially you simultaneously need elemental spirits while also needing to not have it. And that's just one of the problems.

Shaman has many more problems than the ones you listed out. The "solid benefits" list isn't really a benefit when you consider opportunity cost. 1. Mages 2 AoE stops on a 25 sec cooldown. And they're not delayed unlike cap totem. 2. AoE slow is something that is almost never that useful, and even if it is, Frost mages are just better at it just doing their regular rotation. Windrush totem is a worse Stampede Roar. 3. Ankh is not a cheat death, is more like a free battle rez. Which are very different, as you pointed out, you will lose buffs, pots, flasks, lust, everything. 4. Even Paladin healers, arguably one of the worst healers in the patch, have Devo aura, peramanent 3% DR for everyone. 5. You can count on one hand the uses of tremor totem in PvE. Poison cleansing is very useful for Afflicted, I'll give shamans credit for that, but the affix is getting removed next season, so... 6. That's ok 7. Shaman has good mobility on a long run, but mobility in PvE is usually better with instants dashs, and even though shamans have gust of wind, Mages are still superior with Blink/2 Shimmers and Alter Time. 8. Almost every class in the game has some sort of snare cleanse. There is literally nothing that Shamans excels at, other classes just do the same but better. If you just look at the DPS specs, and compare to Mage. Mages just have better damage profile, better survivabilty, better mobility (for doing mechanics), better AoE CC, somewhat similar group utility with Ancestral Guidance/Mass Barrier.

That's all fine and dandy for m+, but the problem is and has always been raid utility, and perhaps more importantly right now, our talent tree/hero tree designs that are a complete gameplay impasse and are either unbelievably boring or actual madness to play (even discounting all the bugs).

Should have room to take Sundering again in TWW so they'll have 3 aoe stops

FYI the reason some shaman are able to do 20s is because they have premade groups and can coordinate defensive/external usage while probably having an aug. But in your average 14/15 pug when mechanics start one shotting you if you don’t defensive, it’s a lot harder. You’re pretty much at your groups mercy so it’s less “shamans running 20s found a way to survive” and more “groups running 20s are capable of coordinating and keeping a shaman alive.” Elemental shaman is actually a OKish replacement for mage in the god comp but I still wouldn’t take one to a 15 without being in voice chat with em.

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15ish is where defensive usage really starts to matter and shaman just doesn’t have enough of them. Pretty much every class has better ways to mitigate the damage so shaman is reliant on externals when lots of other classes simply aren’t. Groups that are coordinated can play around this but it’s still less than ideal. I guess you could call externaling the shaman every other stomp executing a strategy but I’d just call it a limitation of the class and probably not invite a shaman. Even hunter has better defensives atm and hunter has terrible defensives.

Enhancement could roll into the next expansion as is and it wouldn't be that big of a deal, but not ideal. Resto has a lot going for it with the totemic hero talents that it wouldn't be that big of a deal if they didn't receive further changes, but not ideal. Elemental has fundamental problems at every level and has never received rework in the history of the spec. Farseer is the dullest hero talent set in the game with zero ZERO interactivity with your spellcasting in any appreciable way, we have capstone talents that didn't see a single dungeon or bossfight of use, and we have capstone talents that should just be baseline stat behavior, and we are allergic to crit because they have lava burst making up >50% of our total damage profile right now. Elemental has no damage cooldown, fire elemental has gotten so bad it's barely worth the gcd to cast it so the closest thing we have to a damage cooldown is primordial wave which currently has a \~20 second cd due to the set bonus. We are the flattest of flat damage profiles. Meanwhile our only aoe spender Earthquake is ground placed, smallish radius, and ticks over 7 seconds which just fundamentally sucks in M+ environments that require constant drag pulling and sanguine and etc. Our spenders are so weak right now that we will often, every single bossfight, spend 5+ seconds at fully capped maelstrom just machine gunning lava bursts instead of using the resource. Master of the Elements (mote, going forward) used to be the main "finesse" about elemental gameplay but with things shifting further and further toward only casting lava burst we basically have mote up by default and it takes zero thought or setup like it used to, especially when our spenders are so weak that worrying about moting them is a moot point to begin with. Our talent tree is one of the most poorly constructed and it seems to force this idea that we are either a lava mage or a lightning mage, rather than an elemental shaman that used to be about weaving all the elements together. We have to spend 7 talent points unlocking and buffing the spenders that are dogshit anyways, and there are a bunch of forced talent points that do nothing for us, like making us path through icefury when in reality we'll end up using the frost shocks buffed by icefury at such low priority that they often will fall off entirely before being spent. S2 ele was just as bad when built around lightning, we didn't take lava surge or 2charges of lava burst and instead too WLR which would give us a surge proc to use after every spender but then we'd sit there with that proc active on our screen for 8+ seconds while we built up maelstrom and then right before firing it off we'd toss out the lava burst that only existed to buff the Elemental Blast, bringing up a new proc that will just sit on our screen now until the next spending cycle. We also are the only dps spec without any unique utility or raid buff, we're squishy, and we ultimately just serve no purpose bringing into a raid whatsoever.

Enhancement is one of the most fun specs to play in the game rn, but severely lacks defensives and survivability.

Agree enhance is easily the most enjoyable of the Shaman specs. The only thing I'd add is that it has severe target capping issues that aren't very relevant in raid but are problematic in M+.

Enhance is the most fun its ever been, but the current Enhance has no hero talents for it. If Totemic was designed to fill that niche properly then all would be well. But as of right now Totemic is horrible and we'll end up in the Stormbringer/DRE lottery.

Yeah, people who are complaining about enh gameplay are either wrong, or bad. The lava enh build is one of the best made DPS rotations in wow history, it's just hard as fuck to optimize but also crazy fun and satisfying. Storm is less interesting but it's easy so it provides an alternative, but if they made storm the main build it would be a tragedy. Other comments before have said the Shaman discord is biased toward the lava build, and it's true, people are biased toward the fun build! The class has fundamental issues with survivability that need to be changed, and provide no 5 man group buff (and ele/resto have no real raid buff utility). Ele and resto are both really sad. (Have played Shaman for all of DF)

Presently, in Dragonflight: Enhancement is actually one of the funnest Specs in the game with two different builds. Restoration is probably the most dated spec in the entire game. It does what it does and it does so boringly. Ele, salvageable. The core abilities are fine, how Ele actually gets played and built is on the completely mindless drivel side of things, usually. Sometimes has an okay tier where it kind of plays like it should, and not spam one button. As a class? One of the most squishiest and least amount of useful unique utilities. Masters of none, jacks of some.

Jack of some is funny lol

Say what you want, I like resto gameplay because it didn’t change for 20 years :) I can always log in and heal just fine!

Totemic shaman looks like it’s giving restro a lot of depth and interactions. So much so that I’m shocked it’s not all baseline. Now it just needs an extra defensive or two and it would be fine.

I played enh in season 1 (for the bit I did play), and did enh for S3 when I came back, and swapped Ele for S4. It is just an alt character so nothing crazy, I do some heroic raids and clear 8-9s. Enh has 2 builds that are “viable” but in reality it’s just the one. Like a 10-20% difference in performance, which is too big to pass up. Lots of buttons and a convoluted priority list roughly 17 items long. It is super fun though and can easily be boiled down once you get the hang of it. Elemental was harder for me to pick up. I was never sure if I was doing it right, and just spammed lava burst or whatever and earthquake. Every tank to exist pulls out of my earthquake thinking the 10 yards they move a pack is saving the key time, but I have 8 EQs down and just lost all my damage. They have thunderstorm knock up and cap totem stops nearly every pull, sometimes twice, so it’s super handy in that sense. Low cd range kick is nice too. Not much for defensives, but at the level I played it wasn’t an issue. Everything currently played around primordial wave for both specs. Maybe it would be better if that one talent wasn’t tied to the tier set.

I was away from wow for 8 years. Came back a month ago and decided I'd finally try out a shaman because I had never played one in my previous stint. Rolled up elemental and got going on the remix. I had no preconceived notions about how it should play. I hadn't been reading any kind of community posts. I got him up to 70 feeling like it was a pretty clunky 'rotation' and struggled a bit but I was happy to have finally played Shaman. I have since leveled 8 other classes. Every single one was both more fun and more powerful than my elemental Shaman. I hope they give it a few tweaks because I was really looking forward to having a kick-ass Shammy!

I think shaman was great in MoP, the era where all classes had their own identity and uniqueness.

I don't find it fun to play because I feel like the damage comes from weird places and the animations are terribles so there isn't good feedback to what you are doing. some stormstrike, arguably our hardes hitting abitlity, requires quite a lot of talents to buff it and is so low damage we don't use it outside of the odd filler. some our best damage comes from frost shock, lava lash and elemental blast. Lava lash is great but its animation is a slightly orange swipe to the left like we are on a wow dating app. Elemental blast is also pretty cool but its a range ability so we barley see it in melee range and I also find it irritating having to have 3 different maelstrom spenders as we still need to use lightning bolt for primordial wave. finally frost shock is just downright stupid. it is a slow from years back that now seems to be pivotol for both ele and enhance. for enhance it only takes 2 talents to make it hit harder than most other spells. It has a dull wave of the hand animation which looks out of place when you are weilding a weapon and like a lot of the other abilities it barley noticable in melee. So to make it hit hard you need to use it after you've use a maelstrom spender when you have enough stacks of hailstorm and also after an ice strike where possible. (by the way Ice strike exact animation of lava lash but blue. ) the other issue is far to many buttons, even ignoring storm strike. just the core ration is Lava lash, flame shock, frost shock, ice strike, primordial wave, lightning bolt, chain lightning, crash lightning/windfury totem (dependant on aoe or single), elemental blast and Feral spirits. this is the current best build the lighrning built adds stormstrike back in with doomwinds and ascendance on top of that. with all that you have a load of extremely situational utitlity and one quite weak defensive with no real raid buff.

I only play enhance but I just want two things A) windfury totem placed automatically while doing stormstrike B) chain harvest back but in a cool elemental version

Chain harvest for resto too.insta apply riptides to all party

Amen

Chain harvest was amazing! My fave times playing enhance

I want 1. weapon buffs to be shown first on the buff list instead of last (dont know why they changed that in Dragonflight) and maybe also make them last longer than 60m or as a permanent buff. (also rogues get to have poisons AND weapon runes/sharpening stones while shaman cant use sharp/weight/runes still)

One of the hero talents in TWW make WFT a passive. Still works the exact same way it does now, just becomes a passive Taking that route also *adds* a new totem to your rotation but…at least WFT is passive lol

Placing totems feels like a waste so often

I've found Resto shaman to be enjoyable this expansion, though not as fun as Shadowlands resto due to losing chain harvest. With Acid Rain and Chain Lightning, you can output acceptable healer dps without much effort, which is nice. Primordial Wave is meta, but I'd say it's not a strict requirement, and you can still have success in Heroic Raiding and +10's without taking it. Resto Mastery is still the best pug tool. Cannot speak on Mythic Raiding or PvP, though. I'm assuming flaws in design become more prevalent in both, but that goes for a lot of specs rn. The main issue I have with Shaman is that their talent trees are super bloated and a lot of stuff in then needs to be baked in, feels like you're being made to choose either wheels or an engine for your car while also accepting you'll never have doors or windows.

Resto mastery is the most irrelevant stat in the game.

Numbers ok Gameplay shit

Any class and any spec in wow is "fine" for 80+% of the wow player base. If you're new to shaman you'll probably have fun. People who are angry are the ones who either play very competitively compared to the average wow player (casual wow player base is enormous compared to mythic or m+ pushers), and they know all the faults of the class in and out because they probably play multiple specs at high level. It also has barely changed in years, like 6+, so people who love shaman are itching for absolutely anything to move forward. Enhancement is super fast paced whack a mole melee. Elemental generally plays like a simple caster spec (I personally hate the current tier play style but others would disagree), and resto is a classic push button health bars go back up play style. It's a solid class that can do a lot of things, but none of the specs do anything the best so it usually gets shunted out of the top tiers of play.

Frustrating. On the pulls with 6 mobs and getting plenty of well timed DRE procs it actually feels good, it’s just that this is also never consistent. The most annoying part of this entire problem is that the core of a fun class is actually buried under multiple problems that ruin the class and blizzard just does not care, like at all. Go onto the shaman forums and check the blue posts, it is actually disgusting how little they communicate and this is going back years. At the end of Shadowlands they decided to nerf storm elemental effect of reducing chain lightning cast time not because it was overpowered but because they didn’t like the playstyle when combined with the tier set. No compensatory buffs and the change was not reversed after the tier set was removed. If you go back and look elemental has been bottom five DPS specs on launch for the last 5 expansions, why on earth would we expect that to change. Actually if you remember the start of shadowlands earthquake damage was buffed 70% and chain lightning was buffed 35% after like a month. Those sort of numbers being necessary to change just flat out proves how completely useless they are and how little they care.

We need Chain Harvest back

So ele is pretty much in the bin generally, enhance is fun and if you really wanted to do you could do all content with it. You wouldn't though as its way easier just to play ret

Enh feels button mashy/spammy in PvE. Death from a thousand paper cuts. It’s meh at best. In PvP it feels like the worst iteration of any spec in the history of wow. Ele feels lackluster and gimmicky in PvE. Lavas feel awesome but the dps just isn’t there. In PvP it FEELS amazing to machine gun lava surges in every direction, but it’s just an inferior version of pretty much every other caster. Low mobility, destructible totems, bad defensives, all damage is easily shut down by a single dispel, etc. only benefit is it doesn’t have to hard cast. I don’t play resto, it’s the least interesting healing spec in the game imo.

Only one of the two Enhance builds is button mashy/spammy and that's Storm. If you're spammy on the Elementalist build you're just playing it very wrong.

I've always loved resto and I still think it's a super fun healer. I've loved every single version of enh, I grew to love Legion enh just before bfa, and I grew to love the bfa rework just before shadowlands. Now I'm loving the df one with the exception of primordial wave. Elemental is fucking amazing... in theory. There are amazing talent choices you can use that gives spells great synergy and makes it super fun to play... however the best spec is just spamming lvb, and it's kinda boring. It's basically like making an absolutely delicious cake and then covering it in fondant so it becomes inedible. There's a great spec in there if blizz just got rid of that disgusting fondant.

Enhancement - two solid specs (lightning and elemental builds) and bringing a unique buff to your raid with windfury totem. Enhancement has been eating well this expansion, although personally I dislike the lightning spec because it feels like I'm spamming one button. Elemental - two clunky builds, but you're mostly throwing meatballs and not much else. Feels like the spec has gone backwards from Shadowlands, honestly. I felt that the Elemental had great pay off with Earth Shock back then, but now it's Elemental Blast which is also a setup spell and not instant anymore, it doesn't feel great. Elemental's big strength historically has been big trash damage, but with Earthquake pinning mobs in place you really don't want to be Elemental on Sanguine weeks. Resto - I love Resto but it can feel like you're waving your arms around doing nothing outside of your cooldowns. I think it's a case of how our mastery works, where our heals are tuned to do much more when the party is low, but with Dragonflight healing has been very binary (full health or dead) which can be stressful. Regardless, still probably my favourite spec for pug healing, there's a lot you can do with your utility and your cooldowns are great. Overall - we're very squishy and quite jealous of our mail comrades' survivability cooldowns. Also, the TWW hero class trees were the last to be released and can work against our play styles. Which made us think we would see some rework to have it make sense. We have seen no rework.

Blizzard needs to come out and say, "We rather you didnt play ~~Demonology~~ Elemental Shaman". I'm no doomer by any stretch... but It's hard to come to any other conclusion than this.

I dont have a loto to imput, but as a Resto players being one of my four main classes/specs, Resto is so braindead easy, I hate it. Its very enjoyable, dont get me wrong, but it's too simple imo

I'm weird and have half a dozen shamans (shamen?) either maxed or on the way. They're absolutely my favourite to bumble round in, and have been since wonky dungeon tanking with mates back in vanilla, but endgame just feels kinda eh.

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Mediocre Enh Shaman main here. Overall, the class (shamans in general) lack defensive capabilities, currently in DF, we got 2 deff cd's and tbh one is use as offensive more than defensive, that's Earth elemental, grants you 40% increas max hp, but the problem is that the class has so little passive defensives that sometimes even with that 40% you still get one shotted. The other one is 40% dmg reduction on a 1 min and 30 sec cd, which on many M+ per say some bosses have a mechanic you gotaa use your deffs and at one point it overlaps in a way where yours is on cd and you just fizzle out. In WW, with the new tallents, they try to improve, but it's basically worthless. You gain shiled for 2% of your max hp, not stacking, but it's up all the time. It's nice for dot dmg, but it's still worthless if you get hit by something stronger, which other classes can usually tank and survive without deff cd. And what is the best part, almost all classes, if not all, have already gotten tons of changes and hot fixes, while Shaman just got something that is more of a nerf on the resto tree, that's all.

Earth ele is 15% more hp, which you only really use for certain boss abilities in high tyrannical 10's or higher. (Like gale arrow) I had to run out of a nokhud to respec just to survive the gale arrows since they were 1shotting me without externals. Also hunters like to complain that they're squishy but they have 3 defensives, one of which is a complete immunity. Heck even feign death can be a 4th defensive that just cancels out some mechanics.

What is cd on Ele Earth elemental, i assume is 5 min same as Enh?

Yes 5 minute cd

I mean, 5 min cd for a mediocre defense is just bad design, no matter how you look at it. Other classes have immunities for less cd

Yea it's not meant to be a dungeon defensives, it's great for soloing that beefy rare to take the heat off you for a minute, or in an emergency if the tank died. Would be great if they made a lesser earth ele choice-node-talent that gave you 20% more health but it didn't taunt.

Elemental is clunky to get used to. Feels like you're juggling mid fight. But I still find it a fun spec to play and did fine in DF raids

It was the first class in remix I leveled because I never played one max level, and most I gotta say is they got some crazy bad button bloat. Sounds like they are due for their rework like paladins and monks got and they need it. I played mostly enhancement and there’s just too much buttons for me personally Their healing is real easy though and easy to understand

As someone who has consistently played Shaman (primarily Resto) since WOTLK, I can say Shaman is in a really good spot right now. Now I will proceed with my massive rant. I hate to see people arguing our fight for us who don't even play the class. BUT it's far from perfect and some major pain points from a Shaman POV. 1. Class fantasy is all over the place, I'm not huge in to the lore, but I wish we had more "cool" elemental effects. I understand visual clarity is important but sometimes I feel they could do much better with the animations and such. 2. Homogenisation ruined a lot of the "uniqueness" of Shaman. I hate how other healers have kicks now, how so many classes have access to BL and the amount of control. Sure Shamans is still unique, but less so. This is also why I don't want Shaman to have a raid buff, not everyone needs everything. 3. Our CD's always feel kinda useless and have such long CD's. When ascendence was first introduced I was so happy, I thought it was so cool and finally had a big impactful button to press, now it just feels so so. I hate how many people are all of a sudden fighting for shamans pointing out things we don't even care about. 1. I like the ascendance form. 2. I like we don't bring a raid buff. 3. I like that we don't have massive amount of heals to choose from but we can do damage and control. 4. I like how Ele is all about getting up flame shocks and firing out a shit ton of lava bursts or how you reposition people in raid to fit in to a group with the Enh to get the most out of WF. 5. I like how Enh is kinda like rolling the dice and there is no "strict" rotation since you might get some procs. All of this is how Shaman always has been. I just wish they did more with the effects/animations and look of Shaman (tmogs are always shit) and added a bit of uniqueness back to Shaman or removed shit from other classes that only Shaman had. I do also wish Ele got bought a bit more in line with other casters. Enh and Resto have some good talent choices/builds right now. Not sure about TWW with the hero talents. End of my schitzo ramblings.

It’s really in a good spot. It could use a few tweaks but nothing major. What they really need is a way to play each of the “builds” in both of the hero talents ( resto does not have this issue.) the physical build vs ele build for enhance and lighting vs fire/all elements build for elly. And some cosmetic love on spells and abilities. Make glyphs to use the old spells if you want, but new updated dorks (for most classes really) would need very welcome.

I mean to put it simply shamans feel like they’ve only slightly been updated since BC. Resto needs a tank CD to help them do better in M+ and Enh needs a bit of button purging and more consistent maelstrom generation. I haven’t played much Ele but when I have I’ve had next to no idea what I was supposed to do with it beyond hit the glowing button.

I'll only speak on Elemental case, cause that's the spec i've main since i started this game It's okay, like, meh, you know, like it's playable don't get me wrong, you can pump out some very good dps, i'm always on the top 5 of my raid dps But that's it, the build currently because of the tier set is unbelivably boring as you're simply a lava burst spam class with primordial wave launched every time it's up again Flavor wise, ur supposed to be a master of all elements but the spec depending on set tier forces you to either focus yourself into lightning or lava, so that flavor is not here as of DF Visual wise, shaman is one of the class with the oldest non-updated VFX so if you want to look cool, other caster do this way better And if we're talking cosmetics, unlike druids or warlocks, your elemental cannot be customised, nor can your totems, and u have 3 wolf forms in glyphs TLDR : The class is playable, just extremely forgotten flavor wise by blizzard

In terms of unique mechanics, we have weapon imbues that you have to talent into if you aren’t Enhancement, a very small number of totems that largely provide utility, and Maelstrom (for Elemental) or Maelstrom Weapon (for Enhancement). We are also the only class that often doesn’t take our cooldown spell (Ascendance). I mostly play Elemental, and I wish Blizzard could change the talents to make it more acceptable to take Lightning and Fire talents; we often have to pick and choose.

From a PVP perspective, Elemental is probably the most forgiving ranged spec in the game. Tons of utility, excellent sustained damage and cleave with some pretty decent burst. The problem is that anyone who has PvPd at all in the last four years knows exactly what the ele is going to do, and it won’t change at all in TWW.

Totemic was designed in a manner that requires Enhancement to spend points in a specific way in order to not ignore any of the talents in the Hero Tree. However, due to talent point bloat we are unable to actually do this, and thus are stuck choosing to ignore certain talents that exist within the tree. Totemic's main ability, Sundering Totem, also feels like a slap in the face to Elemental players, as it is a physical damage ability that moves with the enemy target, and does not randomly CC them. These are things elemental has been asking for for Earthquake for almost a decade.

As a casual who played a lot of elemental in legion and BFA, and now picking elemental and enhancement up again at the end of DF, I’ll just say it feels really weird using the same spells I know as ranged caster as part of the melee rotation. Launching lava procs between casts of lightning bolt makes sense. Launching lava procs between melee spells with 12s cooldowns, and random melee procs, and also lightning bolt procs? does not. I haven’t touched primordial wave, don’t @ me

I’m an ele main. It’s my favorite spec and I enjoy playing it but it needs some serious updating. As other commenters have pointed out, the talent tree is bloated and generally unsatisfying, particularly the bottom of the trees which should be more powerful. From a play style standpoint, we’re constantly pigeonholed into a single element build (all lightning or all fire) which is disappointing. And it’s blizzard’s fault because the tier set bonuses force us in that direction. In my opinion, shaman should be like WW monk where you’re incentivized to not hit the same button more than once, but instead weave multiple elements in harmony. We have no major cooldown so our damage profile is flat and lame. We’re extremely squishy despite carrying a shield. We essentially bring nothing to group content that you can’t get elsewhere. Those are the big picture issues but the more detailed issues need addressing as well. Flame shock needs to be much easier to spread. Our spenders hit like wet noodles and earthquake is particularly frustrating as it’s a location spell with the damage spread out over a lengthy amount of time. Some visuals are wildly outdated. Frost shock and earth shock have almost no visual effect and an extremely unsatisfying sound which make them feel bad to press. The ascendence model looks stupid. I could go on but it feels fruitless. Blizz constantly ignores the spec and I’m about out of hope that will ever change.

Enhancement: Adderall Whack-a-Mole, the game you can never win. Of your 13 rotational abilities, you must press something different every second, but each ability buffs something else, and the procs are largely random so every wrong choice is a dps loss. Time off target is a major dps loss. We don't scale well, so gearing up is a dps loss. We have one defensive CD, so we die a lot, which is a dps loss. Elemental: used to be fun with spam LB until LvB procs, then giggle at the big number. Now it's spam LvB, which has two charges and can't be spammed, weave in casts of Elemental Blast or Ice Fury, Frost shock and LB as filler. Have Deeply Rooted elements proc mid cast, but you can't stop your cast without losing dps, so instead you waste half of your biggest 6-second proc. I spend a lot of time smashing a button that is on CD, wondering why none of the most amazing spells in the game are shooting out of me. Resto: enjoy being the least-desirable healing class. Your casts are long and weak, so you must compensate by hoping everyone stays inside rain, which they won't. So instead you burn your mana with triage spells. Only fun when your gear is so high as to trivialize the content. After many, many years as a Shaman, I play Warrior and Warlock now, because they feel like Enh and Ele used to. TL:DR Devs: who needs gameplay when you have S-Tier class fantasy!

Enhancement is popping, most fun I’ve had in a class in a long time.

I picked up melee shaman in season 3 after being scared to try it forever and it’s probably my favorite spec now(sorry DK) the rotation and gameplay is not nearly as daunting as people make it seem. In AoE scenarios you will be tab targeting to get DoTs on everything but apart from that its just hit summon wolves and hit shiny button. It definitely lacks in defense though so its a spec that will make you use your utility more than others. It also has 2 different builds within the spec with storm or elementalist which is nice. I see a lot of people complain about [primordial wave] but it’s one of my favorite buttons to hit because i know I’m about to [lightning bolt] 9 enemies for almost double the normal dmg of the spell. All in all a very fun spec to play, don’t let people turn you away from it with tales of how hard it is(it really isn’t)

Here's make take as a resto m+ player: I want to say first of all that I love playing resto and have loved the gameplay for quite a while now, there's just something fundamentally satisfying to its core loop that I can't get enough of. That said, the whole design of resto feels very outdated compared to a lot of the other healers and there is so much MORE they could do with the spec. Obviously, there are a lot of terrible talents and 2 point nodes on the resto tree, many people have been saying this for a long time now. Something that people don't mention as much about the tree is that there is a severe lack of synergies and interactions *between* our abilities. * The closest thing we have to a synergy between abilities is tidal waves, which may as well be a passive since its basically always active and you never have to think about it. * Chain heal has a bunch of talents buffing it, but nothing that interacts with any other ability. * Healing rain, wellspring, and downpour are all terribly tuned right now but also interact with none of our other abilities. * For enhance and ele, ascendance has multiple nodes that improve it and make it do interesting things but for resto its just a button you press and do more healing. While it is still a fun cooldown, I would like them to do more with it. * On that note, NONE of our cooldowns (except for mana tide with spiritwalker's tidal totem) have any sort of interaction with the rest of our spells which is quite unusual. Compare this to things like tree for resto druid and apoth for holy priest that both change up how you play and do interesting things with their abilities. * Primordial wave is one of the few abilities we have that has quite a few interesting interactions, and yet still the talents improving it are dreadfully boring and uninspired. I don't understand why elemental gets to have things like rolling magma and primordial surge while we're stuck with +25% healing and -15 second flat cooldown. All of this together leaves resto shaman feeling like it has a lot of lost potential. I want to make it clear that I understand a lot of people might like resto shaman to stay "simple", but I think there's room to offer more options and more synergistic playstyles while maintaining a generally straight forward rotation. I also think it would be healthy for the spec to encourage more crossover between abilities. The next thing I want to address is primordial wave. A lot of people hate this ability and want it removed. Personally, it's one of my favorite abilities shaman has and offers a little bit of that interesting gameplay that I wish we had more of. That said, there are numerous things about prim wave that I think could use improvement and would make more people enjoy using it * The most common complaint about pwave is that its "clunky". I think this complaint mainly comes from the fact that you have to press pwave, wait a global, then cast a while healing wave in order to get the healing out. This could easily be fixed by giving shaman a way to get instant cast healing waves. A common suggestion is to just change pwave to additionally cause your next healing wave to be instant cast. Personally, my suggestion would be to add a talent that says "casting healing rain makes your next healing wave instant cast" just to add a bit more to healing rain. They could even copy lava surge and give riptide ticks a chance to proc an instant healing wave. Anything of this sorts would automatically make pwave much easier to use and more responsive. * Another thing about pwave that most people are unaware of but I want to bring some attention to are the inconsistent interactions between % modifiers and pwave. Unleash life for example when used for the casted healing wave will also buff the entire cleave. Undulation will only buff the casted healing wave but not the cleave. However, if you set up undulation at 2/3 stacks so that it will proc off your next healing wave, then you cast pwave healing wave, it WILL buff the entire cleave. This requires a weakaura and is completely unintuitive. Master of the elements only buffs a single healing wave, regardless of situation. This issue was worse in the past when we had more modifiers, and I really hope they can change this to make it entirely consistent. Next another pet peeve of mine are cast time reductions. The resto shaman tree is full of these: tidal waves, flash flood, tidebringer, spiritwalker's tidal totem. Now with TWW there's the air mote in the capstone of the totemic tree and the s1 tier set. * The biggest problem with cast time reductions for shaman is that it doesn't reduce the global cooldown. This frequently leads to situations where you have a very fast cast but then have to wait on the GCD, which feels very clunky. This is especially noticeable when using tidebringer combined with spiritwalker's tidal totem. This is also the reason why flash flood has never really been good in M+. In addition to being a 2 point node, it also causes you to go below the GCD on healing surge, losing most of the value. * Another particularly clunky piece of gameplay is the fact that tidal waves is wasted with tidebringer, as with or without it chain heal is already below the GCD. * These issues could be solved by allowing cast time reductions to also reduce the GCD (this is the case with cast reductions for many other specs) However, I think that in addition a large amount of our cast time reductions should just be removed. I think that the cast time reduction of tidal waves should just be made baseline as a part of healing wave and chain heal, and the effect of tidal waves changed for these spells. Flash flood should just be removed and replaced with something more interesting. * A controversial opinion I have is that I believe the cast time reduction of tidebringer should be removed or scaled back. I love the range aspect of tidebringer, and has made chain heal much more fun to use in m+. However, the range in combination with the cast time reduction turns chain heal into a complete monster of an ability. It's a fast casting smart heal with more or less no range restrictions. I think this is too much, and overpowers other parts of the kit. I know a lot of people think that the spec plays "too slow" without tidebringer, and I agree, but I think there are other ways to fix this issue in a more balanced way.

Had so much fun levelling and gearing an enhancement shammy in remix that I changed to enhancement on my retail resto shammy. And all because a comment here on Reddit that said "they are like melee mages" and oh boy does that ring true I love it

I've always wanted to try out Shaman so I finally leveled one to 70 in remix. I pretty much only played enhancement and I found that I basically never use totems. I thought totems would be much more crucial to every spec. Could it just be that you're so OP in remix that you don't need to use totems? Or am I just doing it wrong?

As a practical matter, while questing, not really. Stoneskin and Healing stream totems are helpful but they won’t save you if you really fuck up. Windfury isn’t really useful for random mobs. I’ve heard good things about the stunning and slowing totems for PVE but I don’t use them myself.

This is gonna be a bit facetius; I love Shaman and I have mained it since BC, when alliance could play them finally. I also find Enhancement to be consistently one of the most fun melee specs, because it does not rely on a builder the same tedious way as some other classes do. For me, curated RNG makes any class more fun, because I am the type that find tedium in repetition. Now to the more facetous part, Elemental and Resto. The former has had far more of an identity crisis I think - although why is a big mystery since it is so easy to come up with cool things in that theme bucket. Anyway, the reality in Dragonflight is that these two specs got replaced by Evoker. Really, Devastation and Preservation is just 2.0 versions of these specs. Now I am actually not the type that mind having similiar designs and similiar abilities, in fact I love having a different spin on it (eg paladin vs priest for holy), but if you undress some theme differences here, they are remarkably similiar specs only improved, in what you actually do. Utility healer and burst proc caster. I want to say I think that's fine, but it really illustrates that the shaman specs (enhancement is the best design imo) need to have something done with them. The core is not bad, but in this light, it's really obvious that their little pain points are like annoyances that stack up. I guess that is why I hope the delay means that they are thinking about this, because it must be hard not to either ruin what's there or design something new that people won't take to. I just know they need to do something. After all I still think it's fun to play it, just it could be more fun; I sometimes wonder if it's just a matter of updating the visuals that really makes it feel this way. Hard to say since that's definitely true with eg the stupid ascendant forms.

Ele PVP is fun, I farm the elite transmog set each season in my shaman. Enhance PvP is fun but not as fun as Ele.. Ele Pve is well yeah there are better options. Enhance PVE from what I remember was fun and a ton of numbers. I havent played Resto is years lol.

Restoration is a fun mix of reactive and proactive healing and has been my favorite healer for quite some time. Enhancement feels fun hitting dummies, but I haven't played it in actual content in a while because of the burden of gearing an alt for both int and agi. Shaman's an alt for me, so I could be getting a lot wrong, but I believe the main problems with Shaman are a wide dislike for Primordial Wave, a lack of defensives which makes it pretty much nonviable after a certain point (and pretty rough until that point) unless they're funneled externals, and a clunky mess of utility that could probably be reduced to fewer buttons. They also lack any real raid buff, with Windfury being exclusive to Enhancement and a party buff, not a raid buff.

i genuinely dont understand the frustration people have, other than that some utility talents are hard to take together and we have few defensives. that's it. i play Resto in raids and keys, Ele in some keys, and Enhance to quest. so i could be missing a lot of enhancement issues. but resto feels amazing as it always has and ele feels better than it ever has. who hates slinging almost infinite cleaved lava bursts?! not me.

Terrible, unfortunately.

I just finished leveling my ele shaman from 60 to 70 and it was PAINFUL. Meanwhile I'm leveling my ret pally from 50 to 70 and it's been fast and fun. Shaman feels so behind and ignored. Makes me sad.

I played wow since release nonstop on mid mythic level. never played shaman because i think the class fantasy stinks (obviously my opinion), but i leveled every class on remix and just thought it would be dumb not to take that chance and get one up finally. So this is a very shallow look into the class itself without any input regarding the performance or numbers themselves but pure playstyle. First of all. This class is bloated as hell. i had trouble fitting all those spells in my bars and every single thing does something so niche that they give holy pala a for their money. Gamba is fun. Ele is boring and resto is ... well pretty dog tbh. so many things you could do and none of them feel worth it. The talent tree is absolutely shit, class AND spec trees. Like why do enhance have to spend a talent point in the lower end of the middle for a movement ability. i don't get it. I now understand why shamans are outraged about their missing update. Shamans and holy paladin need a freaking doctor asap

I really, really like the confusingly named Elementalist build for Enhancement Shaman. The Dragonflight rework is why I started playing Shaman again. Stormstrike is one of the most satisfying buttons to press in the game for me, in that "monkey neuron activate" meme kind of way. Restoration Shaman is a super comfortable healing spec for me. Totemic seems genuinely great, Surging Totem insta casts Healing Rain, it tracks you and your group 5 times, and a bunch of your totems now cast chain heal when dropped. Feels great. Elemental Shaman is something I play in RBG's because I'd rather be a squishy ranged than a squishy melee. Don't often play Ele but every time I do it's a Lava Burst meme build. That's what Farseer is, you and your ghostybois tossin' meatballs.

I've been playing Enhance since just after TBC came out. Its always my main in raids, mythics, and solo. I wish I could meet someone else who also plays enhance so they could tell me why my damage is always trash (yeah yeah "get gud scrub"4 I get it). At the start of a season I'm always at the bottom of the meters. Midway though the season I sit firmly in the middle. At the end of the season, when finally fully geared out and everyone else is on their mains, thats when I shine and finally get into the top 3. But as others have said, there is a ton of button bloat, talent bloat, and just weirdness all around. I still find the class fun but I wish "die and rez" wasn't a tactic that the plate wearing warriors scream at us.

Yeah, you lack haste early ln the expansion, and as you get more, the class gets better, it's always been the same. Bad early, OK mid, Good late

I started playing shaman in BFA, played enh and loved it, it was kinda simple and fun, loved the animation for stormstrike spam i could play that all day long in keys. Shadowlands release destroyed that for me, rotation was kinda bloated with useless lightning spells, animation was just bad. Like every time i press instant chain lightning or bolt it feels so bad i just cant. Started playing ele in shadowlands because enh was dead and i loved it, it was simple bursty in m+ and animation felt really good, i was back to shaman and i did all 20 keys really fast because i played so much i had too much fun. Dragonflight again destroyed this spec for me, they made the talents so bad, if you play lightning build you need to take like 2 extra spells that are just extra buttons and it feels bad, rotation became complex just for sake of complexity. Fire build is "flame shock, flame shock. Oh do i have 6 flame shocks? I cant see i just press flame shock" like i hate it, it was too complex for me (yes i learned it in the end, but it was pain). And i hate visuals for fire, like if i want to play with fire i go fire mage or destro warlock. I wanted to play shaman for lightning not for lame fire. Right now i still think that shaman will be bad in TWW. They did not adress anything ele or enh. They still have buttons in rotation they dont need and its just adds complexity and nothing positive. PS. i hate that stormstrike is doing zero damage with so many stuff to pick and support it in talent tree. If i could fix something enh should get rid of buttons they dont need, they should make new spenders abilities that match animation to enh shaman and they should buff stormstrike by (big number)%. They should give me my charge back because right now we never pick that and its just sad. They could make it after you use charge you get damage reduction or versa or something. Ele is overloaded with spells too and ele blast should be gone or instant, feels bad to cast it. I did not include new hero talents they have diff problems. Btw. They should get defense and raid buff.

It kinda depends, I would say for the most part they are pretty fun with one caveat. Probably the biggest issue is that they all feel kinda trash until you reach a certain gear level and it needs another defensive. Probably the biggest issue is primordial wave, they just need to remove that skill completely. It literally feels terrible to use in almost every spec. Literally as long as they don't make cloudburst OP where it is required to use it and they remove primordial wave or at least make it not mandatory with how strong it is you would have shamans celebrating.

Im really liking Stormbringer/Storm Enh on TWW beta right now. Sadly totemic feel really bad. And elemental blast conflicts with Stormbringer hero talents, so that had to be dropped as well.

The stormstrike build is imo the most fun dps in the game , people seem not to like ot , but I do . I also care about vfx and it looks the best , with fire mage being close to it . Numbers change all the time and unless you plan to be among top 1% , any spec can do the job . So focus on things that remain the same throughout expansions .

Elemental: press lava burst

I'll make one tomorrow and play on it and let you know how it feels

I don’t mind them right now. I’m always sceptical about seeing posts wanting Shaman changes. The last time we got “changes” (for Enh anyways) they removed our Shock spells and turned our Weapon Enchants into battle usable abilities. And they felt awful to use. Everytime they try to “change” something for Shamans they just remove something fun. 2handers. Tanking. Sentry Totem. Shocks.

Ive played almost every other spec to varying degrees of competitive since beginning season 3. I was primarily maining healer but I can also dps. Restoration is one of the most bloated healers in the sense that you have only three heals you will actually ever press but the spec has 10 buttons that basically do nothing in terms of real throughout. Elemental and Enhance are unique in the sense that they both try to accommodate two unique play styles in their spec tree. From my experience they also have dramatically different play styles between their AOE and Single Target builds. Usually it’s also to a specs detriment if they have to choose between aoe and single target spenders. Overall the class struggles massively with survivability in high level content because they simply lack the defensive capabilities. Astral shift is on a considerably longer cooldown than you need it to be to stay alive and your only other option is to stop doing damage to heal yourself. For an extensive version, if you’re interested in an expert opinion, you could check out the feedback threads on the official website. There are some very smart shaman players with a lot to say. The main takeaway is that the class tree itself essentially adds nothing to damage, and the utility is poor.

Ele shaman is certainly down bad, but as a main myself it has a few positives too. Because of the tier set, there is only one build you can play. Its centered around primordial wave and consists of you spamming lava burst the vast majority of the time. Aoe, cleave, single target, all burst spam. The talent tree, animations and models for the class are outdated. We bring no unique buff or team utility. Usually pretty mid on damage. There are a few positives, though. The current iteration is the most mobile caster in the game. Remember how you'll be mostly casting lava burst? Most will be instant cast procs. Our spenders have no cast time outside of Elemental Blast, and we even get a spell called nature's swiftness that makes it instant cast. All that on top of spirit walkers grace that let's us hard cast spells while moving means there is almost no downtime even while repositioning for mechanics. Additionally, because we have no big damage cooldowns, our damage profile is relatively flat and consistent. The last thing I'll say about ele is that although it doesn't have unique buffs or utility it brings to groups it has a shit ton of general utility that all shamans get in the form of totems.