For the Record

After a meeting last week, I had a post written up which I was doing edits on. Issue was, I didn't know what to write for a conclusion.

I decided to forget that and just post what I had, as at least there were points to comment on and refer to later.

If you need to reference something containing developer feedback and want to ignore my other, more conversational posts, then this will probably be it.

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Enhancement Shaman have a difficult time in PvP compared to the other trees. While Elemental and Resto are regarded by the devs as performing well in PvP situations, there seem to be a lot of folks who leveled with Enhancement, which lends itself well to the solo game, but the transition into end-game PvP could cause a shift where players either respec or continue with Enhancement. These folks may not want to respec due to their love of that tree or aspect, particular gearing may become an issue that player's may have to review for themselves, etc. This may or may not be the case in all situations, but when it comes down to it, if you really wanted to optimize for PvP, enhancement might not be the best choice for it.

Conversely, in PvE, while Enhancement can put out some decent dps, they are also seen as absorbing heals by being in melee range for a boss encounter, so they may not be preferable to a plate wearer or someone who can mitigate enough of their own damage cleanly.

The devs don't see the class as broken, and while realizing there may be things to adjust in the future, there is no rush for big changes, revamps, gutting the class to rebuild it, or other similar, drastic measures. The changes going in to 2.1 don't show signs of being altered and are seen to place the class in a reasonable performance category.

For the record, there are other specifics which have been brought up many times, which are regarded as issues that the devs and players may disagree on, such as:

• Counterspell locking out a primary source of damage, nature. Paladins are in the same boat and this is deliberate.
  
• Along with that, nature immune creatures. The devs do see this as an issue and are being more relaxed with immune mobs. While these immune mobs may crop up from time to time, it isn't in such a way as to block progress.
  
• Mana Tide has been considered for trainability, but it is not seen as a candidate. I'm sure this will come up again at some point, but it has been acknowledged before and the answer doesn't seem to be changing for now or the foreseeable future.
  
• Threat generation, or more particularly, the ability to remove threat has been considered, but as shaman, for the most part, share standard 10% threat reduction with other casters, the devs don't see it as a pressing issue.
  
• Weapon itemization for healing or damage spec'ced shaman not comparing to wands. The point has been brought up and acknowledged, but there isn't anything to say beyond that at this time.
  
• Windfury buff scaling with weapons better than other weapon buffs, making it the obvious choice, which also seems to exacerbate people's concern over the upcoming off-hand buff change. Yes, windfury does scale better and that's fine, however the devs don't see a necessity for buffing the other buffs to make them "more desirable".

Q u o t e:

- if enhancement is the solo build and elemental is more end game desirable, why is it that there are more group buffing talents in enhancement than elemental? I.e., only real group buff elemental has is totem of wrath, as opposed to several totem improving talents, storm strike and unleashed rage

Enhancement can put out a lot of dps in raids, given certain circumstances. Frankly, trying to find labels for trees seems to confuse the issue more than anything. Here, I'll just take that part out, because I agree it is dumb.