Enhancement Shaman Future.

#0 - Oct. 28, 2010, 9:40 a.m.

First off I love enhance and it's the only reason why I am here to give some thought regarding the spec. I have chatted with many enhancement shamans and we pretty concerned that the spec has the highest risk factor going into the expansion.

2 issues we have to come to terms with is:

1) We don't bring unique buffs to the raid anymore.
This means you could potentially take another melee dps instead of a enhance shaman especially with encounters where enrage timers are a problem initially and you want to get that kill in before your competition guilds.

2) The unintended consequence of the dismantling of a lot 25 man raiding guilds into 10 man raiding guilds.
As a raid leader why would you take a enhance shaman over any other class/spec with all things being equal. Eg skill for skill/gear for gear.

I do trust things will balance out at 85, but if we going to pay the hybrid tax surely ferals/rets/fury wars and dks
should be paying the same taxes?

Ghostcrawler

#6 - Oct. 28, 2010, 4:32 p.m.

Q u o t e:
1) We don't bring unique buffs to the raid anymore.
This means you could potentially take another melee dps instead of a enhance shaman especially with encounters where enrage timers are a problem initially and you want to get that kill in before your competition guilds.

Nobody brings unique buffs anymore. It isn't a tenable design when you have 30 different specs and raid groups that are sized 10 and 25 to have 30 very valuable unique buffs. I further question how fun it is to know that you probably only got brought because you make everyone else functional.

Q u o t e:
2) The unintended consequence of the dismantling of a lot 25 man raiding guilds into 10 man raiding guilds.
As a raid leader why would you take a enhance shaman over any other class/spec with all things being equal. Eg skill for skill/gear for gear.

I do trust things will balance out at 85, but if we going to pay the hybrid tax surely ferals/rets/fury wars and dks
should be paying the same taxes?

A raid leader should bring you because you perform well, contribute to guild progression and are a pleasant person to play with. If your dps is dreadfully low, then it's understandable if a progression-focused leader feels like he or she can't afford a spot for you. The only PvE specs we felt were dreadfully low in the previous expansion were Arms warrior, Frost mage, Subtlety rogue and BM hunter. If we can fix those for Cataclysm then we'll be in pretty good shape and the onus will be on you to be a capable enough raider that folks want to raid with you.

Ghostcrawler

#26 - Oct. 28, 2010, 5:10 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Are you saying though that Enhancement is balanced with the other specs at 85 based on all your evidence and aren't lagging behind at all.

At 85 on the current beta build, Fury is high. Ret, Feral and the DKs are either close or slightly high. Rogues and Enhance might be a little low. This is how things look this AM and after a few more raid tests and balance tweaks, we might feel differently.

We know not everyone is able to beta raid test, but it is very useful to compare our internal tests and estimations to what players are actually able to accomplish.

Ghostcrawler

#28 - Oct. 28, 2010, 5:14 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Wait let me guess this straight... you change everything about every spec, cut and redesign some talent trees from the ground.... but you base your ''who is broken and who is not '' off PRE-patch data?

Am I reading this right? And am I the only one shocked and almost insulted by it?

I think you are going out of the way to look for insults. I said that in LK, most raiders were able to pick any spec they wanted to for raiding purposes -- with the exception of the few underperforming specs I mentioned -- and that if we can do even better this time around, things will be in a good place.

Ghostcrawler

#32 - Oct. 28, 2010, 5:24 p.m.

Q u o t e:
That being said you must understand how conflictual the information is on our hand. I understand that you want rational backed-up feedback, but what 80% of us has to go bye is Live lvl 80 data, then the other 20% is on Beta, and no one has a clue what is going on with your internal testing.

I understand. We're constantly talking about better ways to get our current thoughts out to the community. Some days I'd just love to start the morning off with a "Here is what we think after last night" post / blog / tweet / whatever. Stuff changes pretty fast at this stage.

Ghostcrawler

#40 - Oct. 28, 2010, 5:35 p.m.

Q u o t e:
I've always wondered why classes aren't first balanced on a stationary DPS fight such as patchwerk and then tweaked from there. Wouldn't this aid in making all DPS classes more in line with each other and not all over the board which is what we're currently seeing in beta?

Can you not just slap the gear from each of the upcoming tiers on the classes and run tests of this nature? I understand very few fights are like patchwerk but it would give a great starting place to balance for fights with movement, with downtime, with adds. and things of that nature.

We do this. A lot. It doesn't have a lot of bearing on actual fights though. Nobody cares if they win the combat dummies if they have so much down time on the Nefarian fight that their dps is dreadful. Enhance in particular is a spec that does pretty well on stationary fights (say Saurfang) and falls a lot when it has to move (say Sindragosa, Purtricide, LK).

We're also in a high flux environment, so things might be stable, and then a designer changes a talent or fixes a bug which introduces a new bug. As we get closer to ship, the rate of change decreases and things start to stabilize. We still miss stuff sometimes, however. It's a complicated game.

Ghostcrawler

#136 - Oct. 31, 2010, 6:42 p.m.

Q u o t e:
You're also ignoring the 25+ page enhancement thread. For shame =(

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=14697595457&sid=1