A Look Back at Enhancement Shaman in Dragonflight & War Within Wishlist – Editorial

With the sun setting on Dragonflight and The War Within on the horizon, our Enhancement Shaman Writer, Wordup, offers a retrospective highlighting Enhancement’s journey in Dragonflight and shares their hopes for the spec’s next evolution with a War Within Wishlist.

Enhancement in Dragonflight: A Resounding Success

Over the years Enhancement has been a strange spec, experiencing several reworks and a very volatile place in the game. It’s occupied a variety of different specialties and niches, been an amazing spec and a terrible one and everywhere in between, and even spent a long stint as one of the forgotten melee. Fortunately, Shadowlands started to brush away some of the imperfections with our (hopefully final) major rework and then we ran headfirst into Dragonflight with a renewed design space with far more room to grow. Tuning wise, I’d say especially compared to recent expansions we spent the lion’s share in the upper half, and spent the entire time as a truly desirable spec in DPS rosters in every tier (for reasons other than just Windfury Totem), for the first expansion in a very long time.

The story of the spec during Dragonflight itself then is one of design success, with arguably some of the best-designed choices and flexibility within the new talent tree system that evolved throughout the expansion. It did this in an extremely healthy way as well – it came out the gates screaming with a great core and then had surgical changes made patch-by-patch to lift up the pain points that arose – all without spending any time truly languishing. In this article, I’ll be going through all of the things that I think makes Enhancement one of the posterchilds of success in the expansion, what still needs looking at, and what I think Blizzard should try and emulate in the new Hero Talent system. Strap in, because this is going to be quite long.

Enhanced Talent Trees

Probably the most well-known success of the talent tree for Enhancement specifically (or at least, the one I keep harping on about to people who will listen) is how it managed to achieve two completely different builds on one tree. Not just cosmetic differences, but deep-running alterations to priority, gameplay and damage profiles that had little overlap with how they did their damage or what button they even cared about. The Storm and Elementalist tree split managed to have distinct options and solid overlaps, and pathing (eventually) that accommodated both – to the point where at one stage during Patch 10.1 every single throughput talent on the tree had a place in a used build. Better yet, these build archetypes were so well defined that it was pretty easy to understand the running theme and whether a talent lined up with it well, which just scratches the itch of building your own tree you never thought you had.

The Magic of Distinct Builds

There’s a lot to say about the two builds because they play so differently and even represent two completely different eras of the spec. Blizzard achieved something with Enhancement that wasn’t really expected because in reality, it’s a massive undertaking and an even bigger ask to actually achieve it, but somehow it was done. While to some choice is overwhelming, and the worry that balancing two builds in one spec is a herculean task, this is about as close as I’ve ever seen them come over the course of an entire expansion. Due to that, I think it’s only fair to do a rundown of what makes them so different and why it was so cool for each of them below:

‎ ‎Elementalist‎ ‎

Elementalist is the build that represents the bridge between the old (MoP/WoD era) and new (Shadowlands) raised to its final form in Dragonflight. It draws from all eras of the spec and managed to fix some extremely long standing issues related to resource, flow and cooldown strength all while injecting an incredibly unique playstyle – one I’d argue exists nowhere else in the game.

It occupies the right side of the tree mostly, taking all of the different Frost, Fire and Nature elements of the tree to really lean into the battlemage fantasy better than the spec ever has before, culminating in Elemental Blast and Primordial Wave as Elemental school spells. One thing that the spec always has struggled with is defining what “Enhancement” is supposed to be – are we enhancing others? Our weapons? Ourselves? That got very muddy in each iteration, but I think what this design did was answer that question: melee strikes enhance spells and vice versa. The interplay between two distinct components of the spec, building up buffs into big combo moments is deep and rewarding, and the flow (while it does have a rough onboarding experience that can be overwhelming) is undeniably good when you understand just how many callbacks the tree has. It functions off three main pillars in gameplay:

• Maelstrom Weapon and Feral Spirit – this is the central pillar. Building and spending Maelstrom Weapon leads to big finishers in Elemental Blast, feeds back into more Feral Spirit activations amplifying the rest of the tree, and bridging our resource through that cycle. Primordial Wave is the last backbone to this giving us a “refill” that fuels itself which is exactly what it needs to staunch the variance.
• Lava Lash – the melee core that has the right side pillar of Hot Hand, Ashen Catalyst and Lashing Flames. This serves as the variance portion to keep the gameplay exciting, and also feeds the funnel.
• Hailstorm – the final pillar that serves as a background combo to make our “filler” feel more impactful. This happens in between all of the other important buttons, letting us build up a buff pairing of Ice Strike and Hailstorm to empower Frost Shock (that adds in some free AoE too), meaning that the rotation never really hits a lull.

I personally think this is the best designed the spec has ever been. Every component of the class, from Shocks to Maelstrom Weapon to our primary strikes in Stormstrike and Lava Lash have a clear purpose, and Feral Spirit is the meaningful (though a little frequent) cooldown we spent a long time missing.

‎ Storm ‎

Storm on the other hand is a more updated version of the modern Enhancement that was tried out in Legion and BfA. It centers its entire gameplay loop on Stormstrike, focusing on the all-out melee attack with RNG heavy components, giving it a frenetic pace at the cost of complexity and depth that I know some people have really enjoyed.

Of the two builds, this is one that still needs the most work to really get it to that place of completion, but that it’s even this close considering some entire specs aren’t this cohesive on design goals speaks to the quality here. It does capture what defined the two expansions it draws inspiration on quite well – Stormstrike is the star of the show and everything else is in service of that singular goal. Maelstrom Weapon and resource? Doesn’t matter, it’s going to Stormstrike. Every major effect on the tree such as the classical Windfury Weapon and the somewhat controversial Deeply Rooted Elements are built around elevating that. It’s visceral, and it’s simple to understand, and having that on the tree as an option is great. Its gameplay is a bit more obvious:

• Stormstrike – this is the only main pillar here. Everything else is in service of this, and as such the gargantuan number of talents related to it in Stormflurry, Elemental Assault, Storm’s Wrath, Stormblast, Tempest Strikes, Deeply Rooted Elements (and more!) make it clear. Pressing this is the primary directive at all times because everything feeds back into it in a recursive loop.
• Windfury Weapon – this is a secondary component used to fuel, you guessed it, more Stormstrike. Forceful Winds, Unruly Winds and Doom Winds add in a way to keep it more relevant as an imbue since Stormstrike is the main-hand strike activator in our rotation, so it serves as the way to generate the real resource (which is Stormbringer procs).
• Maelstrom Weapon – different to Elementalist, this is used to leverage Legacy of the Frost Witch so we have an active way to trigger a reset – something Legion and BfA sorely missed. This talent alone effectively keeps the resource relevant for a spec that would otherwise not care about it without being too obvious about that, which is pretty clever.

Its downfall is though, ultimately, that singular goal doesn’t mesh as well with other components of the tree because its GCDs rely on shallow single button spam. The concept of “too much of a good thing” applies to Storm in spades here, the sheer amount of Stormstrike access alongside everything else becoming fuel for that diminishes the rest of the toolkit, and that ultimately needs addressing in a way that doesn’t deter those who enjoy the playstyle – which is a difficult task. The lack of depth and AoE conversion tools has meant it walked a razor thin line on tuning (Season 2 is an example where it landed in the sweet spot by accident more than anything) and that puts it at risk of being a trial and error build going forward. Keeping this while having the gameplay work isn’t nearly as impossible as this may be coming across though, and I’ll touch on that in the gameplay section.

A Class Tree Spread Too Thin

I’ll start with positives on the tree to get them out the way, as the title may suggest I think it’s one of our failure points. The amount of control on the tree and the pathing routes/overall tree structure are excellent. I can path wherever I want and there’s enough flexibility to get any configuration I could imagine. Thunderstorm / Thundershock were excellent additions, as was the return of Ancestral Guidance, and the option to pick up a large suite of different tools (even if the majority used to be baseline) is welcome. Totemic Projection was also fantastic to get back to help us drag around Windfury Totem, and made life a whole lot easier.

On the other hand, the class tree is a bit more abstract for us in terms of value. Initially at its reveal, it looked great – lots of open pathing and flexibility with some good niche picks we could freely access. That is still true today and is great in theory, but, the counterpoint is that so much of the tree feels low impact and forgettable. I grab the handful of points scattered about the tree I want, pick up a few more that might be useful, and still have loads of points to scattershot the leftovers. Nothing below the 20 gate really encourages me to path there, and there’s not many above it that really excite me either. What highly specialized counter tools (such as Poison Cleansing Totem or Tremor Totem) need to be compelling choices is friction. I need to feel like I’m giving something up, but making a smart choice to “outplay” an encounter through knowledge rather than having it by accident. Our class tree feels like it’s still in the first draft, especially after the refreshes we’ve seen with newer design philosophies. It may be a sin to want throughput, but even some universally useful utility would go a long way – We suffer from the inverse of the choice paralysis other specs have: we have the choice, but it’s because the choice doesn’t matter.

Because the Dragonflight tree carved out a lot of the baseline utility to try and make those compelling choices, what it mostly revealed (at least to me) is how rarely they’re useful, and that even when the situation presents itself, it’s usually not the kind of thing that a group jumps for joy about having. Having a class tree filled with these nodes is technically the Swiss Army Knife it looks like – sure, it has a blade or two that you’re always going to need, but the rest is just 20 toothpicks. You might get food stuck in your teeth once in a while and it’s great to have one, but you can live without it, you certainly don’t need 20, and it would be really nice to have a can opener right now instead. Sadly, you’re just stuck with all those toothpicks and the decision is what colour you want.

Finding Enhancement’s Gameplay Roots

Enhancement’s gameplay isn’t immediately obvious at a glance because its key effects aren’t tied to resource. Instead, we use a pseudo-resource in Maelstrom Weapon procs and are gated by specific ability cooldowns we need to manage. This was the core for all expansions aside from Legion and BfA, and Dragonflight drew from every corner of our history to make things functional. The big thing to repeat and emphasize in this section is just how different the two builds that exist are. It’s not a superficial change of damage profile or cooldowns, everything down to the very core of the spec alters in terms of what you care about. Due to that for those that haven’t been playing Enhancement in Dragonflight, there’ll be a visual representation of the key aspects for each build alongside to highlight how little overlap there is.

Elementalist

Elementalist is both the most interesting, and by far the most difficult to wrap your head around. I’ve seen the comments this expansion about the giant priority list and piano playstyle, but the thing with it is once it clicks, it really clicks. It’s something that’s overwhelming at first because it looks like a lot is going on, but like Neo you eventually just learn to feel the vibes and intuit what’s coming, and that kind of feeling in gameplay is almost unbeatable for me.

‎ Elementalist‎
Primary Pillar	|	spell=187880/maelstrom-weapon	|	spell=117014/elemental-blast	|	/spell=51533/feral-spirit
Rotation Core	|	spell=60103/lava-lash	|	spell=342240/ice-strike	|	spell=375982/primordial-wave
Key Effects	|	spell=201900/hot-hand	|	spell=334195/hailstorm	|	spell=384447/witch-doctors-ancestry

The overhaul of Elemental Spirits to buff all damage of a type (rather than the variable amplifiers to specific spells last expansion) was a long overdue reduction in RNG and bringing forward Witch Doctor’s Wolf Bones kept the momentum based CDR gameplay intact. Focusing on Elemental Blast as a huge impact finisher (and the very welcome second charge via Lava Burst) gave us flexibility that tapped into any Feral Spirit roll, and having Overflowing Maelstrom added to let us dump resource more aggressively freed up GCDs we lacked with all the new tools on the tree. Keeping Hot Hand in as some healthy variance, but relegating it to more of a supporting role compared to the main star it was in Shadowlands helped a lot with frustration. It’s AoE on the other hand is not to everyone’s taste – it relies on tab-target debuff maintenance with Lashing Flames that’s very deep when it comes to optimization, but there’s a lot of plates to spin in a given pull. That said, the tri-fecta of Crash Lightning providing resource generation for Chain Lightning spend moments, Primordial Wave as a burst cooldown and Hailstorm as a backbone is working out great. In particular, the shift to make Splintered Elements give 20% Haste in single target and rise to 40% at 6, rather than 10-60% in Patch 10.2 also did a lot to give it an ebb-and-flow gameplay style regardless of target count.

What Dragonflight did to this playstyle was take the Shadowlands revert back to the WoD era and touched it up with all of the experiments that had been done in the interim years. Virtually every aspect of our Shadowlands kit was one step away from being cohesive, but between system and talent locks it was always tantalizingly close and yet so far. We are a spec that is fundamentally built on synergy, and until now we were presented a variety of things that clearly work together and were stopped from combining them – having those weights removed has felt great.

The thing that the gameplay did struggle with throughout the expansion though was finding the right spot for Maelstrom Weapon generation. Fundamentally a resource this important that, at its base, is so random presents a problem of feeling agonizingly starved (which Season 2 had on full show). Elemental Blast and Primordial Wave feel so good that when we can’t generate enough to keep them recharging it’s impossible to avoid the feeling you messed up. This was tuned and rebalanced over and over in the expansion (and proof they were always paying attention to feedback that things were slightly off) until Season 3. Elemental Assault adding in Lava Lash and Ice Strike, and freeing up pathing to Elemental Blast was the last piece of the build’s puzzle and it shows.

Storm

Storm on the other hand scratches an itch for Legion and BfA gameplay, and leans extremely heavily into the proc gameplay that brought. It sacrifices all management to go all out on using Stormstrike as much as possible, and as such there’s an ocean of talents on the tree that link directly back into improving the button and enabling the goal. This also saw an uplift from the original Maelstrom system we had as a build/spend class, deftly using Legacy of the Frost Witch as a vector to convert Maelstrom Weapon into activations. Feral Spirit being a flat Physical damage amplifier as well worked out great, keeping our most iconic cooldown not only a relevant buff but a running thread throughout all builds for the first time in what seems like forever.

]‎ Storm
Primary Pillar	|	spell=17364/stormstrike	|	spell=17364/stormstrike	|	spell=17364/stormstrike
Rotation Core	|	spell=384450/legacy-of-the-frost-witch	|	spell=378270/deeply-rooted-elements	|	spell=51533/feral-spirit
Key Effects	|	spell=201845/stormbringer	|	spell=33757/windfury-weapon	|	spell=384411/static-accumulation

This however is where a little personal bias comes in. I understand that big RNG moments are really fun and this spec has a lot of explosive moments thanks to Deeply Rooted Elements, but when people call it a casino spec they aren’t exaggerating. Everything relies on fishing for procs ad infinitum, and when you don’t have them it’s really a desperate race to the next hit, which wears thin during extended play sessions. The sheer lack of consistency or predictability in the entire build is just a little too much for my taste, but it’s definitely closing in on the fun that Legion achieved at its tail end compared to the downturn of BfA, it just needs a little more time in the oven to find its core.

What the spec truly does achieve that I greatly appreciate there being, is having a simpler option on the tree when Elementalist is so complex. Having a jumping off build that still remains relevant is extremely big achievement for the design team, and that it keeps a distinct identity is what impresses me so much. Its real issue I think though is, it’s just a little bit too shallow. There’s room for it to be simple with a single-minded goal, but I think we’ve strayed too far past even the simplest specs in the game’s history. Stormstrike spam is great and it’s entirely welcome to exist as the key to the spec, but there needs to be something else to hook into somewhere or it lives and dies on the tuning surrounding that one button, and how often we can access it. This extends especially to AoE – Crash Lightning and Windfury Weapon procs simply aren’t enough to build an entire AoE package around at their current tuning point in the modern game. It feels like it’s missing one pillar there (or a way to convert Stormstrike into a relevant AoE tool reliably) – and even when Storm Cleave was a popular build that feeling never really went away. It’s also by far the most point starved build we have – the two points required for Molten Assault to enable possible tools like Primordial Wave and Fire Nova are brutal since it doesn’t want to path any further.

Tier Sets: the Seasonal Saviours

The return of Tier Sets for us has been great. To put cards on the table, I love tier sets and always have because they give room for devs to experiment and inject something different into the game without worry that they need to be supported forever, and it feels like that was used deftly for us. In more than one case, the bonuses were so ideal that they covered weaknesses we didn’t even know were there until we lost them, and in hindsight, that’s really cool:

Elements of Infused Earth

• 2-Piece – Casting Stormstrike causes your next Fire, Frost or Nature ability to deal 10% increased damage and generate 1 additional stack of Maelstrom Weapon.
• 4-piece – Consuming Maelstrom Weapon stacks increases your Haste by 0.5% (was originally 1%) per stack consumed for 3 seconds (was originally 4).

• Season 1 – The real all-star here was the 2-piece bonus. There’s only so much you can glean from how something will feel in extended play from Beta, and something I and many others under-estimated was just how Maelstrom Weapon hungry the builds were at their core. This bonus not only kept Stormstrike in a healthy spot for both builds, supported them with damage, but gave us a great springboard to start the expansion without feeling sluggish like usual. The 4-piece helped with this as well, bulk stats when we’re lacking gear alongside re-teaching the importance of our resource was a very clever onboarding choice. The 2-piece was so instrumental in fact, that the functionality eventually got rolled into Elemental Assault come Patch 10.2 and was one of the best received changes of the expansion.

Runes of the Cinderwolf

• 2-Piece – Casting Sundering grants you 24% Mastery for 15 seconds.
• 4-piece – Casting Sundering increases your Physical and Fire damage dealt by 20% for 15 seconds, and also causes your next 2 Chain Lightning casts to deal 20% (was originally 100%) increased damage and refund 50% of the Maelstrom Weapon stacks consumed.

• Season 2 – I’d consider this the odd one out, but it was a cool experiment. I was pretty harsh on it initially, but that was largely because it threatened to split the two build dichotomy we had by not supporting one at all. The idea of extending Sundering to be a cooldown activator was and still is a really cool thing to explore, and it came at the perfect time. We had some AoE issues (especially burst) and it managed to shore that up enough to not only keep us relevant but make us a specialist in it. Timing was everything here, and it’s something that could fit snugly somewhere on the talent tree.

Vision of the Greatwolf Outcast

• Season 3 – Of all the bonuses I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t far and away my favourite. Both bonuses and their impact on Primordial Wave (a button that may be contentious, but is very deep and provides a lot of flexible power) were fantastic, injecting in variable cooldown reduction giving us outplay potential on encounters. Much like Season 2, it also came at the perfect time with a raid and season where having more access through correct play to burst was especially valuable. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say without this, we wouldn’t be nearly as competitive as we are today. This is also the bonus that would be a tragedy to leave on the cutting room floor in The War Within, but I can understand why they may want to shelve something so powerful.

Basically, Tier Sets for us did exactly what they needed to, exactly when we needed them to do it. The gameplay of each may not have been to everyone’s taste, but that’s why experimentation is important to find out how the playerbase receive it. It’s hard to really ask for more, because even the less exciting ones did things behind the scenes to cover some design teething. If this was accidental then we were astronomically lucky, and if it was intentional it was a stroke of genius to land on these for each tier. This isn’t the first time either, we have a long standing history of Tier sets eventually becoming part of the class (Siege of Orgrimmar 4-piece, the original Hellfire Citadel 4-piece and Nighthold 4-piece to name a few), so them coming back has been a boon.

Why Dragonflight Mattered for Enhancement

While I’ve mentioned it in quite a few places so far, I think a clear point needs to be made for how important this expansion was for finding what Enhancement wants to be. We have spent such a long time between reworks, tweaks, changes and tested mechanics that were shelved and we were in desperate need of having a defined goal and specialty. We’ve spent time as a sustained single target spec, a burst spec, an AoE spec, a funnel spec and everywhere in between, and the core buttons of the gameplay loop has moved around more than a student on a gap year.

With a number of other specs in these retrospectives or in the lead up to Dragonflight raising the question of a lack of identity or defined theme, highlighting our success is really important as an example of how it worked. Our loop has been locked down and defined – we care about ability cooldowns and Maelstrom Weapon, these are the pillars and you carve out Enhancement’s unique design space. We bring sustained damage with bursts of priority, alongside funnel and free cleave – that gives us our purpose in a group. Our abilities have a lot of overlapping interactions giving it a combo playstyle that’s fluid (borrowing from MoP/WoD era), but we have a healthy amount of high value variance in procs (borrowing from Legion/BfA). Every part of the kit matters for at least one build (with one or two exceptions) – that makes for a compelling design. The devs also noticed that some things simply do not mesh, and as such carved out a second build to let that breathe – this feels like the way to solve that problem rather than trying to force it in where it doesn’t fit.

For a very long time (and I’m very guilty of this) we’ve come out of an expansion knowing as players fairly confidently where the biggest pain points were and complaining about it, and feeling like the only real way to fix them is with pretty extensive changes. This is the first expansion I can remember where the overwhelming majority of the spec and tree has a reason to exist and works, and as such it’s the steadiest ground we’ve ever stood on for the future of the game. It feels now like we finally have something we’re expected to be tuned strongly for by design, while before we were at the mercy of a diceroll.

Problems that Need Addressing

While there’s been a whole lot of praise here, there are still some issues that exist that could probably do with a second draft going into The War Within, with varying degrees of severity. I want to super emphasize here though, most of this is nitpicking the remaining issues, rather fundamental flaws that require overhauls to address.

Survival Woes

First, Survival is a problem, there’s no way to cut it any differently. Having only one real active defensive tool on a 1.5-minute cooldown in Astral Shift in most cases (but especially in Mythic+) absolutely doesn’t cut it in the modern design space. Season 3 came in with a large number of one-shot mechanics, and that our only real answer was to wear a tank trinket speaks volumes. In a world where things like Deflecting Dance and Feint exists, having no active damage prevention and instead, extremely costly damage recovery (via Maelstrom Weapon healing) makes it feel like you’re playing a different game. It also doesn’t help that our last resort defense in Earth Elemental (which grants us +15% max HP so long as it’s alive) has a massive 5-minute cooldown and has a habit of trying its absolute best to get itself killed in Mythic+ by taunting everything, arguably the place we need defense the most.

Spirit Wolf is an example of gameplay not meshing well with design – we lose so much throughput from a loss in momentum but our only consistent DR tool demands both that and foresight, while Ursine Vigor for Druids (who are suffering from the same singular defense tool problem with some specs) is immediate response survival on specs that have DoT damage redundancy for downtime. If Spirit Wolf was instead a decaying DR that maxed out on shift and faded slowly, we’d be in a much better place comparatively. This goes for our Shields too – Earth Shield costs a lot of GCDs to maintain for fairly low self-healing and Lightning Shield does nothing compared to the past, why? We suffer from a situation where every way of surviving more costs a lot, and they’re not even strong tools comparatively to ones much easier to use for most other classes, which is a distinct (and sometimes insurmountable) weakness.

Survival tools have power crept so much in Dragonflight that even though we gained a lot of ground from Shadowlands, we still feel like paper and other classes notice it. It’s so extreme that I’d even say, considering the sheer amount of cheat death and immunity effects in the game now, Reincarnation being a once-per-encounter 10-minute cooldown wouldn’t even be considered overtuned anymore, nor would bringing Burrow to the class tree from the PvP tree. To go with that especially for the PvP players out there, that we still can’t activate any defense while stunned (rest in peace Shamanistic Rage) when so many others have outright counters or can activate while CCed is just rough (and Soul Thorns reminded me how nasty that is). This is a running theme too, we used to be able to do this for a very long time, just like we used to be able to Tremor Totem out of fears, it’s strange that we sometimes need extra hoops to jump through (Capacitor Totem wind-up as another example) for things that aren’t even that special to begin with.

Talent and Throughput Issues

With regards to throughput problems, I think at this stage the experiment to target cap has been completely abandoned. It was fine when it was being employed more broadly, but we seem to be one of the last remaining sufferers of it. We’re firmly the last remaining melee to be hard target capped at specifically 6 – it doesn’t square root or spread the damage, we straight up do not hit anything above that with anything meaningful. Instead, we unevenly deal damage to packs, and in big pulls (that Mythic+ just loves to have) we stick out like a sore thumb. The closest equivalent is Fury with Meat Cleaver who suffer from the same problem. They have their own issue of not even being specialists when specifically at their 5 target cap, but they do at least have some uncapped, high impact abilities (this season via Odyn’s Fury and Thunderous Roar) specifically for those situations. Since we have no “big moment” cooldowns to pull around as a weakness, and we’re an ebb-and-flow CDR profile, it stands to reason that we should always have a way to engage with different damage types should the group need it, be that with talents or abilities. That situation is exacerbated by Augmentation being so popular – in raids amplifying a specialist is often done but in Mythic+ you’re over-investing in a niche you don’t need that much of, at the cost of the flexibility a generalist spec brings. If a spec like that exists and becomes as dominant as it was in Season 2 and 3, the space for a spec that can’t even engage with a key type of damage is a whole lot smaller, because you’re sacrificing 1.5 group members worth of large scale AoE.

From a “meta” point of view, there are three DPS specs this season as an example that compete with us comfortably in priority damage even with funnel considered, but also bring significantly more AoE while doing it. This begs the question: why would you want a specialist when a generalist can do it better if you plan around it? That’s not even mentioning that effectively executing our AoE involves complex tab-target maintenance of Lashing Flames – which gets infinitely harder with higher mob counts. This is due to the random Flame Shock spread targets from Molten Assault – we technically lose AoE potential when extra targets are added due to management and GCD overload, something fire-and-forget AoE classes don’t have to deal with. On top of all that, spreading Flame Shock can be extremely obnoxious due to the spread being relatively short range, and radiating outward from the centre of your target – making it hard to work with on a number of bosses with smaller hitboxes. This dovetails into the talent tree and a couple of specific issues:

• Fire Nova – this talent has basically no purpose for existing currently. Its design space overlap with Hailstorm is extreme, its damage is hyper-specific for target counts, and it comes at a much greater cost to enable. It’s a cool button that has a lot of history, and considering we have the above problem it seems obvious that finding a way to let this be “the AoE button” vs. “the Cleave passive” would kill two birds with one stone. I’d also argue Lashing Flames may need something to let it extend past the cap (potentially uncapped smaller pulses if we Lava Lash a target with it already applied) so we have some way to ease the burden and shift our focus when pulls go big.
• Converging Storms – the idea behind it is sound and it has history as the funnel conversion from Legion, but in practice with how little Crash Lightning and Stormstrike contribute, Storm’s AoE is lacking an entire pillar to its AoE toolkit. This talent has only ever succeeded by failing upward where other talents couldn’t fit into a build. Where this is positioned stands as a great place to bring in a way to empower Stormstrike for AoE purposes (to accomodate Storm, such as the Tomb 4-piece bonus and/or make Crash Lightning more of an AoE pillar) rather than a generator should we want to interact with larger pulls.
• Doom Winds – this is a cool button, and has a lot of history considering it was our artifact button, but it just lacks the punch of a cooldown. Being on the GCD is awful, but even worse is how short the duration is paired with that. We have such a busy GCD filled with so many overlapping active abilities, making it very easy to waste the value setting up or mis-timing it, all for bad RNG to ruin it, without even having that much power when it hits properly. At minimum this could serve as an AoE swing on cast, but really it needs something happening while active in the background (or a duration extension) to bring it back to feeling like a big moment.
• Deeply Rooted Elements – maybe the single most controversial talent on the tree. This alongside Ascendance is a node that is a really difficult nut to crack, because it’s got so much power built in and is a core part of an entire build. Right now, Ascendance as an active ability mightaswell not exist because its tuned so poorly against the alternative (and for a 3-minute cooldown that takes 4 talent points to enable, its power is terrible too). This pairing needs a serious look at, and the activation method being so recursive on Deeply Rooted Elements needs to be checked as well – the volatility it adds and gameplay decisions it removes are too extreme. I understand not wanting to overload too much into Maelstrom Weapon spending/generating, but something needs to be looked at specifically here.

Utility and the Class Tree

Most of our serious “utility problems” are rooted in the class tree itself. We have a lot of options that technically interact with a variety of mechanics, but none of them really shine or are a reason to seek out a Shaman. Currently part of that problem comes with what other classes are popular who have, in effect, better versions of what we bring, but that’s completely fine and natural. The issue is how rarely the answer to a problem in a group or raid is “employ one of the shaman’s tools”. Some key ones are:

• Stoneskin Totem and Group Defense – this is our one single group defensive tool. Currently in Season 3 there is one single boss mechanic that does AoE Physical damage (Smashspite’s Earthshaking Stomp) despite a number of them potentially working as Physical hits. It’s so rare for this to have use outside of incidental tank help that it’s frustrating to see the sheer wealth of group defense tools across other classes increase while ours stays kind of pointless. Considering the defensive creep it seems silly to add more but, why this can’t be Magic (or Elemental to fit the theme) damage reduction or a pulsing small absorb shield is a bit lost on me when tools like Mass Barrier and Darkness among other examples exist.
• Redundant Nodes – there’s quite a few of these. Tranquil Air Totem is a massive offender, and especially considering its position on the tree that it has no real use case is astounding. It’s especially bad when you consider how many good totems we’ve had in the past – Grounding Totem (I know it’s awkward to exist but man is it unique utility), Windwalk Totem and Stone Bulwark Totem just to name a few. Winds of Al’Akir as well is effectively just 2 tax points to reach a movement tool we had baseline, which is a bit archaic considering it does little to nothing we really want. A more forgivable problem is the bottom left side with Spiritwalker’s Grace and Nature’s Swiftness, these have zero applications for the spec at all despite being deep in the tree. Unfortunately, there’s not really any other valuable alternatives making a lot of our own talents seem like empty space.
• Totem Talents – we have so few impactful totems available to us and the majority of them are quite niche. Despite that, a whopping 12 points alongside 4 choice nodes are on the tree related to them. Totems are cool, they’re a good aesthetic for the spec, but they just aren’t impactful and all they really serve as is filler and you can feel it. It even extends past the 20 gate, with the right side being focused on minor Totem cooldown reduction (which we don’t need) and a Totem reset that mightaswell read “Wind Rush Totem or Capacitor Totem have a second charge” – not very exciting when compared to other trees, nor does it inspire confidence if we end up with the Totemic Hero tree!
• “Control” as a Utility Niche – this is really complicated, and ultimately a deep meta conversation but is relevant for Mythic+. That the thing we bring most clearly is good AoE control, how valuable we are is directly linked to how much other specs can bring. Right now, I think the overload of control on a couple of specific tanks alongside a certain controversial new addition is doing a lot to undermine the value of this. You don’t need someone who can bring control if you get it in spades (and more of it) elsewhere on a mandatory role. We effectively went from a spec with 2-3 extra stops up with more comfortable cooldowns on most specs vying for space in Mythic+ to now having at most 1 extra (and in some cases less!) thanks to design creep. We’re not a super desirable spec in the first place due to the survival problems, and losing this aspect only further incentivizes not bringing it to runs.
• Bringing a Stick to a Knife Fight – all of this combines when looking at raids. The only reason to think Enhancement is in the group is because of Windfury Totem (well, that and its excellent raid damage profiles). Look at many of the comments surrounding the race to world first – when two were seen the answer was obvious right? They wanted a second Windfury Totem! Or, at least, that’s what players assumed. There was nothing else even on their mind that could have been a justification for it (like the damage it brought itself) because there is no unique selling point of the spec from a utility perspective outside of a pseudo raid buff that looms over it like a shadow. That it costs a talent point and requires us to drag it around as well feels like another example of us having things other classes have, but in a more annoying way.

Last, there’s a couple of tiny issues with the Spec tree. Feral Lunge is something that simply exists, but there’s no world where there’s a point hanging around for something remarkably niche with almost a 1:1 overlap with Gust of Wind on the Class tree that doesn’t compete with throughput. The Refreshing Waters / Focused Insight node is similar, these are incredibly expensive points considering how strong our spec tree is yet they read like class tree talents – a place where we’re drowning in points with nowhere to spend them. They’re simply nowhere near the power level they’d need to be for what they’re competing with, it’s like being asked whether you want a delicious cake or a lump of coal for Christmas, the choice is kind of obvious.

Looking Ahead to Hero Talents

When it comes to the new fancy feature of Hero Talents in The War Within, it’s a little funny for Enhancement because technically we’ve already spent an entire expansion with two distinct build paths thanks to Storm and Elementalist. The first and most important thing I want to say is that I really hope that they don’t get in the way of that dichotomy existing and favour one heavily, but I’m also enough a realist to know that’s a very tall order. When it comes to which will be ours, I genuinely cannot tell. Stormbringer seems likely considering, well, Stormbringer; Farseer in Warcraft 3 had both Chain Lightning and Feral Spirit; and Totemic is pretty universally “Shaman” – It’s anyone’s guess this early on.

For what I’d like to see, it’s largely a case of making sure what happens within those trees doesn’t add excessively complicated mechanics to the spec. While some classes are in dire need of extra depth that the tree could add, we already have that in spades on our spec tree to begin with – instead we need things that will marry well with the existing core without getting in the way. I’d also probably lean toward them being more consistent than random as well, because we have quite a lot of that going on between our resources and proc tools. I could see us sharing a tree with Elemental that overlaps rewards for Maelstrom Weapon/Maelstrom expenditure (such as the Season 1 4-piece), Primordial Wave access/strength and even Flame Shock interactions considering we both have a lot tied into it. Deciphering how we’d marry with Restoration on the other hand is harder – if it’s Totemic then I’m worried it will inject additional maintenance into our spec we have no room to press, and it would take a lot of convincing to get me onboard considering Vesper Totem was very awkward. If instead they share Stormbringer with us (you can have rainstorms too!) I could see some crossover spells like Crash Lightning vs. Healing Rain having multi-functional activations of certain effects. More than ever though, what I really want to see on these trees ties into the remaining problems – we need more defense that actually matters in a number of different departments.

Also, last but not least even if it’s a small thing, a couple of the names are a bit off for me. Totemic is very narrow, and they’ve not been a major part of our gameplay for a very long time – largely caused by how bland and unimpactful they’ve been. Stormbringer also clashes pretty heavily with one of our long-standing mechanic names in Stormbringer, which might end up just being confusing. It’s also pretty narrow in what it could really lean into, and with none of the names really implying a link to non-Nature themed spells I wonder if we might see parts of our kit neglected. Considering there’s a deep pool to draw from with Shaman theming, tree names such as Witch Doctor, Spiritwalker or Primalist to open up design space more broadly might suit better alongside Farseer which is pretty cool and broad, but that’s just my opinion!

A Fond Farewell: Concluding Dragonflight Enhancement

As Dragonflight winds down and heads into its final Season 4 victory lap, this really was an expansion that was a solid experience from start to finish for us. We’ve had a lot of rocky expansions over the years, and it’s always been a bit miserable to do these types of retrospective posts and only have negatives, so getting to end with the same hope I started with is definitely a new experience. There’s some critical parts of this article, but the overwhelming sentiment is that this feels like the expansion where Enhancement finally got real attention after years of neglect or wayward design. While we bounced up and down with tuning, I think we spent more time as a desirable spec than a buff-bot, and the thing to remember is: numbers are temporary, but mechanics are forever.

I think we stand as an example of how much potential the design space still has in the game, and even moreso as a blueprint for what hero talents could be in The War Within. I’d also like to give a spirited appeal to those reading who do main Enhancement: this expansion has proven that two builds can exist at once, you aren’t fighting each other to get attention and remove the other, at the core we all love the same spec. My hope would be that we can be used as an example of how broad trees can work, and granular decision making alongside well themed design goals refresh specs that have had long standing issues; and that can be expanded to other specs that are expressing those concerns currently.

With that, Dragonflight has been a pleasure for us, my love for the spec is revitalized and to the Dev or team responsible for bringing this spec back to life over the course of the last few years: Thank You.