Unsure what class to play in Dragonflight Season 2? Whether you’re a returning player coming back to play the new content or a longtime veteran just looking to explore a new main or alt, we’ve got you covered.

We break down all the reasons you should consider playing Enhancement Shaman in Patch 10.1 and even throw in a few reasons of why you might not. From all the changes since launch to the new tier set bonuses coming in 10.1, join us as we explore Dragonflight Season 2 Enhancement Shaman!

Need help choosing a new Class in Season 2? Check out all the released articles in the ‘Why You Should Play a Spec’ series below:
Why You Should Play a Spec in Dragonflight Season 2 Series

Blood DK
Havoc DH
Feral Druid
Guardian Druid
Preservation Evoker
Beast Mastery Hunter
Arcane Mage
Fire Mage
Mistweaver Monk
Retribution Paladin
Holy Priest
Shadow Priest
Assassination Rogue
Elemental Shaman
Affliction Warlock
Protection Warrior

Frost DK
Unholy DK

Vengeance DH
Balance Druid

Restoration Druid
Devastation Evoker

Marksmanship HunterSurvival Hunter
Frost Mage

Brewmaster Monk
Windwalker MonkHoly Paladin

Protection Paladin
Discipline Priest

Outlaw RogueSubtlety Rogue
Enhancement Shaman
Restoration Shaman

Demonology Warlock
Destruction Warlock

Arms Warrior
Fury Warrior

Dragonflight Season 2 Shaman Tier Set

Why You Should Play Enhancement Shaman in Dragonflight Season 2 (and Why You Shouldn’t)

Dragonflight is well under way, and with the first season under our belt it’s time to go back and look at Enhancement, its successes and its failures. In this article I’m going to be looking at all the things that went well – and what makes it an appealing spec – but also take a look at some of the pain points that still exist that could turn some players off. To be clear on the intentions: this isn’t a guide, it’s what I think (in some cases unrelated to pure performance) makes the spec special, but also things that you should probably know before getting started that may be a problem. Anyway, let’s jump in!

Enhancement is one of the more unique melee specializations, coming with a wide array of different abilities that pull from different schools to create a battlemage style, weaving spells and melee attacks together to create a frenetic gameplay loop that’s constantly changing. Dragonflight has created a sort of greatest hits compilation, where a lot of the best core aspects of the spec throughout its history all come together and co-exist. If you’ve ever tried Enhancement in the past, you’ll probably recognize something here between the big strike focused builds with Stormstrike and Lava Lash, Ascendance procs through Deeply Rooted Elements, explosive AoE with Fire Nova, and powerful Maelstrom Weapon spenders to fully flesh out the battlemage concept, and even more recent additions such as Hailstorm and Ice Strike.

While not everything takes centre stage like they have in previous iterations, there’s a lot of things that mesh together to create a busy, but cohesive design that leaves room for some customization and personalization. The rotation still maintains a similar ebb and flow with periods of starvation and periods of flood (which leads to inevitable waste) that needs to be managed. These droughts are even more pronounced with the loss of some Season 1 effects, in exchange however, burst is more intense in highlight moments. Season 2 doesn’t so much bring drastic changes, but moreso refinements to what already existed while opening up parts of the tree that were previously more exclusive. There are still some teething and balancing issues related to how abilities function, and as much as this wide scope of abilities a blessing, some people may find it more of a curse. To summarize my feelings on the spec for Season 2, here’s a few key points:

Why You Should Why You Shouldn’t

For those that are already familiar with the spec, and with 10.1 bringing a number of talent changes, I recently did a video that breaks down the biggest things that you should bear in mind for the patch. This can serve as a quick primer leading into Season 2, and showcases just how many talents we make use of, and our varied gameplay styles:

Why You Should Play Enhancement Shaman in Dragonflight Season 2

Enhancement comes out of Season 1 after seeing its best Mythic+ performance in a long time (if not ever) and a solid raid showing. It’s hard to deny that it’s been one of the more desirable picks which, for Enhancement, is an unusual spot but a very welcome one. Season 2 looks for the most part to be continuing that trend, with everything that made it good before still present, and some extra tools to round it out.

Utility Toolkit

The real standout upgrade for Enhancement coming into Dragonflight in Season 1 brought it right to the top of desirability for melee, because of just how many different gaps it could fill in a composition. None of these are going away (and some are even getting more broad uses!) so for that reason alone, unless tuning completely fails us I don’t see any of that changing in Season 2. Some our biggest highlights are:

As you can see there’s very much a swiss army knife of tools and options that Enhancement can take to suit what a group needs. While it can’t do everything, it can do a lot of things simultaneously and cover a lot of holes a group may have. That it also brings Bloodlust on top makes it a desired pick for groups missing that. The most powerful specialty that Enhancement has for Mythic+ is the sheer amount of control it brings, between Thundershock, Capacitor Totem and Sundering you can almost single-handedly control groups alone, leaving more room for a composition lighter on those. To top it off, we also come with the lowest cooldown interrupt in Wind Shear that can even be thrown out at range, meaning we don’t have to worry if we’re forced away from important targets. That said, Season 2 will trim this slightly by making it more difficult to hold Sundering due to the new Set Bonus being tied to it, but that comes as a trade off I’ll talk about later.

When it comes to raids Windfury Totem is completely unique to Enhancement that is, while not the strongest buff by any means, something that is mostly free so most organized groups seek it out. Ancestral Guidance provides extremely strong burst healing in Mythic+ trash pulls while in raids, it has a more targeted benefit that can often cover dangerous moments in an encounter, and Wind Rush Totem provides a moderate boost to your groups speed when needed for a relatively long duration. More specific tools such as Poison Cleansing Totem, Cleanse Spirit and Tremor Totem can be taken to counteract very specific issues without much of a problem accessing them, and Purge gives us an offensive dispel with no cooldown – though its costly in the Mana department. Last, but not least, we can also sacrifice a fairly large amount of damage to cover the group with offhealing thanks to the multiplier provided by Maelstrom Weapon on Healing Surge and Chain Heal, helping healers in high pressure moments or saving an ally.

Additionally in Season 2, there are three new affixes in the Mythic+ rotation (Incorporeal, Afflicted and Entangling) coming that requires specific tools to counteract them. Enhancement is primed with counters to all three, which may prove very useful in the coming months:

Damage Profiles

While many specs in Dragonflight have a specialty they excel at, Enhancement’s specialty is its flexibility. Through the depth of the talent tree, it’s possible to build your character to suit the situation in a meaningful way where, with enough foresight, you can specialize for the encounter rather than sticking to one profile. It has tools for strong sustained and burst single target, varying between high intensity, long cooldown and frequent-but-moderate intensity depending on the tools you select. It can also leverage extra targets to funnel into a primary target with tools such as Splintered Elements and Ashen Catalyst, which is highly sought after in Mythic+. Unlike in Season 1, the refinements in the tree for Season 2 have made many things much more malleable, with most ability packages slotting into your selected build without too many issues.

We also have variable soft and hard target caps (though one thing we do lack is a strong uncapped AoE toolset, but there are some moderately valuable options) anywhere from 2 to 6 depending on your specialty, and the tree is flexible enough that you can pinch points in either your single target or AoE picks to lean further into one or the other depending on preference. Tools such as Crash Lightning, Crashing Storms, Hailstorm, Fire Nova and Alpha Wolf each give varying degrees of benefit to either of these on a sliding scale, with some providing a more versatile bonus to both while others are more focused on specifically AoE, making your decisions granular enough to build smart, rather than cookie cutter.

Our cooldowns are also a healthy mix of different effects that can all provide different things, and most of them don’t take centre stage on their own requiring you to take all of them. It’s mostly about finding what works together rather than picking the big shiny button:

  • Feral Spirit – our core cooldown that’s always taken because it provides so much in a tight package. This is thought less of a cooldown at this point due to the frequency with Witch Doctor’s Ancestry CDR, but it can be flexed between different bonuses depending on your selected build to round out selections thanks to Elemental Spirits and, when appropriate, Alpha Wolf.
  • Ascendance – New to Season 2, the base ability is now somewhat desirable and even Elementalist that previously avoided it grabs this. While it’s not the flashiest cooldown, it gives a window of near unlimited resource flood and a way to siphon it off thanks to the follow up talents in Static Accumulation and Thorim’s Invocation (that are greatly improved in Season 2). Physical can even take this as it’s a reasonably similar uptime – but more controlled – compared to Deeply Rooted Elements in 10.1, which is much healthier.
  • Primordial Wave – A simple big damage button that can flex into AoE, and thanks to Splintered Elements gives a massive followup window when extra targets are available. This is as simple as they come, press button and hit enemy hard, and since it sets itself up with Primal Maelstrom it’s a core part of our burst AoE.
  • Sundering – Again new to Season 2, thanks to the newly introduced set bonus this is now an extremely strong burst window following each cast in both single target and AoE, and layers comfortably over all of our other effects.

Season 2 Tier Set Bonus

While it went through a number of iterations, the new set bonus Runes of the Cinderwolf coming in Patch 10.1 has settled into something that looks quite powerful and currently provides the following bonuses:

As it stands right now, relative to the Season 1 bonus this is a solid performance increase and a significant boost to our damage versatility. The typical WoW rule of “burst is better” really does apply to this bonus, thanks to it condensing the impact into a short window. Losing the old 2-piece bonus that granted Maelstrom Weapon on spell casts following a successful Stormstrike cast, and the frequent bursts of Haste when consuming Maelstrom Weapon from the 4-piece however may not be comfortable. Both of those bonuses did a great job smoothing out our rotation and now we’ll be left in full RNG generation territory with our resource, meaning that it’s now more important than ever to manage it properly. Considering that, moving from the current tier to the new one will net a modest single target boost and a significant AoE one.

The bonus does bring in Chain Lightning into the single target rotation which is an… acquired taste, but the damage it brings during the window is undeniable. This only gets stronger with extra targets, a welcome addition as our bonuses have historically leaned more into the single target side. While the new bonus is very powerful when played correctly, unlike before the bonus can also now be misplayed and fizzle – meaning it’s an extra thing to consider. It also makes it significantly less desirable to hold Sundering for its CC effect as there’s so much baked into it, hurting our Mythic+ utility.

Build Diversity

Tangentially from the above, the spec also has an extremely wide array of different builds it can opt into compared to many specs. There are two distinctly themed “builds” in Elementalist and Physical, both leaning into different focuses, damage profiles and playstyles that give a similar-but-different feel that effectively feels like one and a half specs combined. While the core remains – manage your Maelstrom Weapon and press ability cooldowns – what the focus is, how the resource flows, and what goals you have when executing it differ completely. What the’re strong at also diverge, but in Season 2 the lack of parity between them in varying situations is mostly addressed, and while I can’t say for sure you’ll be free to pick either whenever, it seems much more likely that you’ll be able to opt into your preference. Noteable improvements to each build in Season 2 are:

  • Fire Nova: Converted to Flamestrike (Fire + Physical) damage, allowing it to scale with baseline Feral Spirit buffs, Legacy of the Frost Witch and the new Sundering themed 4-piece. This is especially powerful for Physical builds, giving it a much better option to round out its previously struggling AoE toolkit. Flame Shock has also been converted to Volcanic (Fire + Nature) damage, giving a small boost thanks to Nature’s Fury and lightning wolves from Elemental Spirits.
  • Static Accumulation and Thorim’s Invocation: Both been given powerful passive effects that are active even outside of the Ascendance effect, making the leaf significantly more desirable for Elementalist which previously avoided it.
  • Deeply Rooted Elements: Has been made significantly more consistent, but also less frequent as a result. It’s no longer the overriding goal of any Physical build and is more a short, big moment as extensions are now exceptionally unlikely. While this in isolation is a nerf, it’s significantly healther for the playstyle and is more than compensated for with the follow up talent buffs. It also allows for Ascendance to come back in as a reasonable option to path through for controlled bursts.

Gameplay Style

Finally, the spec is just plain fun. It’s extremely fast, and very rewarding when you layer together all of your amplifiers just right and land that huge Elemental Blast or Hailstorm combo, and there’s ample opportunity to outplay situations by thinking about where you need to readjust your resources in an encounter or dungeon. Season 2 doubles down on this with all of the Sundering bonuses, giving even more boosts in a condensed window that really plays into the feel of playing an active part in enhancing your abilities to converge in one big moment. That’s something that often the spec has struggled to land quite right in the past, but Dragonflight has consistently met that mark and that’s pretty cool. While not meeting those requirements is in some cases extremely punishing and you’re met with a complete halt in your momentum from a bad decision, when things start to click and you run into those less and less, it’s a tangible improvement that feels like you’re mastering the spec.

Why You Shouldn’t Play Enhancement Shaman in Dragonflight Season 2

While there are a lot of things about Enhancement that makes it unique both from a gameplay style and viability perspective, there are definitely some parts that can put off prospective players giving it a try. This section is less a comment on whether it’s good or bad in Season 2, and more what about its gameplay loop and toolkit may put you off when picking it up. Just to be clear though, current tuning seems to imply we’re as good, or better than season 1. The above mentioned versatility is something that makes it highly desirable for Mythic+, but knowing where the meta lands in advance is difficult.

Rotational Quirks and Learning Curve

One of the most common things I’ve noticed with people giving Enhancement a try this expansion is how overwhelming everything in the spec can be at first glance. There are so many different interlinking synergies, and a robust priority of when to do what (and when) that keeping those rules in your head during play can be a lot to pick up quickly. While normally specs tend to have one to two rotational directives (build + spend resource, sync cooldown windows, overlap buffs etc.), Enhancement tends to have 3-4 at least. This means, until you’re comfortable enough with some to let them happen in the background, some can be left at the wayside and pinpointing why you’re performing poorly can be a rabbit hole. While some builds have more and some less, a typical Elementalist build (not accounting for new Season 2 effects which add extra complications) has to:

  • Maximize generation and management of Maelstrom Weapon to avoid waste while also using it to fill empty spaces. This includes both pooling and burning at different spots.
  • Juggle and desync ability cooldowns to fit comfortably and avoid downtime.
  • Align multiplier buffs such as Ice Strike and Hailstorm.
  • React to Feral Spirit CDR via the Witch Doctor’s Ancestry effect as quickly as possible, while also trying to fuel Elemental Blast casts with Maelstrom Weapon within the window.
  • Switch rotation to react to fast paced Hot Hand windows while weaving in between the cooldown, and reacting to unexpected Stormbringer procs when in filler maintenance.

Some of these are more important than others, but the difficulty when learning comes from the fact that all of these are happening all at once, and they all have knock-on effects with each other. The more mistakes you make, the more punishing it will be, as misplaying any of these will drastically impact your rotation and slow it to a crawl. This usually leaves you crying out for procs and Maelstrom Weapon stacks – without knowing why it’s happening. It’s very much a spec that can be extremely fast paced if executed correctly, but its momentum is dictated by the quality of your own play rather than a fixed pace.

All of this creates a steep learning curve where the way the spec feels to play in its real form doesn’t really come together until the end – and chipping away at it learning things piece by piece can be frustrating. That there are multiple builds as well that require you to rewire how you approach certain situations and alter your priorities only exacerbates the situation and can put people off experimenting. This is especially true if a certain build is your preference, but is simply not suited to a given task – something that was extremely common in Season 1 but is looking to be less of a problem in Season 2. To many (myself included), this is part of the depth that really gives the spec its appeal, but it’s definitely an acquired taste.

Keybind Requirement

While to some this may be a positive, if you’re looking at Enhancement and wondering “does it really have that many rotational keybinds?”, the answer is yes. While the total number of buttons required isn’t drastically higher than some other robust specs, the necessity to have them all on hand at a moments notice means that there’s a uniquely high ask for a comfortable suite of buttons at your fingertips. This feeds a lot into the “playing a piano” gameplay style people refer to Enhancement having, and while it is a lot of what makes the spec unique to many players, to some that can be too much to ask. That there’s so many things to keep track of as well may distract you from the most immediately important thing happening right now – and that’s the encounter you’re playing, which can be equal parts frustrating and deadly.

Due to there being so many ability links and synergies, alongside a volatile resource, you really do need to be able to hit everything as and when the situation calls without thinking too long. There really isn’t much that can be done with the tree either to avoid this – actives are just part of the spec’s personality. Everything is also all on the GCD (cooldowns included), meaning that you usually only have that space between presses to think about what’s going to happen in the immediate future, as your current Maelstrom Weapon resource state and cooldown situation can fluctuate drastically at a moments notice. If extremely busy specs with a lot of moving parts and a variety of procs to juggle all at once (rather than a single rotational goal) usually puts you off, it may be worth thinking again about Enhancement because as it stands now, that’s unlikely to be going away.

Lower Durability

The one noticeable failure point of Enhancement in Dragonflight is, like in the past, it’s not quite there when it comes to durability in a lot of situations. While it got some improvements and looked to be trending upward going into the expansion, other specs that were already ahead of us in many cases got just as much, if not more, causing us to fall behind on the power creep curve. Right now the list of things we can take is fairly long and all on the class tree, but are low impact:

But wait! That list’s quite long isn’t it? Well, while there is a good number of things here and we’re pretty close to having enough, we’re just shy of what other melee can do that puts us often at the most risk, and vastly behind the extremely durable specs – both in terms of raw passive reduction and especially in active tools. What’s more, a lot of the things we do have come with noticeable downsides:

  • Brimming with Life causes us to lose the 8% max Health if we ever use Reincarnation. This is our strongest passive survival tool, and often Ankhing at all in higher Mythic+ situations or raids means you’re kicking the problem down the road – you’ve now fallen under the minimum threshold to survive things until it comes back (which may be the next dungeon, or 3 pulls down the line). This is one of the most egregious issues we have right now in my opinion and really has no good reason to do this.
  • Spirit Wolf requires you to sit in Ghost Wolf for 4 seconds before a damage event occurs to reach the full 20%, during which you do no damage at all, and pause your rotation entirely. Considering we’re GCD locked at almost all times, this is especially punishing and doesn’t mesh well with our playstyle compared to similar effects for other specs.
  • Earth Elemental not only has a long cooldown, but it can just straight up taunt a mob and die, leaving us without the benefit.
  • All of our Maelstrom Weapon fueled off-healing tools come with an extreme penalty to damage that can take a long time (anywhere from 5-20 seconds of hoping) to recover the resources spent, is a random generation effect to begin with, and is limited by Mana that’s shared with other utility tools such as Purge.

When our survival benefits aren’t particularly good to begin with, and they come with a harsh downside, that means often we’re relying on our personal cooldown in Astral Shift. This cooldown is very powerful, arguably one of the best, but it’s weighted in the wrong direction to cover the gaps we have – focusing on intensity and duration rather than frequency. When it’s our only reliable, pre-emptive survival tool that makes relying on one single cooldown all the more punishing if you don’t time it correctly, or simply result in situations where you don’t have anything to survive situations everyone else can. I would hesitantly say that considering what else exists in the game, resetting Ankh on wipe or drastically reducing its cooldown wouldn’t be nearly as dangerous of a suggestion as it was in the past.

While it hasn’t, and likely won’t stop the spec from being able to do all content, it does mean that you need to be more wary of dangerous situations than others and plan accordingly, in some cases sacrificing quite a sizeable amount of damage to make it through safely.

TL;DR Conclusion

To sum everything up, all of the things that made Enhancement worth taking in Season 1 remains so if you’ve dipped your toes in and liked what you see, all signs point to that sticking around. If you were put off by certain things (builds performing unevenly, Deeply Rooted Elements RNG, stagnating performance) then you may want to give it a second try as our performance is noticeably up, but the playstyle hasn’t deviated significantly from what we saw either. Our Season 2 talent changes paired with the set bonus only seems to lean further into what we’re good at on top of the flat number buffs, and adjust up some of the areas we were falling behind in. While this isn’t a rebuild it’s a fresh coat of paint that will hopefully keep both the Elementalist and Physical sides of the tree similar, but streamlined, and I’m looking forward to seeing what it can do in Season 2. While attention hasn’t been on the spec as much as others, it hasn’t felt like we needed broad scope changes as much as some others and moreso just surgical adjustements – which have mostly happened. Hopefully the last few concerns (in particular durability) gets a quick look somewhere down the line, but I’m pleased to be able echo the same positive sentiments I had just before Season 1 began.

About the Author

This guide is written by Wordup, a long-time Enhancement player and moderator on the Shaman Discord server, Earthshrine. I’ve played every iteration of Enhancement since Sunwell, and played in Echoes on Laughing Skull (EU) since Warlords of Draenor. You can catch me on Twitter, or in Discord if you have any guide related questions!

For more information on playing Enhancement Shaman, please see our class guide updated for Dragonflight:

Enhancement Shaman Guide





Source link

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here