For DPS shammiesFollow

I really enjoy my enhance shammy, though my experience is very limited but I would like to try it out sometime soon. The reason that I play enhance is simply because they lvl faster and I am too attached to respec. I love DW and stormstrike, combined with good weapons and windfury, you got some nice damage. Also, I like playing in the tank group for raids, where my totems benefit the most (WF, SoE, healing stream) and I can still do great DPS with that group. I always feel withdrawn from a fight when I am casting so I like to be right there in the chaos.

I like elemental I tried it out the last couple moths before the expansion and enjoyed pvp as elemental a lot more then enhancement, the burst was about the same, but it seemed to be a bit more skill based in pvp and versatile at 60 at least.

So I guess I prefer elemental but enhancement still is quite fun as wel, running around with 2h weapons at 60 and seeing the wf attacks just destroy a target was always lots of fun.

Some cool remarks in there, Ozone! /cheers

On topic: because I could not choose and because I kind of "light-roleplay" my characters I do not respec. Which caused me to create 2 orc shamans, one elemental, one enhancement. For me both are equal in the fun-department! Another equilibrium-vote...

Do you mean to say at 70 you, in blues, outdps mages in kara/tailoring purples? That, I'd have to see. And it would have to be where it counts. We did have an amazing shammy (dps) in our old guild (but he was also very well geared). He was almost always number 1 dps, but he paid for it in the price of 1) mana potions and 2) repair bills. He didn't ever get that that Tank ought to be tanking nightbane, not him.

Enhancement is still hands-down the best spec for solo questing/grinding/leveing/what have you. So if you're concerned with nothing else but maximum efficiency, then Enhancement is the spec for you. However, Elemental works perefectly fine for leveling as well (once you get into the high 50's and early 60's that is, it's terrible up to that point), so if you'd rather choose a leveling spec based on what you enjoy, either Elemental or Enhancement is fine.

Personally, I'd recommend leveling Enhancement until Outland. If you're tired of it or you just plain don't like it, you can switch to Elemental at that point. No harm, no foul. Or you can just keep on keeping on if you like it.

aquifer


you my friend would be surprised with the three peace crafted lw set the badge shield and lower city mace some time ago i had no problem being on top of the damage in heroics and 10 mans even against fully epic mages and locks. You see ele shaman dps requires nothing but crit at first and you can put out some great damage with low dmg and high crit. One would think our dps would stay amazing but we don't scale as well as mages so as guild gets even higher we become weaker and since nature only gets major buff from storm strike we are also basically not getting buffs from other classes like they tend to buff each other.

no biggie though elemental is a great spec for any 10 man and atleast provides decent buffs for a caster group.

Then only proof in your pudding is that you, sir, are one hardcore Elemental fanboy in a long list of Elemental fanboys.

Look, guys... I'm not saying Elemental's not great. I never have. But way too many people on this forum mistake their own personal preference for Elemental as raw, effective result. No matter how much you unconditionally love playing the spec... You know what? Nevermind. Anything I say here is going to get taken the wrong way and I'm going to have another parade of Elemental fanboys marching down my throat the same way I have every single other time an Enhancement vs. Elemental debate has come up.

You people do what you want. Just... please. Try not to give the newbies the wrong impression with your over-inflated opinions.

How do you work that out? Melee classes generally stand behind a boss thus no cleave... and all other AOE is magic anyway so it doesn't really matter if you're plate or cloth at that point.

And no worries Gaud, I've decided I'm going enhancement anyway. It just seems like my kind of thing... I never tried to instigate a discussion about what's best for raids, I'll leave that to the theoryelitists.


It's rather odd, I seem to be getting into a new class all the time. When I got my druid to 66 I suddenly gained a lot of interest in paladins... Once he reached 36 I became obsessed with trying out an odd mage spec... and now that my mage has popped 35 I'm really excited about trying a (first weapons ftw) shaman.

yo gaudion I must say though enhancement isn't always best for solo and grinding once decent geared you can go for a while without needing to stop and can do this with almost never getting hit, i usually 2 shot my enemies lol.

But I can agree that enhancement starts off better.

Nice trick when soloing is to use Power Infused Mushroom, i know it is an old trinket from Zagarmarsh but its affect is still good for soloing.

i believe enhancement to be a bit more fun than elemental, but having just turned 70 having a set of both ele and enh gear, ele seems to come out ontop.

Ele is only worlds better at the dps part of a dps shammies job

That won't happen 'til the very end of the game though, with end-game gear. At which point, if you're a DPS spec... it honestly does not matter. You should be tearing through anything you want to like a hot knife through butter. So yes. But this board has become so biased in favor of Elemental that even when a leveling thread comes up, we'll have plenty of people in there saying it's awesome to go Elemental right out of the box and stay that way the whole times. Which is just plain crappy advice. And they'll go on to make it seem like, as I said earlier, that Elemental is so much better at Enhancement at every aspect of the DPS game that there's just no reason to spec Enhancement unless you happen to like it. Which is, again, just crappy advice as pretty much the exact opposite is true.

Like I said. I am not saying anything bad about Elemental. It's a perfectly good spec, acceptable for raiding, acceptable for solo grinding, questing, leveling, etc... once you reach the early 60's. But it is just not what everyone on this board talks it up to be all the time. I mean, I don't even play a DPS Shaman, much less an Enhancement Shaman, but the misrepresentation is so out of control that I just have a hard time watching it. I don't want to see people incorrectly steered one way or the other. If anyone wants to talk Elemental up, that's fine... but try to keep it objective and keep the rabid fanboy perspective out of it. (And I'm not saying you're guilty of that jmfmb, but there are plenty of others that are.)

That's all I'm saying. Keep it objective.


Eh... You'd think so, but it seems like every time I see or hear about a DPS Shaman making it over 2k they're almost always Enhancement. The Elementals seem to be rarer higher up than the Enhancements outside of 5v5, but I think it's probably a little harder to see why if you don't play a healer (or at least with a good one). Elemental Shaman are so much easier to live through in small-scale PvP, and the Enhancements can stretch their mana a lot further, which really helps as the higher up you get, the more fights have a tendancy to turn into knock-down, drag-out endurance matches if there's at least one healer involved on either side.

Overall, with all manner of PvP being considered (BG's, duels, 2v2-5v5), I'd say the specs are really about even in performance though excelling in different areas. The bigger it gets, the better Elemental gets while the opposite is true of Enhancement.

taurrus of coarse an enhancement shaman brings more to a raid then elemental we buff spell damage and crit/hit with spells, 3% crit is not much and in raids most casters are hit capped (atleast should be), and while spell dmg is nice it is nothing compared to Unleashed Rage wf and strength. Elemental buffs don't scale enough where wf and unleash rage scale a crap ton.

My basic veiw on raiding as a dps shaman is elemental does more damage when you start out since threat is less of a problem as elemental, all you need is about 20 crit from gear (not hard to get even with mostly blues) and you can out dps full T4 dps in raids no problem with 700 spell dmg. this is in kara of coarse, but when you step into a 25 man your dps does not scale as well, we get less benefits from other classes, we have trouble maintaining mana, and don't provide as much to the raid as enhancement does, by the time you are in T5 content being a competitive dps as elemental can be tough but is much easier for enhancement since while there damage is not as great at first, starts to really shine and push further then elemental.

My personal opinion is enhancement levels faster. but level as you like, if someone wants to be ignorant and say elemental is better grind spec look at the gear there is from 1-58, even if you down grade to cloth your not gonna find much spell damage or spell crit that is easy to get. The only possible benefit to leveling elemental over enhancement is you can use the same gear to heal with in instances so you can still do solid dps for solo and find groups as a healer when you don't want to solo. Again by all means people can level as they wish and if they want to say elemental is better let them be ignorant, at 70 play what you prefer, both specs have there uses.

Also good point Gaudion I can see what you mean by it depending on the type of pvp I think enhancement is better for 2s and elemental are better at 5s. I am not sure who is better at 3s but i guess either could work but probably more groups selection as enhancement.

Untrue, spikes from WF are easy to predict; they happen pretty much every 3 secs. Over a 5+ min boss fight, that's quite regular DPS.

That'd be like saying rogues have spikey damage because we crit a lot.