enhancement DPS
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Totem Talk: State of the enhancement shaman address
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. On Saturdays, Josh Myers tackles the hard questions about enhancement. Can we tank? Can we DPS with a two-hander? How does one shot web? The answer to the first two is "no," and roll a hunter for the third! Despising Blizzard Entertainment is easy. When things go wrong in a raid, when filthy boomkins and surly shadow priests pass over you on the DPS charts, or when buff homogenization leaves you feeling like there is no reason for your raid to bring you to progression content anymore, it is exceptionally easy to point to Ghostcrawler (lead systems designer) and say, "This is your fault." The complaint I most often hear used to demonize Blizzard goes something like this: "Blizzard doesn't care about enhancement shaman. We're the redheaded stepchildren of WoW." Beyond just being offensive to the fiery-follicled and to stepparents everywhere, Blizzard does have a history of dealing with enhancement shaman issues. So today, we're taking a journey of perspective. The Burning Crusade has long been heralded as the pinnacle of enhancement's glory, at least in terms of PVE. To me, it was enhancement's high school jock years. We may look back with fond remember whens and nostalgic feelings of pride and accomplishment, but the real thing will never measure up to the stories we tell about it.
Totem Talk: Post-patch enhancement shaman still waiting for buffs
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shamans. Rich Maloy lives and breathes enhancement: his main spec is enhance, his off-spec is enhance. He blogs about the life and times of enhance and leads the guild Big Crits (Season 2 Ep 06 now out!) as the enhancement shaman Stoneybaby. We're now two full weeks into patch 4.0.1 with our new and improved enhancement spec. Improved? Actually, no. Our DPS is only marginally improved over the previous incarnation, while our fellow melee brethren were buffed to the teeth. My rough analysis shows the difference between us and top melee DPS, usually warrior and death knight, has widened significantly since the patch. I'm going to preface all of this analysis by saying that I am not the top enhancement shaman, by far. I play well, I study my class, I optimize my spec, gems, forging, gear and rotations. I don't die to stupid stuff -- well, at least not often! In other words, I try to push my damage without sacrificing myself. Be forewarned that some of these numbers I'm embarrassed to post in such a public manner, and while I'm hardly the benchmark for DPS, I can at least provide a baseline of what your average progression raider's numbers look like. On average across eight of 12 hard-mode fights in ICC (excluding the gimmick fights Gunship, VDW and BQL, and excluding H-LK because we're just now working on him), the top melee DPS was doing 50 percent more damage than me pre-patch and 64 percent more post-patch. I could narrow that gap down to about 15 percent on a standstill fight such as Deathbringer Saurfang, but on high-movement fights such as Sindy, the top melee would do as much as 80 percent more damage than me overall. As much as it pains me to say this, as a raid leader I have to ask the question: Am I dead weight in raids right now? Will level 85 with Unleash Elements bring better output?
