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Totem Talk: The ups and downs of playing enhancement in Dragon Soul
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. Josh Myers once only tackled the hard questions about enhancement but has recently expanded his sphere of responsibility to all shaman DPS specs. (And no, two-handed enhancement is still never coming back.) I've said in the past that enhancement is in a good place in 4.3, and that's the truth. Despite some really awful itemization and some as-yet-unresolved issues with the spec, enhancement is remaining a strong middle-of-the-pack contender. In non-cutting-edge raid groups that don't have multiple Dragonwrath-wielding casters, we're even better. Dragon Soul is a great instance for enhancement in 4.3 because it offers a variety of fights. Some play to enhancement's strengths, some highlight its weaknesses, and some fights are Ultraxion and your DPS spec doesn't matter, provided you can push buttons and click a shiny purple dot on his screen every 45 seconds. For the purpose of brevity, I'm going to assume you're familiar with the normal-mode mechanics of these fights (and if you're not, some are conveniently covered by my frenemy Tyler Caraway in the Ready Check column) and just speak to how enhancement specifically fares on these fights. Chopping Morchok There's nothing particularly special about Morchok for enhancement, except if you're doing the fight on heroic. Shamanistic Rage and Glyph of Stoneclaw Totem make Morchok's Stomp damage negligible, but Stomps don't really hit hard enough on normal to worry about. However, if you have a healer in line of sight during a black phase (and you've done nothing in recent memory that would cause them to hate you), Glyph of Stoneclaw Totem and Shamanistic Rage will let you stay on the boss for most if not all of the phase. If you don't have a friendly healer, enhancement still fares better than most melee on this fight, as cast Lava Bursts and Lightning Bolts still hit hard.
Totem Talk: Enhancement shaman, welcome to patch 4.3
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. Josh Myers once only tackled the hard questions about enhancement but has recently expanded his sphere of responsibility to all shaman DPS specs. (And no, two-handed enhancement is still never coming back.) I'm going to start this post by talking about how excited I am. For those of you who've read my About The Bloggers, you'd know that I considered the last patch of Icecrown Citadel to be the absolute worst patch this game has ever seen. In hindsight, 4.2 was probably the second worst. Enhancement's DPS was mediocre unless you abused a gimmick. Our AoE was pathetic. Firelands was an exercise in trying to discern how much red and orange the human mind could take in before making us go totally mental and putting a fist through the monitor. But now, 4.3 is here! Fresh, new heroic 5-mans are here, complete with a beautiful new axe for enhancement shaman who couldn't get Gatecrasher to drop. Dragon Soul has been introduced, offering various backdrops for your boss slayings, a new super-easy mode option, and mechanics that actually seem to favor having an enhancement shaman present. Most of all, though, we received a terribly needed buff to our AoE, breathing a new quality of life to being an enhancement shaman.
