Eliot Lefebvre

U.S. sanctions against the Crimean region have led to a blackout for World of Warcraft and Diablo 3 players located therein.

Had you been hoping to get just a little further in the first season of StarCraft II's 2015 ladder? You missed your chance.

Talent selection is not crazy difficult at this point in the game's lifespan if you've played Enhancement before... but who doesn't want to think more about their talent selections?

Last week, I talked a lot about totems and Enhancement, and how we really don't need them any more - or if you want to be super on-point, we basically don't have them any longer anyway. This week, I want to talk about how we could reverse that.

If you were so inclined, you could argue that totems were counting down the hours until they got removed from the game as soon as Enhancement was made a viable spec in The Burning Crusade. I wouldn't make that argument myself, but it sure does sound convincing when you look at it the right way. Sort of sideways, maybe squint a little.

The Enhancement problems come down to three basic issues: too much emphasis on area damage, not enough meaningful and impactful cooldowns, and too many buttons to rotate through normally. As cool as the spec is, we wind up feeling unwieldy and tuned for a role we didn't really ask for.

Despite my earlier flirtations with other classes and my continued love of several others, Shaman is still my preferred class and the one that I tend to think of as mine in World of Warcraft. I've taken breaks from it before, but I've always kept my eye on it just the same. And it took me a startlingly long time to realize that there was a good reason for it: Shaman is the last vestige of a class design that's kind of moved on from the game as a whole, especially when you're playing Enhancement. As specs become more and more rigid and settle characters more firmly into roles, Enhancement winds up still containing some of that flavor of the earliest days. It's a hybrid. It's always been a hybrid. And with a decade of the game gone, I would argue that it's the last true hybrid left in the game.