Shaman

When I first played World of Warcraft, I barely cared about Lightning Shield. Now, I barely care about Lightning Shield. Those are the end points; the parts in the middle get interesting.

To say that my return to Elemental has been marked by a large learning curve may be a bit of an understatement. I have always loved throwing lightning as a shaman, but I just haven’t really had the opportunity to do it in a raid environment in a long time. I mean, since Wrath of the Lich King long time.

Sometimes, you open up a set of patch notes and you see that there are a whole lot of changes that just beg for your attention. Other times, it's patch 6.2 and you don't play a Rogue or a Monk, you play a Shaman.

Healer and damage dealer, ranged and melee, elements and hitting things with pointy sticks. As a result of trying to be so many things at once, balancing the class became quite a bit of a hard point.

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?

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.

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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.

I tried all of the other classes, and while they were certainly fun, it always came back to shaman. It's always been a class that spoke to me and made me happy to play, and chances are that if you are reading this you feel somewhat the same way.

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.