11.0.5. Ele Shaman 10/29 Balance Tuning Summary - By Earthshrine (includes % nerfs estimates)

Classes Shaman
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I posted this in the Blue Post about the 10/29 changes, but I figured I’d toss it here for better visibility to stir the pot. The following is a post made in the Earthshrine discord, the Shaman theory-crafting discord, and was written by HawkCorrigan, the Elemental Shaman Wowhead guide writer. The current estimates and discussions were made with the combined effort of multiple theory crafters and dedicated players such as Stormy, the Icy Veins Elemental Shaman guide writer, Bloodmallet (yes, THAT Bloodmallet), and many other players (I myself am just a loser reposting it here for copium). The post was copied and pasted directly from Discord with tiny formatting done by myself for readability. If you wish to review it on the Discord Server, Hawk’s post can be found in the “ele-ptr-rework” channel (latest post).

Balance changes referenced can be found after the write up so you don’t have to flip flop between different posts/tabs.

Hello and Welcome to my Soapbox

In today episode, we will look at balancing, bugs and numbers. (Shocking I know)
I want to have a look at the coming balancing, the balancing we already received and some of the relevant bugs and their impact.

We are going to start with Single Target, taking some (Mythic) Kyveza logs as source, and then move over the Mythic+, looking at dungeons around a +11.

Previous Balancing:

On the 23rd Blizzard nerfed Lightning Rod by 50% and announced a fix for a bug with ascendance.
Lightning Rod contributed roughly 5-7% to our damage, making this a ~3% nerf.

The Ascendance bug is still active in-game. A conservative estimate puts this at 7% in pure damage and 2% in resource generation.

Balancing on reset (10/29)

Arc Discharge to 1 stack: roughly 1.8% nerf
Echo Chamber halved: roughly 4.5%

Asc change: 3.75% nerf after adjusting for the Echo Chamber nerf
Preeminence: Ignoring all haste caps it comes out as 0.7% nerf

TLDR:

When you log in on Tuesday/Wednesday, your character will be at least 10% weaker.
If Blizzard actually fixes the Asc bug, your character will be 19% weaker.

What about second (breakfast) LR nerf?

This is a weird one. When looking at logs, LR was doing less and more than the intended 10% in a lot of cases.
The logs I looked at had it at about 11-12% of the amount of Lightning damage, so this came out as roughly a 1.5% nerf.

So adding all of those adjustments and fixes puts us at a 24% Single Target nerf roughly, since release.

Let’s look at Mythic+ now.
Here it is much, much harder to actually keep these changes separated in a way that we could just sum up the numbers at the end.
As such the result here will most likely be slightly overshooting (1-2%). This wont be significant in the greater scheme of things.

These are numbers taken from dungeon logs. While that approach isnt perfect, given the volatility of dungeons, it should still paint a rough picture.

Previous Changes

First LR nerf at the start of the week comes out as a 10% nerf on average.

10/29 Coming changes:

-Ascendance nerf: 5.1%
-Echo Chamber: 5.1%
-Arc Discharge: 2.1%
-Voltaic Surge: 3.8%

In sum: 16% nerf in M+

On top of these 16% we need to add the fix to the Asc bug.
If they fix Asc to work correctly in AoE, it gains us about 5 Lava Bursts per activation. If they fix it we will lose 10 Overloads and 80 Maelstrom per activation in Single Target. Essentially, we gain AoE damage and lose Boss damage. Considering that significantly more Maelstrom is spent in AoE, this comes out roughly damage neutral.

The problem here is that “damage neutral” doesnt mean “DPS neutral” and “Time neutral”. Gaining the same absolute damage on bosses is worth significantly more than the same amount of damage, spread out, in AoE.

TLDR

If you log in on Tuesday you will lose about 16% in Mythic+, with significant losses in burst.
On top of that you will also lose the roughly 9% Boss damage, traded for some AoE, whenever Ascendance gets fixed.

But what about Stats?!?

Well.
Mastery doesn’t become awful.
It certainly loses some value, but still seems like the best stat for Single Target.
The surprise is that the loss of Asc damage, lead to a drop in the value of haste, because fitting in more spells into the cooldown is just not as important anymore. Chances are a good few of you will need to recraft Mastery+Haste to Mastery+Crit and play with lower haste than you currently do.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk

Usual Disclaimer applies: Be nice and civil to each other and the devs and use this data to provide constructive Feedback through the appropriate channels.

Good Night

Please correct me if there are errors and I can edit this section.

10/23 - Initial Lighting Rod Hotfix nerf:

10/24 Ascendance Bug fix mention (not yet implemented):

10/25 - The Second (Breakfast) LR Nerf/Hotfix:

Upcoming Balance Changes for next reset (10/29):

45 Likes
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thanks for posting it somewhere that hopefully blizzard employees pay attention to. I sincerely hope they realize the mistake they are making in this heavy handed approach on a class I have long loved but been unable to enjoy at the levels I would like to.

5 Likes
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Wow that is hard. Potentially 19% overall is intense and severe.

Guess it’s enhance again this expac lol.

2 Likes
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Enhanced needs a bigger nerf then that

2 Likes
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Found the Druid.

1 Like
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What’s really unfortunate is they keep nerfing the only builds they make viable for us. They could’ve just done an overall aura nerf of 10%, waited to see where we were at and then maybe done more or less. Aggressively nerfing key parts of our kit, that THEY DESIGNED TO BE THAT WAY, just feels significantly worse since we have nothing to fill in the gaps that are being left.

7 Likes
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Don’t worry ench nerf is next. They can’t allow another spec to beat mages

1 Like
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I know 95% or more of the playerbase doesn’t even look at PvP, but adding this here as well based on very rough math:

  • Due to the additional nerfs in pvp modifiers, Ele will see about a -21.35% decrease in its damage. The spec is currently god tier op due to how oppressive its burst damage is, but this takes likely into B tier or worse.
3 Likes
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Want to reiterate what Rahtal just said. This is a massive nerf in pvp since ele also had PvP modifiers nerfed too. Short version of my post:

-Nerfed both in and out of Ascendance, ele was only S tier in pvp due to Ascendance+Ascendance procs. Needed a damage buff outside of Ascendance, not a nerf.
-Echo Chamber is a terrible nerf for both pvp and pve, but for pvp it is likely going to cause Eles that went mastery to swap to haste, but PvPers just finished gearing meaning nobody has the conq to buy different tier pieces (nor the catalyst charges) or to buy off pieces or new conq weapons. Making massive adjustments like this 1 month into the season is a bit ridiculous. We need more frequent, less heavy handed tuning.
-Stormbringer got nerfed due to PVE when it wasn’t played much in PvP and could have possibly been an alternative choice to Farseer if these nerfs did not apply to PvP, but they do.

Longer feedback:
The main thing making ele S tier in pvp right now is Ascendance and Ascendance procs, outside of that Eles damage is okay but not great. However with these nerfs, ele also took a hit outside of ascendance with Echo Chamber getting nerfed. So not only did Ascendance get absolutely demolished, but our damage outside of Ascendance got hit as well.

We really just needed damage shifted out of Ascendance, but instead got nerfed both in and out of Ascendance lol. Its going to hit ele pretty hard and this was not the tuning I’d like to see. Stormbringer also got nerfed relatively hard due to PVE when it wasn’t even played much in pvp, so potentially playing a Lightning bolt build with that is not looking good either.

Also nerfing Echo chamber was a terrible decision. Tired of tuning changes that are so massive they cause you to have to swap gear around 1 month into the season when you basically just finished gearing. Everyone just bought their final piece of conquest gear this week or last week, meaning nobody has the ability to swap stats easily on things like which tier pieces we have catalyzed and which conquest off pieces we have, same goes for conquest weapons. Thats absolutely insane to me. Not saying tuning shouldnt happen, but I am saying it should not be such massive adjustments all at once.

3 Likes
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This is the same situation that has happened in PvE and I think your suggestion of getting damaged shifted out would be better.

1 Like
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B tier really? We will find out on wednesday but cant they just global people in a couple of seconds rn? would a 20% nerf make it b tier if it can just absolutely destroy people rn

1 Like
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Part of it is because of the Ascendance bug I’m assuming. Right now Ascendance is bugged and when pressed (or when DRE procs) basically fires like 6 Flameshocks and 10 Lava Burst overloads (which are amped by 150%) into your target instead of apply Flameshock onto your target and 5 other nearby in addition to firing a Lava Burst at your targets and at 5 other nearby targets. So the bug fix removes a stupid amount of single target burst and resource gain which happens at the literal click of a button.

However I’m unsure if the Ascendance bug appears in PvP or not.

1 Like
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I don’t understand where they are getting their numbers from. Sure we burst huge in Spymaster window, but outside of that it’s pretty comparable to every other class I run with.

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So why don’t nerf the Spymaster trinket ?
From release of Nerub’Ar palace, this trinket is the very BiS for all Intel DPS.
It’s not just the first trinket of the list on Bloodmallet website, it is at least 10% before others, and for some specs, it’s like 30% better than the second BiS trinket.
This thing provide insanely huge burst that shouldn’t be allowed and are not healthy for the game.
So why this trinket receive no nerf ?

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Deff agree and I’ve seen this brought up alot but that still wouldn’t fix it necessarily. Go look at any Lust pull on a boss where people aren’t going to have 40 stack rolling and you’re see that Ele’s burst during Ascendance dumpsters other specs.

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Ah yes I know with lust and ascendance and all CD, the pull are insane, but I think with correcting the ascendance bug, nerfing spymaster web, and some MODERATE nerfs on the Ascendance or Echo Chamber to minimize impact of mastery, the problem can be solved.
Here I feel like they nerfed all things they added in 11.0.5

But, hey, they buffed the ghosts so maybe Farseer is back in Single Target.
Sorry if some people like it but I find it very bored since it doesn’t add anything on the gameplay.

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It’s not. Even with Grandpas getting buffed, Farseer is still far and beyond worse that Stormbringer because alot of these nerfs hurt Farseer as well. In fact the Ascendance bug is stronger for Farseer since Ascendance/DRE procs make your Grandpa’s turret Lava bursts into your target which is the only reason its even just 5% to 7% below Stormbringer in single target right now. When the bug gets fixed, that gulf is only going to get bigger.

1 Like
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Myself, try not to catastrophize the proposal of cutting overall dps anywhere from 10% to 24% by rationalizing the changes. It does feel like getting punched in the gut for getting nice things. I can’t help but be concerned with single-target performance getting gutted when it’s performance wasn’t the problem or an outlier.

The biggest changes are concerning the new values of Mastery. It’s basically 10% overall damage from talents & abilities. I imagine for a lot of people outside of the most elite, we haven’t dumped and changed all our stats to Mastery gear and enchants.

It’s also unclear how much of a change it’ll be for Ascendance in M+ AoE when they fix the machine-gun to be spread rather than concentrated. Having flame shocks on multiple targets provides a lot of interplay for talents such as the Fire Elemental, Primordial Wave, Flames of the Cauldron, and Searing Flames. Even Erupting Lava (D:) benefits from going wider with damage over-time rather than tall and immediate.

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The only thing that is changing is the magnitude of Overloads, the proc chances and interactions remain the same. Given that, Mastery is going to be the strongest. The issue is more so with the 2nd best stat going from Haste to Crit which is gonna be a larger blow to players that didn’t swap their gear to Mastery/Haste. Crit was held equal to Haste for AoE, Haste just won out in single target. Even now though, Crit Flasks and Weapon Enchants are found to scale a bit better in AoE but Mastery is still better since Single Target in keys is still stupid important.

Fire Elemental is completely dead and damn near no value on bosses in M+ in comparison to Storm Elemental’s haste, not to mention that even with Erupting Lava our damage profile its way more nature oriented so even picking Elemental Unity nature damage would be more favorable over fire damge. Flame shock damage is widely negligible now that SFD is gone which devalues Flames of the Cauldron since the benefit of that pick was SFD itself; they would have massively buff Flame Shock damage to outweigh the haste amp granted by Storm Ele. Searing Flames was also normalized in the same way Lava Surge was on target counts where it’s proc chance is divided by the number of active Flame Shocks meaning its the same regardless of the number of targets affected (this was done when they decided to murder Farseer Fire during Beta); its only chosen in single target builds to path to Pwave. They’d have to rework those talents significantly and I’m pretty tired from the reworks considering this is effectively the 3rd time they have done this if you count how they gutted Farseer Fire during the beta like 3 week out to release.

The thing is that time taken on bosses is almost on par with how long trash takes and often times your failure point in a key are the bosses at +10 or higher. So taking that boss damage potential you have and spreading it thin across 20 odd minutes is worse for the key even if it ends up damage neutral. It’s a significant damage loss on bosses for a minor DPS increase on multiple trash pulls.

Thats the biggest issue. These nerfs are largely due to fearmongering from AoE burst potential (though it did need to reigned in) but the manner of the nerfs are going to end up damaging Single Target worse than our M+ performance. However there is some hopium that either today and tomorrow we’re receive news of them going back on some of these.

To clarify, the 10% number is just from the balance changes coming on 10/29 with the 19% value coming in if we also get the ascendance hotfix put in. However, we have already been nerfed by 5% from the 2 LR adjustments they made earlier this week. The 24% value is taking all those in account all of those to represent how much of a nerf we will have comparing performance from 10/22 to 10/29. This also just for single target. For M+ performance its like 16% with roughly 1% to 2% variance.

1 Like
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Whole Earthshrine discord is full of crap egocentric people who supported the rework that survived 7 days and now is even worse damage profile wise for every form of contenct. Congrats guys you are truely “knowledgable” and supportive to shaman community. Please don’t compromise yourself anymore.