11.0.5 Elemental Rework is still disappointing

Classes Shaman
1

I know I said a lot already but this is really bothering me at the moment. This rework doesn’t resolve any design issues and make them even deeper. It feels forced to achieve certain design goals but doesn’t consider fact that none of the players are happy with it.
The issues for me are:

  1. Offensive CD bloat. Ascendance and Stormkeeper will be mandatory now now matter what build you plan to go for and at the moment Elemental Shaman has this amount of CDs:

-Bloodlust
-Fire Elemental/Storm Elemental
-Ascendance
-Primordial Wave
-Ancestral Swiftness
-Stormkeeper
-Totem of Wrath

Imagine pressing them all to burst. It’s madness. Also nobody targetted Errupting Lava Flame Shock consuming issue. Ancestors LvB consumes it too…

This is absolute madness. As far as I know Blizzard aims for sustain damage not Shadowlands 100-0 one shot fiesta. What was the point of nerfing Stormkeeper in DF to now come back to similar design. I completely don’t get it.

  1. Forcing cooldown on us that are completely not related to the nodes below.

Why am I forced to take Stormkeeper. I don’t want it as it’s the most telegraphed CD in the game and is easy to stop. Also with Mastery being reworked it’s not even half as strong as it once was. How is Stormkeeper related to Primordial Fury or Swelling Maelstrom?

Why is Improved Flametongue Weapon in this location when it’s completely not related to builds or talents above it. It doesn’t make any sense.

Why is Echo Chamber mandatory if I want to take Ascendance. Echo Chamber is misleading. It only buffs Mastery damage to 35% not by 40%. Why cannot I go to Ascendance from Searing Flames talent for example?

  1. Elemental damage is underperforming in PvP. It’s not the best at the moment already. Recent Wednesday changes made it’s winrate drop even harder and so far all these changes look like a huge downgrade.

I’m extremely worried and frustrated with the state of my favourite spec. I’m truely considering unsubing or rerolling. I don’t enjoy the game too much at the moment and after testing Ele on PTR I feel it’s even worse.

20 Likes
2

Yea elemental has been falling so flat and it’s not looking much better at all with all these changes. It also fails so hard in the class fantasy category for me, especially with lightning bolt still looking so bad

I’ve been maining elemental since Mists of Pandaria but I think I’m finally going to make the jump to enhancement. It looks so cool on ptr and it’s the only spec of shaman that actually matches the class fantasy in my opinion.

I hope one day elemental will become cool but alas I’m saying goodbye to it

6 Likes
3

I think elemental is being punished for how well it performed. Pre tww, post season 4 dragon flight.

2 Likes
4

I was maining Enha till Legion and then swapped to Ele as I didn’t like “blue rage” warrior. Enha since rework is just a shadow of it former glory. In PvP it’s either one shotting for 2 weeks or a meme spec competing with FDK for the title of the worst meele.

Elemental now will be 7 offensive CD spec like Unholy before TWW. I probably reroll Shadow or Mage.

5

elemental have a nice playing i dont know what you said play frost mage itf you want 3 keys…

1 Like
6

I cannot wait for people like you to cry on how bad new Elemental is and how “I told you so”.

Also you clearly didn’t touch Mage because Mage suffers from the same button bloat issue. All these 30 sec micro CDs that are unnecessary. Also based on your performance in PvE and PvP you clearly didn’t press every button available on your classes.

3 Likes
7

Ancestral Swiftness doesn’t have a GCD, and can be cast in creative ways with the spell you wish to cast it immediately.

Totem of Wrath (PvP) was changed to be cast automatically with Primordial Wave. It causes plenty of problems with abilities like Totemic Recall amongst probably others, but “pressing” it is not one of its problems.

8

Still it’s another button and another modifier. Blizzard was redesigning spec damage profiles around sustain damage - not modifiers based 100-0 one shots. And this is completely opposite to it.

3 Likes
9

What a load of fear mongering banter. No one is forcing you to do a damn thing. But you act as if Blizzard drove to your house and made you do something.

You’re just as guilty as those you accuse. More or less you don’t want there to be any optional skill tree to play, but that which you want. From the sims I have seen Farseer is still top DPS by a large margin in all but AoE situations. Which to you means all possible situations apparently.

You can speak for yourself, I don’t like it when unreasonable people pretend to speak for the whole community.

2 Likes
10

I’m glad they made Stormkeeper easier to get. Elemental is a class with low amount of active skills.
Also, Stormkeeper is a nice talent in situations that the boss hides, you need to hide, or to precast.

I hope this new update makes the Farseer/fire build stronger. At this moment it is rather a struggle to do DPS without using lightning/stormbringer build.

11

There will be no optional tree as it is now. Since you have Farseer - single target and Stormbringer aoe. In next patch nothing will change. Also I couldn’t care less about any sims since I don’t play PvE.

So far there were multiple topics and there were 2 people (including you that liked it) rest are disappointed. Also how can you be happy about the downgrade. All builds are performing worse than they are now. I was on PTR and tried multiple things - it is worse.

Except Stormkeeper is mandatory now and I have to take it even if I don’t want to.

12

Not sure what post your talking about. As I only see this shaman thread and a thread I got into it with the fellow who thinks everything in the game is “Simple” that revolve around shaman (and that Ret thread was directed at enh shaman not elemental) in any recent post.

I am an old school (post totem play) shamy enjoyer. It is well known that those angry are most likely to post, just because there are not an overwhelming number of supporters does not mean they don’t exist. Back a few years ago when they decided to make Lightning Bolt Shammy’s main source of damage instead of Lava Burst there were pages and pages of shaman players who wanted to keep Lava Burst as it was (like 30 pages). Blizzard ignored all of us and changed it anyways. Now here we are 2-3 years later and where did all those players go? Well like me, many of them quit the game. Any movement by Blizzard to move back to a Shaman who’s main source of damage is Lava Burst is going to be liked by me. I am totally on the side of enjoyment of playstyle over being #1 on the charts.

More or less this forum is dead, the same post sit on the front page for days. So it’s not like it use to be where hundreds of people were posting about shaman alone. We are now a very small portion of what use to be a vast community. Really though, I’ve seen so much over reaction on these boards since I came back. The vast majority of post are “The sky is falling, I’m not #1 on the charts QQ, we took a small minor nerf lets act like we were nerfed to the ground” kind of post. It’s getting irritating.

Blizzard is not forcing you to play a particular type of play, your previous playstyle is still 100% viable in PvE, it’s the acting like it’s not that sparked me to post about it. You’re OP while mentioning PvP does not specify it’s solely directed at PvP. Since that was the case I took it as directed at both PvE and PvP. From this last post it seems PvP only, indicating the OP is fully about PvP which the OP is not remotely close to being clear on.

So if it’s all about PvP and not PvE at all, then that is where the disconnect is.

BTW 4 likes on your OP in a thread where only 7 people are participating is somehow overwhelming support by all shaman??? PLZ

1 Like
13

First glance I like what the intent is for 11.0.5 rework.

The current version of Elemental is more degenerate than meatball spam.

Discord is where you go for more serious discussion. Moderated, and doesnt allow people unfamiliar with how things work to dominate the discussion. Shaman discord is regularly rocking.

1 Like
14

Yeah but the PTR version has you tracking like a dozen different things in ST, including needing to use complex weakauras to track your Tempest builders because you want to SoP into them and you can’t do that without preemptively knowing when tempest is going to proc due to spell queuing and tempest replacing lightning bolt.

It’s a little overboard. I feel like they need to find something a little more in the middle.

Plus AoE is arguably even more degenerative on PTR. They need to do something to make icefury cleave worth using. Otherwise it’s literally just Chain Lightning/Earthquake spam. It would also really be nice if they integrated Lavaburst into the AoE rotation in a way that doesn’t require a capstone talent on a 30 second timer… maybe some sort of Flameshock/LB spreading interaction.

15

If you mean that Earthen something discord. Then I left it myself as it was bunch of one time duelist guys behaving like they know everything and how our spec is supposed to be played lol. No thanks

1 Like
16

They are extremely knowledgeable.

The people that seem to have issues there are ones that don’t understand the class and want to tell them numbers are wrong based on their feelings.

17

They aren’t… They were talking a lot of crap.

Maybe they are better in terms of PvE - no idea. Didn’t touch it yet in TWW but in terms of PvP they were acting like they are Swapxy or Zeepeye.

Also in terms of numbers I tested it a bit and it’s not satisfying in PvP. Keep in mind that opponents in PvP aren’t target dummys or bosses that interrupt only when it’s scripted. Also getting big 3 min. CDs isn’t good for your performance as the strongest defences have shorter CD.

If I want to talk about Shaman I prefer to go on Swapxy or Zeepeye’s discord.

18

The discord and the mods are largely based on PVE. And the people are regularly very helpful

19

I rarely play PvE - if I have extra time. I mainly play PvP.

PvP part of the discord is low quality I’d say and if I say something about PvP on the general part of Elemental discord I was memed there. To be fair…

If you are PvP player then this discord is useless.

20

PvP
Tracking down PvP in those discords is like pulling teeth.
Yeah I feel that, there’s not a lot of PvP knowledge getting floated, else we’d definitely get more feedback floating about the often non-recommended talents like Storm Frenzy and Icefury that absolutely were aimed at or undertuned for what problems they could be addressing.

TL;DR. with FOL CDR removal, the common cooldowns should sync up 1.5(minor)/3min(majors) and Lava Burst damage weaving should be a thing.
P.S.: I feel like this is me spewing a rant, and I apologize. This isn’t an analysis, but more of of an emotional response to the current and proposed gameplay changes that don’t address things I like

PTR Feedback
I jump in to the PTR when I can and try to give a little feedback, but it’s always so many little things that need tweaking. It’s really why I feel like the developers/designers really play enhancement but not elemental, then delivered (what will basically be) a year of 2 variations one button specs across 4 seasons.

I am of a strange opinion that they should just try and make a unified weaver elemental build that provides either more optimized instantaneous output with lava or more optimized casting time output with lightning. The 11.0.5 changes to the tree basically mandating by positioning Stormkeeper and Ascendance, along with Ascendance’s rework lends itself to that idea. But there’d need to be so much more, including stripping a lot of the micro damage modifiers from the tree and rebalancing the spells by themselves.

Balance of what’s being addressed
Flash of Lightning’s (FOL) CDR RIP
Like FoL wasn’t oppressive in DF because the damage was there, particularly in Season 2, it’s just the rotation was too complex and stringent to the point of it being the same song every time since there was only one proper way to fit the pieces together. (Yes, 1 button face-roll is also the same song every time but there at least was a learning curve to weaving properly).

If there’s only one change in the 11.0.5 that I would like to see added it’s:

Ancestral Swiftness and Primordial Wave need to have the same Cooldown.

Other Generalities
Anyway… there’s three big things that irk me about Elemental’s gameplay atm, because really there’s only been improvements overall since the balancing team has been on it to keep us competitive.

  • LvB’s Damage
    The reason we can’t throw Lava Bursts is because Lava Bursts don’t feel like they are worth it. They always crit… for pathetic amounts of damage, then you look at Lightning Bolt and it’s critically hitting for great damage. Then the modifiers for Lava Burst are knee-capped because they don’t actually apply roll the damage modifiers onto the overloads or potential overloads.
    A) I would love to see a PTR where they just go, “Hey we’re trying something with Elemental within our new environment and letting Lava Burst off the chain to see how it looks, because there are so many modifiers to the ability but many historical restrains on how those modifiers are applied to it and particularly it’s overloads”
    B) The desire to see the Mastery actually feel like Crit for Lava Burst again doesn’t feel like rose-coloured glasses, but more like revisiting the original design of why Lava Burst is different from Fireball or Pyroblast.
  • NS/AS desyncs from PW
    Yes, restating from above. The main problem I have with the proposed change is that for Farseer build, Nature’s Swiftness/Ancestral Swiftness just desyncs completely from Primordial Wave, and that feels terrible.
  • Hero Talent Contribution, mainly Stormbringer Fantasy
    Just feels like a litany of things killing my fantasy of Favi as a stormbringer and it’s not something I can do as a lightning slinger in raids without shooting myself in the leg, and the PTR hasn’t really changed that for the better.

Stormbringer fantasy grievances expanded:

  1. Single vs Multi-target performance. I dislike the disparity of Stormbringer on Elemental vs Enhancement. Clearly, Tempest is going crazy for Enhancement, while for Elemental it’s relegated to only aggressive pulls in M+.
  2. Tempest frequency. Armchair content creators praising the change of Nature’s Protection going from 10% during activation to 3% always-on not seeing it as a nerf. It’s clearly a nerf, because I would love to see more Tempest procs, and the only reason it’s not a nerf is because there are so few Tempest procs that having just a boring flat DR is an improvement.
  3. PvP applicability. Instant and fast casts are still king in PvP, and stormbringer in arena feels like a straight up non-starter.
2 Likes