I am writing to urgently request an immediate rollback of the recent pre-launch Shaman talent changes, specifically focusing on the catastrophic nerfs and design choices hitting both the Elemental and Restoration trees. While I understand the desire to fine-tune the meta for WoW: Forever, the current iteration of the Shaman trees fundamentally guts our specs’ viability, strips away core class flavor, and is actively forcing a massive portion of the player base to abandon the class entirely before servers even go live.
Here is exactly why these changes have killed the class:
The Death of Riptide as a True Capstone: Forcing a 31-point talent investment into an ability with a massive 12-second cooldown that completely lacks an upfront, reactive heal is unprecedented. A capstone should define a spec’s playstyle, not act as an over-costed, heavily restricted maintenance buff just to get a 25% modifier on Chain Heal.
Resto is Mathematically Inferior to Baseline Level 4 Spells: There is an indefensible double-standard in the healing numbers. Riptide provides roughly 953 total healing over 15 seconds but is strictly time-gated by its 12-second cooldown. Meanwhile, a Priest’s baseline Renew or a Druid’s Rejuvenation—learned at level 4 with zero cooldown—provide highly comparable healing throughput and can be blanketed across an entire raid at will.
The Stripping of Elemental Class Identity: Deleting Lava Burst completely from the bottom of the tree to replace it with a passive crit talent (Call of Thunder) completely destroys the master-of-the-four-elements fantasy. The +80% damage buff to Lightning Bolt does not make up for the fact that the rotation has been reduced to a monotonous, vanilla-style single-spell spam fest. Furthermore, increasing Chain Lightning’s cast time to 2.5 seconds and surging its mana cost to 225% of Lightning Bolt makes the spec’s mana economics unnecessarily punishing.
Severe PvE Mechanics Suffocation via Lightning Bolt Spam: Forcing Elemental into a rigid, turret-style single-target Lightning Bolt rotation completely ruins PvE playstyle fluidity. Without Lava Burst to break up the cast order or trigger interactive rotational procs, the gameplay becomes numbingly non-reactive. Furthermore, modern raid mechanics require heavy movement; reliance entirely on a long, hard-casted nature spell means our PvE DPS completely craters the second a fight forces us to step out of a floor hazard.
The Fatal PvP Consequence of a Single-School Toolkit: Removing our primary fire spell leaves Elemental with zero multi faceted offensive pressure while in PvP. Worse, relying solely on single-target nature casts transforms us into an easy target for enemy disruptors. Because we no longer have Lava Burst to bait out enemy kicks or deal damage on a secondary spell school, a single well-timed Counterspell, Kick, or Pummel completely locks our entire offensive toolkit down, leaving us utterly useless in a match.
Zero Caster Mobility and Total PvP Vulnerability: By stripping Riptide of its initial direct heal, removing Elemental’s instant fire nuke option, and burying Improved Ghost Wolf deep into the 4th row of the Enhancement tree, caster Shamans have been left entirely defenseless. Outside of a 3-minute Nature’s Swiftness cooldown, we have zero reactive instant healing and no alternative spell school to cast from if our Nature tree is interrupted or kicked, making both specs completely unplayable against standard melee training in PvP.
Enforced Melee Danger via Totemic Call: Changing Totemic Projection to Totemic Call and forcing totems to drop strictly at the Shaman’s feet entirely ruins tactical positioning. Forcing squishy healing and ranged casting specs to run directly into melee range just to land a crucial Earthbind, Grounding, or Fire Nova totem defies fundamental mechanical logic.
I strongly urge you to reconsider these adjustments before launch day. Reverting the Riptide cooldown back to 6 seconds, restoring its upfront direct heal, bringing back Lava Burst to give Elemental a multi-school toolkit, and moving mobility talents back to accessible rows will save the class and retain a passionate player base that wants nothing more than to love this game. I have played my beloved Shaman class for many years and would love nothing more than to be excited about it again in WOW Forever.
I was so excited for riptide and being relevant in PvP. Crazy how much that one change has killed the hype for me. Now I feel like I’m just going to be playing another cope sim begging for relevancy for years to come if I play the class
WoWF lava burst never had the instant cast proc. Yesterday’s design excluviely had hard casted Lava burst with zero proc ever. It was just a red lightning bolt on a different key. It was not good design.
Not saying the change is much better, and that’s why the crash outs are valid, ele’s design is just always mediocre.
What are you even saying? Resto and ele are so much tankier than enhance lol. Tankier than rogues and cat druids too. The problem with removing totemic projection is the awkwardness of having to run into melee to drop some totems, it has nothing to do with spec toughness.
I disagree. I like that they went back to the Vanilla ways of elemental.
You folks need to remember this is supposed to be in the spirit of Vanilla, and this is pretty close to it.
You seem to be asking for every class to have great mobility, instants, great aoe, multiple spells so you can’t get locked out during counterplay… I mean this isn’t retail.
Spot on with everything here. What makes this double-gutting of Resto and Ele completely unhinged is looking over at the patch notes and seeing Warriors getting buffed yet again.
While Caster Shamans lose Lava Burst, lose Riptide’s upfront heal, and get single-school hard-locked into Nature, Warriors are over here getting:
2H Spec doubled in power (3% → 6% damage)
Flurry condensed to 3 points for the full 30% attack speed, and completely unlinked from Death Wish
Massive threat buffs across Defensive Stance and Defiance
Overpower procs streamlined into a 2-point talent via Bloodthrill
A brand new cooldown (Reckless Swings) and reduced Whirlwind CDs
It’s absolute favoritism. Blizzard is stripping Caster Shamans down to one-button turret spam with zero PvP school protection or mobility, while systematically tuning Warriors to be absolute gods in both damage and threat. Why does one class get complete modernization and quality-of-life consolidation while Shaman gets reverted to 2004-era design? Roll these Shaman nerfs back!
That sounds like a you issue its not a crime to cast ghost wolf and lava burst is wa wrath spell that doesnt belong in classic im glad they removed it elemental now has its class fantasy back.
The enhancement shaman changes are great a 6sec stormstrike is insane and rip riptide pick a class and race you like to play dont choose it because of a spell.
…Man when the Druids dislike something they come together on Discord and have a lot of memebers that put together something factual and researched for Blizzard to look at. Seems an odd way to get things done!
I agree. It’s ridiculous that they didn’t have the talent trees worked out before beta and now they’re rushing all of these last minute, terribly unbalanced changes.
I want to know who thought the riptide nerf was a good idea? Seriously. Does not a single person on their team play resto shaman?
Ele sham community seems to be divided about what they want, but not a single resto sham wanted a mindless chain heal the main-tank meta that doesn’t require you to ever change targets.
