How about that… Is that what it looks like. xD This feels so… alien to me hahahaha.
Of course - us “second class citizens” don’t get communication like that.
While some people get it here in the forums, there are many other classes and specs where the main developer is active in the class discord. It’s all alien to us. Welcome to being a Shaman.
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Feels shaman man.
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Elemental definitely needs a rework. The fire build just being spamming Lava Burst with your spenders being super weak is just bad design. The lightning build being a static rotation where you have to cast things in the correct order every time while being a turret kind of sucks.
Neither build is truly Elemental since they both focus on 1 single element at the expensive of the other 3.
I’m glad WW monk is getting reworked though. They suck every single expansion because they scale poorly with stats after the first tier.
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Out of curiosity, how do you suggest it? If you were to design an elemental shaman.
-Use all 4 elements
-separate talent pathways that do have different playstyles.
If you want it to exist, make it as easy for them to steal it as possible. 
First thing I would do is get rid of Frost Shock and Icefury. That would help with rotational and button bloat that Elemental shaman suffer with.
I’d honestly focus of Fire and Nature Damage dealing for Elemental meaning Fire and Lightning spells and go back to the days of MOP and Cata where we had utility and where we were able to move and cast our filler spell but had to stop for lava burst and our big spender. Currently our big spenders feel like a wet noodle. The Frost aspect of of elemental is useless really, especially when they can’t even master 2 elements for us 2 use.
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I agree Enhancement as I had stated just needs a few tweaks. Shamans as a class needs better defenives in pvp and pve, but blizzard is sticking their head in the sand refusing to do this for us. Shamans also needs a graphical update for alot of our Animations.
As for the other two well this shaman has been Enhancement since og tbc. I tried elemental at the end of tbc but back then it was lack luster and was back to Enhancement. So I do not know what is happening with the other specs. So thank you for responding nicely to my questoin. Other Forums you ask a questoin and get a ton of Greif for not instantly knowing the issues with the specs.
Ret pally and rogue were announced well in advance.
I just got home and could not believe they have reworked monk with them being top heals in raid and M+ WTF . This is the 2nd time that they have reworked Paladin . I can’t believe it lol.
I would start with looking at what actually makes ele unique
- 250% Crit Damage
- Overload Mastery
Breaking down the two prominent builds from this expac S2 Lightning and S3 Fire
S2 Lightning Actually utilizes both quite well, the majority of your damage came from Stormkeeper Lightning Bolts and Elemental Blast, both were heightened significantly by hitting crits, and Elemental blast added a nice chunk of damage when it overloaded. Fundamentally they utilized Crit and Mastery well.
When it comes to S3 fire build one of the reason’s lava burst spam is so strong is because outside of ascendance, lava burst is utilizing both crit and mastery at maximum potential since mastery is stacked so high that you basically always overload and since lava burst always crits on a target with flame shock technically outside of ascendance lava burst can get the maximum value of the 250% crit bonus with 0 crit stat.
If I were to start redesigning the spec I would look create talents that surround the core ele shaman spells and try have unique interactions with getting crits and overloading.
I think they should keep IF, but instead of it synergizing with FS, it should apply a shatter when used before LB.
Honestly, if they just used one ability from each element, and made them all synergize with each other in different ways and remove Flame Shock and its DoT.
For example, an ability called Windflurry that gives the player 2 instant casts of their next ability. When used before LB, it throws a fire tornado instead of a meatball. The fire tornado would swirl around the target for 4 seconds doing damage.
Using Icefury and then Lightning Bolt would cause every mob within 8 yards to build a static charge for 5 seconds. After 5 seconds each mob would be struck by a bolt of lightning doing damage. Of course, changing Icefury into a nuke with a maelstrom or mana cost and no CD would be best.
Honestly, there’s so much they could do to make interesting abilities, it just doesn’t seem like they want to.
I remember Shadow Priests went through the same thing during SL. We just need a lot of people to speak up like we did then.
Elementalist definitely needs a rework, it’s been in a sad state for too long. Resto is super bland and doesn’t stand out in any aspect.
Enhance needs a rework to add more synergy so we can actually make choices and have multiple builds. The two main talent specs do alright and feel okayish, but what doesn’t feel alright is picking a certain talent essentially making many other talents “useless”. If you go elemental you’re not picking up stormstrike talents. I guess the other issue is that the two builds require ALL the talent points to work. Stormstrike alone is awful, with one talent it’s still awful, two you better believe it’s not great. It’s not until you pickup all the talents that it becomes decent. Same goes for elemental, you can’t dabble, you need all of them for the spec to work. The talent tree is just setup to funnel you down certain paths and that frankly sucks and takes all the choice out of picking a talent spec.
I’d also like to see a more regular rotation that has much less proc/cd whackamole that never really lines up into a pattern. Regular use Button bloat is certainly an issue that needs to be addressed. I don’t know about anyone else, but my regularly used abilities exceed my regularly usable keybinds.
Defensive(s) on all shaman specs need reworks.
The class tree as a whole needs reworked. the fact that shaman has 3 very different specs means our class tree has “useless” talents that work for one or two of the specs but are useless or incredibly niche for the third. As enhancement I feel like the majority of the bottom half of the class tree is either super niche or useless. Why would I ever pickup It certainly doesn’t feel good that the class tree capstones are pretty bad relative to what a capstone should be. As enhancement I’m never going to take Nature’s swiftness, it’s all but useless to me. Every single talent in the class tree should be useful/usable for every spec, zero excuse here given they have talent node choices.
I fear our hero trees are going to fare the same as the class tree. Each spec will get a hero tree that “fits” and the others are technically usable but in practice are far inferior and don’t fit the spec playstyle. If that’s the case it’s just one more major disappointment in thinking I’d actually have an equal choice.
If I had to rank what needs worked on first I’d probably say:
Elementalist > Defensives=Class tree >Resto=Enhancement
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The devensives is the easist to fix. Return Shamanistic Rage at full functionality(aka being able to be used while stunned.) Add a flat all damage reduction to our elemental shields(Lighting, Water, Earth) but not allowing them to stack the resitances. There you go added defensives and haven’t had to majorly make any big changes.
I do agree our class tree is a bit of a mess, what I would love to see is Ascendance be redesigned for each spec and for it to be baseline. Like wings for paladins. Not that hard to do just have it increase damage and healing. Also would love to have Enhancement get the increased melee range that ret got.
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I think for enhance and ele instead of mana Shamanistic Rage should regen MSW and MS. Its the one change I would make.
I would personally love to see Crash Lightning pushed up further in the tree and Primordial wave put in the class tree as a capstone. It makes no sense that all three specs use it yet it is in the spec trees and not the class tree. Also, yes to the range increase on enhancement. Enhancement have a little more movement then Paladin, but in pvp its easier to shut down where as paladin is a lot harder to shut down. Unless they want to give Enhancement its own Blessing of Freedom.
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As Enhancement main, i’d rank what needs worked on first:
- Class tree
- Defensives
- DRE
- Stormstrike talents
- Molten Assault
- WFT / Feral Lunge
Like you said, the class tree as a whole need reworked, all capstone in the class tree is 100% useless or niche. Enhancement Shaman doesn’t have any cast time of Lightning Bolt, so Nature’s Swiftness is 100% useless. Stoneskin Totem is 100% niche, it’s only physical damage reduction when we have too many magic AoE damage. Totemic Recall is 100% useless, we don’t have any damage totem at all.
We need Shamanistic Rage back and we need some passive defensives, we should be okay.
Enhancement’s DRE is pure toxic gameplay because it only promotes to spamming Stormstrike gameplay. Having Stormstrike as a high priority ability is fine but it’s priority over the spenders, that’s pushing us over the edge. Just completely reworked or deleted DRE from all specs trees.
Stormstrike alone is too weak, you need a lot of talents to make Stormstrike become strong but you have to spamming Stormstrike due to DRE.
Storm build is unable to spread Flame Shock like elementalist can because Molten Assault is 2 points talent and Storm would not spend 2 points on Molten Assault so they can’t get Fire Nova / Hailstorm. Just make Molten 1 point, that allows storm build grab Fire Nova / Hailstorm.
WFT and Feral Lunge probably should be baseline.
Enhancement tree is generally good but just need a few changes to Enhancement tree. Class tree need a major rework, it’s a hot mess right now.
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Its not obvious at all. Why is it obvious?
I have thought about this much so dont spin your wheels here, but could Elemental be a ranged WW monk by alternating spell schools for additional power?
By all means spin your wheels haha. Im trying to get people to give tangible ideas instead of vague concepts. Do the design and thinking for them to leech off of or use as a base.
So you want the class spells to be the same just have them effect different spell schools? Cast fire spell to buff nature, nature to ice, ice to fire type of idea? Or are you offering something completely new with spells?
For example I have a post where I offer a Storm strike bebuff idea.
Spirit Siphon - 15% “Mortal strike” except the healing is redirected to the shaman instead. weaker main effect for a unique and good secondary. Fits into our toolkit perfectly with healing and can be dispellable. Which also feeds off our flame shock dispell.
Their design team is very limited, I would be surprised if theres an actually dedicated shaman team. They prolly go all over the classes together. They know the problems but most posts just complain and dont offer unique ideas. A lot of posts call for things from the past exactly as they were or just give us what other classes have. Which I feel like is something they are prolly not allowed to do. I imagine they have guide-lines for each spec/class they have to follow no matter how much they want to do something.
WW mastery is something like “if you dont use the same attack twice, you get a buff thatbdoes 10% more damage”
Elemental could do the same if you dont use the same spell school twice. This would mean at least one path on the tree emphasizes all 4 schools: fire, frost, earth, and air (we’d need new abilities) and the focus would be to rotate them.
I also think our totems, for the class, should be snap buffs that are up for X seconds, and function like auras during those X seconds. So they dont stay up in perpetuity, and youre not supposed to spam them. But they should function almost like Commanding Shout.
It is amazing to me that the expansion is in alpha and we don’t even have a rough draft. Alpha is for fixing and beta is for polishing and balancing (plus a little fixing that alpha missed). We can’t even give feedback because we have nothing to go on.
The structure of their intentions for all classes should already be built and ready for testing/feedback, and yet shaman is so far behind that it isn’t even there to be datamined.
I’ve seen it too many times (both in games and in life)- this is going to be a 4:30 on Friday throw together way too late in the process for feedback to be useful.