Some time ago blizzard came out and stated that they felt that lightning bolt/chain lightning should be center points to the elemental rotation, because shamans are the only lightning casters in the game and everything else should be secondary to that. Damage was moved from earthshock into lightning bolt to facilitate that.
Guess what, it didnt take. There’s still only one obscure build that heavily utilizes lightning bolt, while lava burst/earthshock are still the high points.
Now, with shadowlands, you claim that you want the core of playing an elemental shaman to be “Managing flameshocks on enemies in order to focus on lava surge”. Which is great, most people playing shamans on live love getting lava surge procs and wrecking faces with lava blasts.
Except… you say that while making earthshock hit like a wet noodle without fulmination stacks, which are only gained via lightning bolt/chain lightning. At the same time, you’ve added absolutely no way to effectively spread flame shocks to multiple targets, which is what’s necessary for the kind of gameplay you seem to want us to focus on.
I was hopeful that Surge of Power (one of elemental’s current talents) would be the solution to this; with earthshock no longer having a resource cost/“cooldown”, it would have been possible to spread flame shock to two targets every 6 seconds. But, lo and behold, because of the other potential effects of SoP, it was changed to require 6 stacks of fulmination in order to use, which means that a minimum of 3 lightning bolts needs to be cast between each flame shock, an average of 6 (which cannot be fit into a 6 second window), and if your luck is really bad you might not get enough fulmination stacks at all to use SoP before your first flameshock falls off the target. So yea, great gameplay planning there, you really knocked it out of the ballpark.
Not to mention that fulmination might as well be roll the bones for shamans. Why do blizzard developers like stacking RNG on top of RNG with class mechanics? Please, just let us know what’s going to happen when we push a button and not have to rely on your crappy internal randomizer to decide whether we get the outcome we expect or not. That’s pretty a pretty straightforward concept, I would think. Reliability in rotation. It’s something blizzard cant seem to get a grasp on, though.
Elemental needs a reliable way to spread flameshock in aoe situations if you want flameshock management to be a core component of the gameplay. Make earthquake spread it, or chain lightning, or just remove some of the other efects on Surge of power and get rid of the fulmination stack requirement for it. Stop screwing over some classes every single patch and expansion while playing favorites to others.