Earthquake holding Elemental Shaman back?

Classes Shaman
1

Does anyone else feel like Earthquake, I’m talking in PvE, especially in higher Keys is holding Elemental Shaman back from actually excelling?.

In Higher keys, where movement and mechanics are probably most abundant now then ever, having mobs stationary for earthquake to actually do damage is so rare.

Don’t get me wrong, on that rare niche time they do stand in your earthquake you feel great, but it’s so rare and niche now. 90% of the time I’ll cast Earthquake and it goes to waste and yep their goes my dps.

The Higher the key I do, the less damage overall Earthquake does purely because tanks need to keep kiting due to mechanics.

Suggestion, why not remove Earthquake, remove the need for our dps to rely if they stand still, simply put its damage all in Earth Shock, let Earth Shock be our AoE spender, literally does everything Earthquake does but upfront rather then overtime in a AoE around the Target instantly.

So ST we Elemental Blast, AoE we Earth Shock, having the dps upfront aswell be a hell a lot easier to tune aswell and a huge QoL and boost of dps as we arnt reliant if they enemies move or not.

Have all relevant talents that effects Earthquake apply to Earth Shock adjusted,

  • Tumultuous Fissures, Earth Shock has a 5% chance to knock down Enemies.

  • Echoes of Great Sundering, Elemental Blast increases your next Earth Shock by 100%

When casting Earth Shock just apply aswell the visual of Earthquake under the Target for 2 seconds showing it AoE.

This then creates a easy upfront AoE dps spender, won’t be hindered at all my movement and mechanics and definitely when the Tanks need to kite.

I just feel like Earthquake in modem WoW has lost its use and severely holding Elemental Shamans back.

I could go on especially buffing the Lightning Build insanely more to be competitive with the Fire primordial wave build but that’s for a different thread.

What do you all think? Earth Shock becomes a player targeted AoE spell, damage all upfront.

3 Likes
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Elemental Blast replaces Earth Shock first off. Also, I think its fine. There are plenty of times where mobs are clumped and stationary and you can get the most out of Earthquake. The onoy time it suffers is Sanguine.

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I would fix Ele AoE a few ways since EQ is indeed outdated and ground targeted aoes suffer in regards to m+

1 - Give Liquid Magma Totem baseline so that Ele has a quick way to spread Flame Shocks — reduce the damage of the totem if need be, to remove the cooldown

2 - Replace Earthquake with Fire Nova (the enhancement talent ability) as their main AoE. Elemental already benefits off flame shocks, so this just makes sense. Additionally, give it interaction with Earth shock or Ele Blast. Something like your next Earth Shock/Ele Blast after Fire Nova cleaves X additional targets for Y damage.

The AoE now becomes, Liquid Magma to spread Flame Shocks, followed by Fire Nova to explode those AoEs — then Chain Lightning, with lava surge proc lava bursts for priority targets, and building up your maelstrom to dump into a cleave Earth Shock/Ele Blast depending on what’s taken.

Earthquake in general should be reworked as an Enhancement ability (it does physical damage after all, not to mention enhance’s history of earth-based abilities: rockbiter rework, Earthen Spike, Sundering), and also as showcased by Thrall using it in Heroes of the Storm as the Enhance sham archetype.

2 Likes
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Id love Earthquake to go Enhance but be damage upfront.

Also with a lot of your changes it really just solidifies Fire Build which is already seriously out performing the lightning build further.

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As a ST spender, I understand, but I’m saying to remove earthquake and change earth Shock to be the AoE spender and have its dps upfront.

See that’s my issue lower keys earthquake is fine but going to 20+ and beyond it’s rare, Very rare, chain pulling, tank kiting, mechanics.

Seriously I cannot think of one trash pack in higher keys that the tank will just sit still, not one.

Outside of a few rare instances on bosses, for Example Germination phase on Tree in AA, but what other instances do you get the full effect or over 75% of the effect on Earthquake?

Like I mentioned lower keys it’s fine, but the higher I’ve pushed Earthquake is doing less and less dps overall.

And that’s my issue, modern day WoW is literally built about being as fast and bursty as you can be, why do you think melee is currently king they can burst in a instance.

Shadow Priests with Psychic Link spreads the AoE regardless where they stand, Starfall on Boomkin too. They are insanely good currently, desired in high keys cause movement doesn’t effect their dps.

Don’t get me wrong, when I join lower keys to help my mates, 18 and below Earthquake pumps, it feels great, then you go higher keys where more mobility and being able to dps on the move literally determines if you time a key or not Earthquake feels like rubbish.

6

It wouldn’t have any real impact on Single Target builds, because you aren’t gonna be using liquid magma totem in single target…you’ll just flame shock. Fire Nova won’t impact single target either.

So I fail to see how it would impact lightning builds in single target.

For AoE, lightning is already behind, but nothing is stopping you from still taking surge of power and using Chain Lightning after you Earth Shock to get the overloads. Lightning build for M+ also seems to just be more focused on single target altogether, for things like tyrannical. It still does AoE, but will most likely always fail in comparison to the ease of liquid magma totem + lava surge procs.

7

Should be entirely reworked to be a copy of the Heroes of the Storm version but for MMOs

The same way that Sundering is a dps/CC ability, EQ operates the same.

For the record, Thrall also has Sundering in HotS which operates almost identical as to WoW.

8

I think one of the main issues surrounding earthquake isn’t the spell itself, but the ele shaman talent tree not making good use of the ele shaman AoE toolkit.

Boomkins
Take Boomkin’s starfall for example, you take one talent in Aetherial Kindling allowing your starfall to extend the duration of your dots. Then Boomkins have additional talents to increase the damage of their dots like Cosmic Rapidity and other talents like Waning Twilight which increase their overall damage by 8% for having 3 or more dots on a target, which in turn have been extended by casting starfall.

Boomkin’s starfall also benefits from the frequency in which they cast starfall through Starlord and Rattle The Stars. So just from continuing to cast their spender in a good cadence, they are able to increase their haste, decrease the cost of their starfall as well as the damage of their starfalls.

Every talent benefits from casting starfall one way or another.

Ele Shamans
Taking a look at how Earthquake interacts with Ele shaman’s talents.
Pressing earthquake can give us buffs from talents like Surge of Power and Lightning Rod. The difference between these and Aetherial Kindling, is both SoP and Lightning Rod lose value if we were to cast earthquake back to back because we’ll either lose out on a SoP buff, or lose out on lightning rod uptime by not casting chain lightning while the Lightning Rod buff is running.

Looking at the talents that increase the damage of Earthquake, for Both Master of The Elements and Echoes of The Great Sundering, we have to cast a single target spell first to gain the buff, which is used up in a single cast of Earthquake.

Then there’s Magma Chamber, which is great for buffing our Earthquakes, but the quicker you’re able to get earthquakes out, the less value this talent has, especially when shamans can’t get as many flame shocks up once Liquid Magma Totem and Totemic Recall are on cooldown.

When you compare Earthquake to Starfall you see a huge discrepancy in the way the two interact with the rest of the spec’s toolkit. Not to mention the fact that Earthquake has a much smaller radius and enemies can be moved out of it easily.

6 Likes
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Lightning Rod
If casting Earthquake “also refreshed all existing Lightning Rods” and tried to apply a new one to targets within the AoE where possible, we’d see a steadily but dramatic ramping of AoE as damage gets funneled to one more target every 65/50 maelstrom.
I don’t think it’d be akin to Feral Druids and Unholy DK, since you’d have to build towards it rod by rod rather than it being an instantly on switch of uncapped AoE. It’d be an interesting contrast in terms of damage profiles.

Other talents?
I’d say the mechanism would need to be applied to Lightning Rod talent rather than say interplay between talents. It would just seem convoluted to see a caveat written into Echoes of the Great Sundering.
I don’t really embrace the justification why overloaded Earthquakes don’t utilize the rest of our talents when one takes Mountains Will Fall. Aside from EQ being undertuned for anything less than 5+ targets, it’s mini-me version just feels like it falls further and further behind with how it interacts with the rest of the kit. Overloads will greedily intercept Master of the Elements buffs, creating suboptimal variance, but won’t apply stun chance or lightning rods to targets.

2 Likes
10

Imho I’d love to keep EQ but front load the dmg similar to wild growth, strongest on first tick and getting less and less strong with each tick. Thus the majority of the dmg is dealt with the first tick and moving mobs are less of an issue.
In addition I’d love to see the area increase in size with each tick, so the chance that the entire spell is effective is higher and if a lot of movement is necessary, then the majority of the dmg is already dealt and the loss isn’t too great, should mobs move out of the area of effect.

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dunno how popular it would be but could drop a talent in there to make it so earthquakes placed on a target and then quake is centered around them no matter where they move, to not make it op could remove the knock down effect. could make it more viable even if said talent made it slightly longer cd or something.

obviously would have to somehow not work that way in pvp

3 Likes
12

I honestly wouldn’t even mind completely removing the knockdown effect of earthquake and replacing it with a movespeed slow or a cast time/attack speed slow instead, the knockdown can be a downside in dungeons like Shadowmoon Burial Grounds on the channeling mind control mobs anyway that you normally don’t want to interrupt.

1 Like
13

I don’t mind changing earthquake to help it with mobs moving out of it but it would be such a huge downer to remove one of the original abilities from WC3.

14

EQ is weak, stationary and needs a huge amount of setup to even do half of a DH eye beam. I had a thread on this months ago and got eviscerated in the replies and some 1000 IO, LFR shaman had the audacity to argue across 10 posts about how I was wrong and EQ was perfectly fine.

Blizzard just doesn’t understand logical balance. Think of a huge knight in full plate armor and a massive sword. He’s going to hit really hard, and his defensives are hard to pierce, but he’s very slow.
He hits hard, and has good defenses therefore he is slow. It’s checks and balances that make or break games. Earthquake is stationary: it cannot be moved, It takes 6 seconds to deal it’s full damage, it does not deal high damage outside of EoGs. So you have an ability with no mobility, that takes time to damage and deals low damage. Seems like a knockout. GJ Blizzard™!

2 Likes