There are a lot of cleave fights in the new raid. I feel like there should be a combination of talents that really excels specifically on two targets, and I haven’t found it. I’ve been using my full m+ spec on them, which seems to work well, doing well on the meters. Even on Sentinels, which only has an add maybe ~25% of the time my m+ seems to keep up with if not beat my pure single target spec. But it feels like there should be a more specifically tuned option for raid cleave, and I haven’t figured it out yet. Has anyone figured out a really potent cleave spec specific to raid?
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Ele Shaman absolutely blows at 2 target cleave. Its been a main weakpoint of ele for a while now. Eles strengths are 3-4+ targets and single target. If the targets aren’t spread like sentinels ele can perform better ie Twin Fangs but its still quite bad even then at dealing with only 2 targets.
On sentinels most people just play the single target build and throw up a flameshock on the other sentinel. You could play voltaic blaze to cleave the other sentinel with lava burst but it isnt worth the dps loss from dropping a lot of the st talents to take it so nobody really does.
For something like Twin Fangs, people usually play a variation of the m+ build so voltaic blaze is taken. Its also nice for cleaving down the 3 serpent adds that spawn in which ele is pretty decent at. For Explorers, its mostly the m+ build thats played with a slight variation since 2/3 of the bosses are stacked and you can keep flame shock on all 3 of them for constant lvb cleave.
People have figured all sorts of things out at this point, check warcraftlogs to see what builds people are going with on which bosses.
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Always has, always will without a major spec redesign lol.
Ele Sham has historically been good with ST or 4-5+ AoE. 2-3 cleave has always been the challenge, especially when spread.
Lightning Rod helped a bit in recent expansions (s/o Havoc copy), but it’s just the spec.
Voltanic Blaze was a poor attempt. My only real longstanding gripe with Ele is the Flame Shock element. I think Lava Surge always protected the CD element but its just silly. I’d rather the Lava Surge mechanic be removed so FS has no CD and just let VB be a one-time lava burst to all FS targets and give VB a 30 sec CD or something.
I’ll go to my grave or quit the game with the Flame Shock grudge. It’s so weird. No other ranged caster has a CD for a DoT spell.
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I think its honestly close to being well designed. 2 charges of Voltaic Blaze would solve any issues with FS including spread cleave. Should have 2 charges baseline of VB once you talent it, and then they could maybe reduce the cost of Crackling Fury to make it a 1 pointer (while keeping it the same strength as 2/2 points) since point investment for VB is already quite high.
I also think they could solve the 2-3 target cleave issue but I dont know if it would actually work out well. They could add a talent or a baseline function to Chain Lightning where it does more damage if it only strikes 2 targets (not nerfing our aoe, strictly buffing our 2 target cleave), but they would have to be careful with that since it could lead to cl being better than lightning bolt in st but they could buff lb to compensate maybe. I dont really mind ele being bad at 2 target spread cleave though, its okay for specs to have a weakness but ele should be good at ST and 3+target cleave/aoe, sometimes it gets outcompeted in those areas while also being bad at 2-3t spread cleave which feels bad.
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