Ele sham AG compensation needs to be better, especially for PvP

TLDR: Please add a talent that makes Healing Surge and Chain heal instant+increases their healing by x% every 100(?) maelstrom spent. This could replace AG in the class tree for ele, or make this a pvp talent. This way we don’t have to constantly cast off heals to make up for the massive loss of AG but still use active globals on off healing.

Longer feedback/explanation:

In one arena game that lasts 3-5 mins, AG does 9-12 million healing for me reliably. In one blitz game that lasts 6 minutes, it does 15-16 million healing for me reliably, and in a game that lasts 8 minutes, it does around 17-20m reliably. Healing stream barely gets to around 3-3.5 mil in that same time frame. AG also heals much more per tick.

An 80% buff to healing stream totem, which can also just be killed in pvp, is not nearly enough to make up for losing AG. Its not even remotely close. This will only push ele into hard casting healing surges which feels pretty terrible in a pvp environment with how much damage goes out. Right now pairing AG with ascendance feels great because it means I dont need to spam cast healing surge during ascend while im dying through astral shift.

Its also pretty easy for melee to catch an ele shaman, and we already spend a lot of globals on root/frost shock/grounding totem/tremor totem/earth shield/skyfury if it gets purged, etc. Having to not only spend globals on off healing but casted off healing will feel really bad with how often we’d have to do it without AG. This is a pretty huge nerf to Ele survivability in pvp with (so far) almost no compensation for it, really hope we see something here.

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I’d be happy if they just let mastery effect our healing spells too with overloads and increase to healing by %. Makes mastery even more engaging.

There is potential for that but there are a few problems. One problem is how bad casting can already be in pvp in general. Theres a reason so many casters have moved to instant casts, and what AG does is allow you to continue bursting during Ascendance instead of trying to get casts of surge off, getting interrupted on a surge during asc sucks because it then locks you out of earth shock. It doesn’t feel good, and AG makes it possible for us to keep pressure out since damage is so high astral shift can just be damaged through.

Another problem is how that would practically require Ele shams to go full mastery in pvp to gain more survivability, which is really limiting. Right now for example theres some Ele shams going full mastery, but a lot are going high haste/medium mastery instead. Theres options. If this happened, those options would disappear. Not sure how it’d affect pve, but I imagine probably in a similar way, just not as bad because pvpers are limited with stats due to vers.

I think, at least for pvp, I’d prefer to see a talent replacing AG that makes Chain Heal and Healing Surge instant+buffs their healing every x maelstrom spent.

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Anything besides hard casting all the time lol

Yeah I mean its going to be difficult for them to make up for AG in pvp, they need to do something substantial here. They cannot just say “yea guys you can spend globals on hard casting healing surge and pressing healing stream, that will take care of it” especially when we already have a ton of globals to press on utility.

Healing stream can get killed at any point, has 500k hp or so, if you throw it down to save yourself it can just get swapped to and killed in a global.

An example of how crazy this is: Healing streams max hit in blitz for me is 159k crit. Ancestral Guidance’ max hit for me in blitz was a 1.1 mil normal hit. In this blitz game, AG did 27mil healing, Healing Stream did 2.89mil healing. Thats 4 casts of AG, 5 casts of Healing Stream. An 80% buff to Healing Stream doesn’t even touch the loss of AG. No MS effects on me during this game.

Need buffed instant surges/chain heals from maelstrom spent via a talent. Or they can just leave AG for ele/enh and remove it for resto if this is too complicated to fix.

Seems like they have been dedicated to dismantling this spec the entire x-pac.

What gives?

This is the most fun I’ve ever had on ele honestly. I’ve played shaman since MoP and haven’t enjoyed it this much since then. I’d say they did a fantastic job with ele overall so far this expac, but 11.1 could completely ruin that we’ll see.

The primordial wave change and removal of AG with no actual replacement so far outside of an 80% healing stream buff (not even close to enough) is not a good sign, but time will tell if they look at our feedback or not and adjust these things.

I am fine with the spec but maybe they are looking for something different to do with the class. To my point though, they have shifted back and forth with this class and it really is all over the place.

Iam actually in agreement with wanting to provide something new & fresh to ele as the spec is a bit over done as far as playstyle. I just find it it odd to do it after the launch.

Maybe there will more new changes as they continue with it. They over reacted early on only to have to give quite a bit of the power back. Never seen so much change to one class and be back & forth with it.