I’m bad at explaining things, but ele sham has primordial wave, ascendance, fire/lightning elemental, stormkeeper, a spender earthshock/elemental blast/earthquake. and a dot to maintain, flameshock, with liquid magma totem as an “AoE” cooldown for it, but really its only 3 so you need totemic recall.
On top of that fire build and lightning build always seem to conflict. Someone come correct me if I’m just yapping about nonsense, but ele sham, to me, needs to streamline which cooldowns it wants to build around.
You only take Pwave, Storm Ele, and Stormkeeper, and those you send on CD. With LMT’s short CD and Pwave’s now reduced power you pretty much only use it once in a pack and there’s no real reason to take Totemic Recall unless you for some reason need to use Windrush alot. Flame shock also really doesn’t need to be maintained as much since in single target, you’re going to have pretty much full uptime because of how frequently you cast Pwave, and in M+, after you do your Pwave cleave, you can just let it fall off.
The spenders are pretty simple to play around with if you pretty much only spend if you’re about to overlap and you’ve pooled enough to the SK combo, which should be easy unless you’re spending a lot.
You’re just naming every ability to make it sound complicated. You can do that with literally every spec in the game.
That being said, with the current iteration of shaman you don’t take ascendance at all so scratch that. It’s fire OR storm ele so scratch one of those. It’s earth shock OR elemental blast so scratch one of those. Your left with pwave and stormkeeper after that. With FOL pwave is every 20 seconds so it’s just a rotational ability. We have two cooldowns. Stormkeeper and storm elemental. That’s literally it. You hit lightning bolt 20 times before you press anything else. Look up some guides and you will change your mind
Nah dawg ele is good imo. I don’t like sometimes how primordial wave doesnt get off cooldown so I can refresh it ONLY with it but have to use flame shock to keep it rolling then like 2-4 sec later gotta use PW for ancestral to show up.
Generally, if your rotation is sound you should never have to/never should manually flame shock a target. The only time that should happen is if your forced to move and do not have a lava surge proc or spirit walker available to cast anything else.
I wouldn’t really classify any of those as “big cooldowns” other than Ascendance and Fire/Storm Elemental (which is one or the other. Right now most ele shams aren’t going Ascendance anyways.
Pwave/LMT and Stormkeeper are more like part of the rotation than true cooldowns. Other than the stuff you listed we pretty much just Lava Burst after PWave and then Lightning Bolt > Earthshock or Chain Lightning > Earthquake, so we don’t really have much going on outside of the maintenance spells anyways.
You definitely worded it better than I did. The button bloat just kills it for me. But even more so than just the sheer amount of buttons is the class identity. Most classes have a streamlined focus for cooldowns. Spriest is voidform and this xpac void torrent. Demo lock for example has always been demonic tyrant, and every build has revolved around this rotation. Devastation Evoker is dragon rage, using empowered spells to extend it.
Ele sham I feel like doesn’t have just one. Is it Ascendance? Stormkeeper? The class has always been split between fire and lightning, and ice fury feels really forced and hasn’t properly worked in a smooth way.