I’ve had the privilege of being able to mess around with elemental shaman on the beta for the last few weeks and I’d love to give some of my thoughts about the spec overall. Just for reference, I’m multi R1 on multiple characters over the past 11 years while also currently being the highest rated Ele player on retail ladder. You can check out some beta or retail gameplay at twitch.tv/smexxin
I just want to note that despite this list feeling a little lopsided, ele feels incredibly fun to play and is sooooo close to being complete in my opinion.
Positives :
Overall, I’d say that the changes to damage breakdown feels incredible so far.
Lava burst doing the main damage, with Overloads and interactions between covenant/echoing shock feels AMAZING.
Utility is as good as ever. Having healing stream and Spiritwalker’s Grace for offheals feels really strong.
Having different options of how to setup burst with stormkeeper/ascendance/lasso/echoing burst combos with all of these makes the class feel a lot more dynamic and decision based instead of scripted and proc based.
Changes to some of the talents has been amazing so far. Ascendance, Echoing Shock, Ele Blast all feel really good to press now.
Negatives :
Flame Shock cd/duration. There’s such a huge disparity between the fun that you have when able to keep up triple flameshocks, to when a healer is continuously dispelling/dps classes dispelling themselves with feign death etc and you literally cant do damage outside of stormkeeper and lasso. Lava burst/lava surge procs feel like the CORE of the spec and desperately need help in pvp. It’s relatively easy for teams to disrupt this flow and completely shut down elemental, especially with some of the legendaries that have been introduced (warrior spell reflect, hunter feign death legos.)
Some kind of change to flame shock cooldown or some sort of dispel protection via a new/reworked honor talent would be undoubtedly widely accepted, especially with lava burst being so core now to our damage.
Defensive Capability. Currently our only reliable baseline defensive is Astral shift, that is still not usable during stuns. Our self heals are definitely better, but with damage being so high and our heals being casted, its going to be a big struggle vs a lot of different comps. Having another layer of defense through primal elementalist is AMAZING, but really feels bad to not have that row be opened up to the more fun options just because we NEED that defense. Adding the earth ele functionality of primal elementalist to not only ele but also enhance would help out both specs tremendously.
Many honor talents/regular talents are basically untouched, while some feel so completely mandatory that they should be borderline baseline. Echo of the elements, master of the elements, nature’s guardian, primal elementalist (because of earth ele wall/stun) all feel so core to ele and nearly impossible to spec out of. Talents such as static Discharge, aftershock, static charge, liquid magma totem, storm elemental, ancestral guidance, wind rush totem, unlimted power (especially this one since its in the last row) all will barely see any playtime and are in desperate need of some love in my opinion.
The same way some of the regular talents feel mandatory, some of the honor talents function the same. Grounding totem, skyfury, lightning lasso are all so core to elemental that I highly doubt many other ones will be picked very often at all. Elemental attunement, counterstrike totem, swelling waves all feel pretty outdated, and could use some redesigning to introduce some things that could cover up some of the weaknesses of ele (dispel protection, a reliable form of defense etc.)
Control of lava while being incredibly powerful now that lava burst does damage, creates way too many balancing issues with all the different modifiers and interactions with lava burst. Currently, you can basically one shot an entire team with it up, and just feels gimmicky more than anything. Would love to see this talent be redesigned to help out our ability to keep up flame shocks on multiple targets vs teams we normally would heavily struggle vs.
Mana issues. Ever since the changes to ascendance, we’ve had some heavy problems with mana. Most of our damage abilities now cost mana, with lava burst being a pretty chunky 600. When ascendance is used or procd via the legendary, it almost instantly ooms us and I’ve actually been stuck there not being able to use anything for a good solid 3 seconds because of this. This takes away from our ability to use our utilities like purge/grounding/wind shear/heals and feels like a complete oversight or mistake.
Currently when using the legendary “Helm of the Deep Elements,” theres a small chance that when using the covenant ability “primordial wave,” you can actually nearly one shot an entire team without even using control of lava honor talent. It seems like more of a problem with the helmet and its maximum possible overloads with comboing the covenant ability because every lava burst thats being shot out at each target with flame shock has a seperate instance to proc the ascendance.
Some of the new baseline abilities like Flametongue Weapon and Primal strike are literally useless. Feels a little odd to have these abilities given to us with no use.
Earth Shield and Lightning Shield cannot stack. Feels odd to have a talent not work in sync with our baseline tool to get maelstrom back from being hit by melee.
Overall thoughts :
Ele feels incredibly incredibly fun to play now. Lava burst doing our damage is PERFECT, and I hope this vision of it continues on throughout the expansion. After fixing up some of these situations where ele just gets completely shut down because of flame shock, I really feel like this will be one of the most fun iterations of elemental ever.
To piggyback off of what you said regarding flame shock dispelling gutting our damage w. 0 counterplay & control of lava being a balancing nightmare & ele being able to oom casting (damaging) spells, here are a few ideas I had to fix the issue.
Scrap control of lava talent as a whole & add in these options to replace the talent :
Electrocute - purges 2x spells at once & does x amount of damage over time (8-15s cd) this talent would give ele the option to purge occasionally w.o ooming & without feeling inclined to spam it and output 0 damage.
Ineffable truth flame shock - when flame shock is dispelled you get a short buff 4-5 seconds causing ur flame shock to recharge x% faster. (similar to http://puu.sh/GsFng/6d45f81f85.jpg from wotlk) I do believe that baseline 2x charges of flame shock is perhaps too powerful & this idea gives the enemy team the option to counterplay the talent idea by not dispelling flame shock & us eles the option to counterplay assuming they do dispel, it’s a double edged sword in a good way & I very much love the idea.
Spam purging feels so bad now, especially with lava burst and other spells doing actual damage. Getting the old double purge talent back but with some additional damage would be amazing.
Cooldown reduction when flame shock is dispelled is a great fix to the problem. Would be nice to have an actual competitive honor talent with the other 3 great ones as well.
Or maybe wait until they completely gut us on the next patch and we arent completely revolved around gimmicky dmg as per usual (see Lava shock) before worrying about how the spec feels.
ive been on the beta too as ele and lavaburst doing so much damage feels really good
honestly all of it feels good or atleast “ok” outside of the randomly implemented mana problems and flameshock duration reduced and the cd not removed or reduced
getting spam cleansed is even more frustrating now that lavaburst is meaningful
Don’t have beta but I have watched as many streams/videos as I can and have kept up to date with the changes.
Not sure why our damaging spells even cost mana on the beta, I feel like blizz just forgot to remove the mana costs when they changed back to maelstrom.
I hope they just put an internal cd on the ascendance legendary rather than gut it because it looks super fun to play with, but I don’t want it to be broken. Also lava burst doing damage means mastery won’t be a useless stat for us anymore.
Still think Echo of the Elements should be baseline and flametounge should give spell power like it has in the past.
I agree that with a couple tweaks Shadowlands ele has the potential to be the most fun iteration since mop.
There should be abilities that let you spend maelstrom to amplify different things. For example, you should have a way to spend maelstrom to reduce damage taken, remove movement impairing effects or increase speed.
Make a move like Sweet Ability Name - Based on the last school cast the shaman spends 40-100% of maelstrom gaining :
Sweet Buff Name for duration. Instant Cast. X Cooldown.
Fire - Increase haste by x% ratio based on maelstrom spent.
Frost - Restore friendly target’s mana by x ratio based on maelstrom spent.
Nature - Reduce damage taken by x% ratio based on maelstrom spent.
Elemental - idk I wanted an elemental buff because E blast was subpar but after the maelstrom generation change it seems really dank. Maybe cooldown reduction like other people are mentioning or interrupt/silence immunity since elemental school is the most risky to cast.
This rewards players for having knowledge about what school their casting, creates situations for more complex game play and rewards players in more ways than just damage for capping out their resource bar which goes along with the hybrid role.
I think control of lava / elemental attunement could easily be altered or changed to give dispel protection to flame shock or give us a more effective way to spread it. Liquid magma applying or spreading flame shock would be a fun mechanic.
I also really miss MoP clearcasting as well as weapon brand’s and unleashing.
Make echo of elements baseline. Make new level 15 talent that does x (insert w/e small passive dmg you want) and resets the cd on flame shock when it’s dispelled. Two problems with elemental fixed at the same time.
i also just noticed flame shock duration is reduced on beta from 24 to 18 on beta with a 6 second cooldown. which makes it even more punishing to have it dispelled. flame shock should at minimum be a hasted cooldown and maybe a passive that when you earth shock it splashes the flame shock to up to 2 additional enemies in 8 yards or something
It’s def similar, but again surge of power only lets you modify damage abilities. As a hybrid our resource we actually play to generate can ONLY be spent on damage. Idk seems like we should be able to use it for a defensive or utility as well. Also surge of power doesn’t really care about spell schools it just modify’s 4 damage abilities post earth shock. Only shaman and a couple other classes have 4 spell schools. I feel like that’s a niche that could be taken advantage of in game design more than it is currently.
There’s something with soulbinds [?] that allows Fire Elemental to extend the duration of Flameshock by 100%
Also you just described Surge of Power applying Flameshock.
This panda with extremely limited game experience/knowledge comes into every thread with serious ele discussion and attempts to tell everyone they’re wrong, usually in an extremely rude and hostile manner. Just ignore them.
I’m hoping the mana costs on spells are a bug. The other caster hybrids like shadow & balance don’t have mana costs on their damage abilities. It’s like they were tuning resto sham costs and accidentally added them to ele & enhance.
Flame shock desperately needs tweaking for both PvP and PvE. The duration is too short, which feels clunky and bad in most scenarios. And as others have said, with LvB doing so much of our damage now - getting your flameshock dispelled is a nightmare. We either need a way to reduce the cooldown, or gain a benefit from a dispel. This is the main issue (in my opinion) that holds ele back from feeling perfect.
Even though I highly doubt Blizzard would even consider doing this but how does having a target cap on flame shock say 3 or 4 targets max but remove the cd? This way in PvE there would be no way to abuse the flame shock/lava burst interaction and in PvP you can always keep your flame shock on target.
If you’re doing PVP BG’s its one of the better options on the row. I don’t understand what you’re trying to say, I’m not sure you understand what you’re saying
