Over the past few years its been interesting to watch classic wow evolve alongside retail wow. We can watch the beginning concepts of how a class was designed and see how it changed to what is current. With the beta release of Cataclysm it really hits hard just how much class design has evolved for better and worse in Elemental. We’re seeing how the meatball evolved from a modest 4-5 talents to well over half the tree supporting it’s gameplay. I’m not sure about everyone else but I initially got into Elemental because of the lightning or combination of elements, something we don’t see other classes get. If I wanted to play Lava Burst, I’d just go make a Fire mage.
We had two raid utility buffs now stripped to none, and a plethora of passive defensives such as DR while casting, DR while using our offensive, and DR against magic in addition to active defensives. Now we have just bulwark and Earth elemental which can be accidentally overwritten by Fire/Storm Elemental and vice versa. Ancestral Guidance was nerfed into oblivion and Nature’s Guardian doesn’t do anything to prevent a possible 1 shot if you’re at 36% or higher health.
Offensive abilities are extremely in favor of the Lava Burst playstyle as well, having our biggest cooldown as Ascendance with two choices exclusively centered around Lava Burst and Storm Keeper, while being lightning focused, still having relevancy for Lava Burst builds. Take it a step further, and 4 of the 5 choices for capstones have positive effects on the Lava Burst builds while only 2 have positive effects on lightning builds. Take it an even further step, and 60% of the talent tree is dedicated towards Lava Burst builds, and you can currently make one with only 2-3 spare points that don’t give you a real benefit. While the remaining 40% is ‘Lightning Bolt’ but really its about mixing the elements (which is cool) but its not a good split, its not a fun split, and its only fun if you like Lava Burst.
Give me back casting Lightning Bolt while moving. Give me back raid utility. Give me back real passive defensives. Fix active defensives. Stop treating Reincarnation as a defensive.
Conclusion
I want to play modern WoW…
I’m all for reworking other classes as well, but I can’t believe some of the classes chosen to be reworked prior to shaman as a whole. All 3 specs need a major rework, barring maybe Enhancement but it needs it as well if only so all 3 specs are brought to raid for the same reason. Not for 1 having Windfury Totem and the other two having special totems.
There is so much talent at Blizzard, at this point it just feels like theres no passion for Elemental shaman, and its all directed to Enhancement.
I can’t wait for hero talents to explain to me why Stormbringer has Lava Burst centric talents or isn’t even for Elemental Shaman.
Unfortunately shaman has always been one of the last classes the devs seriously look at throughtout the expansions.
I agree that it needs a serious rework. Hopefully we get it. The sad part is it’s not even half the tree alone supporting the meatball build, it’s the tier set too. Even with all of that elemental falls short of the majority of classes.
To me as it stands right now, Flameshock and our aoe damage are the biggest issues in my mind. Flameshock needs a method to spread faster or cast on multiple targets at once outside of Magma Totem. Maybe put in a talent to have Earthquake spread it. Our aoe damage is subpar too, we don’t have aoe spells for damage, we spread flameshock and rely on Lavasurge procs. Earthquake has been useless for multiple expansions now, Chain Lightning is just a maelstrom builder and outside of Stormkeeper tickles compared to many other class aoe abilities. As someone who plays both Resto and Ele alot, it’s really deflating to see my Lavaburst and Lightning Bolt hit for a good deal more damage as resto then as ele.
I think the problem is that our class started as a utility class way back in the day through totems and only lust. As the game evolved and everything was given to other classes, they just made shaman good enough to match the average of other classes and not much thought was put into the synergy and design of the talent trees. I don’t play Enhance much, but Resto and Elemental really feel mediocre at times.
already a thing in DRE windows, would put even more power into Lava Burst, which would be counter to people’s complaints of it being the vast majority of their dmg, put more dmg into spenders
I agree that Flame Shock needs an easier spread mechanic for Elemental, though I think Earthquake would be better to do so for more power in a spender and actually making a spender desirable
No I’d rather they increased the target cap, but having it hit every single target is nutty, I think 8 targets is a good cap to raise it too, as situations where you are pulling more than 8 targets are few and again making it hit every target would put more emphasis on CL in AOE than EQ, a spender
Yeah, that. Or make it bigger with a shorter duration/scaling with haste.
8% is a fairly large dmg DR but it might be deserved given how ridiculously squishy all 3 shaman specs are. Id argue that this should just be baked into the class as a whole however instead of necessitating Earth Shield for Ele and Enh.
I’m fine with that as long as it continues to provide the same or greater benefit to Enhance shaman in addition to the raid buff, just change its node in Enhancement tree to an “Improved Version” or something.
Spenders scale very well with crit, so anything to make Crit the most viable stat for Ele is needed. Lava Burst is the holdout, so fix it.
I don’t care how they fix Chain Lightning and EQ for AOE, however having it hit so few targets but ALSO hit so weakly is not viable. I’m actually ok with Ele’s power being in its builders (it makes it kinda unique and interesting), but they need to make the builders feel really good and valuable in all situations.
8% is a decent amount without being crazy strong, and forcing ES uptime to get it balances it out and makes it feel shaman-esqe and gives it an opportunity cost.
No, WF totem as a special buff that 1 spec brings needs to go away. Any shaman should be able to provide a Windfury buff without having special consideration for a specific raid buff to build around. It is horrible design and a relic of the game that should have been done away with a long time ago. Enh Shaman should be good in their own right and not brought because they make other melee stronger like that.
Idk enough about ur first point to argue one way or another so I guess if it works it works
I kinda disagree with ur second point only because to me it just feels unintuitive to sit atop my mountain of maelstrom and only spend it if I can’t press Lava Burst anymore
My concern here is that Earth Shield is hard to talent into for Ele without sacrificing something important, which won’t change unless they rework the tree a bit or make it so Totemic Recall isn’t such a huge gain for Magma Totem in AOE
I think I was misunderstood a bit on this point, I wasn’t saying that WF should provide both its current buff to the party as well as the raid buff proposed, I was saying everyone should get the 3% haste from the proposed raid buff, and ONLY the Enh shaman should get the current effect
Hell, I know this post is primarily about Ele, but I would LOVE for Shadowlands style Doomwinds to return with it on a minute CD debuff again and lasting 12 seconds with the slight tweak of the duration not counting down until you hit Stormstrike/Crash Lightning for the first time after dropping the totem. Then they can finally get rid of that godawful redesign of DW with it doing zero dmg and lasting 8 sec.
100% to get rid of the cast reticle for earthquake (even with @mouseover the FPS of your system makes this a painful, or you loose the cursor in the visuals).
As far a knockdown effect another 100% agree. However, why not have it (and earth shock) provide a slow to movement and casting speed. Spreading flame shock would be great too, but slow seems to fit more with what the spell is - Earthquake.
They could just get rid of frost shock and ice fury too or keep them with resto tree and sperate the elements between specs some (water = resto, ele= lightning, fire=enhance)
just quick random thoughts, but I wish they would do something.
This is a function of the current tier set. I’m talking about the base spec kit and talents.
If you played last season, we only used lava burst to buff Ele Blast, which scaled HARD off crit. Lava Burst would be great if it scaled with crit, because then we would happily stack crit for days and enjoy big Ele Blasts and be able to interact with all our spells and the whole tree.
The current tier is what it is, and is fully designed that way because lava burst scales in such a different way than the rest of the kit that it becomes our whole spell kit.
Sounds considerably more involved, I’m new to Ele only having started playing it seriously this season, I tried to pick it up a few times last season but I didn’t really like the Icefury+Electrified Shocks mech, it confused me.
I actually hard agree with the premise but I think we need to look back at all the changes that lead to this point and point to key times that have lead to the current iteration. Lava Burst for me used to be a fun spell as it hit REALLY hard in Wrath but it had the 8 second CD. If we have to be a builder/spender (not convinced this is a good thing) then each spell cast should matter more than just spamming spells out.
Lava Burst is too played into but half the fire side has flame shock talents that are far too weak and somehow we dont have fire nova or searing totem/magma totem.
Lava Burst should be buffed in damage but Lava Surge procs/Windspeakers should be scaled down in consistency to make the proc feel good.
Get rid of vers so we can natrually have more crit, haste, mastery which we can use to play into things like Ascendance over DRE and tie those stats into earth quake/chain lightning.
Easy win for raid buff is wrath of air totem and the pvp talent totem of wrath. These are excellent totems that dont exist or are locked out of the PVE play area. (bring back totem bar and 5 minute totems as well)
Icefury just needs to go, even when lightning build was good its just not a fun spell IMO
For Damage Reduction we had a talent in a prior expansion called Shamanistic rage iirc it was a 45 second CD that provided like a 10 or 20% DR, just bring that back.
Either get rid of DRE or buff Ascendance, no shot that a on use 3 minute CD should be worse than a randomly proccing transformation with a free lava burst. Also Ascendance actually makes lava burst scale with crit (a little bit) but its not powerful enough.
(sorry guys im super opinionated on ele I apologize for the many comments)
Primordial wave needs to be replaced with a lightning/earth ability or move icefury here and make it more interesting and fun and put something new in icefury’s place, if its staying that is}
I main enhance so I can’t comment on everything you have here, but two things I absolutely can and do agree with are:
-All shaman need better defensives. Adding a passive DR to earthshield is an idea I really like. Bringing back shamanistic rage would also be great. It pretty well sucks to know that a mechanic another class can ignore will one shot me.
-Moving windfury totem to the class tree and making it a raid wide haste buff would also be welcome. In its current form windfury is quite annoying to use- its the only buff (that I’m aware of) that only buffs your party and is pretty weak for most melee. Its not even in the same ballpark as 5% AP/int or 3% vers.
As a player that has been mainly playing Shaman for nearly 17 years now, I must say I agree (and this hurts me to admit). EDIT: Lots of great feedback and information in the farseer thread, so I won’t add anything here.
This isn’t accurate, I just remember what Elemental had and the reasons for it. Wrath/Cata ele had more totems than anything after that barring a combination of PVP talents and totems area likely to be where the raid buff would come from considering that’s where Enhancement’s buff comes from as well. This is the only thing I mentioned that came from Wrath.
This feels far too much pulled from wrath era. It needs to be looked at from a design/conceptual standpoint however most of those are bad gameplay with current design.
For example I’m in love with the elements concept but I hate the totem concepts, which its always felt elemental is straying from each expansion anyways. Icefury feels bad because there’s nothing to expand it, as it stands current design of Icefury is purely as “other elements exist” tokenism.
What we need in my own opinion is to change Ascendance to be only an active talent, choice between current LB and a choice for lightning ascendance that overloads additional lightning bolts/chain lightnings. With an additional talent underneath saying “while in ascendance your raid gets x% stat”. This would give a 3 min cd, make it a 25 sec duration then give this to all the shamans but make enhancement benefit the Elementalist build as well.
I’m ok with splitting LB and Lightning as long as one isn’t distinctly overpowering the other. I have an image of what I’d do but can’t post an image here for some reason.
Don’t be fool. Lava burst “crit” is just its normal damage. Its just a mechanic to punish you if you don’t have flame shock on. if it was like any other crit ability it would do good damage and when it crit it would hit hard but its a wet noodle.