Elemental Shaman 11.0.5 Feedback

In Development The War Within Patch 11.0.5 PTR
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Note, this feedback is entirely around design and not regarding things like overall strength (as that’s entirely done via tuning) or on the visuals of the new Ascendance.

The Good
Bug fix of Storm Frenzy is good. Little surprised it took so long, but good nonetheless.
Finally allowing icefury to proc from LB/CL is a similarly good step.
Lightning relevant capstones (capacitor, new Herald of the Storms talent) are fairly well designed and fun, though the lightning rod one is fairly passive.
Ascendance’s refresh and the new Erupting Lava give some good synergy to fire that has been badly lacking
Removal of Flash of Lightning CDR. Unfortunately, this talent became a balance nightmare as expected – when the main fire capstone ability (primordial wave) can be reduced by casting lightning, it throws everything out of whack.

The Bad
Unfortunately Elementals and Ascendance still exist simultaneously. It’s been said often over the past couple years, but flame ascendance really should be a choice node with lightning elemental (or simply have the choice between a flame/storm ascendance form). Two very powerful -and- descync’d cooldowns is just… not great. It will create balance problems, likely leading to a fire mage scenario where Ele only deals damage while Asc/Ele are up and hit for nothing outside of it.

The Ugly
Even with these past couple updates, I think they really don’t know what they want to do with Elemental as a whole. Obviously there’s a fairly contentious split between the Fire and Lightning side of elemental players, and the class designers seem like they are trying to split the difference between the two.

The core kit of shaman is obviously designed with Lava Burst in mind – why the central node in the tree still isn’t a choice node to either upgrade fire lava burst (perfect spot to return the critical damage scaling) or transform it into storm burst is beyond me. This lets both sides win, and there’s plenty of lightning orb blast animations to draw from; no new animation work required.

Ultimately, the upcoming work has some good stuff. However it does feel as if Elemental is struggling from the designers not wanting to do -enough- to it to really make the spec both work well and feel good.

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Also, isn’t that a nerf to Farseer Ancestors? Fewer Pwaves → fewer Ancestors. That could use a buff.

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I am agreement on it appears they do not know what they want for Ele Shammys.

Looking at the pvp nerfs it appears they were going after a one shot build with the removal of volcanic surge and the crit damage in ascendance mechanics changing.
To set that up the 1 shot, one had a very long list of casts to do it so it wasn’t that much of an issue to stop it. I dealt with it fine on my toons when facing that build.

So with lava burst not being the focus and being far weaker. What do they want for them in pvp? Just mix bag of frost shocks and maybe an occasional lighting bolt or storm keeper cast?

To be honest, I am not digging the temporary pets for seer. I mean surely there can be more creativeness than making another bloated pet class right? I suspect this will get reworked again.

On a side note I do like what they did for enhancement.

The stormbringer is all lightning that really doesn’t do much else. Both those trees need to be redone imo.

Guess we will see if anything can be done with the removed talents and moved talents.
i wished I could see where the new talent changes are atm.

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The overall changes lead to some interesting things imo but looking over the entirety of the class the problems it has will likely lead to what you said being a fire mage cd line up. Probably to the point every time you need to do damage you hit ascendance and ele 1 and 2, especially with the change of deeply rooted elements basically making it mini combust procs. Now of course they can avoid this doom scenario if they put power into the great sundering talent and give lightning more power to the left side of the tree instead of having both sides go down the right and middle.

I think most of all the potential upside is truly in how the talent tree is going to be layed out and if they reattune the mastery for overloads to be a thing. Personally I love overloads being a thing from the visual effects alone so a great sundering and mastery/haste lightning build would be the most fun they could design for me. However great sundering is still a dead talent and needs the mastery to yet again be fixed.

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With the loss of Skybreaker’s Fiery Demise, elemental shaman loses so much damage in PvP. On top of that, the hard PvP nerfs to ascendence (no longer procs from LvB, 50% reduced damage to first lava bursts when used) pretty much kills ele’s viability in PvP.

On retail, we are a solid A tier spec in PvP, with damage behind shadow priest, frost/arcane mage, and dev evoker, but with utility to make up for it. With the nerfs coming in the 20th anniversary update, elemental will very likely fall to dead last in pvp damage (no exaggeration).

In my opinion Skybreaker’s needs to stay in ele’s pvp kit somehow, either putting it back in the talent tree or making it a pvp talent.

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If I’m honest, they could delete Lava Burst/Prim Wave and I would be exponentially happier. Have never liked or enjoyed pressing either button.

In fact, just replace Lava Burst with Tempest and decouple it from Lightning Bolt.

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this could work , with some balancing , please blizz let us stormbringer shamans have fun too

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I was liking the changes until I got to the big phat nerfs section of the post.

  • Flash of Lightning no longer reduces the cooldown of Nature spells when Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning are cast.

  • Fire Elemental and Storm Elemental now last 20 seconds (was 30 seconds).

  • Lesser Elementals from Echo of the Elementals now last 10 seconds (was 15 seconds).
    The following talents have been removed:

    Unrelenting Calamity
    Skybreaker’s Fiery Demise

Maelstrom generation is still terrible and it’s going to be even worse now with slower cast times and even further reduced values from icefury/frost shock. Elemental duration reduced by 33% and the cooldown reduction talents for the elementals are all being removed.

There doesn’t seem to be any damage increase for compensation so the big question I have is why is elemental shaman always forced to mediocrity?

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So they’re gutting a core unique spec functionality (CDR) for the benefit of increased rotational complexity and a central focus on the major CD that most of the spec player already hate (Ascendance). And to cap it off we’re forced to look like on of those goofy Troll doll toys from the 90s because you’ve made it nearly impossible to not take Ascendance.

You should have removed Ascendance entirely and leaned into the CDR aspect, not the other way around. You needed to find a way to get Lava Burst and other spells to work within the CDR nature of the spec, not completely remove the CDR and lean into Ascendance. The CDR is what made the spec fun and different.

Now the spec is going back to being a bargain basement version of mage with dogwater defensives and garbage mobility.

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Blizz remake ascendance model ofc they will force shamans to take It, down our throath if needed

Elementals are dead , maybe putting some CDR for elemental on herald of storms?

for Stormbringer : changing lvb into tempest and start working from there.

there is so many options instead of forcing every shaman into ascendance.

DRE sucks now , elementals have been hard nerfed, the rotation has slow down a lot , otside ASC it feels weaker

defensives have long Cds now 3min shield, 2 min Astral and thats it…no longer CDR for those. Spirit walker is now 2 min too (u better pair it with ASC tbh , a mechanic can kill your ASC cd) with no way to reduce its cd …

PW now is 30s (no more CDR) u gotta refresh your flame shock manually, speaking of wich;

the new talent erupting lava just show that blizz jus throw things to see what sticks , flame shock has a CD , only way to spread FS it is using a 30s cd…others “aoe spread” are 20s or gasp none at all.

for ST u now need to cast lvb , full lightning is dead. Hope u like those 2s casts (less with haste…oh nvm u going full mastery now because ASC )

p.d i know things will change btw now and live. Just hope that shamans have “OPTIONS” , because thats what talents are for , and thats why we got hero specs , to have different gameplays , instead is looking that no matter spec / hero talents u are gonna play “the same”

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Please include a Glyph for the old Ascendance form

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I still really think blizz should revert the CDR removal changes. We do not need yet another caster that is focused around cooldown windows and is useless outside of them, especially because ele would be doomed to become a weaker mage. Not only does the CDR build reward Flame Shock uptime, but it also lets ele maintain persistent dps in dungeons without being entirely dependent on Ascendance windows. Again, no one wants to just be a discount mage.

As stormbringer, the other changes are a net positive for the rotation. Icefury into Frost Shocks should be tuned as a proc that we want to press during AoE. It should do good damage and it should especially generate more maelstrom than if we were to ignore the proc and press chain lightning instead. Let Lava Burst be the short CD ability we want to hit in single target scenarios. Increase the recharge and increase the damage accordingly. Alternatively, redesign it entirely and let it be a proc based on flame shock ticks if we really want to go nuts.

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CDR is bad but only for shamans

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If the terrible CDR removal change is going to go through, can we at least do shaman a favor and take out the ele as a CD and bake it into ascendance through talents? Elemental shaman must be one of the biggest offenders of needing way too many GCDs before we can actually start pressing our damage buttons. If all our power is going to be baked into ascendance then we will always line up the elemental CD with it and we might as well just bake that all into one button.

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There is absolutely no issue with having both ele and ascendance at the same time.

If anything what they should do is merge elementals, no more lightning vs fire bs for no reason. You can still specialize a bit, but there is no reason to have elementals separate.

It was mixed, i did not like the further ms gen nerfs, seriously, screw that.

I don’t like the choice node between more sk and the elemental when we could get both before

I don’t like fol change when they could have just changed some interactions.

I don’t like the removal of skybreaker.

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Yeah for aoe is crazy
elemental,sk, totem, pw, ascen

ST remove totem but still…

So many globals before we start the dmg rotation