Elemental Shaman class fantasy has lost its way and how to fix it with a rework

Classes Shaman
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I’ve been a long-time shaman player, but ever since I returned in Legion I have been struggling with the class’s kit and theme. They are like an onion where they have built upon the vanilla class design, layer upon layer of iteration that has lost the core concept and leaves questions as to why the class is the way it is. Only one of the specs has seen a seriously rework and it shows. Enhancement Shaman feels great while Elemental and Resto are still the old dogs. I suspect they are getting a rework with The War Within, but nevertheless, here is my dream for the class.

First let me address class fantasy issues of Elemental, I’ll post about Restoration shaman later. Right now, you build with weak lightning or lava spells and spend on earth spells (or as of DF, elemental blast). This is, imho, backwards. Earth spells should build up stacks of Overload for the next lightning or lava spell. In AoE, you can just spam Earthquake or earth shock (although it should be like earth spikes that either launch through the air or rise below the target, instead of a shock, let earth shock go away, it is old enough to retire now). Mastery can scale the intensity of each overload rather than the chance, let the number of overloads be directly tied up to a maximum that is twice the amount you can spend at once, to allow you some wiggle room in your rotation for movement and procs, much like Enhancement has with maelstrom weapon.

It would look a bit like this:

Earth Spike
Instant Cast

Deal x Physical damage.

Generates 1-2 Overload charges.

Earthquake
Instant Cast

Causes the earth within 8 yards of the target to tremble and break, dealing X Physical damage over 3 seconds and has a 5% chance to knock the enemy down. Multiple uses of Earthquake may overlap.

Generates 1 Overload charge per target hit, up to a maximum of 6.

Earth Spike, Earth Spike, Earth Spike, Lava Burst + 3-6 overloads. Simple enough. You can have talents centered around building overload charges along the center of the tree.

Next is the abomination that is Lava Burst, I love it thematically but ever since its inception it has been problematic. A spell that auto crits is nullifies the usefulness of an entire stat. Imo kill off Flame Shock, Ascendance and Primordial wave. Turn Lava Burst into:

Lava Burst
1-6 Overload Charges
1.5 sec Cast

Hurls molten lava at the target, dealing X Volcanic damage over 6 seconds. If lava burst is reapplied, remaining damage is added to the new lava burst.

Replace Flame Shock with the following:

Elemental Eruption
10 sec cooldown
1.5 sec Cast

Causes the target afflicted by Lava Burst to erupt, instantly dealing 50% of the damage over time effect and causing 4 lava elementals to burst forth to attack the target for 6 seconds.

When the elementals expire, they erupt to apply 1 stack of Lava Burst to all nearby targets.

Liquid Magma Totem
1 min cooldown
Instant Cast

Summon a totem at the target location that erupts dealing X Volcanic damage to all enemies within 8 yards every 1 second for 15 seconds, causing all Lava Bursts in the area to continuously trigger an Elemental Eruption.

Can only trigger on up to 8 targets per 1 second.

For Lightning Themed spells, I imagine the following:

Lightning Bolt
1-6 Overload Charges
2 sec cast

Hurls a bolt of lightning at the target, dealing X Nature damage per Overload charge. Each bolt causes the to gain a stack of static charge.

Chain Lightning
1-6 Overload Charges
2 sec cast

Hurls a bolt of lightning at the target, dealing X Nature damage per Overload charge and then jumping to additional nearby enemies. Affects a total of 6 targets. Each target struck gains a stack of static charge.

Static Charge
Passive

When a target accumulates 10 static charges, a Lightning Strike at the target’s location from the sky, dealing X damage split between up to 6 targets. Applying a new static charge to any targets struck.

Stormkeeper
Instant cast
30 sec cooldown

Cause all static charges to connect to each other, dealing X damage instantly and causing X% of the next Lightning Strike to be repeated on each linked target. If there is only one target with static charge, damage is increased.

Lightning Storm Totem
Instant Cast
1-2 min cooldown

Summons a totem at the target location that Lightning randomly strike a random nearby target every 0.5 sec for X sec within 15 yards. Each tim5e a static charge is generated from any source, this totem apply 1-3 additional charges.

Let water/frost spells be strictly for healing, not for rotational dps. While the above rotations are simple, I think they will be rewarding to play with. I personally don’t think complexity makes a class good.

6 Likes
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RK, some great concepts here. I feel the same about elemental. There doesn’t seem to be enough attention to the design of the spec with a goal of making it feel holistic.

I would also like to add from the standpoint of someone who used to play elemental for several expansions, it’s like they forgot how to make it just fun to play. Big fan of overarching themes- a lightning elemental shaman, a fire elemental shaman, or an earth elemental shaman.

Used to, back in pandaria, there were two things I loved about the spec. 1) chain lightning aoe primary and 2) move and cast lightning bolt. When they introduced earthquake here was my reaction- so you’re making my most flashy, class unique aoe into something that hits like a wet noodle and replacing it with a tiny ground effect that so many tanks move mobs out of? Move and cast lightning bolt speaks for itself, it was SOOOO much fun.

One last point to bring up in the hopes that there is a developer somewhere reading this that can internalize feedback into the war within version- taking an instant hard hitting earth shock and “upgrading” it by making it have a cast time (elemental blast)? I don’t care what added benefit it gained, cast times are just not as fun as the instant which are too far and few in between. To upgrade a spell, start with what made it fun in the first place (instant) then add the effects to it.

8 Likes
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That instant cast lightning bolt from MoP was actually why I wanted all the Overload builders to be instant cast, then you stop and plant your feet to cast a big overloaded spell. It was so much fun back then and I miss having a bit of mobility that wasn’t tied to awkward cooldown windows. Right now they seem to be trying to go with the “masters of the ‘chaotic’ elements” in their general theme, instead of letting us specialize into something and it really isn’t all that fun unfortunately.

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I’m pretty excited to see what they’ll do with the stormbringer hero talents. I don’t know what the resto/ele hero talents will be, but I’m hopeful for all of them.

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The sad thing is that so much of the Elemental kit could work really well with small changes, but Blizz just leaves it kinda crappy.

Simple changes that would not be difficult but would make the spec insanely better.

  1. Lava Burst damage increased by your critical strike chance.
  2. Chain Lightning has no target cap for Elemental, but cannot hit the same target more than once. Max 5 targets for MP generation.
  3. Earthquake no longer knocks targets down, and emits from your target.
  4. While applied to you, Earth Shield reduces damage taken by 8%.
  5. Windfury totem changed to Shaman general raid buff. Windfury, grants party/raid 3% haste.

TADA, Elemental Shaman suddenly a good spec that is worth taking in all forms of content.

11 Likes
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In my dream world, Ele would be primarily a lightning caster specializing in burst and procs and big crits. That’s what the class was when I first played it in BC.

Lava Burst when it was introduced was this massive nuke spell, and every expansion after that it was watered down to where it is now. I wish it would go back to being a nuke, something like chaos bolt.

Earthquake is an iconic ability, but I wish it was a cooldown instead of a spender. 1 min cooldown that does massive damage and still knocks down, and talents could potentially lower its cooldown or alter it in other ways.

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I just want more lightning. If I wanted fire damage there’s 2 other classes I could play and spamming Lava Burst is the least enjoyable of the 3 fire based casters.

Just give me more lightning. The spec icon is even a lightning bolt.

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this is a thing already in DRE windows, and having it be permanent would mean tuning down the dmg of base Lava Burst to compensate, as well as outrageous amounts of crit stacking, which tbh im fine with, as haste/crit feels better to me than haste/mastery

YES PLZ, and buff up the dmg so it doesnt feel ridiculous to press without stormkeeper, and while they’re at it make it so Lava Beam always crits and scales with crit chance as well

TBH, while I’m def in the minority here, I kind of like having to place Earthquake down on the ground, it adds a slight element of planning, and though its really frustrating when its wasted I think it should be made to scale with haste again to increase its tick count and actually hit like the finisher its meant to be. Also visual fx update on it plz, let me actually fracture the ground like a real earthquake, instead of slapping a moving sticker on there.

This would be awesome for all 3 specs of shaman, given how unfairly squishy we are compared to others.

Eh tbh I dont like this idea, partially because I’m primarily an Enh shaman and I like having something special, and partially because yet another necessary raid buff I’d need to target while forming raids on alts sounds annoying.
Just give Ele Skyfury Totem that increases the party’s spell-crit dmg by like 3% or whatever x% is appropriate and make the PVP talent a buff to it. Just replace one of the severalstatic dmg% buffs in the ele tree that are almost always taken anyway.

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Maybe in the next expansion :pensive:

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Though I didn’t follow all your example improvements. I agree with you over all, and would push to say, ALOT of classes have lost their way as far as an Identity. I think cataclysm was one of my favorite iterations of Ele Sham. Could run while casting lightning bolt. Lightning bolt actually hit for damage. And you looked forward to the slam dmg lava burst, and it’s resets. There are some talents that let you try and move towards lightning bolts again, but it’s not as smooth as lava burst focused builds. My lament right now is it seems you can completely ignore lightning bolt in some builds and just spam lava burst and earthshock. I wouldn’t have a huge problem with this is they gave me a version where Thunder spells were more my focus. An over simplification of it would see lightning on one branch of the tree, lava on the other, and Elemental blast or something chaotic like you mentioned in between. You could even make my day undoing the nerfs to the SL storm ele build where you were just a chain-lightning canon. Man those were some fun moments.

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So Lava Burst may need tuning down in PvP if they made this change, but given that Lava Burst effectively scales by mastery in much the same way it would scale by crit if this change was made, I don’t think you would have to do anything in PvE with this change. Ele is already on the low side for single target damage, so if you really wanted to get alot out of this change you’d be shifting mastery->crit, which would just be a shift in how you’re dealing damage.

That would be fine. Ele with CL that hits everything would just feel very thematic, and stacking crit with the above change, the damage it deals would feel good finally for aoeing.

Ground based aoe would be fine if they increased the radius of earthquake to be as large as Rain of Fire, however EQ is quite small and has to be cast many times. Either it needs to travel with the target or have a much larger radius.

Agreed

[quote=“Pastafied-thrall, post:8, topic:1786044”]Eh tbh I dont like this idea, partially because I’m primarily an Enh shaman and I like having something special, and partially because yet another necessary raid buff I’d need to target while forming raids on alts sounds annoying.
Just give Ele Skyfury Totem that increases the party’s spell-crit dmg by like 3% or whatever x% is appropriate and make the PVP talent a buff to it. Just replace one of the severalstatic dmg% buffs in the ele tree that are almost always taken anyway.
[/quote]

So your idea is to give ele an EXTRA buff so that now you have to find a place to fit 2 shaman into a raid instead of being able to give 1 buff by having a shaman in the raid of whatever spec. Changing WF into a generic raid buff evens out the contribution for shamans, makes them work with any other class and comp, and removes the need to fit the “right” melee into a group for WF totem.

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I honestly don’t mind ele, it’s just that enhance is extremely good and i like melees more 60% of the time.

I don’t really like ele blast being a cast time, i would rather make it instant and reduce the damage of it a little to compensate.

As for what you said here there are some pretty good ideas.

Also, remove windfury totem and make it a standard raid buff as someone pointed out.

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I don’t like multi-targeting flame shock to be effective. How about making the lightning build viable dps?

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Ah yes I also preferred the S2 playstile.

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Even the Icefury spell? That’s what killed S2 for me.

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I’ll be really happy the day they remove icefury from the game

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I think they should get an ability similar to paladin’s divine steed but instead its a wolf. Just like the WC3 farseer shamans. And then, make the idea of mounted perks more defined, for both paladin and shaman. It would help differentiate them and fulfill some class fantasy and identity.

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We already have literally the same ability but without cd and duration.