Hi everyone,
I wanted to add a feedback thread, since there is no official one for the Elemental Shaman changes. This post is mostly compiled from the impressions, ideas and criticisms that have so far come up during testing by members of the Earthshrine Class Discord. I obviously do not speak for that community as a whole but I do believe that this post is a fairly accurate if non-exhaustive list of the current thoughts about the changes on PTR.
Credit goes to the people who have already spent a lot of time testing the changes and discussing them with others.
One of the biggest achievements of these changes is that they make away with the idea of there being a fire and/or a lightning build. The changes truly bring us back to being Elemental Shaman, rather than being Fire or Lightning Shamans. The changes to the way Icefury and Routine Communication procc as well as the complete redesign to Ascendance are well thought out changes that have been received overwhelmingly positive and do feel like the community feedback has been heard and plays a role in the design decisions that are being made. That being said, there are some concerns in the wake of the changes that I have outlined below.
Cooldown Reduction
The new iteration on talents saw the removal of all Cooldown Reduction talents outside of Hero Talents. Namely Skybreaker’s Fiery Demise being removed and Flash of Lightning losing its CDR on Nature spells.
Doing something about Flash of Lightning was an important and welcome change. The talent warped entire builds around itself and we will likely be stuck spamming Lightning Bolt in the weeks until 10.0.5 because of its power. And while the rotational impact the talent had was clearly unhealthy, outright removing the CDR from everything does leave a bit of a question mark, especially since the talent worked with a whitelist of spells it applied to. So there would have been the potential to target problematic interactions with precision. Outside of the rotational abilities, Flash of Lightning affected many of our defensive and utility spells. Taking a hard look at something like the cooldown of spells like Stone Bulwark Totem, which has a comparatively high cooldown of 3 minutes and adjusting where reasonable would go a long way. The same goes for Astral Shift, which would be easy to bring in line by adding a second charge to the ability. Otherwise the survivability of the specc is likely to see significant drops once 11.0.5 hits.
Skybreaker’s Fiery Demise being removed AND Elemental talents being nerfed does feel a bit like overkill. While the current uptime on Storm Elemental is clearly to high for the power it offers, the uptime on Storm Ele in particular is compounded by Flash of Lightning also reducing the cooldown of Storm but not Fire Elemental. The removal of SFD is also linked to other changes, namely the reduction of duration of our Elementals. Hitting every associated talent to our Elementals by removing SFD and nerfing both Everlasting Elements and Echo of the Elementals has single handedly relegated our Elementals to complete insignificance, which in turn means that our capstone Primal Elementalist is never going to get picked in any situation. That is simply due to the fact that changes like these usually would be expected to be accompanied by proportionate buffs to the power of the relevant abilities. The buff to Storm Elemental however is not significant enough by a mile to compensate the uptime nerfs. Fire Elementals not receiving any compensation buffs so far is also a point that will hopefully be addressed.
As a tangent, this line in the patch notes:
Does read like there are either more changes to Elementals planned or these changes are more impactful than the design team anticipated, because there is currently no way to reduce the cooldown of our Elementals to a level where this would be relevant.
Flameshock
Our Damage over Time spell currently has a severe identity crisis. The changes during beta and the ones on the PTR have compounded into a scenario where Flameshock only plays a marginal role and is more of a nuisance than anything else. Since the Beta changes, maintaining multiple Flameshocks no longer offers access to additional Lavasurge proccs, which has single handedly killed any funnel potential the specc had. Removing Skybreaker’s has taken away Elemental CDR and a source of additional damage for Flameshock. Currently, the uses of Flameshock are to guarantee Lavaburst crits, generate Lavasurge proccs (for which maintaining one application of the effect is enough due to the massive diminishing returns with multiple instances of the DoT) and to generate additional haste with Splintered Elements. For the last point it is sufficient to apply as many Flameshocks as possible every 30 seconds and and then not care about them.
This means there is currently no incentive to maintain more than one Flameshock in scenarios where we would previously have been able to generate additional resources and damage through skilled play. Searing Flames exists but is simply too weak to be a consideration.
Which brings me to the next issue connected to the spell: In scenarios where it was optimal to maintain as many Flameshocks as possible, Elemental Shaman has historically felt very clunky. The reduced cooldown on Liquid Magma Totem has alleviated this somewhat. Still, if we look to the other side of the river where Enhance Shamans have historically had tools to not only maintain but also spread Flameshocks with relative ease and little GCD investment, the tools in Elemental’s arsenal feel lackluster. Liquid Magma Totem needs to be used without any Flamshocks present in the targeted group to guarantee it actually applying 3 new Flameshocks, and Surge of Power has extremely limited range, is tied to casting a spender and comes with attached opportunity cost. That is only talking about applications, Ele Shaman currently has no way of refreshing active Flameshocks or to spread the DoT in any way. This feels outdated, especially when you keep in mind that another Shaman specc is reveiving another ability at the same time to not only have access to easier Flameshock management but also offers deeper gameplay interactions to the spell.
These issues also feed into the new talent Erupting Lava: I want to make it clear that playing with this talent is a frustrating experience. The additional duration of Flameshock does not even come close to offsetting the runtime that is consumed by Lavaburst. In reality this talent leads to having to refresh Flameshock with significantly higher frequency, the fact that overload also consume duration feels like adding insult to injury. The community has long asked for an interaction between Lavaburst and Flamshock beyond the guaranteed crits. And while it’s great to see that this wish is being picked up on, we generally were more thinking of something like Lavaburst spread Flameshock or some other interaction that enhances gameplay. As it stands, the talent is reasonably powerful, but impedes the gameplay flow significantly. It is also not clear if the talent is actually strong enough to justify the opportunity cost in the form of GCDs that we need to use on refreshing Flameshock. That issue is exacerbated by Ascendance of all things, because the additional overloads basically immediately consume most of the duration of the Flamshock it casts.
Ideas to solve this have ranged from having the primary Lavaburst work the way it currently does with Erupting Lava, while having overloads actually add duration to Flameshock to adding something like the burn effect from our Dragonflight Season 3 tier set.
What it boils down to is this: More interactions between Lavaburst and Flameshock are great as an idea, but this specific implementation feels like a miss.
Ascendance and Deeply Rooted Elements
The changes to Ascendance are unquestionably the highlight of the patch notes. The ability does feel very powerful and impacts gameplay in an engaging manner. It is an elegant solution that really works to bring the specc together, it is hard to overstate how good Ascendance now feels.
Overloads are a well-chosen vehicle for this cooldown and new talents like Earthshatter in combination with Mountains Will Fall offer even more synergy.
Issues arise mostly around Deeply Rooted Elements: Changing the way it proccs was definitely the right move, however because spending Maelstrom is a fairly rare event compared to the frequency we pressed Lavaburst during Dragonflight, especially in the last two seasons, the amount of proccs we get from pull to pull swing widely. It also means that DRE is significantly better in AoE scenarios where we generally generate more Maelstrom that we can spend.
While linking DRE to spending Maelstrom is generally solid way to make it work, making it more deterministic by linking it to Maelstrom spent like Tempest works, would go a long way in making the specc feel less random, especially since Ascendance is such a powerful cooldown now.
Having DRE occur in a fashion that can be planned around is also relevant because pooling resources and cooldowns for Ascendance windows seem very powerful at the moment getting surprised by a DRE procc with no way to play around it and instead having to spam Lightning Bolt in a window that is supposed to make you feel powerful for its duration does nothing for engaging gameplay.
Lastly, I want to address the choice node of Preeminence against First Ascendant. Currently, there is absolutely no use case for First Ascendant. 20% haste and additional duration easily trump one minute of cooldown being shaved off, at least ion raid scenarios. An idea thathas frequently been proposed is to remove DRE and replace it with First Ascendant while keep Preeminence in its current place. This would require a significant point investment for a significant power gain, which feels like a good trade off.
Icefury and Frostshock
Icefury only generating one charge of empowered Frostshocks is a confusing change. We did in the past let some of these charges fall off, but that was simply due to them not being powerful enough and not due to the feeling of “drowning” in Frostshock charges, which meant we would mostly press it for movement or because we had no better option. Frostshock is one of the spells that could do with a significant infusion of throughput power in its empowered form and limiting access to it without giving it more juice is a lost opportunity.
There is also the issue of Flux Melting: This talent is completely dead on arrival. While the idea of incenitivizing weaving gameplay is laudible, this can be better achieved by tuning Frostshock and Master of the Elements to be more powerful. Flux Melting would have to be buffed by several degrees to be even worth considering.
I hope this feedback can be put to productive use 