If you main Ele Shaman you likely have felt some of these issues when trying to complete higher difficulty content and compete with other classes. I have identified a few key problems that I feel Blizzard band-aids through minor buffs to direct damage like Lightning bolt or Lava burst, but this doesn’t fix the core problems of the spec.
First and most obvious is the problem with Ele shaman and secondary stats.
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Critical Strike – Given ‘Elemental Fury’ which increases Critical Strike damage from 200% to 250% this has always felt like a class defining trait. Big crits! Unfortunately, because Lava Burst is guaranteed to critically strike when Flame Shock is applied the value of this stats becomes null for a major part of our damage profile. Like Warlock’s chaos bolt, I have always felt that an automatic Crit ability should scale with critical strike. Obviously, this would need to be tuned appropriately, but it would drastically improve the desire for crit in both single and AOE gameplay. This change would also require a rework of Ascendance.
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Mastery – The theme of Mastery: Elemental Overload is amazing. Mirroring enhancement’s Windfury buff, you can proc additional spell casts! Unfortunately, this buff only benefits our builders like Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning (reduced chance to trigger), and Lava Burst. It has no impact on shock spells or our spenders Earth Shock, Elemental Blast (talented), or Earthquake. With ‘Mountains Will Fall’ you gain a chance for Mastery to proc on your spenders at 50% efficacy, but it doesn’t feel great to take 2 talent points and the capstone just to make better use of a secondary stat. ‘Mountains Will Fall’ is a single target talent and typically not taken in Mythic+.
The problems with Mastery and Crit lead to completely different talent and stat profiles for Single Target vs AOE situations. This makes damage underwhelming in both raiding and mythic+ where a combination of the two are always required. Ele Shaman/any class will ALWAYS underperform vs another class with more talent and stat synergy across single target and AOE.
Second, button/ Setup bloat.
Weaving elements and having spells that ‘setup’ or buff other spells is a core design of the Elemental shaman. When you start to list them out and think about all the spells that interact with each other it becomes exhausting. Eventually you will let a buff run out, over cap maelstrom, or be forced to misuse something based on the situation and that doesn’t feel good at all.
Individually, these interactions can be extremely satisfying and engaging, but there are now so many that being able to manage the rotation becomes very bloated. It’s not that it’s SO difficult, it’s more that the payoff is lackluster given the combinations of spells being applied. In Mythic+ when you set up a Stormkeeper, into a flame shock, into a liquid magma totem, into a primordial wave, into a flameshock into a lava burst, into an empowered chain lightning, into an earthquake, another earthquake, into an empowered chain lighting, into an earthquake you feel like an elemental GOD. But you also just matched the output of a rogue pressing a cooldown combined with blade flurry on 30 second CD.
Proposed spell/talent ideas:
- Mastery: Elemental Overload: Just flat out needs a rework.
Doesn’t affect spenders unless talented, the more of it you have the less valuable it becomes as you spend more globals on the spenders, doesn’t affect shock spells.
Boring Idea: Increase all baseline maelstrom generation from builders by 20% and have this mastery just increase elemental dmg by x%
Thematic idea: All direct damage casts have an X% chance to trigger a chain lightning on the target dealing x% damage and granting 15 maelstrom.
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Lava Burst: damage scales with critical strike.
I feel like we have had multiple rounds of Lava Burst buffs that could have been solved from the beginning by having this ability scale with secondary stats. It will continue to scale over the course of the expansion and doesn’t have the problem of getting no value from a secondary stat (crit). -
Chain Lightning: now has 10 target cap. Maelstrom still caps at 5 targets and damage is reduced beyond 5 targets. (Stormkeeper still overloads on first five targets. Surge of power increases Stormkeeper and maelstrom cap to 6 targets)
Allows slightly better scaling beyond 5 target pulls and would create some sick visuals (the whole point right). -
Liquid Magma Totem: Replace with “Fire and Lightning”
Lightning Bolt spreads your current Flame shock to 1 additional target.
Chain Lightning spreads flame shock on your current target to all targets it hits (Flame shock still with 6 target cap). Additionally, Flame Shock DOT increases the damage of your nature spells by 5%.
Mirrors Enhancement being able to spread flame shocks. Works for both 2-5 target given lightning bolt or chain lightning priority. Eliminates so much bulk when flame shock spreading, but still requires targets to be grouped. Can immediately open with chain lighting after flame shock to start building maelstrom. Don’t need to take talents down to Totemic Recall (just another global). Has both a single target and AOE benefit. Most of all it would be a cool talent name, period. -
Primordial wave: Replace with Searing Totem
Drop a searing totem at your feet that instantly casts a lava burst at 100% effectiveness at your current target and an additional lava burst at 80% effectiveness at all targets affected by flame shock
45 second cooldown
Subsequent talents unchanged
Takes away the ability to range spread flame shock, but it combines the effect of Primordial wave with the subsequent lava burst cast. Also realigns ability with a shaman totem! -
Ascendance now increases all fire damage by the caster X% and removes the cooldown on Lava burst.
No longer entangles this buff with a secondary stat and has an impact on Flame Shock DOTs. -
Master of the Elements: Lava burst increases the direct damage of your next spell by 10%/20%
Allows lava burst to be double casted with efficiency, and still gives choice to prioritize spenders or stormkeepers. Makes an even stronger ascendance cooldown that reinforces smashing Lava Burst when available. -
Echoes of the Great Sundering:
After casting earth shock (ele blast) you increase the damage of earthquake by 60%/120% (70/140%)
ALSO, after casting earthquake you increase the damage of earth shock /ele blast by XX%/YY%
Allows this talent to synergize in both single target and AOE whereas today if taken for AOE, numerically, you would still only use Ele blast on single target.
I don’t want to sound like a hater. I love and main ele shaman. The themes, the visuals, the spell combos are great. But some of the stat/talent synergy and button bloat feels a little off. Some smoothness in the use of globals in the right situations could go a long way in how the spec feels to play!
Let me know what you think.