Elemental Shaman T31 Feedback

In Development Guardians of the Dream PTR
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T31 effects

(2) Set Bonus: Primordial Wave also casts an Elemental Blast at the target at 100% effectiveness, and grants you all three Elemental Blast bonus effects for 15.0 seconds.

(4) Set Bonus: For 10 seconds after using Primordial Wave, whenever you consume Lava Surge, your next Lightning Bolt or Chain Lightning is instant cast and deals 25% increased damage.

First things first. Without being talented into Primordial Wave these bonuses do nothing. Which means, we’re forced into taking this talent for the next tier.

2p

The additional damage from Elemental Blast on Primordial Wave is a great way to improve the immediate value and feel of the talent. While applying Flame Shock is a good feature to have, adding the damage makes casting it so much more rewarding.

Furthermore this effect grants all three Elemental Blast buffs. These present a sizeable chunk of stats.

The additional Elemental Blast is cast for free. And there exist multiple talents triggered by casting Elemental Blast. Here is a table of them and whether they are triggered by the 2p effect.

Talent 2p can trigger it
Surge of Power :x: no
Lightning Rod :white_check_mark: yes
Mountains Wills Fall :white_check_mark: yes
Further Beyond :white_check_mark: yes
Windspeaker’s Lava Resurgence :white_check_mark: yes

4p

This bonus is a neat idea. It suggests to weave our different spell schools. The benefit would be Lightning cast similarly empowered like with a weak Stormkeeper. Well, except the damage amplification is a lot lower in single target and no Overloads are forced.

At the time of writing it’s unclear if the 4p is intended to stack and get consumed with an active Stormkeeper or not. The latter could mean we’ll sit on these effects until all of them are consumed and very likely waste/overwrite stacks of the tier set. The former would make Lightning Bolt hit even harder, providing yet another multiplier on top of the already existing stack of the current Lightning Build.

Sadly this bonus is currently very weak overall. Just as a reminder, thanks to Unrelenting Calamity Lightning cast change only from 1.75s casttime to a 1.5s casttime with the 4p. Having more instants is always a great thing for movement, though.

Synergies / Builds

Here comes the elephant in the room. Further Beyond. By combining Deeply Rooted Elements, Primordial Surge, Aftershock, and Further Beyond we can go for infinite Ascendance.

While we normally moan that Ascendance isn’t very strong, this build generates a lot more value than baseline Ascendance could generate. This value is driven by the free Lava Bursts and Flame Shock refreshes from Deeply Rooted Elements procs, while Primordial Wave also refreshes Flame Shock between Deeply Rooted Elements procs and also extends Ascendance thanks to Further Beyond.

This might sounds cool, but it deteriorates the gameplay loop to pure spam-casting Lava Burst into Elemental Blast with the occasional (once every ~30s) Primordial Wave. Any talent points invested in e.g. Lightning or Icefury are wasted while Ascendance is active.

And in case the above didn’t hint at it yet: the 4p bonus is absolutely useless while in Ascendance. Making this build essentially play with only one tier bonus.

The problem? It looks like these builds are going to be the strongest by far. With a similar distinction in power as current Lightning versus everything else.

Issues

The 2p Elemental Blast starts to fly at our target once the Primordial Wave bullet hits.

This delay is noticeable and slightly disconnecting.

The 2p stat buff durations are overwritten by follow-up Elemental Blast cast or the Overload of the initial effect.

Which means their uptime can accidentally get reduced.

The 4p effect can easily get overwritten by itself. Introducing stacks to the buff could help a lot.

The 4p effect is not consumed.

Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning can neither generate Maelstrom, nor can they overload with the 4p bonus active.

Lava Beam is not affected by 4p.

In case the permanent Ascendance stays, we’ll get tuned around being in it at all times. But mechanics will force us out of it, and while we wait for the next proc, we’ll quickly fall off the expected target dps. I imagine this to be a balancing nightmare, so I hope this won’t go live as is.

As a broad scale issue, returning to a Fire build means we’ll once again have to chose between single target damage and AoE damage. This is due to the way the Fire focused talents are setup and their effects. Lightning on the other hand isn’t facing this issue at all, because all Lightning talents combine single target and AoE.

Conclusion

The tier set is a good idea. Weaving spell schools makes sense for what Elemental consists of. The current version of 4p is too weak to actually promote this gameplay, though. Infinite Ascendance needs to get removed. It deteriorates the gameplay and invalidates many talents. This way I hope multiple different flavors of weaving talent combinations will emerge.

Yours sincerely,
Bloodmallet

29 Likes
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Thank you very much for putting the work in for the devs to see clearly.

Elemental historically has been the most fun when we are using fire AND lightning talents equally, not just 1 because of talent/tuning discrepancies imo.

I hope they work the kinks out to make this playstyle a reality. :slight_smile:

1 Like
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Some additional feedback I’d like to give about the tier set.

The 2 and 4 piece set bonuses were very likely designed with the idea of taking the talents Primordial wave, Rolling Magama, and Primordial Surge. The issue with this pathing is that Primordial Surge is part of a choice node talent option with the talent Splintered Elements. While Primordial Surge is a great talent option for low target encounters, Splintered Elements is the clear winner in large aoe. However, without the guaranteed generation of Lava Surge from Primordial Surge, the 4-piece bonus loses all value unless additional investment is made into a different talent for generating Lava Surge procs. With a talent build for aoe, this potentially leaves our only hope for making ANY use of the 4-piece set bonus the talent Lava Surge, a random chance for each damage instance of flame shock. In addition to the chance being random, it must also fall into the brief 10-second window following your use of Primordial Wave. It is very likely that we will go entire dungeon bosses without ever making use of this 4-piece bonus.

The entirety of this tier set simply has too many restrictions. We are left with very few options on which talents we can take and are forced to make very large sacrifices on either Single Target or AOE, much larger sacrifices than most other classes make.

6 Likes
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Feedback

The Tier 31 bonuses force us into spending 4 talent points in order to use [Primordial Wave] and [Primordial Surge] in single target, or [Primordial Wave] and [Splintered Elements] in AOE. Because our talent tree is one of the most overall point-heavy AND the most bottom heavy of any spec, we have very few options to supplement this gameplay. In fact, so far we’ve found that the only viable build in Single Target (by a substantial margin of 15-20% or more) spends another 4 points to use [Deeply Rooted Elements] and [Further Beyond] to create an unhealthy gameplay loop of maintaining permanent ascendance by using [Primordial Wave] on cooldown, building with [Lava Burst] and spending. With this setup you completely ignore the 4piece [Lightning Bolt] procs.

The most glaring issue for Elemental right now is our talent tree. We have an abundance of mundane nodes that provide flat damage increases (Elemental Fury, Call of Thunder, Call of Fire, Flow of Power, Unrelenting Calamity, Flames of the Cauldron), a substantial number of 2-point nodes that use up a significant number of talent points for low value, and the most bottom-heavy tree of any spec that prevents us from picking more than a few of our most impactful talents at a time. It seems like the intention with this tier set is to create a gameplay loop where we alternate casts to take advantage of Master of the Elements, but the current structure of our talent tree prevents us from creating a viable build that does this.

Ideas / Suggestions

  • [Rolling Magma] and [Oath of the Far Seer] should be removed and added baseline to [Primordial Wave] and [Ascendance] respectively. [Primordial Wave] and [Ascendance] provide very little value on their own, and needing 4 points to make them usable starves our choices in the rest of the tree.
  • [Primordial Wave] and [Ascendance] should also both be moved to the class tree. The Shaman class tree provides very little power compared to other class trees and these talents are available to all 3 specializations. In my mind they’re the shaman equivalents of [Avenging Wrath] and [Divine Toll]. This would free up talent points to make other meaningful decisions in the spec trees.
  • While we’re talking about them, [Deeply Rooted Elements] and [Further Beyond] should both be redesigned or removed from the game. [Deeply Rooted Elements] is a highly controversial spell amongst Elemental and Enhancement players, and more often than not provides a frustrating gameplay loop of “gambling” for procs. [Further Beyond] is equally disliked in the Elemental community for creating a 2 button gameplay loop where you spam [Lava Burst] and spenders and basically nothing else.
  • Please consider balancing the weights of the Elemental spec tree. We currently lack choice in the two tiers of talents while having far too many powerful talents in the third tier that are too spread thin to create impactful combinations.
  • Elemental fire / lava builds often struggle between having to choose either strong Single Target or Strong AOE with very little in-between. I would love to see new talent choices to help bridge the gap a bit. I’d personally love to have [Fire Nova] like Enhancement does, especially in combination with [Liquid Magma Totem].

Bugs

  • I’ve noticed that several times pressing [Earth Shock] with [Lightning Rod] talented is not refreshing [Lightning Rod] on my target. This seems to happen infrequently but is definitely noticeable.
9 Likes
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My opinion is that the tier 4-option is not enough of a numerical tune, there is a fundamental problem.

In a build that doesn’t opt for FB (of course, the situation with FB is much more problematic and I won’t go into it now), the number of LB buffs you can get from a single Primordial Wave is 2-3. This is expected, considering LB with SK in a normal scenario, where even a small buff would be powerful enough.

However, the AoE situation is different. The % amount we need to use LvB in our AoE rotation is a different number.
By default, LvB is not used in AoE, and the % buff required to use it on a large number of targets would be many times higher than in the ST situation.

This is hard enough, but we need to go back to the problem with Fire ele.
It’s a problem that forces you to choose between Splintered elements and Primordial Surge, and between AoE and ST.
This set doesn’t work well if you choose Splintered elements. In ST situations, you’re mostly going to be buffing LB once, and in AoE situations, you don’t want to use LvB for a small buff. Bottom line, it doesn’t work well with this talent.

All in all, this tier option is difficult to utilize, and it seems difficult to fix because of all the bad things that have been said about elemental shaman.

Here are my personal opinions on how this could be fixed (others may have better ideas, of course).
The first option is to remove the 4P option that requires you to spend Surge.
This change would make up for the weakness of having too little ST dps with this option, as you will be getting a lot of ST dps in situations where you are using Splintered elements. Additionally, there will be no reason to use a lot of LvB in AoE situations, so you’ll be able to fully utilize the Tier option.
The second way is that LvB gives you a minor version of SK rather than just a %.
SK is more powerful with more targets because it triggers a lot of overloads, which offsets the AoE issues mentioned above and makes it more tempting to use LvB in AoE situations.

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commenting and updooting for visibility

2 Likes
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so this is all fantastic! but… its ele shaman. Blizz would rather die than fix its issues

2 Likes
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Hey hey hey, Ele shaman was really good back around Cata timeframe. The Firelands set bonus was awesome.

Since then… well…

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lava burst lava burst lava burst? it’s devolved a bit eh lol

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I mean right now…no… but it certainly isn’t particularly good

1 Like
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Thank God. Hope it stays this way. Replace the 4pc with a different fire bonus. Having to manage the Icefury/ES/FM windows with procs of surge, FS spreading, ect would make ele bad in M+ for a second tier in a row.

Damage is all well and good, but hybrid classes sometimes need to spend double digit GCD’s on utility in a single pull and doing so causes a plethora of problems and damage loss with current ele in M+.

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Just to provide some numbers from early testing and sims, we’re seeing differences of ~25k or more between lava builds combing [Deeply Rooted Elements] and [Further Beyond] to alternative builds that “weave” lightning and lava. We’ve also confirmed these differences in-game. Nothing comes even close to the standard [Further Beyond] build in single target, meaning we’ll completely ignore the bonus while [Ascendance] is active.

Comparing three sims with equivalent gear (just re-statted to optimize), we get:

Further Beyond - 234.5k dps
Weaving build using Earth Shock - 208.2k dps
“Raszageth” build - 205k dps

Another comparison we can look at is the variance between high, low, and mean in the sims. Comparing Further Beyond to the Earth Shock weaving build, we get:

Further Beyond
Min 167,900 dps
Max 268,000 dps
Mean 234,500 dps
Range 101,000 dps

Weaving
Min 184,000 dps
Max 235,000 dps
Mean 208,200 dps
Range 51,000 dps

At the maximum, Further Beyond is 12.31% ahead, at the mean 11.22% ahead, but then because the RNG of Further Beyond builds is so drastic, at the low end it actually falls behind by 8.75%.

We also found that in the [Earth Shock] weaving build where we would want to utilize the 4-piece set bonus, the 4-piece bonus provides very minimal value in single target:

Baseline - 180,176 dps
With 2p - 205,157 dps
2p+4p - 208,227 dps

This means that for that build, the 2-piece value is worth about 12.2% dps, but the 4-piece value is only worth a measly 1.44% dps. Because there is basically never a situation where you manage to get more than 3 utilizations of the 4-piece buff in a given [Primordial Surge] window, tying our 4-piece to it naturally makes it extremely weak. An alternative could be that ALL [Lava Burst]s provide a 25% buff to the next cast of [Lightning Bolt] which we believe could be worth around 4% dps.

2 Likes
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Now that the revamped tier set has been available for testing for a few days I would like to give some updated thoughts on the current PTR build for Elemental Shaman.

First, I would like to start off on a positive note. The updated 4pc set bonus reads…

“When consuming primordial wave and for 10 sec afterwards, each cast of your chain lightning causes your next lava burst to hit up to 3 additional targets affected by your flame shock for 100% of normal damage.”

This is a fantastic addition to both our tier set and our entire spell kit. Elemental has greatly struggled with damage profiles in the 2-4 target range due to our lack of cleave damage and this tier set does a great job at strengthening this weakness. It helps improve our already good funnel and feels fun and impactful to use. I hope that even after this tier set is phased out in the future, we see some version of this effect added to our talent tree.

Unfortunately, I feel like this is where the positives end and the mixed/negative reception begins. The other half of our updated 4pc reads…

“When consuming Primordial Wave and for 10 sec afterwards, Lava Burst burns your target for 25% additional damage over 4 sec.”

While a bit boring, this passive effect can be either incredibly powerful or incredibly weak depending on the talent build being used. In order to maximize this tier set bonus, we are further incentivized to fully commit to a playstyle centered around the talents Deeply Rooted Elements and Further Beyond in an attempt to maintain as close to 100% uptime on Ascendance as possible. When you are able to achieve this uptime, and with a sufficient amount of the mastery substat, this 4pc set bonus can amount to as much as 12% of your total damage on a fight. On the other hand, if you are not able to cast multiple lava burst during this 10-second window, such as if you fail to activate an ascendance window in time, this tier set will do as little as 1.5% of your total damage.

Ultimately, this tier set further punishes the player for not getting lucky and activating Deeply Rooted Elements at the right time, or for being unable to maintain Ascendance through Further Beyond, either through a lack of DRE procs or being forced to move for any reason during an encounter. It also effectively removes the value of ANY talent build that does not have some way of achieving Ascendance. This wouldn’t be as much of an issue if the damage difference between Deeply Rooted Elements and the ability Ascendance weren’t as large as it is.

The new 4pc set bonus also has some negative implications in aoe as well. The current interaction between the extra lava burst provided by the 4pc set bonus and the talent Splintered Elements creates a positive feedback loop that lets us achieve extremely high uptime on the Splintered Elements buff and reduce the cooldown of Primordial Wave to about 10 seconds. With a CD this low, it becomes a DPS loss to use Earthquake in most aoe situations under 6 targets. Instead, you would simply use Primordial Wave on cooldown, and alternate lava burst and chain lightning for optimal aoe damage. Ignoring our resource spender is an incredibly bad gameplay experience and speaks to both the overvalue of lava burst with the current playstyle and the incredibly low tuning of our Earthquake ability.

In summary, the current tier set and talent build options for Elemental have the following issues…

  • Our optimal damage is entirely reliant on achieving and maintaining Ascendance through the talents Deeply Rooted Elements and Further Beyond. If you don’t get lucky with Deeply Rooted Elements or are forced to stop casting for more than a few seconds, you will be unable to maintain your ascendance buff and will lose your ability to do, effectively, any damage at all. You are 100% reliant on maintaining this buff at all times.
  • Our current optimal aoe rotation for most aoe situations encourages you to completely ignore our primary aoe resource spending ability in Earthquake, and instead make use of the low CD on primordial wave and lava burst.
  • The difference in value between the talents Deeply Rooted Elements and Ascendance is FAR too high in favor of Deeply Rooted Elements to the point where it is never preferable to take the other option.
  • Any ability that is NOT lava burst feels awful to press. Lightning bolt, frost shock, earth shock, earthquake and elemental blast are all incredibly weak and in many cases simply not worth pressing. This creates a number of issues when we are forced to take talents that encourage the use of these abilities, such as ice fury, but are ultimately still ignored.
4 Likes
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Feels bad

[THIS IS BAD] Season 3 Dragonflight Tier Set Changes - Elemental Shaman - YouTube

This video sums up issues.

For raid, can we get a simple raid utility? Could just simply give us Stormlash Totem from, MoP for nostalgia:

  • Summons an Air Totem with 5 health at the feet of the caster, empowering allies within 40 yards with lightning. While empowered, allies’ spells and attacks will trigger bursts of electricity, dealing additional Nature damage to their target. Lasts 10 sec.

In talent tree, place Stormlash totem where Swelling Maelstrom is and combine Swelling Maestrom and Power of Maelstrom together below it