Hopefully this post doesn’t come across as “BUFF ele shaman NOW!” I intend it more as a brainstorm for fixing ele in the inevitable future.
Elemental Shaman as a spec has a lot of problems that have been addressed with set bonuses, but this has lead to us keeping the old items and bonuses. Our prospective bis going into next phase is more than half items from old content. The root cause of this problem is that our base kit is very weak and requires powerful item-specific effects to be made viable in endgame raiding content.
I don’t expect any talent overhauls to be made for SoD in its current state, but in the future case of a potential reboot/creation of a classic+ type game mode I would expect some talent adjustments.
There are only a handful of talents in the elemental tree that are actually useful (4-6 nodes depending on who you ask). This is significantly fewer than most specs. This is the result of many of the talents either being fire totem related (call of flame, improved fire totems) enhance/melee related (eye of the storm, elemental devastation), or just being bad (sorry elemental mastery but you are one of the worst capstones in the game)
Here are some suggestions for replacing useless talents with things we would actually use:
-Replace Fire Totem talents with Lava burst talents:
Some set bonuses have really helped keep lava burst in our rotation. Examples include the AQ10 set bonus of crit chance as bonus damage and enh 2.5 set giving it ignite.
-Replace Eye of the Storm with the 2.5 2p bonus, if not a weaker version. Other casters get baseline pushback protection so we should too
Here are suggestions of buffing existing talents based on what felt good as set bonuses:
-Add damage bonus to Clearcasting
-Add additional crit damage to Elemental Fury
Additionally, there are some talents that should include Lava burst, assuming we are keeping it as one of our core spells:
-Lightning mastery should reduce its cast time, but its base cast time should be increased. This also solves the current problem of lava burst being outscaled by lightning bolt’s spell power modifier
-Storm’s reach, maybe also increasing flame shock range
And then there’s poor EM. It’s less than 1% of a dps increase in a minute long fight and its actually better to just take NS from resto. A big suggestion would be to make it stronger by adding a duration of haste, maybe a duration where everything is a crit, maybe throw in the effect of cast while moving from retail, there are a lot of options that are infinitely better than one guaranteed crit every 3 minutes, especially when our strongest spell automatically crits.
I would love to see more suggestions!