this
right now with flash of lightning we have steady dps with bursts here and there once we get elemental out (reduced cast time)
maybe put some CDR on herald of the storms would alleviate the issue
come this patch , elementals are 2.5 Min cd , Asc 2 min …your dmg outside that isnt goign to be stellar thats for sure , to balance things out u know…
On live with full honor gear, when going all out burst with volcanic surge pvp talent, I do about 1.4 mil dps. On ptr with full conquest and without volcanic surge and doing full burst I do… 1.4 mil dps. These were tested with duels with someone on both live and ptr. Outside of burst I do 500k on pvp target dummy and on ptr I do about 400k.
Both using farseer and lava burst build with storm keeper.
Side note - ascendance no longer gives no cd lava burst. So it’s actually common to run out of lava bursts to cast during ascendance and you either cast chain lightning or you stand there spamming your lava burst button waiting for the cd.
I was testing this on PTR today too and ascendance interaction in pvp is weird to say the least. The -50% modifier on the overloads + initial hit sucks, but I kind of get it cause of how strong it would be.
The additional overloads is where it pops off. You’re getting 4x+ lava bursts at once with increased overload dmg…but that is heavily nerfed in pvp.
Without CDR or a default 2 min cd (and the haste talent used to be mandatory due to lava burst spam) ascendance feels meh. The inability to just dump lava burst feels kind of weird for an ability that used to be tied to fire and is visually associated for ele.
DRE is absolutely a dead letter. Maybe in M+ you’ll have enough earthquakes/earth shocks going to justify it, but in pvp content it’s worthless. Perhaps, dear blizzard, you could change the proc rate or revisit enhance and resto’s DRE proccing off spammed builders?
I’ve spent the morning playing Elemental on the PTR. Significant amounts of it’s power is concentrated into a 15 second window every 2-3 minutes. It’s like playing a scuffed Fire mage.
And the really bad part is that eventually they’ll tune our damage outside of our ascendance window to compensate for the huge damage we do in our ascendance window, meaning we’re going to have the fire mage problem of doing tank damage outside of our major CD window. The difference is that we aren’t fire mages, we have garbage defensives and comparatively terrible mobility.
If the class goes live like this what will eventually happen is that the spec will be good in high level premade dungeon groups that pull around Ascendance (assuming it can live, which is an iffy assumption) and is going to be utterly garbage in lower level dungeons where you can’t get good value from ascendance or where the tank doesn’t pull specifically around your cooldowns. It’s also going to be prime for nerfs because Preeminance will make it a natural target for Power Infusion abuse and is going to wildly skew metrics.
You still use Lightning bolts and lava burst. Now you just also use Icefury>Frostshock too, which feels extremely blah to press and eats up way too many globals. The major difference is that your Lightning is far slower due to lost cast reduction from your Storm elemental changes (no uptime, massive haste reduction) and your have no CDR on your other CDs, which means everything else slows down too (ie Maelstrom, Ancestors from Primordial, Elementals CDs, and literally everything else that was effected by CDR.
When you play it feels objectively worse outside of that 15 second window you’re in ascendence. But I will admit that 15 second window feels really good.
No. That’s not what’s happening. Storm elemental directly reduced Lightning and Chain-Lightning cast time significantly, and we had high uptime on it. Now our uptime is significantly reduced and the cast time reduction has been halved. The end result is that our spells do less sustain damage. Casting Lightning and CL feels like your sludging along in sand on the PTR compared to live.
What actually happened is that significant amounts of our sustain has been moved into the ascendance burst window. Our burst window feels really good, but outside of that burst window feels significantly worse. It’s kinda like how Fire Mage and Combustion feels, except without Sun King’s Blessing.
You can’t look at damage in that much of a vacuum. Maelstrom generation got buffed (so more spenders => more damage) and the new talents are very strong. The amount of changes require sims to determine if there is actually a DPS increase or decrease.
Regardless, PTRs always have a damage tuning pass and the cycle just started. If there is a regression, they’ll fix it.
That is definitely not my experience on the PTR, especially in single target. You generated far more Maelstrom rifling off Lightning casts with almost permanent Storm Elemental uptime and extremely low CDs on things like primordial, stormkeeper, and ancestral swiftness.
The amount of changes require sims to determine if there is actually a DPS increase or decrease.
I’ll tell you right now that’s going to give you a very skewed outlook in this case. Because of the insane damage potential in the Ascendance window, Elemental is going to have a very generous damage profile in sims. But the reality is that average players in average pug groups are never going to come anywhere close to getting the value out of the CD that a sim will showcase. It’s one of those CDs that is highly dependent on pulling around it. It’s likely to be very strong in high key environments with premade groups pulling huge pulls and aligning CDs, and it’s going to struggle to get value outside of those environments; much like Combustion and Fire mage do. The pulls will be too small and stuff will die too fast, and you’ll essentially lose damage because your sustain will take a hit to compensate for the burst damage that’s been moved into Ascendance (again, much like Fire mage). That’s why fire mage sims are absurdly good ( with typical tuning), they’re often meta in high keys, and yet they routinely underperform in typical mid to low M+ keys that 90% of the playerbase engage in.
Of course the main difference is that mages have elite S tier defensives to survive in high keys, and Elemental w/out CDR scrape the bottom of the barrel on defensive survivability. So where exactly are you going to have a place?
Random numbers
Live : shaman doing 850k steady dps with 1m burst when elemental is up
PTR: shaman does 1,5m dps with ele and ascendance, then goes down to 700k
But even if dps is equal over 10 min…
The Gameplay feels like a rollercoaster,its fun when u are falling , but slowly going up not so much…
M+ kinda same u destroy 1 Big pull , but next one u are near tank…
I pray the devs reads this article and makes changes. Hey devs im looking for a job right now. let me join your class balance team lmao. I’d do a good job
Somewhat in the ballpark between Live and PTR is actually a good sign since the talent choices and rotations have been optimized yet given the changes. That will most likely improve.
Damage profile shifts between burst/consistent damage are more subjective, although since Enhancement is more consistent damage, giving Ele a burst profile to differentiate it isn’t bad.
This is a common trend in MMOs (especially FF14), where they determine a cooldown window that every class aligns on because it makes balancing easier, especially in dungeon design.
It’s lame and not fun, and we’re going to keep seeing more and more 2m CDs through the next few years of expansions 
This is not like FFXIV. FFXIV has the flaw that the damage buffs are also group damage buffs and are multiplicative.
WoW has no such thing outside making sure to have your coolddowns up every 5 and 10 minutes up for pots and heroism if you can.
An Arcane mage does not need to worry about somebody else’s use of a CD to align with theirs.
This is good, because it allows for each class to have its unique rotation whereas in FFXIV everyone lives and dies by squeezing their highest potency skills inside 2 minute coordinated windows across the whole group.
Of course, PI and augmentation have started to muddy the waters, but that’s why they’re a bad design direction that actively harms the game.
That’s part of the problem of FF14, which wasn’t mentioned here because it isn’t relevant here. 2m windows in FF14 has tons of implications on gameplay, drifting, being screwed etc, but it also is part of the overall balance they use for their entire dungeon cadence for the past X expansions since like HW.
Fun fact. PvP players are actually pushed out of Ice Fury because they will not have enough talents to spec into it. The damage will be lower in single target scenario but better in AoE. I’m not a fan of it.
Funny you mention that, was talking with my roommate who plays Volcanic Surge and loves hardcast lighting bolt spec has been dooming about the changes with the removal of it and all the reductions to hardcasting and the outright dmg nerf in pvp. Hope they find a middle ground for pvp at least.
I need to apologize to everyone here. Normally, whatever class and spec i choose to play at the start of a new xpac will get throttled. Shaman seemed to be in a decent place so i thought i might be safe. Im sooooorrryyyy. I did this to you
True, and other ranged classes have better single target and aoe. (shrug) I guess that is what they want.
I am having trouble seeing the point of what they announced. Outside of another rework it doesn’t make much sense. Hopefully the change in position of talents will be enough.