Elemental Spell & Talent Suggestions

There’s been so much talk about how ele shamans can only either do AoE or ST and one of the largest contributing factors is the value of secondary stats, so how can we make both Mastery and Crit viable secondary stats for both damage profiles.

Lava Burst
I think one of the simplest solutions is having lava burst scale with our crit stat just as it does in ascendance.

Echo of the Elements
I mean I feel like it just been repeated over and over again… When is this going to be baseline for us.

Ascendance
If lava burst were to gain ascendance’s buff I think there are a couple of different options for a new buff.

  1. Lava Burst always overloads during ascendance.
  2. Some sort of multiplier to keep scaling with our crit stat.

Further Beyond
If the suggested changes to ascendance happened I this talent would make us a bit too reliant on receiving PI. A suggested change for this would be instead of extending the duration of ascendance, reducing the cooldown when casting EQ, ES, or EB.

Deeply Rooted Elements
While this might be an unpopular opinion, I think this talent should just flat out be removed from enh and ele. As far as I’m aware Enh only uses this in their Physical build and Ele currently uses it in both ST and AoE and while it feels good to get a proc, I would rather the devs actually put some effort into expanding on the on use CD rather than being able to fall back on a pretty strong proc.

Helping Out Our Spenders

Eye of the Storm
I think this should just be baseline it’s kind of crazy we have to spend 2 talent points to make Ele Blast not cost 90 maelstrom.

Mountains Will Fall
Just another talent that should be baked into our mastery already, providing some value for mastery in AoE without having to spend talent points.

Something that’s common among the top performing specs in the game right now is that most of them only have 3 capstone talents… Elemental Shaman has 5 we have to spend a lot of talent points to get them. Baking this into our mastery would at least alleviate one of those capstones.

Echoes of Great Sundering
How the mighty have fallen, maybe it’s just due to the initial nerfs to Earthquake but this talent is not what it used to be. One suggestion I saw a lil while back was to replace this with Tectonic Thunder from BFA which I think would be a great change to give us some more burst AoE.

Icefury
To be honest I’m not really sure what to do about this talent, I’ve always loved Icefury as a talent, but I don’t really care for Electrified Shocks or Flux Melting. Blizzard has done a great job building out frost shock talents for enhancement maybe taking some lessons from Icestrike and Hailstorm to make frost shock another option as a spender to maybe give us an option for 2 target cleave. Elemental shaman is already so bloated with spells that are casting X buffs the next cast of Y I think the current talents are unnecessary.

Primordial Wave
I’ve seen someone suggest combining Primordial Surge and Splintered Elements which I think would be a great change as well allowing us not have to choose between AoE and ST.

Final Thoughts
I know this is a lot to ask for, but I think a lot of these changes are necessary for the spec. Would love to see some additional thoughts about these suggestions.

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Well this all sounds good… but there could be any number of solutions that would work, ranging from drastic reworks and changes to mechanics to simply tweaking numbers on skills and talents. Like they could literally just crank up the damage on chain lightning and earth shock and that would probably work… who knows. Would that be interesting? probably not. Would it trivialize the effectiveness and design of other abilities in their kit and thus never be done? probably.

I think just like every other class they need to get a trimming of their abilities, though perhaps a tad less for shamans. Blizz obviously has an obsession for the idea of shamans using ALL the elements in ALL their specs, which has been the main source of them having extra abilities that they don’t seem to know how to design, such as icefury. So if the ability design was just a little more clear cut then I think that would solve a lot of the issue.

I like the idea to emphasis IF on being a 2-3 target cleave SPENDER but my problem with icefury is well…icefury itself.

The fact that it is not doign anything on it’s own but it’s still a cast feels very awkward, it feels like a Cooldown with a relatively long cast time.

Either make it a passive that make IF cost maelstrom and cleave , or make IF instant and buff if dmg + cleave (i d rather the first one as it would save a keybind)

2 Likes

This alone would be amazing.

I would have preferred not to keep any of the covenant abilities. It’s when they slowly add “new and exciting abilities for blank” each expansion that we start to get button bloat. But since they did keep covenant abilities, why didn’t they keep more? Feels pretty arbitrary the ones they chose to keep around. They need more choice talents between active abilities and fewer choice talents between passives.

I think this is the common issue w/ this part of our tree. It adds mediocre gameplay, and we have more satisfying options for cleave atm. Plus, the location of this talent and is its corresponding limits playstyle to where you have to take this spell to use as an (if you can do nothing else) button.

For years it feels like the only changes they’ve made for the spec is tweaking the dmg our certain spells I think I would rather them take the risk with the rework. What they’ve done with enhancement has overall been very successful and since ele shares so many spells with enh there is so much opportunity for the devs take what they learned when designing enh to support an ele rework.

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Oh I definitely agree, I was just pointing out the possibility. I think just about every class needs a huge rework. Simply changing the talent system without trying to revamp the classes in any meaningful way to match was a mistake.

Regarding them wanting to emphasize shamans as using all the elements in every spec instead of having “Fire” spec or “Storm” spec, I’ve always thought their mastery should have been swapped with ww monk. Ele overload is cool and all, and obviously it’s never going away now, but the idea of alternating between elements to increase the power of each would solve a ton of issues too. Simply remove the cooldown on Icefury after adding in a passive where you want to alternate elements and it would already feel so much better.

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Definitely not unpopular to me. Just looking at warcraftlogs for the heroic raid elemental is dead last… yet if you talk to the highest-end players they’re seeing the opposite. Top parse on Terros is an ele shaman getting godlike luck with DRE & Further Beyond to end up with 90% ascendance uptime. However if you have average or poor luck you do nothing. This talent is super unhealthy for the game, almost to a legion-era Surrender to Madness for Spriests.

I personally would like to see it reworked or removed and in the meantime just a solid buff to Mountains Will Fall & Echo Chambers to make up for our generally poor single target.

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