(Elemental) what changes do you want to see?

Classes Shaman
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We finally have all 3 trees and one thing is clear:

Elemental players are not happy lol.

I mostly main Warlock, but I’ve kept a Shaman around since about 2010 and started really playing it around 2018. I enjoy Elemental, and I remember when the DF talent tree first came from Alpha I loved it.

But something feels off right?

Why do we die so easily now? Why does it feel like all of our active abilities give us less payoff than classes with fewer? Why does it feel like Ele has to time everything perfectly for such a middling damage profile? I for sure noticed that in Arena I don’t feel like a mail/hybrid class anymore.

I can’t put it into words, but I think a lot of you guys probably can. So if you have the time: Please rant here.

Last week a couple of us made some thread on the Warlock board that seemed to get dev’s attention. I want to target the same surgical criticism at Ele but I think a lot of you can break down the issues better.

So why do we feel off? What pushed Shaman from the mountain? What problems did DF have that we want fixed in TWW?

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You can find your answer by literally clicking any of the post on the shaman forum.
We didnt get any feedback for so long so prob no one is gonna give feedback anymore.

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It’s a shame, but I understand. Hopefully some other posts make their way to some dev who cares.

I just hate seeing Spriests get feedback within an hour of overhauls and Shamans get left out to dry

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These are some things that I thought might help improve the spec without a major rework. Basically I want the spec to not be forced into a full fire or full lightning style. I want to weave nature and fire abilities together and I want all our capstone talents to work for more builds.

Flame Shock - No target cap

  • This is a no brainer and will provide better scaling interactions with a number of other abilities.

Lava Surge

  • This should still have a target cap, 3-4 targets. This effect greatly contributes to the lava burst spam and putting a cap on this will allow lava surge procs to feel more meaningful when they happen.

Icefury

  • Include the frost shock cleaving mechanic from electrified shocks.

Electrified Shocks

  • Now acts similar to flux melting, any time you cast frost shock, the target takes increased nature damage for a duration. This would allow more consistent application of nature damage boosts and give frost shock more value overall.

Unrelenting Calamity

  • In addition to current effects, Earthquake slowly follows enemy targets. Quality of life addition.

Surge of Power

  • Chain Lightning also doesn’t lose damage with jumps. -OR- Chain Lightning jumps to 3 additional targets. This talent is great but chain lightning could use a boost here to incentive use over lava burst spam.

Aftershock

  • Replace this effect with a new one: Your maelstrom spending abilities summon a lesser elemental for 5-7 seconds. Earth shock and elemental blast summon a storm elemental that casts lightning bolts, and earthquake summons a fire elemental that casts a flame Shock and then fire nova. This would do two things: one is to add a more competitive option with a simpler style against surge of power, and two it would add more elementals to the elemental spec. This talent is currently very underwhelming.

Master of Elements

  • Change the effect to a duration instead of next spell cast -OR- Have the effect stack two times -OR- buff the effect. This talent is engaging and incentivizes weaving nature spells between lava bursts but it clearly isn’t quite good enough to achieve the goal.

Power of the Maelstrom

  • Change from 25% to a 100% chance at 2 points. Change from two overloads to one. This boosts the effect overall and incentivizes weaving in nature spells between lava bursts.

Elemental Equilibrium

  • Remove the 30 second cooldown from this effect and reduce the damage bonus to compensate. This will incentivize more consistent use of all three elements, which I believe is the intention of the gameplay behind this talent.

Liquid Magma Totem

  • Lower the cooldown to 30 seconds, reduce damage to compensate. This allows a more consistent application of multiple flame shocks.

Choice node with Liquid Magma totem

  • Remove Primal Elementalist from the choice node, and instead place a new talent here that allows Earthquake to spread flame Shock to new targets once per second. This will do several things including having a passive option to spread flame Shock and also giving more power to earthquake.

Primal Elementalist

  • The active skill from each elemental should automatically replace the summon elemental skill on your bar. So after summoning fire elemental, Meteor should replace the skill for its duration. Players already do this with macros, just put it in game.

Echo Chamber

  • This talent should be a one point node. It’s a good talent but should be more competitive with other capstones.

Searing Flames

  • In addition to current effect, maelstrom spending abilities increase fire damage by 10% for X seconds. This talent is currently useless as we are swimming in maelstrom with weak spenders. This would give spenders more power and make the talent more competitive.

Echoes of the Great Sundering

  • New effect: Earth Shock auto casts an Earthquake centered on your target. This would add quality of life to earthquake use, and make the talent more competitive.

Magma Chamber

  • Reduce total number of stacks needed to reach the 60% boost to 10. This will incentivize using spenders more often.

Skybreakers Fiery Demise

  • This talent should be easier for Storm builds to access, move it higher in the talent tree even if it must remain a capstone.

Primordial Wave

  • Add Lightning Bolt to the mechanic. This talent should be practical for storm builds as fire already has Ascendance to spec into. Add lightning bolt similar to the enhance version.

Rolling Magma

  • Include Lightning bolt and chain lightning in the CDR. 0.25 / 0.5 seconds. This will allow this talent path to function better for storm builds.
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Nah, first give us a defensive. Second give us a raid buff.
Then we can talk.

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I like a ton of what you have here. Particularly the following:

Aftershock
Changing this to a simpler effect where mini-elementals are spawned to do fairly basic AoE or ST attacks is a great idea to contrast with Surge of Power

Master of the Elements
Having it stack X times would be good. However, I think if you did this you might want to switch it to stacking off of Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning and then have it usable on everything but the Lightning Spells.
Otherwise, definitely buff the effect, this should be a core thing to Elemental shaman in many most builds

Rolling Magma
Absolutely make Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning interact with the CDR of Primordial Wave

–Some other ideas–
Mandatory, Give Us Raid Buff Please, We would like our raids to enjoy our presence

Ascendance and DRE
Rework Ascendance so that it doesn’t just give free access to Lava Burst. Spell weaving should still be present in Ascendance, maybe it change everything to have a fire effect and damage is increased by your Crit%, also make it reduce the recharge of Lava Burst, not eliminate the recharge entirely (some synergy with Master of the Elements here)

Primordial Surge
Delete this or rework this, we need to trim down the Lava Burst accessibility.

Lava Burst
Make this scale with Crit% somehow… Maybe make it so there is an additional Overload that rolls on Crit% instead of Mastery%. Just increasing damage based on Crit% works too, just steps on Ascendance’s toes a bit.

Icefury
This is a very controversial ability. Maybe make this more like Glacial Spike. Make Frost Shock have a 6 second CD and generate Maelstrom, make it do way more damage, each Frost Shock builds up a buff (animated as little frosty orbs floating around your character). After 4 or 5, Frost Shock changes to Icefury, where you send these orbs flying at the target to do big damage and generate a burst of maelstrom. Electrified Shocks would do what it does now, causes Frost Shock to cleave and apply the Nature Dmg Amp.

Flux Melting
Replace this. Using the new Icefury above, you could make this reduce the number of Frost Shock (orbs) stacks you need to Icefury. Making this the Single Target version where you get more consistent Maelstrom gains and big damage instances from Icefury

Searing Flames
This is essentially Magma Chamber, just giving you more Spenders instead of stronger hitting Spenders. Maybe move Skybreaker’s Fiery Demise here as a 2pt node

Choice Node of Windspeaker’s Lava Resurgence
If you move Skybreaker’s to replace Searing Flames, maybe put something similar to the Lava Burst Cleave (S3 4pc) here. Where Spenders causes Earthen Spikes to fire at all of your Flame Shocked enemies.

Echoes of the Great Sundering
Make this similar to Ferocious Bite on Feral Druid, where Earthquake can spend additional Maelstrom to do more damage. The 2 pts then increase the amount of damage that is added for the Maelstrom spent

Primal Elementalist
Bring this baseline, just make our Elementals do more damage and be more impactful generally. Also change the CD of Elementals to 2 minutes

Call of Fire and Call of Thunder
These talents buffing Flame Shock, Lava Burst, and other Fire Spells or Lightning Spells is bad, we don’t want to split the tree up into Lightning vs. Fire. Maybe make these more neutral but still themed where Call of Thunder (or maybe rename to Call of Air) gives Haste% and Call of Fire gives Crit% (which would work well if Lava Burst scaled off Crit). Better yet, remove these entirely and replace with something more interesting.

The Second Stormkeeper Charge
This has never been taken because it only gives 1 more Stormkeeper use in a fight. Change this to something else. You could make this similar to old Lightning Rod where you would mark a target (but with a Spender) and then it would pulse lightning AoE damage based on the Lightning Damage you do. This could be Limit of 1 and tuned accordingly so that it is the simpler alternative to DFs Lightning Rod

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Less 2 talent points, but aside that, i actually really like elemental gameplay.

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A change to Earthquake to center on a target would be nice. It probably wont happen but if shadow crash now centers around a target versus using a targeting circle on the ground, it can be done with earthquake.

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  1. Allow volcanic surge pvp talent to be a pve talent for choice of gameplay.

  2. Have the stormkeeper skill last until used instead of a 15 second buff or at the very least, let it last 30 seconds.

  3. Have mastery be able to proc off itself for less dmg instead of it being capped at one additional cast (I could have sworn it used to be like this).

  4. Let us use our defensive while cc’d.

  5. Let the farseer hero tree have mastery effect their spells.

  6. Reduce cd of flame shock to 1.5-3 seconds OR add a talent that makes lava burst spread flame shock.

  7. Give a 3-5 second debuff on the target if flame shock gets dispelled so lava burst still crits.

  8. Let natures swiftness effect stormkeeper.

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I personally want ele to drop the all consuming lava burst spam and actually use their whole tool kit again.

I would start by getting rid of lava surge. This is controversial yes, but I think it would be better if it’s gone. Lava surge just insures that anytime a tier bonus, hero talent or any buff to lava burst means it devours the spec completely. Removing it, and by extension lower our use of lava burst means other spells get used.

Lava burst is an amazing spell, but we’ve been reduced to a single spell spec because of it. When it was introduced in WOtLK, it was awesome! It did massive damage compared to other spells and it was very fun to press. Now it’s had to be nerfed since we spam it and it no longer feels like a strong spell. It’s only strength is in spamming it. Ele gets 250% crit damage, but it doesn’t ever feel like it since crit is bad for lava burst spam and lava burst is a neutered spell.

If I were to redesign the spec I would have ele work similar to balance druid, were we weave back and forth between elements. For one pack in a M+ you would use stormkeeper and blast them with lightning and earthquakes. For the next, while lightning is on CD, you would drop LMT and prim wave and blast it with fire. You would weave back and forth between the elements and not stick to the same spammy rotation always.

The only way to do that is to remove the resets that lava surge brings. Give lava burst a hard CD and only have it proc on prim wave casts like it is now. Our current tier set could be baked into a talent to increase the fun of that part of the rotation also. The main part of this is that after you have your lava burst spam, it would go on CD and you would flow right back into lightning that’s coming off CD again.

After that it’s just icefury and ascendance that’s a problem. Ascendance is the easy one since removing lava surge means it suddenly becomes a CD again. The whole point of removing a CD on a spell is for you to spam it, but if we’re already spamming it that means nothing. This is why ascendance feels so stupid. It’s a 3 min CD that gives us exactly what we had before we pressed it. Lava burst spam. Remove the lava surge procs and give lava burst a CD and removing that CD with ascendance will actually matter. Lava burst can even be tuned way up again since we aren’t spamming it, making ascendance an even better CD worthy of 3 mins

Icefury is complicated. I want some form of ice in the rotation but I agree that icefury ain’t it. Perhaps it could be when you cast a spender you shoot off an ice blast, and that ice blast gives you a charge of icefury to spend? Using icefury empowered frost shock makes your next spell do something extra. Lightning would add a static dot while fire would have a burst of dmg? it could also do the exact same only with the updated way of getting it.

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I would like to see a more unpredictable twist on our mastery design which will also breath new aesthetic life into it.

Overload → Cataclysm (Deathwing inspired)

The elemental mastery of the shaman unleashes a random spell on top of whatever you’re casting (Single target/AoE priority). Lava Burst has a piggybacked ice fury, elemental blast or lightning bolt behind it, is not subject to cool downs or eats any empowerment buffs, frost shock casted with an earth shock behind it. A windfury-like trigger to add a third spell to trigger at a lesser chance.

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Personal M+ focused wishlist as someone who occasionally plays it as an offspec would be:
Lightning Rod gets applied to every enemy hit by earthquake.
Earthquake follows target?
Spenders make up a little more of Ele’s damage.
Icefury removed and baked into frost shock. Or at the very least made a much quicker/instant cast.

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Something I don’t see talked about much is how EoGS currently works. Maybe I am the only one who dislikes it, but I find it to be such a boring implementation of “empowered EQ”.

Currently, you press Earth Shock and then get a percentage bonus on your next EQ with no additional bells and whistles. No change in radius size or tick rate, no change in the effect/animation of EQ, no up-front damage burst, no nothing.

To me, it is a dead node even in situations where it might be stronger simply because I would rather press EQ twice rather than weave in single-target ES just to get a boring %bonus to my next EQ with nothing else added on top of it.

2 Likes
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What about if EOGS were a one-point node…where it uses any extra Maelstrom to make the EQ that much stronger.

ie. “Consumes up to 2x extra Maelstrom to increase the strength of your Earthquake (up to double)”

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Ele (and resto) need a raid buff. At least reduce earth elemental to 2 minutes and maybe give it back its 40 % DR when taking primal elementalist.

Give elemental and resto wrath of air totem back for 3 or 5% haste buff

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  1. Windfury changed to a class wide raid buff that gives 3% haste.

  2. Elemental Orbit providing 8% DR to the shaman if they have Earth Shield on themselves.

  3. Choice node for Chain Lightning that either makes it apply Flame Shock to every target it hits OR hit every target in range.

  4. Earthquake to be attached to the target the Shaman casts it on and move with that target.

  5. All the 2pt nodes brought down to 1pt nodes like the Demo Tree.

  6. Lava Burst to scale with your crit % like Chaos Bolt.

  7. Both hero trees to feel like less “low effort, unimpactful” garbage.

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It’s not too late to give elemental shamans a raid buff, how about 5% Mastery or Spell crit chance for your party?

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Or just 3% haste as WINDFURY, removing the nonsense party buffing aspect of enhancement.

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For ele,

-Icefury gone or made as a passive way to gain empowered FS
-Icefury buff gone, already have enough buff to monitor
-More defensive (and rework ankh as a cheat death / immune)
-Mountain will fall gone, Mastery should work for everything by default
-LvB scaling with Crit
-Eq more impactful
-a better way to spread flame shock
-some 1 to 3 target cleave

  • want to use lvb AND lb in rotation with both being impactful instead of one being useless depending on the tier set
  • of course a raid buff
  • Ascendance becoming an actually descend DPS cd

I probably forget some…

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If Icefury is going to stay honestly I’d like to see a few adjustments for some QoL improvements.

  • Icefury becomes instant cast, it’s a 30 second cooldown, it doesn’t need a cast time, it feels clunky adding it rotationally due to a cast time. It needs to be easier to weave in.
  • Icefury if talented into Electrified Shocks applies the debuff on its cast directly (Icefury applies the debuff itself to the target), easier to slide in especially in ST.