Everyone is addressing gameplay, but there’s more wrong with Ele than that:
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Visuals. Shaman visuals are horribly outdated. From Ascendance to Lightning Bolt, our stuff looks incredibly dated. For other specs, this includes our totems, making it hard to get allies to actually stand in range of said totems.
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The general gameplay of Shaman hasn’t kept up with the fast movement of WoW. Druids call down starfall all around them. We summon tiny puddles and small patches of shaky ground. It doesnt feel good when everything requires movement.
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I would like the Shaman to have the skills that were presented in Plunderstorm: Storm Archon, Fire Whirl, Windstorm.
I can’t believe that Blizzard spent the energy to create these skills to be valid for a short time.
I would like to see the shaman as a God of the elements, of thunder… instead you put an orc spirit with an annoying animation.
Please Blizzard, I’m sure you can do better if you just want to.
One thing to improve ELEs AOE is making EQ act like starfall, making an animation of our character stomp the ground and have the earthquake follow us for its duration. you could increase the duration, just like starfall, or have it stack just like it is right now. Then we wouldnt have to worry about tanks ALWAYS moving out of it.
And yes, less LB, and more usage of our kit. Feels bad to have all the flavor of ELE tossed aside to spam 1 button in ST, AOE, cleave, etc…
On the topic of making Earthquake like Starfall, something that came to mind was it could be a totem, Earthquake would be centered on the totem, stacking like Starfall does. Then, subsequent casts of Earthquake will move the totem and apply another stack of Earthquake/Starfall.
Have Stormbringer upgrade Earthquake into a lightning tornado that follows your current target.
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Why does elemental blast have a cast time? Why does stormbringer have a cast time? Why does flame shock do aboslute dogwater dmg yet have a cd that makes it difficult to spread? Why does earthquake do such lackluster damage? Why does icefury have a cast time? Why is magma totem on such an obscene cd? Why is most of our class tree totems that are so underwhelming we ignore a lot of the bottom half of the tree?
Just some of the questions that run through my head when I’m pressing Lava Burst.
I would like to see effects of this type interacting with others, for example, the water area spell causes lightning to hit everyone inside the wet area.
Another thing I would like to see is catclysmic magic like tornado, tsunami volcano, or even a combination of them like fire tornado.
2 Likes
Some people have also mentioned it but I hope they rework or replace Rolling Thunder from the Stormbringer tree. Having to play around a 50 second timer (that isn’t even visible via the vanilla UI) and plan for burst windows regardless of what’s going on is pretty unfun to me. Probably my least favorite part of playing Elemental in Aberrus, especially when there’s bosses that have burst or immune phases don’t line up with the timer.
Off the top of my head,
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Rework mastery a bit. Duplicating only a couple abilities and not most of our spenders feels lame. It’s typically been a dead stat for certain builds. Maybe lower the % or add an increased effect for spenders or a flat % damage increase.
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Icefury is just awful and the corresponding talents aren’t interesting nor satisfying to place. Frost shock just isn’t enticing enough. If Icefury has to stay, make your very next frost shock hit all targets nearby with a damage boost or something interesting.
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I feel like 100 maelstrom isn’t enough, especially with overloads. Increase it to 150 or 200 baseline. With all the added overloads and instant cast stormkeeper chain lightnings, we just waste maelstrom.
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Ascendance and other abilities need a visual update. Casting lava beam during an ascendance proc will get cancelled if it runs out. Absolutely awful feeling. Change that.
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Rework the capstone talents. A lot of them aren’t very impactful and require total stat changes to be useful. Some require more crit, some more verse, some more mastery.
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Lava burst damage needs to scale with crit chance again. Flame shock needs to be able to be spread more easily.
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Second charge of our defensive, lower earth elementals cool down and change %hp to % DR
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Spenders hit way harder via mastery rework or buffs. Lower maelstrom generation to compensate if needed
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Certain spells like chain heal, thunderstorm, earth shield, healing stream totem, gust of wind and frost shock be made baseline.
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Pwave needs to go or move down the tree to be more accessible. That or be useable with lightning builds
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Too many capstone talents with choice nodes that aren’t very impactful
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Spirit Link Totem into the class tree would be nice, or something ancestor related to give the spec some raid utility, since blizz doesn’t want to give shamans raid utility
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Ankh baseline with a small %DR increase if you recently rezzed. That or make it cheat death esque.
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Ancestral swiftness baseline
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Hex baseline
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Lots of nodes go from 2 to 1 point
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Flurry and maelstrom weapon be baseline for enhance. We will never use this.
I’m sure there’s more but blizz has a lot of work to do. I hope they make sweeping changes next week, since I’m tired of waiting for the next .1 patch to get a tiny boost. I also hate not seeing my spec in RWF or MDI and PvP tournaments.
What I want is some talents to be combined to reduce bloat.
-Make Ascendance in the middle of the tree and make it a choice node for fire or lightning
-Combine Primodial Wave and Ascendance, so your chain lava causes targets hit to get flame shock but reduce the dmg of lava burst to 70% and cause it to hit all targets with lava burst during ascendance.
-For the lightning version, remove Storm Elemental and Icefury's Electrified Shocks and bake the ability to reduce cast time by 6% stacking 5 times since it lasts half as long as Storm elemental does as well as increase dmg by 15%.