I’ve been playing Elemental Shaman as my main character since BfA, before that I played Balance druid from Vanilla to Cataclysm, and then Legion. I do mid-high M+ dungeons, +20-24, and only do Heroic level raids to get AotC. My criticism and opinions are primarily from an Elemental shaman that does PvE grouped content perspective under the current state of WoW in Dragonflight 10.2.6, and presuming Amirdrassil tier set bonus will not carry over into The War Within.
First I’d like to say that I’m hopeful and intrigued by the Farseer tree, I’m curious to see how our Ancestors interact with our talents and what gameplay we can expect and have a tentative ‘wait and see’ disposition when it comes to spec gameplay changes and additions.
At its base the Fareer tree wants Elemental shamans to cast Primordial wave and Ancestral Swiftness (Sometimes Lava burst) as often as possible to summon an Ancestor and then leverage that 6 second (Sometimes 8 second) window to have them copy as many of our powerful spells as possible.
General observations
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Out of 11 nodes in the Farseer tree only 6 of them interact or enhance the main theme of the tree; summoning Ancestors. This appears to be extremely low when most trees have 8-10 nodes that interact or enhance the main spell/proc of their respective trees. Keeper of the Grove is in a similar position to Farseer.
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The nodes that do interact/enhance Ancestors are boring and add little interest to an already bare minimum proc. The only clear thing is that they are low in gameplay interaction, and/or frustratingly based in RNG.
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The window for skill expression, though while (mostly) planned, appears to be very small; after casting our instant spells to summon an Ancestor, we have to wait for the GCD to end, which means in reality we have ~4.5-5 seconds (Sometimes ~6.5-7 seconds), limiting us to 3 (4-5) spells at most. This means that a mismanagement, simply having to deal with a mechanic would be inordinately punishing as so much output would be loaded into those small windows.
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The obvious choice for desired spells to be copied are the ones that have the highest numbers. Unfortunately right now Elemental MS spenders are very weak relative to our MS builders, this would lead to a very underwhelming pay off for playing around our Ancestor summons.
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Deeply Rooted Elements has been a frustration for many Elemental shamans since Legion. Its RNG natures can lead to a feeling of negativity when it takes too long to proc, or procs at the wrong time, rather than joy when it procs at the right time. Having personal performance tied to RNG just feels bad for the player; Routine Communication would introduced a second element of RNG to Elemental shaman, a second thing to be frustrated with and take performance further out of the hands of the player.
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Do Ancestor spells benefit from Elemental shaman mastery; Overload? Do Ancestor spells generate Maelstrom?
Talent choice implications
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Nature’s swiftness and Primordial wave are mandatory talents for Farseer. NS is a class tree capstone talent, limiting talent choice.
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Primordial wave is a psuedo-capstone talent with 3 more talent points as a part of a talent package to enhance the base spell. This severely limits talent choice and talent diversity for Elemental shaman.
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The Elemental shaman tree is already severely segregated between Lightning and Fire builds, this would just exacerbate it.
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Tying Ancestors to Primordial wave loads more power into Rolling magma. This is already a very power heavy node, even without the Amirdrassil tier set bonuses, and would only make the Primordial wave package oppressive over other capstone choices.
Talent interactions
Do spells cast by our Ancestors interact with Elemental tree talents?
- Master of the Elements
- Surge of power
- Electrified shocks
- Windspeaker’s Lava Resurgence
- Magma Chamber
- Echoes of the Great Sundering
- Lightning rod
- Stormkeeper
- Elemental Equilibrium
- Flash of lightning
- Skybreaker’s Fiery Demise
How these talents do or not interact with Ancestors is very unclear and is the crux of how gameplay impactful Farseer tree could be.
Ancestor spells
- Do Ancestors cast spells on the same target as the player?
- Will they choose different target for Flame shock? Do their Flame shocks count to our 6 Flame shock cap?
- Do Ancestors copy utility spells/totems? Dispels? Purge? Lightning lasso?
Ancestor related nodes
The basis of Farseer. No real criticism, as it’s ambiguous as to what the Ancestors actually do and how powerful they are.
I like the theme behind it, but the gameplay impact is not clear and deliberately made vague; ‘the Ancestor will cast a similar spell’.
- Latent wisdom, choice 1 of 2
Similar to above. 20% of ??? is difficult to judge.
This feels uninspired, as the strength of Ancestors will be adjusted with baseline tuning. A no interaction node.
- Ancient Fellowship, choice 2 of 2
An uninspired node with a frustratingly low RNG chance given the presumed low frequency of Ancestor summons.
The choice here comes down to tuning and talent interaction potential. This appears to be a unnecessary node as Ancestors will be tuned up or down.
They are both passive choices with no clear indication between ST, AoE, or cleave preferences. What choice is the player making here?
- Heed my call, choice 1 of 2
Again, hard to judge the strength of a 33% increase in Ancestor duration.
An uninspired node again, as Ancestor strength will be nuetralised in tuning including duration.
- Routine Communication, choice 2 of 2
I went over this above; the RNG nature of impactful procs can contribute to frustrating gameplay and remove agency of performance from the player.
This feels like a copy/paste of Deeply Rooted Elements and takes a part of Elemental gameplay that Blizzard has worked to minimise just to reintroduce it. Why?
There’s a few problems with this node.
- Fire/Storm elemental CDR is a design space that already exists within Surge of Power and Skybreaker’s Fiery demise.
- FE/SE are currently both among the weakest of any major cooldown of any DPS spec.
Because of the abundance of CDR, hitting a critical amount of FE/SE CDR forces their impact/damage to be tuned lower, which means that any other source of FE/SE CDR is forced to be significantly less impactful and less interesting.
Again I feel like this node was uninspired and a copy/paste from existing Elemental talent tree choices.
A side note, the Restoration bonus for this is useless, borderline insulting, given the baseline intended frequency of Ancestor summons; 3 per minute.
Another entirely passive and (superficially) non-interactive node. Again, this feel likes a copy/paste of existing Elemental shaman mechanics in the Amirdrassil tier piece bonus.
Targeting issues aside (Why a nearby target?), the most interesting and exciting part of this node lies in how it interacts with our talents (EotGS, WLR, Lightning Rod, Surge of power), if the player character gets an Elemental Blast stat buff, and if it can Overload.
Keeping within the theme of copy/paste existing talents/mechanics, this is another node that feels uninspired in its implementation. I can understand and completely agree with the intention to limited button bloat (and spells that both do the same thing), but this is a clumsy attempt that just restricts class tree talent choices, and again would not meaningfully impact gameplay as pooling MS is not hard to do for Elemental shaman; you use it on CD, that’s it.
Non-Ancestor nodes
This is a small quality of life node that is incredibly uninspired as it already exists in our spec tree in the form of Echo of the Elements. Why isn’t this ‘Lava surge now stacks two times’?
5% Lava burst damage will come out in the wash in damage tuning.
This is a small quality of life node that is incredibly uninspired as it already exists in our spec tree in the form of Echo of the Elements Swelling Maelstrom, only worse.
This feels like a copy/paste of Expansiveness from the Keeper of the Grove tree, but without considering how each spec uses their respective resource; having an extra 25 MS does not allow us to pool to cast an extra spender, except in one scenario; you can now chain Earthquake+Elemental blast, which only really happens when specced into Echo of the Great Sundering. Super niche.
The effect is too small with almost no measurable impact. There are very very few times, maybe once or twice an expansion, when there is an observable advantage gained between a 15 second SWG and a 19 second SWG.
When compared with other utility/movement Hero talent tree nodes this is sorely lacking in creativity and strength. Super niche, you could remove this talent from the tree and PvE Elemental shaman players would not notice.
Elemental (and Restoration) shaman are two of the squishest specs in WoW, lacking active and passive mitigation that other specs/classes have. When compared with other defensive Hero tree nodes this comes up severely short.
Healing for 25% instead of 20% of max health has little to no impact in survivability. This talent node is just bad. Again, you could remove this from the talent tree and players would not notice.
Earth shield is currently locked behind Chain heal for Elemental shaman, effectively making it a 2 point talent.
This is a very small quality of life node that is incredibly uninspired as it already exists in our spec tree in the form of Echo of the Elements Swelling Maelstrom Surging shields, only worse only imperceptibly marginally better.
The 3 extra charges are borderline irrelevant as we are still forced to spend a GCD refreshing it, often before it drops off. Again, when compared with other defensive Hero tree nodes this comes up severely short.
Another uninspired and non-interactive node. I understand that this might be a tuning knob node for balancing, if that is the intention, why not not tune the strength of Ancestor spells, or their uptime rather than things that have zero interaction with the theme/base of the tree?
Ending thoughts
I think that the current iteration of Farseer is… flat and boring, but it’s hard to really judge as a lot of assumed power is behind how it potentially interacts with Elemental talents and the player character. There isn’t much feedback any of us can give about Farseer because really we just don’t know how it actually works.
Many of the nodes in Farseer are clones that already exist for Elemental shaman, are relatively weak to what other Hero talents gives, and/or are just simply passive and uninspired additions. There’s no meat in Farseer, nothing exciting beyond the initial theme which I think is a tragically missed opportunity.
Thank you for your time,
Mews.