Here’s a suggestion from a top elemental shaman…
“Whenever you healing surge you gain 10% dr for 10 seconds” - work that in somewhere maybe?
Maybe add a Healing Stream totem onto it too? When we drop healing stream, 10% dr…i dunno. Something fun and effective.
Elemental needs less RNG, not more. Enhancement already has proc-juggling gameplay and does it far better. Elemental should be moving away from that, and toward a more stable and planned rotation where they’re not spending more GCDs reacting to procs than executing well on a satisfying flow.
Super agree. The first talent of the Farseer hero tree should give you Primordial Wave or Unleash Life for free or give you a second charge of it if you already have the talent picked.
Very underwhelming, just hope the ancestors look cool
I’m not saying it’s great but it seems playable. The amount of work to truly fix what the community is asking for requires a complete talent rework. I dont see Blizz doing this. I hope I’m wrong but historically they never do anything big for shamans.
It seems like they roll out the talents they do each expac then fix resto by tuning the numbers. In a perfect world they listen to the community and do a bit of a bigger update for the class. They both could really use it but ele needs it more then resto.
Im not a fan of UL either. Pretty much an extra keybind.
As long as they tie the tree down to Primordial Wave without making it baseline, the spec will be pigeon holed.
I mean I agree wholeheartedly. Both Ele and Resto - have great spells, and a great base in place - when we have the freedom to spec how we want (it’s the pigeon-holing that makes us feel off). It’s so weird to say but we almost don’t need a rework - we just need freedom again…and then obviously tuning. For example, there’s no reason Maelstrom should be ignored (this is largely a byproduct of the current tier set anyway) - but just saying - it feels weird for Maelstrom to be a figment of our imagination when doing our rotation (as one example)…or using EQ as just a means to launch more instant meatballs. It’s just wrong how our current implementation is.
Primordial Wave just doesnt feel fun to push. As ele, i might feel forced to main another class. Shamans have lonnggggg been overlooked/forgotten about as a whole, but this feels bad.
I liked chain harvest way better than primordial wave
Just had a bad thought…
Any time that Ele gets the ability to fire off a ton of Lava Bursts in a short window, Lava Burst ends up getting nerfed.
These spirits are forcing a Lava Burst stacking build, similar to what ele has now, assuming it works, are they really going to let Lava Burst hit hard if you can get 4 of them from a single cast?
Same. As a Resto main, I would much prefer to have Chain Harvest over Primordial Wave.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do Ancestor spells benefit from Elemental shaman mastery; Overload? Do Ancestor spells generate Maelstrom?
Talent choice implications
Nature’s swiftness and Primordial wave are mandatory talents for Farseer. NS is a class tree capstone talent, limiting talent choice.
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.
The Elemental shaman tree is already severely segregated between Lightning and Fire builds, this would just exacerbate it.
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?
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
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’.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I’m going to set up two scenarios regarding the Farseer tree for the next couple months for elemental specifically, depending on how ancestors interact with our kit:
Ancestor’s spells do interact with our talents and mastery
This is the “fun” option which would mean planning around ancestor usages have a higher skill-ceiling and can thus result in bigger rewards, as we can set up various kinds of burst moments depending on the situation at hand. This is great!
I do put fun in quotation marks though, because I expect such interactions to be buggy as hell with not only our own kit (which we will spend the greater amount of TWW beta addressing which means all dev time towards elemental in this tree will be bug fixing and not making it better), but also certain other prominent support dragons (read: re-attributing ancestor damage with aug hooks, this is still an issue with many abilities today in season 3).
Ancestor’s spells do not interact with our talents and mastery
This is the boring option in which case I’d much rather any development time towards this tree be spent on reimagining what an ancestor does. People have brought a few comparisons to Grove Guardian trees, which sound really boring to me, and I’d be a bit disappointed if the entire Farseer tree is just more passive damage on Primordial Wave and Nature’s Swiftness usages.
On a last note I’ll echo what most people are saying about the non-ancestor nodes: They’re boring and/or lackluster, please try again.
Thank you
raid buff please ? 
Shouldn’t add a raid/party buff to a Hero Talent Tree, else we would always be required to choose this one or they’d have to also give it to enhancement (which also brings windfury totem)
I’d prefer they just move windfury totem to the class tree (or make it baseline) and make it a raid wide 5% haste buff.
So how long before we get any kind of response from a dev? Or does our pleas and feedback mean absolutely nothing…
Unless something needs to be said from their end, or something is massively broken, they do not respond in threads like you are hoping.
Hear me out. Rename Stormbringer to Farseer, make it the Ele/Enh, and rename the current Farseer to ‘Storm Seer’, or something along those Storm-lines (as Stormbringer is already an Enhancement passive, so changing it to make it less presumed), and change it like this! (I lowkey forgot to share these, I thought of em awhile ago, though I didn’t finish -every- talent spot >_>)
Keystone
(Note this doesn’t give Ele 3 charges of Stormkeeper, it either gives you the ability, or it gives it a second charge if already known, which works fine for Restro, they only have it appear once on their talent tree, and Ele, though it appears twice, the second time further down the tree is a split node with Lightning Rod which should still work!)
Row 1
Row 2
-(Chain Tempest) Elemental: Unless a nearby ally is close to death, it prefers to bounce to enemies and generates 4 Maelstrom per target damaged or healed.
-(Chain Tempest) Restoration: Prefers to bounce to allies who are below maximum health.
-(Chain Tempest) Both: Chain Tempest is treated as both Chain Heal and Chain Lightning by your talents, and yeah, I assume Lava Beam would also need some fancy version that keeps this effect.
(Another talent I’d like to be a split one, but no idea what to pair with it…)
Capstone
-Edits 1/2: I had mentioned wanting a split talent for Electric Floodwater, then later talked about one of my stray ideas for Chain Tempest, and… it literally clicked to just make them both the same split talent. >_> Since they both affected the same skills, but in different ways. Lol.
-Edit 3: I had a much cooler idea for Storm’s Defense.
Admittedly, in hindsight, the whole Storm Seer idea could start with Chain Tempest, a little like Frostfire Mage, and have the capstone interact with Stormkeeper instead or something. I dunno, t’was just an idea!
Admittedly, I DO like the idea of an Ancestor-themed hero-tree, I just hate it being Farseer. I’d rather a name like Spiritwalker, which is still an incredibly thematic shamanistic theme in WoW, and one that specializes in the Ancestors. Just you know… make it interact with our Ancestral spells.
Like, instead Ancient Fellowship, why not give us ‘Ancestors’ Guidance’, a split node that makes our Ancestors’ spells heal up to 3 nearby injured party or raid members for 20% of their damage and healing done.
Remove some of the RNG factors, make it work off Ancestral Awakening (like the Ancestral Spirit has X% to remain as an Ancestor for 6 sec or something), Summon off Ancestral Guidance, etc.
My only feedback is that the “Ancestor” needs to be an elemental based on spec. (Water for resto and Fire-Storm for ele) Apart from that I think it’s awesome! Maybe take another look at Nature Harmony/Earthen Communion (Lower cd and more hp gained from Earth Elemental? or Earth Elemental will give up to 5 players a low%hp shield?)