Feedback: Shamans

[Sizebot-emerald-dream (Sizebot)]

Copying this over from the Alpha forums…

After doing some play testing in dungeons on the alpha I would like to provide my thoughts on the current implementation of the Stormbringer hero tree from the perspective of an elemental shaman.

Tempest

“Every 400 Maelstrom spent replaces your next Lightning Bolt with Tempest”.
“Tempest deals xx,xxx Nature damage to your target, and xx,xxx Nature damage to other enemy targets within 8 yards of your target.”

I like what Tempest as a spell does by offering a reasonably strong package of Single Target and AoE damage in a single cast.

Currently, Tempest is locked at a 2-second cast time with no haste scaling. This feels completely out of place and really ruins the flow of playing the class. I have to imagine this is not intended, considering a later hero talent even offers a stacking haste buff, but I do want to point this out.

400 maelstrom feels like a bit much. Lowering this to 300 maelstrom feels much more reasonable and fits nicely with both the base maelstrom cost of 60 for Earth Shock and Earthquake as well as their reduced cost of 50 through the Eye of the Storm talent.

Having Tempest replace Lightning Bolt creates a number of awkward overlaps and uncomfortable choices when combined with other talents in both the hero tree and the base elemental tree. Currently, tempest removes your ability to cast Lightning Bolt but does not gain any of the benefits of Lightning Bolt itself. This means that if you attempt to properly line up your cooldowns and resources to maximize the damage potential of a Stormkeeper+Lightning Bolt combo, and you end up forcing a Tempest proc, you could potentially ruin your damage output.

Unlimited Power

“Spending Maelstrom grants you 3% haste for 15 seconds, stacking. Gaining a new stack does not refresh the duration.”

The idea behind this is nice but the current iteration is bad. The current implementation of this talent works similar to the talent “Starlord” for Blance druids where the buffs stack but all expire at the same time. This type of ability promote the use of a cancel aura macro to remove the buff before spending additional resources to avoid losing uptime. This sort of gameplay is incredibly degenerate and should never be encouraged. This buff needs to be reworked to function like Iron Fur for Guardian druids, where each buff has its own duration.

Tempest(2?)

“Increases the critical strike chance of your Nature damage spells by 10% and the critical strike damage of your nature spells by 5%.”

Fine. A nice simple talent that can be used to easily tune the overall strength of the tree. Should probably have a new name, though.

Shocking Grasp

“Your Nature damage critical strikes reduce the target’s movement speed by 50% for 3 seconds.”

This is honestly a really bad effect to always have on. While there are many times when having a strong slow like this could be useful, there are also times when having a slow effect is actively harmful. And if I had to choose between always having it or never having it, I would pick never having it every time. This should either be part of a choice node or redesigned into something new.

Supercharge

“Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning Elemental Overloads have a 50% chance to cause an additional Elemental Overload”.

I like that this brings more value to the mastery stat for the lightning side of Elemental. In previous iterations, mastery was very much a wasted stat. Having said that, providing more power through an additional layer of RNG is less than desirable when elemental is already full of RNG effects.

Storm Swell/Arc Discharge

Stormwell: “When Tempest only strikes a single target, gain 30 maelstrom.”

I heavily dislike the idea Tempest providing direct maelstrom. Later on the tree we gain access to an RNG method of gaining tempest. Making use of tempest at the wrong time could potentially see you over-cap on maelstrom very easily.

I also don’t think limiting the targets to just 1 is going to be effective. There are VERY few fights in either dungeons, delves or raids that are truly single target. If there are any additional adds in the vicinity and you just happen to clip one, that’s it, you’ve wasted your Storm Swell benefits.

I would much rather see this talent provide a % increase to maelstrom generation for a set amount of time as well as removing the 1 target cap.

Arc Discharge: “When Tempest strikes more than one target, your next 3 Chain lightning spells are instant cast and deal 75% increased damage”

Possibly my favorite talent in the entire tree. This feels great in aoe and is very fun to use. However, much like with Storm Swell, the target restriction feels awkward. Feeling the need to NOT cast Tempest on a single target because adds will be spawning in a few seconds feels really bad. I don’t see the need for there to be a limiting factor on obtaining the buff.

The buff provided by Arc Discharge also doesn’t stack with Stormkeeper. If you activate Arc Discharge by casting Tempest but also get the Stormkeeper buff provided by the Rolling Thunder talent (something you have no control over) casting chain lightning will consume both buffs, wasting one.

Rolling Thunder

“Gain one stack of Stormkeeper every 50 seconds”

Taken from our 10.1 tier set, this talent is a VERY hot topic among elemental shaman. As things are right now, there is no way to track this effect without the use of external resources such as Weakauras. The dependency on Weakauras has been a growing topic within WoW and a lot of steps have been taken by the development team to reduce the need for stacking Weakauras. Rolling Thunder seems to work in opposition of this by forcing the player into using weakauras to make any use of this talent. Please, give this a buff that can be monitored by the player so we can see the entire 50-second cycle for this ability.

Voltaic Surge

“Crash Lightning, Chain Lightning, and Earthquake damage increased by 15%”

Similar to Tempest(2) this is fine.

Conductive Energy

“Lightning Rod targets now also take 20% of the damage that Tempest deals, and Tempest also the applies Lightning Rod effect.”

This talent is not yet implemented so we can’t test exactly how this works but in theory this looks fine enough. It will be interesting to see if this will apply the Lightning Rod effect without needing to talent into Lightning rod specifically.

Nature’s Protection/Surging Currents

Nature’s Protection: “Targets struck by your Tempest deal 10% less damage to you for 6 seconds.”
Surging Currents: “After using Tempest, your next Chain Heal, or Healing Surge will be instant cast and consume no Mana.

This is, honestly, very bad. Tempest is a core part of our damage rotation and not something that is always available when incoming damage is most dangerous. Tying a defensive buff to our offensive abilities encourages the player to sit on their hands and not cast their spells while waiting for the boss to do something dangerous.

Awakening Storms
“Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning have a chance to strike your target for x,xxx Nature damage. Every 3 times this occurs, your next Lightning Bolt is replaced by Tempest.”

This is the previously mentioned RNG mechanic behind getting the Tempest buff. Much like with Rolling Thunder there is currently no mechanic available to the player to track this buff. This also has the potential to “over cap” on your tempest spell. For example, if you find yourself in a situation where you want to hold your tempest cast for some amount of time, maybe you need the defensive buff to survive a big hit, or you want to hold so you can hit either 1 or more than 1 target to make use of Storm Swell/Arc DIscharge, you run the risk of RNG casting your way into another Tempest from Awakening Storms, effectively wasting 1 cast of Tempest.

Tempest deserves to stand on its own

Tempest is honestly a really cool ability and it deserves to stand on its own without being tied to Lightning Bolt. Lightning bolt has too many synergies within the core rotation to be replaceable. Tempest needs to be a separate button from Lightning Bolt.

With the current acquisition system for Tempest, it really needs to have 2 charges to avoid over-capping and to ease the need on delaying your Tempest cast in an attempt to maximize the numerous restrictions tied to its buffs.

Too much of a good thing

Stormbringer as a Hero Tree is all about celebrating Shamans ties to lightning, but much like with the Farseer tree, it makes me sad to see how we are actively moving away from what made elemental shaman appealing to so many. Shamans should be the masters of multiple elements, not forced into one exclusive tree. In doing so we are neglecting so much of what made many players love the class in the first place. With all of the benefits to Lightning Bolt in the Stormbringer tree, its possible we get to the position of forgoing spells like flame shock and lava burst all together and just devolve into exclusively casting Lightning Bolt for our single target rotation.

Overall, I think Stormbringer needs a substantial amount of work, with access to the Tempest Spell in particular being the highest priority.

[Sizebot-emerald-dream (Sizebot)]

Copying this over from the Alpha forums…

Here is my feedback on the Farseer hero tree from the perspective of an elemental shaman

Call of the Ancestors

“Primordial Wave calls an Ancestor to your side for 6 seconds. Whenever you cast a healing or damaging pell, the Ancestor will cast a similar spell.”

Primordial Wave is a really poor choice for a mandatory talent for a hero tree. Its location in our talent tree means that by taking that point the rest of our build is largely already decided for us. It leaves very little room for choice.it also only has synergy with a lava burst spam playstyle and neglects more than half of our kit.

The Ancestors themselves are possibly the worst “summon” companions of any hero tree I have played. Compared to the Horsemen for Rider of the Apocolypse Death Knight or the demons for Diablosit Warlock, our Ancestors are unbelievably weak and inefficient. Only lasting 6 seconds and requiring us to take action to get any value out of them means they will be useless in any situation where the player is incapacitated by enemy mechanics. Our Ancestors should instead have a set order of spells they cast on each summon, regardless of how the player acts so they can always have value. Something along the lines of…

Summon Ancestor → Ancestor casts flame shock on a target that ideally doesn’t already have flame shock → Ancestor casts lava burst on the primary target of player → Ancestor casts lava burst on the primary target of player → Ancestor casts elemental blast on the primary target of the player. This elemental blast leaves an earthquake under the target.

A set cast sequence eliminates the frustration of summoning an Ancestor only to be pushed out of range by a boss mechanic, or stunned by an enemy in pvp, leaving you to watch the entire value of your hero tree amount to absolutely nothing.

There is also an issue right now with having multiple Ancestors out at once. When 1 expires, the remaining Ancestors will shift their position around to fill in the gap, and during this time they don’t cast their spells properly.

At the very least, the value of the Ancestors in aoe needs to be addressed, as currently their Chain Lighting only hits 2 targets in total (their primary target and 1 nearby target).

Latent Wisdom / Ancient Fellowship

“Latent Wisdom: Your Ancestors’ spells are 20% more powerful.”
“Ancient Fellowship: Ancestors have a 15% chance to call another Ancestor when they expire.”

Gaining additional Ancestors feels far too powerful an option to give up so I don’t see Latent Wisdom ever being a competitive option. Overall the Farseer hero tree is full of ways to RNG your way into an Ancestor army and I would much rather see Ancestors appear LESS frequently but be more impactful when they do. As things stand now, Farseer is just several additional layers of RNG on top of a class that is already overflowing with RNG.

Heed my Call / Routine Communication
“Heed my Call: Ancestors last an additional 2 seconds”
“Routine Communication: Lava Burst casts have a 8% chance to call an Ancestor”

Much like the previous talent options, the increased potential to summon additional Ancestors will almost certainly be the correct pick in almost all situations.

Elemental Reverb

“Lava Burst gains an additional charge and deals 5% increased damage”

Farseer is very clearly trying to tie itself into the “exclusively press Lava Burst” playstyle that we’ve had in patches 10.3 and 10.4 and I feel like thats a mistake. “Farseer” as a theme has no inherent ties to lava magic, so why is that exclusive playstyle being forced into the hero tree? Stormbringer at least has the excuse of being very clearly a lightning-themed talent option. Make use of the entire shaman kit and offer a talent to promote casting other spells instead of doubling down (or tripling down) on lava burst.

Offering from Beyond

“When an Ancestor is called, they reduce the cooldown of Fire Elemtnal and Storm Elemental by 10 seconds.”

If the intention for Farseer is to summon Ancestors very frequently, then I actually like this talent. Our elementals have been neglected for a long time now and seeing some talent synergy is welcome, even if I would prefer a different direction with Ancestors.

Primordial Capacity

“Increase your maximum Maelstrom by 25.”

This feels a little unnecessary. The fire build that will be used with Farseer already takes the talent Swelling Maelstrom which increases our maximum Maelstrom by 50. Having an additional 25 on top of that is fine but feels like an unnecessary addition and a waste of a hero talent. Our fire builds lack synergy with half of our talent tree so we can’t even move the talent point out of Swelling Maelstrom into something else because nothing else has any value.

Spiritwalkers’s Momentum

“Using spells with a cast time increases the duration of Spiritwalker’s Grace and Spiritwalker’s Aegis by 1 second, up to a maximum of 4 seconds”

I quite like this. Spiritwalkers grace is a very cool spell and any additional benefits it could offer is always welcome.

Natural Harmony / Earthen Communion

“Natural Harmony: Reduces the cooldown of Nature’s Guardian by 10 seconds and cases it to heal for an addtional 5% of your maximum health”
“Earthen Communion: Earth Shield has an additional 3 charges and heals you for 25% more.”

These two might be the absolute worst defensive options of any Hero tree I’ve seen, and this is for a class with already some of the worst defensive options in the game. The defensive powercreep in WoW has reached absurd levels and these talents being our options is incredibly sad.

Maelstrom Supremacy

“Increase the damage of Earth Shock, Elemental Blast, and Earthquake by 8% and the healing of Healing Surge by 8%”.

Just a basic tuning knob. Should be fine but should maybe include chain lightning.

Final Calling

“When an Ancestor expires, they cast Elemental Blast on a nearby enemy”

If this worked as intended it could be fine but it currently fires off at any target nearby, living or dead.

Ancestral Swiftness

“Your next healing or damaging spell is instant, costs no mana, and deals 10% more damage and healing.

If you know Nature’s Swiftness, it is replaced by Ancestral Swiftness and causes Ancestral Swiftness to call an Ancestor to your side.”

This is an incredibly disappointing capstone. Why does the final tree in the Farseer hero talent require a capstone talent in the base Shaman talent tree to gain maximum benefit? If we don’t force our way into taking Natures swiftness, we miss out on an additional Ancestor to summon. We should not be able to make ourselves weaker by not taking a talent entirely removed from the elemental tree.

To be quite honest, Farseer seems terrible. Forcing a playstyle that lacks aoe, stacking multiple layers of RNG on top of one of the most RNG dependent classes, offering no improvements to the most lacking areas, such as flame shock management, and pushing the need to take multiple specific talents has Farseer in an awful state.

[Jâzz-blood-furnace]

Hi everyone,

with Beta live and the access to testing being broader now, I’d like to share some thoughts about Elemental Shaman throughout Dragonflight and into The War Within Beta. These thoughts are mostly a consensus among the community and many of the issues and ideas that I will bring up have been thought about, discussed and iterated on by many of the top Elemental Shaman players and theorycrafters on the Earthshrine Discord.
I will first go into some thoughts about theme and class fantasy, link those Elements to gameplay related issues, and add ideas and critique on the design choices around the current iteration of Elemental Shaman. I will also show how these issues run the risk of being compounded through the current design of the Hero Talents available to Elemental Shaman. Last but not least, I will present some ideas for improvements that have been floating among the community for quite a while.
Without further ado, here we go!

1. Theme and class fantasy

Visually and in terms of theme, Elemental Shaman is one of the coolest speccs in the game. It has a long history and is deeply rooted in the lore through characters like Thrall. The spell animations have pretty much always been on point, and it feels really good to hurl molten rocks at your opponents or have Chain Lightning overload into a group of mobs. That being said, throughout Dragonflight, the specc has felt less and less about being attuned to all the elements. Where once it really felt like we were commanding Storm, Earth and Fire, we are now forced to pick sides. Generally, Elemental Shamans in Dragonflight have either played a mostly pure fire build, or a pure lightning build, depending on the tier set bonus of the respective season. Being a lightning based caster is generally pretty cool and is an appealing fantasy. But it’s not what Elemental Shaman at it’s core is exclusively about in my mind. Finding a way to incorporate all Elements into the way Elemental Shaman plays, both in terms of visuals and design/gameplay and making the elements sing together would go a long way fort he specialization.

2. Design issues and Gameplay implications

DISCLAIMER: I would like to get the obvious thing out of the way: Elemental Shaman is the only DPS specc without a raid buff, or mandatory utility. I do not see the need to argue this point, really. This simply needs to change.

2.1 The specialization talent-tree

The specialization tree for Elemental Shaman suffers from some fairly fundamental issues that have been pointed out repeatedly by the community, but I feel this is a good place and time to re-iterate:

• A split tree: Similiar to the Enhancement tree, the Elemental tree is split into two Elements, Fire and Lightning. This is the result of having the talents than lean towards lightning on the left side of the tree, while the talents leaning towards fire are on the
  right side. There are basically no horizontal connections in the tree, and ist layout forces us down one path very early on. This comes with a number of issues. First, it basically invalidates one half of the tree every season. Season 2 and 3 in Dragonflight have shown this. In Season 2 we went all-in on Lightning, leaving out talents like Lava Surge and Echo of the Elements. These talents are generally considered staples of the specc to a point where they could well be baseline part of the kit. In Season 3 and 4, we are turning it around by 180 degrees and putting all our egg in the fire basket. This leaves out basically every single Lightning-related talent and makes spells like Lightning Bolt, our iconic filler spell, persona non-grata in our rotation. To make this clear: Currently, one of the biggest goals in our single target rotation is to avoid getting into a situation where we have to press Lightning Bolt as much as possible. This split talent tree is also splitting the player base. While the season 2 build and playstyle was appreciated especially among higher level players, others felt like it was overly punishing and cumbersome to execute. Similiarly the Season 3 and Season 4 set bonus is often considered fun in the beginning but becomes overly monotonous over time. Finding a way to incorporate a healthy balance between the elements in terms of gameplay is one of the keys to making the specc and the playerbase feel less fractured.

  This issue will also directly transfer into hero talents: Currently, Stormbringer will push us 100% towards lightning builds, where the focus of Farseer towards Primordial Wave and Lavaburst will likely invalidate builds that are not purely based on fire talents.

• Unhealthy talent interactions: When Dragonflight re-introduced talent trees, several earlier tier set and legendary effects were added across all classes and speccs. Some of these led to compounding effects on different levels, and have steadily been adressed. Unfortunately, Elemental Shaman is still suffering from these compunding effects, specifically when it comes to Lava Burst accessibility. Access to this spell beyond the regular cooldown and gaining a 2nd charge via Echo of the Elements was for the longest time restricted to Lava Surge. This made Lavaburst an exciting button to press and Lava Surge an exciting procc to happen. It also made Ascendance a hype cooldown, because we got to spam this button that we usually could not press as much as we would have liked. Dragonflight changed this by adding a combination of talents that gives us basically unlimited access to Lavaburst. In addition to the ones mentioned above, we now have Windspeaker’s Lava Resurence, Deeply Rooted Elements/Ascendance, and Primordial Surge. The two most glaring issues with this are that it creates a toxic feedback loop with talents like Rolling Magma, where casting Lavaburst leads to being able to cast even more Lavaburst, which in turn enables even more Lavaburst. Currently this goes as far as ignoring our resource management: Season 3 and 4 Elemental Shaman is incentivized to regularly overcap on Maelstrom if it means keeping the Lavaburst loop going. The other issue is that it keeps Lavaburst from hitting for meaningful damage. Where this spell once was a hard hitting, exciting button, the sheer number of Lavaburst casts we have now, means that each individual hit is basically a wet noodle.

• AoE vs. Single Target: While Elemental Shaman currently has strong Single Target damage while excelling at 6 or less targets, this is exclusively due to the current tier set. It was similiar in Season 2, where the tier set was colloquially known as „The Bandaid“, because it resolved the issues we had in Season 1, if only for the duration of Season 2. It doesn’t change the fact that Elemental Shaman baseline still suffers from the same issue that so many speccs have since then had resolved for them: We still need to decide
  between Single-Target and AoE in our talent build. This is clearly outdated design and should be resolved for Elemental Shaman as it has been resolved for so many other speccs over the course of Dragonflight.

• Builders and spenders: Elemental Shaman, at it’s core is a builder/spender specc. Unfortunately, the talent tree offers far more interactions and buffs to builders than it does to spenders. Some examples: The only talent that exclusively buffs our spenders is Mountains Will Fall by enabling them to overload. Talents like Master of the Elements and Electrified Shocks are not exclusive to spenders. On the other side, builders like Lightning Bolt and Lavaburst not only get talents that buff their damage, quite a few talents are actually working in a way that buffs our builder spells after we pressed a spender. Windspeaker’s Lava Resurgence is one such example, while Surge of Power is probably the clearest example of this: It gives our next builder spell an additional effect after we pressed a spender. In season 2 we used this talent to prop up Lightning Bolt tot he top of our damage breakdown. In Season 3 and 4 mythic+, we are using these interactions to get more cooldown reduction on our Fire Elemental, and gain access to more Lavabursts. While it is generally interesting to have your fillers do something beyond mediocre damage and building up to your next big hit, our spenders aren’t big hits anymore. Building up to an Elemental Blast just isn’t as exciting when the spell isn’t tuned to a point where it feels impactful and something to work towards. Instead, pressing our spenders now often times feels like a means to give power to the spells that actually matter, which ironically are our filler spells. It should also be mentioned that as long as Earthshock and Elemental Blast are tuned with the same %-increases and decreases, Earth Shock will never be the better choice because it cannot keep up numerically and hasno interactions that Elemental Blast would not offer aswell. Looking at Hero Talents, the earlier theme continues: Stormbringer will likely bring back the focus on buffing our Lightning Bolts to the maximum. This is problematic because Lightning Bold in particular will be periodically replaced by Tempest, which does not interact with with most of the talents that Lightning Bolt is improved by! Farseer will encounter the same issue in a different flavour: With its focus on Primordial Wave and Lavaburst, we will prioritize Lavaburst due to talent interactions I explained above, once again reducing our gameplay to spamming a filler spell and possibly ignoring spenders in a lot of situations in order to gain Primordial Wave CDR and access to more Lavabursts to increase the uptime of our ancestors.

• Talents, their power and cost: In addition to the talent interactions I already outlined, Elemental Shaman also suffers from quite a few talents that feel like they don’t belong in their spot for very different reasons. I want to start with a group of talents that feel out of place in what they do. Specifically the third row of the specc tree offers a number of utility points that feel underwhelming at best. The general design direction of the talent tress has been to build power into the specc trees and putting utility into the class trees. While the Shaman class tree generally succeeds with this from the perspective of Elemental Shaman by offering a broad, if in parts noticeably undertuned utility talents, the specc tree has a number of talents that just do not provide the kind of power/throughput you would expect from a specc tree. Giving us 3% more knockdown chance on Earthquake, easier access to self healing or bigger healing crits doesn’t do anything fort he gameplay loop of Elemental Shaman. It is made worse by the fact that the entire row is filled with talents like these. So we do not even get the choice of maybe shifting some power into utility or trading straight throughput for more uptime. Instead our only choice is which of these underwhelming and frankly for the most part useless talents we take. Having to path through at least two of these talent nodes to access something like more Maelstrom generation and availability (two points that individually feel not worth a talent point each), feels especially bad. There are also throughput talents that are simply underwhelming. Primal Elementalist has not seen play the entire expansion, due to Elementals generally being underwhelming and not offering the defensive power of hardened skin anymore. Skybreaker’s Fiery Demise is a Capstone that only saw play in mythic plus in Season 1 and only because it was the only way of salvaging our lackluster AoE capabilities. The Capstone offering a 2nd Stormkeeper charge is straight up useless because it offers you exactly one additional Stormkeeper charge over the course of afight, since you will press the spell on cooldown. Ascendance is maybe the biggest offender because it just does not hold a candle to Deeply Rooted Elements on a numerical level. Even if we invest 2(!) talent points to make it a 2 minute cooldown, even average DRE proccs outperform it in terms of uptime.
  The theme continues with regards to talent cost. After the reworks that have happened, Elemental Shaman is not only among the speccs with the highest number of 2-point talents, it is also by far the specc with the highest number of talent points located in the third gate. This is primarily due to the insane number of 2-point talents in the lower part of the tree. Talents like Searing Flames, Elemental Equilibrium, Echoes of the Great Sundering and Echo Chamber are all 2-pointers that would realistically just offer their full power for one talent point if they were designed today. This is also true above the third gate with talents like Master of the Elements, Eye of the Storm and Power of the Maelstrom.

2.2 Gameplay:
Elemental Shaman in Dragonflight has shown some clear weaknesses and points of frustration when it comes to gameplay loops. Next to the degenerate gameplay style around Lavaburst I outlined above, there are five aspects I would like to highlight in particular:

• Flameshock Management:
  Flameshock is maybe the most outdated DoT in the game in how it works for Elemental Shaman. Being capped at maximum of six fort he issues that stemmed from another specc, Elemental Shaman also has no way of spreading Flameshock that is reliable and not cumbersome. Liquid Magma Totem is unreliable at best, and does not guarantee Flameshocks on only unaffected targets. Surge of Power has very limited range and forces us to use two GCDs for a maximum of two additional Flameshocks, and DRE is random. Enhancement Shaman hast he option to spread and refresh Flameshock every time they press one of their core rotational abilities in Elementalist build. Having a playstyle that is reliant on maintaining a DoT on multiple targets that is annyoing at best and frustrating at worst to manage just feels like outdated design.

• Resource-Management: Maelstrom is generally a fine rescource. The problem is that it is available in abundance and the spells it is consumed by are significantly undertuned. Currently, Elemental Shamans play around Lavaburst availability and Primordial Wave CDR as a resource. Not around Maelstrom. If we have 150 Maelstrom and get a DRE procc, we spam Lavaburst. If we are capped on Maelstrom and get a Lavasurge procc, we press Lavaburst instead. The amount of wasted Maelstrom in logs currently is insane. This was different in Season 2, where we actually played around Maelstrom numbers and the additional generation our tierset offered to a high degree, because playing it correctly enabled us to pull spell sequences that felt rewarding, although thatlast part is contentious withing the community. One way or another, skill expression throgh resource management is currently non-existant for Elemental Shaman, because Maelstrom is abundant, and spenders just do not hit hard enough and are not something we play around fort he most part. Farseer adding additional maximum Maelstrom, and Stormkeeper introducing the possibility of additional Maelstrom generation is therefore pretty uninteresting right out of the gate.

• RNG: Elemental Shaman has different layers of RNG. Some of these, like our mastery, do not feel intrusive and are instead something we mostly don’t think about but may have impact on optimizing our gameplay without feeling mandatory. The same goes for Lava Surge. Others, like DRE, completely warp our talent builds and playstyle around themselves. Having or not having a DRE procc at certain times can have rotational impacts that last until several GCDs after the effect itself has ended. Both Hero Talent trees introduce additional layers of RNG to a specc that has already at times felt like a slot machine to the point where the first thing you would check on lower performing pulls wasn’t your rotational execution, but your Ascendance uptime, simply because you regularly got unlucky in a way that wou were not able to influence and not able to play around.

• Cooldowns: Elemental Shaman does not have a relevant cooldown. Our Fire and Storm Elementals do not offer the power of gameplay interactions that would be necessary to play around them in any relevant fashion, and even if DRE didn’t exist, Ascendance is still thoroughly underwhelming in terms of power and the point investment neccessary to make it do something in the first place. While having a constistent, non-bursty damage profile isn’t in itself bad, the talent options that are apparently supposed to offer us short spikes in damage, like Primal Elementalist and Oath of the Farseer/Further Beyond.

• Defensives: An almost broken record, not least with the defensive creep that has taken a hold in the game, Elemental Shaman’s defensive toolkit is very underwhelming. While adding additional defensive abilities tot he game is generally not something that is looked at positively at the moment, Elemental Shaman lost a significant defensive tool in Hardened Skin with the start of Dragonflight, and is now left with defensive options that are unimpressive both in terms of quality and quantity. While Astral Shift is a fine defensive that is well tuned, the rest of the kit leaves much to be desired. The additional maximum HP that Earth Elemental offers is being rendered significantly weaker by the ability’s 5 minute cooldown. The fact that we do not receive the additional amount in healing, unlike spells such as Desperate Prayer, adds to the impression of an overall weak cooldown. Ancestral Defense offers some passive tankiness, but 2% avoidance just make a relevant difference, especially compared to classes like Warlock or DPS-Paladin, which not only have more but also significantly stronger passive defensives. Unfortunately, the Hero Talents both continue the trend of offering bad defensive options to a specc that is lacking in that department. Reducing the dooldown of Nature’s Guardian and upping the healing is not only noticeably weaker than the defensive options in the Hero talents of other classes, it is also just about irrelevant in the current state of the game, because a lot of damage will just one-shot players if they aren’t either topped off, or have some form of Damage Reduction. With regards to Enhancing Earthshield for Farseer or easier access to self-healing for Stormbringer, I want to reitarate a fairly old sentiment within the community: We are a DPS specc. We do not want to regularly use GCDs to heal ourselves, or refresh Earth Shield. They are weak option and it feels terrible to use them. Lastly, Nature’s Protection will likely have decent uptime, but does not allow us to control it in any way other than holding Tempest, which really cannot be the solution, since it blocks access to Lightning Bolt during that time.

3. What to do?
With all this in mind, the community has obviously discussed possible directions for changes. While with all things, there is not perfect consensus, the following points are fort he most part not very controversial:

• Limit access to Lavaburst: This can likely only be achieved through significant talent revamps. The interaction of talents like Rolling Magma and DRE in combination with the almost constant availability of Lavaburst creates an unhealthy gameplay loop that erases skill expression and introduces a high dependence on getting good proccs. It also prevents Lavaburst from being an actual hard hitter. Limiting Lavaburst access beyond Echo of the Elements and Lavasurge to talents like Windspeaker’s Lava Resurgence would enable Lavaburst to return to being the exciting button it used to be.
• Similiary, add skill expression to resoucrce management: Right now spenders do not feel interesting to press because they are available just about all the time with the amount of Maelstrom we can generate, they do not hit particularly hard, and they offer no rewards or impact gameplay in any way beyond the mediocre damage numbers they produce. Stormbringer’s Tempest ability being gated behind spending a certain amound of Maelstrom is generally a cool idea, but the way it is right now, there is no form of skill expression in resource generation and the way we spend it, which makes this interaction signficantly less interesting.
• Introduce options to manage and spread Flameshock more efficiently. This could be done via a talent that makes Lavburst spread Flameshock or give the same interaction to spells like Earthshock, which currently does not see play outside of m+, where it’s not chosen because it would perform better than Elemental Blast, but because it once again offers more access to Lavaburst.
• Rework our specc tree. There is, frankly, no way around this. Almost all of the problems I have outlined stem from one issue with the specc tree or another. Bridging the gap between the two sides of the tree and the playstyles that are connected to them, adressing gameplay issues that stem from talent interactions or lack thereof, and making sure that our talent tree is balanced in terms of individual talent power and talent cost, all have the potential of being realized through a rework. This is also important because the Hero Talents for Elemental Shaman are both impacted negatively by the state of the specc tree!

I want to end this post by expressing my appreciation for the way the WoW-Team has staken in feedback and is clearly listening to the player base. Being an Elemental Shaman in Dragonflight has not been easy. And I would be lying if I said that there isn’t a significant amount of frustration over the lack of communication with the Ele community and adjustments towards the specc. But the way the development for The War Within has been going is unprecedented in its volume of communication and willingness to listen. As such, I hope this is a good time to once again raise the issues we as a community have identified and remain hopeful that Elemental Shaman will receive the attention and the changes that this iconic specialization and its players deserve.

[Bitteroldman-stormrage]

This is coming from the elemental perspective: While there is some great discussion in here, I do not think a single word of any of this is being read. They have said in the past that beta is for numerical adjustments and not class reworks. I believe shaman and hunters (?) are the only remaining classes that never received a significant rework in alpha and I do not see them adjusting much beyond changing a few numbers. It is essentially season 4 shaman + hero talents. I do enjoy a few aspects of the hero trees but in both cases the ramp up time for actually doing damage is way too high in a m+ environment. For storm hero talents, the damage in dungeons is going to be super inconsistent from what I can tell from what beta testing I did. it seems that you can pump occasionally but a lot of time you are fishing for procs or buffs to start doing real damage. In low keys you are going to watch the mobs all die while you try and set up procs and/or buffs to do actual damage. The farseer tree is going to require setup to start doing any kind of real damage as it does now, making the spec pretty awful in low keys when mobs die quickly.

The only positive that I see currently is the set bonus is not bad. It doesn’t change your gameplay much but it is not a bad bonus.

I would try enhancement but the button bloat on that spec is pretty abysmal currently.

[Augurion-stormrage]

I’m going to address visual issues with Shaman, in which I feel the class has stagnated or actually regressed from Legion.

My visual problems are as follows:

1- You pruned Earthen Rage, an iconic and exciting visual that incorporated our barely represented earth magics. This feels terrible, it took visual impact away from the class.

Please remove one of these boring small % talent passives from our class tree that have no associated visuals and return our Earthen Rage spikes back to us.

2- Enhancement used to have beautiful tri-elemental earthen rage style spikes from its Legion artifact. Bring it back.

It also used to have flame tornadoes from the Legion artifact, bring that back.

3- Enhancement looks really dumb constantly stowing their weapons to cast a spell like shocks or LB/CL.

Consider doing like DK’s and making us raise our weapons in the artifact raised, crossed weapons animation when we cast a spell, so we shoot our spells through our weapons like DKs shoot their spells through their swords. It’s more thematic for enhancement to channel spells through their weapons.

4- We came off an expansion entirely themed around the elements with the Incarnates, and virtually none of the assets were used to update our dated visual kit. You were supposed to update our spells in Legion, but that never went through.

There are beautiful lightning vfx assets with Dragonflight, as well as flame, water, and frost effects. None used to improve shamans.

The elemental conflux heirloom trinket has a gorgeous tri-element proc animation. Why not grab that animation to update our very ugly and outdated Elemental Blast?

Ascendance has become mandatory to most builds, yet it looks hideous and outdated, please revisit it.

5- Consider expanding ghost wolf and feral spirit forms to more racial motifs. I want the spirit raptor and ghost raptors to use the beautiful and updated Zandalari raptor models instead of the old, outdated vanilla raptors. I’m sure Draenei would love elek or talbuk forms, and taurens their kodoks/thunderhoofs.

[Dedaru-moon-guard (Dedaru)]

Can we fix the issues with Totemic for Enhancement Shaman?

As of right now it feels like some talents are in the wrong spots.

Example: Middle tier for the choice of Amplification Core and Oversurge is VERY underwhelming, and I think they should be the separate talents instead of Totemic Rebound and Lively Totems; the latter two should be the either/or choice in the center. That’s because both Stormstrike and Lava Lash are mutually exclusive buttons that spend between 6-7 Maelstrom

Getting rid of Windfury Totem feels weird for a Totem-based Shaman, The replacement Totem does nothing with our Mastery (or Haste for that matter) and won’t benefit from our damage output AND lasts for only 20 seconds? Meaning we have to babysit it like we did Searing Totem in the past instead of having it be a passive drop and forget.

And don’t get me started on the Imbuement line…Supportive Imbuement upgrading our nothing-damage Flametongue Weapon? Really? Unless the damage of FT Weapon is increased, this is going to be the choice to be ignored.

Feels like it’s trying to be everything at once and stumbling over it’s own feet.

[Drlightning-lightbringer]

I love the thematics of this set of hero talents for elemental and it feels fun to play, but because Tempest doesn’t interact with a lot of our talents it feels off and seems like it would be a way to improve skill expression. Timing your stormkeeper talent or surge of power procs to overload tempest casts in lieu of just lightning bolt casts. I think that was the most surprising part of using tempest was finding out how much it doesn’t interact with.

It feels cool to use and looks nice, but it almost, pauses your rotation because it doesn’t have synergy with a ton of talents associated with lightning bolt. I’m not sure if that’s intentional or not, but I think if we really want to lean into it, it needs to be able to be used in conjunction with stormkeeper for starters.

Further testing

Further testing and I’m starting to think even though Tempest replaces lightning bolt, it doesn’t benefit from our mastery as well, which also seems like a miss. Granted, it’s not listed in the mastery as something it would enhance, but once again, if it’s replacing lightning bolt, shouldn’t it benefit the same way? Granted, it’s cool it can strike a secondary target and proc those sweet three extra chain lightnings, but still.

I played with Farseer for elemental as well and there’s a lot more synergy and possible play loops built into it compared to Stormbringer, so I’m really hoping this is just something waiting to be fixed and updated and not an intended lack of synergy.

It’s still a really fun playstyle because getting back to enjoying throwing lightning is amazing, but I think without those talents and gameplays playing into each other, it’s going to get passed over a lot for Farseer instead which would be unfortunate.

I did a dungeon with it, and it does feel great to roll chain lighting around and everything like that. Also, it’d be really nice to have a resource counter buff for tempest building so you know how far away you are from getting it from using maelstrom as well.

[Conductabull-moon-guard]

My main gripes with elemental shaman are pathing in the spec tree, lackluster spenders, being fire caster #5, not having auto spread for flame shock creating unfun tab target gameplay, and the gameplay of DRE/Ascendance.

The spec tree as most have pointed out is very imbalanced in favor of fire and the lightning builds require a lot of supporting abilities and excessive tracking needed to play effectively.

Our spenders constantly feel underwhelming to hit, most specifically earth quake - you’d think the constant buffing to earthquake as an ability would highlight the fact that it is a massive problem. Earth shock feels like a wet noodle thats just there for a free SoP or Meatball. And Ele blast, well thats ele blast and imo makes the gameplay feel clunky.

Ultimately I’d love to see earthquake just go the way of the dodo or make it follow target we cast it on. With the constant movement in the game coupled with the ability being incredibly weak its just not an enjoyable button to hit.

Elemental blast, albeit can hit hard - which is great! Does at times just feel like a maintenance buff coupled with the talent below. Also its positioning just doesn’t feel right - I’d love to see it put where power of the maelstrom is as the ability really is what the center of the tree seems to aim for and thats be a mixture of both gameplay types.

Earthshock is hella underwhelming, and over the years just has felt constantly weaker and weaker. (I know this is a pipedream, but make it interrupt casts again.)

When it comes to the lackluster spenders one talent comes to mind in specific and is echoes of great sundering. I like the idea of it - but if the concept is to hybridize the ST and AOE by weaving different spenders. Hitting EQ should then also make EB/ES cleave or have some added effect. (Perhaps make ES/EB do do less damage but hit multiple targets.)

And its certainly to late for it, but we have so many fire casters - When you think of iconic shamans you’ll probably think of Thrall or Drek’thar. Lightning and Earth. Ever since the removal of the earthern shards mastery theres been a dire lack of earthern abilities. Really feels like a missed chance to not be capitalizing on effects like these to give shamans that unique class identity outside of lightning.

An issue that always pops up again is flame shock spreading for AoE fire builds. Yes you can juggle your SoP’d Flame shocks, utilize magma totem and p wave to spread them. (I detest pwave as an ability as well, but thats a whole other rant.) - But what about when our SoP just straight up isn’t working right. When theres tiny adds that just eat up your dots, when magma totem decides to take a vacation. Why does enhance get the easy and free spreading only? Why are we saddled with this miserable tag target minigame? Please for the love of god give us some auto spread and while at it, remove the 6 target cap for flame shock. Why is it 6? Why this arbitrary number, are they afraid of the DRE proc’d ascendances and P-waves meatballing to high hell? Theres certainly ideas one could have to limit that.

Another issue is DRE/Ascendance - why are we still using a model from Cata? Why is this ability mainly revolved around lava burst and the talents that interact with it. Why can’t we have further beyond baked into Ascendance/DRE to make us not feel like hitting anything but lava burst a mistake in that window.

Then theres the DRE portion, this really is our only traditional big CD thats tied to complete randomness. Give it the tempest or evoker treatment and make it predictable to proc.

Overall, this class and spec just reaks of a lack of sense of direction - yet we all know how fun, unique, and amazing it COULD be. Atleast some of my grievances with it are being somewhat alleviated with stormbringer. (Which you guessed it is another long list of grievances that i’m huffing copium by the gallon are already noticed. - Given the NYI listed on some of the abilities.)

[Magnvs-moon-guard]

My feedback will be ignoring things that are “hopefully” just bugs waiting to be fixed. Stuff like tempest needing to inherit lightning bolt modifiers feels super obvious, and hopefully is just a missing flag rather than a design decision.

Elemental Shaman

Elemental is sort of a community meme for being ignored. Whether true or not, it does have a bit of an ignominious history: the relative disaster of Legion Shaman followed by the “Just wait for 8.1 full rework” followed by “We don’t do midexpac reworks” has left Elemental in a state of disrepair. Like some other specs (destro, pre-rework Ret, WW) it largely existed as a spec built as a jinga tower of bandaids and half-fixes over the years. However, unlike those other dire specs, it has not yet received its long awaited and long promised full rework.

The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
No doubt the good is that Elemental arguably has one of the strongest thematics from which to draw. Whether taking from titanic themes (fist of ra-den, the thunder king) or purely from elemental ones, there’s no shortage of places one could draw inspiration…

However, it seems that inspiration rarely actually happens. In an expansion where half the enemies are primalists using over the top and gorgeous new elemental spells, elemental received nothing aside from the minor visual rework to primordial wave.

Similarly, elemental has an identity as the only pure lightning caster… but it can’t only cast lightning. I think Stormbringer had a huge opportunity here to replace Lava Burst with Storm Burst or something similar to really double down, but alas. On the flipside, people who prefer a more simple playstyle lovingly hold onto their pasta build and fling meatballs despite the flaws.

Solutions

I’ll be pitching some solutions here, from large scale to smaller.

Maelstrom can be scrapped. Builder spender specs require a great deal of finesse and micromanaging to manage to feel good, and typically this is most easily accomplished when the spending feels natural or as a gateway to something else. Maelstrom (and its elder cousin fulmination did not). In my dream rework, Elemental becomes a combo caster based on short cooldowns instead of a builder spender. This hypothetically opens up weaving elements together for a more fitting thematic.

A more midscale pitch is offer more replacement spells. For example, the ugly central talent point simply boosting Maelstrom could be replaced by a choice node between Storm Burst and a node empowering lava bursts (for example, by increasing the proc rate of lava surge or even adding critical % to its damage done). By offering this clear defined choice, the tree lower down can then be further diversified. The central capstone with mastery proc may remain, but the left side can fully commit to lightning and the right side fully commit to fire. By having it be more diversified, this opens up the choices of customizing by weaving in a little of both or by choosing the preference and sticking to it (as opposed to the current muddied option favoring neither).

Further, it boggles me that there aren’t four capstones: one for each element. It even writes itself, too. The earth capstone could be a return of the old Earthen Fury mastery as a more active debuff. The ice capstone could be a place to move icefury (especially assuming ice is situated closest to lightning, since it fits best in those builds). Honestly, a central 4-way choice node that lets you choose which element lava burst adopts makes a ton of sense too: moving mountains will fall baseline.

Some smaller, more manageable (and theoretically easily doable) changes either instead of a major rework or perhaps alongside some midrange stuff include:

• Increase the power of earth shock so it’s a real competitor to EB (since EB does far more damage per execution time and dps, and provides a buff)

• Clean up ugly talents like Elemental Equilibrium. Cool in concept, but the ghastly 30 second CD turns a cool interaction of weaving multiple elements together to a boring micro CD.

• Clean up two point talents. As we saw from the Destro overhaul, a talent tree without 2 pointers is beautiful. It opens up so many options, and theoretically allows for more developer creativity as well.

• Improve earthquake. There are tons of directions in which this could go. Earth quake could follow its target, or at least move closer to the targets a la frozen orb. Its damage is significantly underwhelming for THE earth spell of elemental shaman. More exciting options include a proc from lightning spells to make the next one free to convert it to nature damage. Or an upgrade in the fire tree to make a volcano.

Summary

Elemental is not in a great spot. However, there are an insane amount of directions one could go to make improvements big and small. Maelstrom is ugly, but passable if other changes are made. Changes big of fantasy with a dash of mechanics could do a lot of heavy lifting in making elemental “feel” better regardless of strength.

[Wólvy-frostmourne]

Some Resto Shaman feedback for Hero Talents now when I played a bit in beta.

Totemic:

As good as the Surging Totem feels - not having to cast Healing Rain and just pressing a renew button every 20 secs, that’s huge win. However, several times the totem would put the Healing Rains in very akward places, for example, the mage standing solo away from the tank and the mobs. If I cast it early, while the tank is gathering mobs, the rains will just chase them but almost never hit anything. I even tried to stay in melee on top of the tank but even that would yield some weird placements sometimes.

Overall it feels amazing when it works and the placement is good but when it’s not, it feels really bad wasting that press of a button and not having control to change how things work. It would probably work great in teams that coordinate and stack but in PUGs that would be a nightmare and it would probably end up being very unenjoyable.

Personally, I wouldn’t mind having to target the totem and may be even allow “recasting” it to reposition it - as many time as you want. You will have full control there and if things go south you can waste globals to replace it. This way it would also feel more like an actual totem because right now it’s just a button that you press but unlike other totems (HST and HTT are exception), you don’t have any interaction with it. You don’t have to place it or you don’t feed healing into it. And although it’s nice to have press-and-forget button, it’d be nice to have it a bit more interaction and control over it so it doesn’t feel wasted in some scenarios.

The other big problem is Imbuement Mastery. First, it kind of forces you to take Earthliving weapon so that the talent even makes sense. That simply feels bad, not to mention that there are no good candidates in the talent tree to free up a point for that. And then I thought ok, Whirling Elements will apply Earthliving for me through Chain Heals. And it does. However, that Earthliving is the regular duration and it’s not increased by the promised 6 seconds. May be that’s a bug? Not sure but basically that’s a dead node and it would make no difference for me if I just removed the point from it and play with one talent less. If there’s no good way to rework that, it should at least apply the extended duration to the Earthliving from Whirling Elements so that the node is not completely wasted.

Farseer:

I was very sceptical about this but it actually feels quite nice to play with as you get on demand healing whenever you decide to summon the ancestors. Having Unleash Life in dungeons is not something that I like as it’s basically an extra button - you did say you don’t want to add new buttons and bloat to existing gameplay but that’s exactly what’s happening here. I don’t necesarily hate it but I also don’t like having another button to press (literally ran out of key bindings as you don’t allow the default UI to bind spells on mouse wheel up/down). At the end of the day, I don’t have a good suggestion on what to replace the Unleash Life with but I thought sharing the opinion above could provide some insights on how to improve it a bit.

Another unpleasant moment was actually having 3 Riptides and 3 Lava Bursts. That could be useful sometimes but that’s more of a niche. Most of the time you don’t need that many stacks, especially for Riptide and it feels like a waste sitting on them. So I decided, fine, I’ll remove my Echo of the Elements talent from the regular talent tree, save a point there and invest it in something else! Only I couldn’t… The problem is that the Echo of the Elements node leads to Earthen Harmony and Ascendance and there’s no other way to get to them. Yes, in raid, you can run some of the other talents and get to these nodes but there’s no way to do that in dungeons. So I had to swallow this and play with 3 stacks of Riptide which at the end of the day felt more like a waste. I think this needs a rework - either the hero talent node or may be adding another option in the shaman talent tree - anything to actually make this feel good.

I assume that’s a bug but Ancestral Swiftness did not replace Nature’s Swiftness so I had both and they did not share a cooldown. So I could use them both! That actually felt really, really good but I would assume that this probably also goes into the overpowered section and it’s probably getting fixed. If it doesn’t though, I’m sure noone would mind it!

And lastly, the ancestors don’t do any damage, they only heal. That is actually a problem in dungeons for couple of reasons. First, you’d often use your Nature Swiftness to cast your Healing Rain on top of the mobs to do damage and then there’s nothing to heal yet at this point thus the ancestor is wasted. Similarly if you are using the talent that allows Riptides to proc ancestors, sometimes you’d proc them in a situation that has no follow up healing and they will be wasted as well. Asking for them to do damage is probably too much but may be if they expire without ever casting a healing spell, you could get a buff of some sort - small primary stat or something similar so it doesn’t feel dismal if you had one rolling but there was nothing to heal.

[Theun-area-52]

The 4pc bonus for Restoration Shaman seems to be giving the incorrect amount of cast time reduction for Tidal Waves. It is taking the base 20% cast time reduction on Tidal Waves to 65% instead of the expected 36%. The mana cost reduction seems to be working properly.

Side note: Restoration Shaman often has multiple cast time reductions now, which means we’re often sitting and waiting on our GCD to finish. Haste generally isn’t a popular stat for us, so sitting for 0.5 seconds (or more) waiting on the GCD to finish feels pretty bad. Aside from that, the set bonus works pretty well and meets all the desired goals

[Urzzoth-tichondrius]

Elemental Shaman Feedback

ELEMENTAL TALENT TREE

This talent tree is bloated and needs some reduction in two point talents. Also the fire side is really hindered by AoE cap. Here are some suggestions:

1. Row 7: To give shaman more options, Eye of the Storm, Power of the Maelstrom and Master of Elements should be 1 point talents. This will free up points for more options. Elemental is one of the top 3 specs with the most 2 point talent nodes. Need to reduce the bloat

2. Remove Swelling Maelstrom. Elemental shaman spec is swimming in resources once geared. Increase Maelstrom cap to 125 and remove this talent.

3. Remove or combine Ice Fury with flux melting and electrified shock. The community either loves or hates this talent. Most of the hate seems to be the hard casting of Icefury and having to spend talent point to get to other talents.

4. Liquid Magma Totem: Increase target cap to at least 6 or uncap. This talent is very frustrating in AoE situation since EQ hits for such little and CL is also capped.

5. Remove Searing flames and add the Season Four 4 piece tier bonus here or make it a competing talent somewhere in the fire side of the tree

6. Surge of Power Flame Shock range increased to 10yards

7. Reduce Ascendance cool down to 2 minutes

SHAMAN TALENT TREE
Elemental shaman needs to have more damage reduction and to bring some better utility to groups and raids. Here are some suggestions:

1. Planes Traveler: increase cooldown reduction to 1 minute

2. Astral Bulwark: increase damage reduction to 40%

3. Earth Elemental: reduce cooldown to 2 minutes. Also reinstate the shield effect to a 20% damage reduction like barkskin. When the Primal Elementalist talent is taken, make the DR 40%

4. Row 7: again major point bloat here: Make Elemental Warding, Nature’s Guardian and Winds of Al’Akar one point nodes

5. Remove Thunderstorm Talent and make it baseline, Move up and replace it with the talents Lightning lasso and Thunderstruck

6. Move up the Stoneskin and Tranquil Totem talents to replace Thunderstuck and Lighting Lasso talent nodes.

7. ROW 10. With Stoneskin and Tranquil Totem moved up, replace them with following talents at this spot: Wrath of Air Totem, a 3-5% haste buff to group/raid members and Windfury Totem. This will allow shamans to choose which totem is best based off their group composition. Also this will free up a point for enhance shamans and also to bring a different buff when not grouped with melee classes.

ADD RAID BUFF:

Elemental is the only spec along with restoration shaman that does not bring a raid buff. Enhance at least has Windfury totem for melee classes and to some extent resto shaman has spirit link totem that is somewhat unique. Elemental does not even have anything close to these talent/spells. Having played elemental shaman since Mist of Panderia and recently played Classic Cata, I am shocked and disssapointed at how much utility elemental use to bring and how it all has been removed from the spec.

Some suggestions for adding a raid buff for (elemental) shamans:

1. Add Wrath of Air Totem and Windfury Totem to shaman tree. Wrath of Air Totem can be a 3-5% haste buff (seem above).

OR

2. Add new talent to elemental shaman tree: Sky Fury Totem: Increase critical strike chance of healing and damage spells by 3%. This talent could replace the Swelling Maelstrom talent (see above)

FARSEER HERO TALENT TREE

Call of Ancestors: I like the theme and this Hero Tree has potential. Some suggestions:

1. Ancestors should be able to overload, albeit maybe at half of the shamans mastery level. The output of the ancestors feels pretty weak.

2. Spirit Walker’s Momentum. Seems awful and with fire build usually not an issue with movement. Remove this talent. Maybe add new one where ancestors now have a change to lava surge.

3. Nature’s Harmony. Extremely weak. At minimum, increase cooldown reduction to 20 seconds and increases heal to 20%. Could replace with a buff to Ancestral Guidance by increasing effect by 20%

4. Earthen Communion: Again elemental has weak defensive this is pretty bad too. Increase charges to 5 and heal to 35%. Could replace with a buff to Ancestral Guidance by increasing effect by 20%

5. Ancestral Swiftness: This capstone is very weak and forces you to take a shaman tree talent. Would like to see this totally scrapped and replaced with a a new hero talent:

ANCESTRAL ASCENDANCE: When ascendance is active, all ancestors are transformed into flame ascendants.

[Upgráyedd-area-52]

Is anyone else missing Windfury Weapon entirely? The talent node that held it is Refreshing Waters now. I see Wordup’s full review of it so far and I cant even embue my weapon to test the spec out. Am I missing something?

[Urzzoth-tichondrius]

Elemental Farseer: When ancestors are active and I am in ascendance, if I cast lava beam the ancestors do NOTHING. If i am not in ascendance and casting chain lightning they will cast chain lightning

[Zezu-daggerspine (Zezu)]

@Upgráyedd-area-52

Is anyone else missing Windfury Weapon entirely?

It’s baseline now for enhance. Look in your spellbook.

[Basahsk-thrall]

For Elemental Shaman, is Tempest’s current lack of interaction with stats or any of the talents which effect Lightning Bolt intentional? As it stands at the moment, some players are recommending that Elemental Shamans should instantly cancel Tempest casts because it is a DPS loss over a plain Lightning Bolt.

Given this skill is the lynchpin of the entire Hero spec, that is a very bad thing.

[Pepino-frostmourne (Pepino)]

Farseer from a Restoration perspective,

• Call of the Ancestors suggestion, Please make it have some interaction with Undulation, I’m flustered already with keybinds and the intensity healing especially in M+, I do not need another button/weak aura to keep track off. I hate the idea of being forced into Unleashed Life especially in M+ where I don’t even take it.

Solution/Reasoning, Every 2nd proc of Undulation calls an Ancestor to your side for 6 sec. Whenever you cast a healing or damaging spell, the Ancestor will cast a similar spell. This gives players especially in M+ an alternative way without requiring Unleash Life if they choose too, or even in Raid if they prefer to not run Unleash Life at all, let the player have choices.

• Final Calling suggestion, Ancestors should cast “Hyrdobubble”, when a party member drops under 35% HP, if not they’ll cast it on expiration on an injured party member.

Solution/Reasoning, With Ancestors casting on the player that essentially needs it sooner than later is a huge quality of life change, I need the shield now not in 6 seconds time, this just creates a better window/buffer time to heal players in need and reduce over healing aswell. When the Ancestor expires I may not even need the Shield or a player who did might be dead.

I think these 2 simple changes, creates better player choice rather then forcing mandatory talents that increase keybinds and QoL when comes to utilising the Shield.

Also will we be seeing and adjustments coming to the class talent trees and spec trees for Shamans as a whole?.

I think a little communication would go a long way to quiet concerns a lot have raised.

Edit: Shamans as a whole needs a proper group/raid buff, we need something to help us get a position in keys/raids, Lust is too common now to be the only reason. Shamans desperately need something.

Suggestions,

• Blessing of Thunderaan, 3-5% Haste
• Blessing of Neptulon, 3-5% Mastery
• Elemental Guidance, 3% Haste, 3% Mastery

Something on theme, unique to Shamans, we need something else other then Lust.

[Wordup-mannoroth]

It’s currently underneath (not below, but physically beneath) the Focused Insight/Refreshing Waters node, but it’s still there and you do still need to spend a point on it. The only real way to do this is using a starter build and removing points around it (so it stays selected). Seems like a bug from migrating the live tree to beta which happened early Alpha.

[Salanda-executus]

Blizzard,

I’ve played a Shaman for the majority of my time in WoW since the release of MoP. I’m honestly saddened by how boring the Shaman Hero Trees are when compared to some of the other classes. Where is the fantasy? Where is the awe-factor? Where is the creativity? It doesn’t exist if you’re a Shaman, apparently.

Stormbringer - can you please tell me why this is even a thing? If I’m Elemental and you’ve let me choose throughout the Elemental tree which element to focus on (which I LOVE because options are cool) WHY would you offer a hero tree that FORCES you to do one element? It makes zero sense.

With my Shaman I choose to focus on Fire/Frost. I’ve chosen options on live that let me exclusively use those elements and no lightning because I don’t enjoy that playstyle. When I unlock my hero talents - the Stormbringer talents are almost entirely useless to my playstyle. Out of 10 points, only ONE point has any effect on my ideal playstyle.

I think it would be much better if “Stormbringer” was revamped into something like Eternalist (since Primalist now has negative connotations as of Dragonflight) where a Shaman can further specialize in their chosen element be it Fire, Frost, or Electricity or choose a new one. Give more options for all three. It could be as simple as:

[Eternal Might] (main talent) - every 400 Maelstrom spent replaces your next Lightning Bolt(Tempest), Frost Shock(Glacier), or Lava Burst(Meltdown) with an improved version powered by the Eternals. This version deals X damage to your target, and additional damage to all enemies within 8 yards of the target. This talent could also simply give you a choice of which element you’d like to specialize in and it would transform all future choices to that element.

[Unlimited Power] - same as live.

[Eternal Attunment] - Increases the critical strike chance of your chosen element by 10% and the damage of your chosen element by 5%.

[Primal Grasp] - Your chosen element’s critical strikes reduce the target’s movement speed by 50% for 3 seconds.

etc.

But please don’t let it go live as it is. Don’t limit the choices of people who don’t want to be a Lightning Shaman. There are quite a few of us!

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And I know what someone will inevitably say. “Well then just do Farseer!” but the issue is (A) Why should I be forced into a single hero tree path? And (B) Farseer is SUPER BORING.

Farseer revolves around these silly ancestors. The ancestors that randomly appear, last a few seconds, and from what I’ve experienced are pretty whelming. Not under, not over, just plain ol’ whelming. They’re honestly not interesting. Why not have them appear as famous NPC Shamans? Would be much more interesting.

Honestly, I think Farseer should be reworked entirely. The premise is not exciting enough. But even with how boring Farseer is, I feel like I’m stuck with it if Stormbringer goes live…which stinks. -_-

Totemic is fun and very useful though. So kudos on that one. Have literally nothing bad to say about it at all.

[Simplejakk-deathwing]

Most people in here are talking about mechanical changes so I’m going to bring up some fantasy recommendations to bolster what it means to be a Shaman.

1. Increase the size of our totems by over 100%. At the moment, totems are pretty small and kinda just look like tiny, meaningless objects on the ground. If our totems were larger in size, it would create more group recognition that there is a class in the party with vast utility. I think that others would sorta feel the Shaman presence more.

2. Please give us more Hex variants. When I think of Voodoo magic and the sort, one key animal that comes to mind is a regular 'ol chicken. How in the heck do we not have ‘Hex: Chicken’? Please expand on this.

3. Give us a glyph that grants the spell effect/s of the old ‘Chain Heal’. The golden color, along with the jingle, feels more Troll-ish or witch doctor-y.

4. Please let us transmog ‘Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros’ over DW. It is no secret that HoR is THE Enhancement weapon. It feels really bad seeing Warglaives of Azzinoth, TFury, Shadowmourne, etc everywhere in the game when we’re not able to wield the legendary that was ours. I’m not asking for 2-hand mechanics, I just think this should be a special exception to the current transmog restriction.

5. Significantly buff the spell effect of ‘Tidecaller’s Guard’ and our other weapon imbues. Maybe the OG spell effects need to be completely redone… we should look like the elements are coursing through us. For something like ‘Windfury Weapon’, our MH should look like a tiny storm. For ‘Flametongue Weapon’, there should be significantly more fire or lava. It would be cool if the character’s entire arms were sorta augmented with elemental effects depending on the imbue/s present.

6. Let us (sorta) customize our elementals. I think it’s fair to say that people prefer certain models over others… please make this happen.

7. Let Shamans turn into a ball of lightning because reasons.

8. For the love of all that is good and holy, put Shaman Tank in the game. I doubt it can happen this expansion but please include it in the next. Shaman tank has been wildly successful in SoD. Also, now that we’re allied with the Earthen Dwarves, it would match in fantasy because they have a strong connection with earth - they could very easily share their teachings with us.

9. Tortollan Shamans when? We helped millions of turtles make it to the water. They owe us. Big time.

10. I know I said that I wouldn’t include mechanical suggestions but please make ‘Lightning Shield’ cool. Give it an interaction somewhere.

11. Tying back to the hex variants, give us glyphs that make our spells look like they belong to witch doctors. Maybe ‘Earthgrab Totem’ could look like a spider web and encase them or maybe we can have that one thing that will turn our ‘Healing Rain’ into ‘Rain of Frogs’… and that’s already in the game!

12. Please revisit Shamans conjuring elemental weapons like our artifacts. This was really cool - I think everyone would like even more!

13. For Totemic: How about instead of dropping ‘Searing Totem’ we can get it reskinned as a ‘Serpent Ward’?

14. Lastly, please… PLEASE… let our spell effects compete with Warlocks, Mages, Priests… the art team went all out with theirs and ours just kinda stayed the same. Beef up the visuals for us.