Self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s specifically because Shaman hasn’t had any updates that everyone is flocking to the thread to meme on Blizzard about it. Half the posts are not feedback at all, and are just some variation of “Still nothing for Shamans?”
Not to take away from the fact that it is shameful that absolutely nothing has been said about Shamans, it is, just pointing that out.
It was not working with some modifiers when the Hunter patch was released. This last restart with the totem icon change is when I noticed all the modifiers were working.
Yes mana spring got updated, but it is still incredibly low so it basically doesn’t matter.
But, what if it DID. Imagine if having a Shaman in the group made the healers life way easier. It would be like Aug. Aug makes a healer’s heals much more powerful. If a Shaman’s mana spring made a healers mana pool much larger to the point where they could spam heals if a Shaman was there then that would be a major selling point.
Imagine if they made it like this:
Mana Spring:
Your Lava Burst and Chain Lightning casts restore 3% mana to you and 1 ally nearest to you within 40 yards over 5 seconds.
Allies can only benefit from one Shaman’s Mana Spring effect at a time, prioritizing healers.
Resh shaman grand papa atm dont work in pvp
I wish there was a way to pin feedback to the top of the thread or make it a jump to post for some of these. Some shamans put in some great feedback and suggestions that answered the questions they wanted from us but this chain has been going so long without any blue posts that stuff has gotten buried. I’ve not reposted ones I put in here cause I don’t want to make it look spammy and bury more posts.
Rhunon is spot on. You guys need to remember this little nugget:
Like Shadowshock said, they are not posting regular updates about it but pretty much all they are doing ATM is just working on making the Hero Talents functional. Putting aside whether or not they should be announcing all these bug fixes as they do them, take a step back for yalls own mental health an realize that about 95% of the suggestions, ideas, and cooks can’t happen until the Hero Talents are fixed up. I get people are upset (as am I) but go air your grievances about Blizzard and how they handle stuff somewhere else instead of burying valuable feedback related to the above. Go post in the Shaman forum for that.
I was given permission via a reddit post to discuss shaman feedback here on the mage thread so here we go.
I want to give a thanks to the team who created the season 3 / 4 tier set for ele shaman. This has been my favorite iteration of ele shaman I have ever played. I really enjoy how my class has access to funnel, and cleave at targets counts that shaman has never been able to. I feel like the gameplay across m+, raid, and open world content is incredibly dynamic, especially when you come across situations where there are various target counts (different m+ pulls, adds coming in on bosses). It really has been a treat putting the puzzle pieces together to figure out how I can maximize my lava burst cleave to reduce my primwave cooldown.
Losing this tier set is going to be rough for the fire side of the tree. The ability for skill expression and equivalency to other specs in the previous mentioned types of content will be greatly diminished. No longer can you play around reducing your potent cleave cooldown by about 20ish seconds on 1 target, 30ish seconds on 3 targets, and even higher amounts depending on target count.
The niche that I have grown to really enjoy and thrive in is being removed from my favorite spec and it honestly makes me kinda demoralized to play moving forward. I really hope that the playstyle/damage profile that ele currently has can be carried forward.
The current Farseer hero talent tree does not do so. The ancestors do not fill the niche that I so greatly enjoyed playing ele.
Ancestors only interact with our kit in 2 ways.
The player himself can “force” ancestors to spawn through ancestral swiftness (45 seconds) and primordial wave (40-35ish seconds). Farseers can also opt into an 8% chance to summon an ancestor via choice node as well.
This is somewhat interesting to play around with through timing ur cooldowns for a single target or aoe burst, but ultimately something to not play around with due to the lack of ancestor damage tuning, guarantee of ancestors (8% while meaningful is just too much variance) and interaction with the rest of our rotation and kit.
Fire elemental cooldown reduction. Currently at 10 seconds per ancestor, this is honestly a fairly meaningful reduction in cooldown, where combined with surge of power, probably can bring your fire elemental to 1 min, or 1.5 minute cooldown. This is very important for m+, but very unimportant in single target due to the actual damage contribution of fire elemental and its flame shock haste buff at only 1 target count.
I compare what the Farseer tree does for the fire talents within the elemental spec tree, to the current tier set, and without the aura buffs to abilities, it is a complete downgrade in my eyes.
My ideas on fixes.
This is just some thoughts I had on how the gameplay of the hero talent tree could be altered.
Greatly buff the ancestors’ damage. If ancestors were so meaningful to your dps that you were greatly incentivized to maximize casts and buffs during an ancestor, there could be some interesting gameplay.
Make them work with the ele kit a bit more. Some player stat buff, rotation changing spell effect, borrowing of effects from other shaman specs, a resource generation effect, an alternate or different cooldown reduction effect, are all potentially interesting opportunities for more synergy with our kit.
A functional change to how they work. I have seen suggestions making them more similar to our mastery overload effect. Other ideas could be: a one time burst similar to the current tome of unstable power trinkets, a cloudburst totem like effect where your dps is stored and can be released, it could also be something as simple as guaranteeing a 2nd or 3rd overload for a few casts.
Sorry to the mages who gotta deal with this. I love yall and ur arcane intellect.
Cy
To some extent this is true; however, it’s also important to communicate just how upset the community is with the state of the class. The content of this thread should be a massive red flag to Blizz about both the state of Shaman and the state of their communication with (as evidenced by both the helpful feedback and the complaining here) a passionate, informed, and active community.
I agree there is a balance here, and I do understand that posts that could be categorized as whining bury posts that provide valuable feedback, but there is some value in communicating the level of discontent the community has re: these issues.
Having said all that… that level of disappointment is clear and evidence in this thread is abundant. Moving forward, it would probably be beneficial if feedback was limited to class improvements as opposed to voicing discontent. If Blizz is unwilling to take seriously the hundreds of posts above voicing frustration with communication and class design… hundreds below won’t help, either.
TLDR: yes, we probably should focus on feedback moving forward, but on the whole, there is value in showing how upset the community is, too.
Hi 
I’m Lucenia aka aka Lucy. I’m an Elemental shaman player for a ~world 300 guild on retail and have played Ele for ~15 years, including playing it in classic TBC, Wrath, Cata, and SoD. I also maintain the Ele sims and Discord guides in both Cata and SoD currently. Suffice to say, I really love Elemental shaman and I love to play it competitively. But if I had to use one word to describe Ele on retail WoW, it would be “neglected”. Ele has been neglected from way back in the Dragonflight Alpha/Beta, all the way up to the current state of Farseer, Stormbringer, and the spec tree.
When I first read through the Farseer and Stormbringer trees I was cautiously optimistic. However after playing both on beta and then doing raid testing with both this weekend, I can’t with good conscience recommend that anyone play Ele until it receives updates, and I’m currently not planning to play it myself. Stealing from someone else’s idea, Hero talents should do at least one of these things:
For me, Farseer and Stormbringer both fail to meet any of these 3 expectations for Ele. Both specs have underwhelming visuals (Farseer by far even among the two), both don’t meaningfully change your rotation, and both don’t feel like they’re adding meaningful amounts of damage that I can feel as a player.
Overview
Farseer on paper had a lot of potential to change our gameplay (in AOE at least). In practice however it’s a forgettable hero tree that doesn’t add anything positive to the spec, and that - while playing - I often completely forget I’m even playing Farseer. Ancestors spawn mostly passively or through buttons we already press frequently in our rotation. They’re hard to see, the damage they do doesn’t feel impactful, and they don’t change anything about our core gameplay loop.
Farseer lends to an even more “degenerate” playstyle (to quote Blizzard) where you’re mostly just pressing Lava Burst and Spenders every global. When I first saw Farseer, I thought that maybe they would replicate all of our buttons and help us maintain more flame shocks in AOE, help us put down more earthquakes, generate some extra procs, etc. But in practice they do very little but spam Lava Burst just like Farseer players will. In single target the farseer rotation for probably about 98-99% of the time is:
When playing it in raid testing I found myself rarely pressing another button, including Icefury and Frost Shock. There’s simply too much Lava Burst to be had and the spec is incentivized to press Lava Burst as much as possible in order to reduce the cooldown of Primordial Wave and to try to proc Deeply Rooted Elements.
Farseers needs to be revisited with some fresh ideas for how they can actually change the player’s gameplay and feel more impactful visually, or otherwise needs to be reworked into a new hero tree entirely. It’s a boring, forgettable, and encourages a boring, forgettable playstyle.
Farseer Suggestions
Overview
Stormbringer is the bigger letdown for me, and that’s not because of the concept; it’s because Stormbringer is barely functional whatsoever. I assume that Blizzard’s intention with Stormbringer was to add an aspect of “RNG” to an otherwise “on-rails” rotation where we’re typically casting the same sequence of spells over-and-over. In practice (at least in the current implementation) this doesn’t work at all for several reasons.
Tempest hits for less damage than our Lightning Bolt, half of the hero talents that interact with it are non-functional, and it doesn’t seem to interact with any of our spec talents. This lends to an awkward play-style where pressing tempest doesn’t feel good at all and disrupts the natural cyclical flow that lightning builds have. From what we’ve found on the Beta so far, it’s better to cancel your Tempest than to press it (at least in Single Target, but its AOE damage is also laughably bad). If something doesn’t change, Elemental is looking to use this macro with Stormbringer:
#showtooltip
/cancelaura Tempest
/cast Lightning Bolt
Looking at specific Stormbringer talents, Conductive Energy is possibly the biggest letdown for me. In Single Target there’s no denying that it will barely do anything, as we already sustain 90% or higher uptime on Lightning Rod. In AOE however, if Tempest were to apply Lightning Rod to all targets hit, that would be a game changer for giving us a way to deal potentially “uncapped” AOE with our severely-limiting target-capped Chain Lightning. Instead however we have an iteration where Tempest only applies a single Lightning Rod to the target it was cast. This makes Tempest far less appealing to press in AOE, as we generally only have 2-3 Lightning Rods out at most at any given time.
The Awakening Storms talent is probably the most interesting one for me, as you can feel when it procs because it plays an audio cue and your maelstrom bar fills up. This is an interesting way to add randomness to the rotation that actually feels a bit impactful, because all of a sudden you might go from no maelstrom to swimming in it, ready to cast some hard-hitting spenders and Surge of Power-buffed fillers after. I would like to see this talent taken a step further and possible deal damage to nearby targets as well, especially in the absense of Conductive Energy applying Lightning Rod to all targets hit by Tempest.
Stormbringer Suggestions
Talents
Elemental’s talent tree is widely regarded as disappointing, lacking choice, lacking impactful nodes, and bloated with 2-point nodes. There’s a great writeup from Earthshrine Mod Elivrio about it already (stormearthandlava_dot_com/blog/2023/10/25/open-letter.html). 3 out of our 5 capstone nodes are fire-oriented (Primordial Wave, Ascendance Windspeaker’s Lava Resurgence/Skybreaker’s Fiery Demikse), 1 is neutral (Mountains Will Fall), and 1 is Lightning-oriented (Lightning Rod). Even of that single lightning-oriented capstone, the second Stormkeeper charge is considered a dead node because of the natural way that multi-charge cooldowns work in WoW.
Many of our capstones are virtually useless on their own and require additional 2-3 point investments to even unlock the potential of. Even if Blizzard were to remove these gate nodes (or rather, bake them into the abilities themselves), we would run into a situation where there just aren’t enough impactful nodes to put your points into for any single build, due to the heavy lightning/fire split and anti-synergy that incentivizes you to stick to only one or the other in your rotation.
Defensives
Elemental is naturally tanky, but lacks active defensive mitigation tools compared to most other specs. For reference, I play mage as well, which has Greater Invisibility, Ice Block, a Barrier, Mirror Images, Alter Time, Mass Barrier. Now obviously mage is a squishier class than Shaman, but your ability to control your survivability with a plethora of usable defensives is unparalleled. Shaman has a single charge of Astral Shift, Nature’s Guardian (which is passive and reactive), Earth Elemental increases our health by 15%, and Elemental has a meager 5% damage reduction through Primordial Bond. Dwarf practically feels mandatory for me as a Shaman because it gives me another active mitigation tool I can use to keep up. We need something more, whether it’s baking Primordial Bond into Earth Elemental baseline, a second charge of Astral Shift with independent cooldown timers, passive Damage Reduction when Earth Shield is applied, etc.
Raid Buff / Utility
Of course I’m going to mention this. Elemental is the single spec in the game that provides no powerful raid buff or utility. People keep saying “Death Knight and Shaman”, but that’s not the truth of it. Death Knights bring grips, which have been mandatory in fight design for at least 1 raid boss since Sepulcher of the First Ones, Enhancement brings Windfury Totem, and Restoration has multiple incredibly powerful cooldowns, Ancestral Protection Totem, and now potentially raid-wide 5% increased health through Ancestral Vigor. What does Elemental have?
Elemental has a long history of being one of the keynote buff classes. In TBC we were a mandatory bring to buff casters. In Wrath we were (less, but still) important for Bloodlust + haste buff (or spell power in the absence of a Demonology Warlock), in Cataclysm we have a whopping 4 buffs (Totemic Wrath, Elemental Oath, Wrath of Air Totem, Mana Spring Totem) plus being one of only 2 classes with an easily-accessible Bloodlust effect (I exclude hunter because it’s tied to a pet).
The Elemental meme in the community has gone on for too long. Many of us play this spec despite its shortcomings because we love the themeing and (historical) playstyle as much, but as time goes on those of us who have been around for years are worn down, we feel defeated, dejected, and neglected. This is a cry for help from the Elemental community. We want to play this game. We want to play this spec. Please notice us, and please care about us enough to do something.
More datamined stuff, maybe stuff is cooking? Source from MMO champion, nothing official yet but I cant’ imagine a world where lighting bolt was an instant cast unless they’re just referring to another spell modifying it. Reading data mining as plain text was never my forte, but we’ve got some more lines about us mentioned so that’s cool.
It reminds me of the “battle shaman” thing you would sometimes see in BFA where people would have a shaman just sit there throwing out his totems and doing damage until it was time to press spirit link and do a huge ascendance window.
I think being able to meaningfully support the other healers and their resources would be a pretty cool idea, but it would have to be really REALLY good to convince people to do it because its in the class tree so an ele shaman could be throwing out significantly more lava bursts and giving the healers a lot more mana than a resto shaman would be with their riptides and the random free bursts they get.
To what Yeastyholes has said, I agree yelling the memes about shaman does not help any one. However, I do wish there would be more communication from Blizzard about what they are looking at, what they are changing, even stating in the patch notes “We have now fully implemented the remaining hero talent in the stormbringer elemental tree.” would help tons and communication would help curb some of the doomsayers.
For changes I would think would help us out in the hero talents:
Stormbringer tree:
– make Tempest replace chain lightning as well, it would just help with the flow of using tempest when it proc’s with out the need to track it with weak auras or other such addons.
– Have tempest gain the values of all the buffs that lightning bolt and chain lightning gets from the talent trees, if needed just reduce there potency if the added power to tempest creates a problem.
– Reduce the ammount of Maelstrom needed to proc tempest, it feels real bad having to cast 8 earth shocks to even start gaining tempest.
– Make Natures protection passive, you can reduce it if needed but don’t tie it to targets being hit by an ability.
– Conductive energy should put lightning rod on every target hit, not just the primary.
Farseer:
– I can’t say how good the spirits would be fully geared to gain the most out of them but from the testing I have done they proc to infrequently with lava burst and only having one come out for prim wave/natures swiftness I dont really see them doing anything. I would like to see more of a chance to proc them with lava bursts to at least 10-15 percent chance. When you use prim wave have 2 come out, when you use natures swiftness have 3 come out.
– have them cast flame shock at a currently active target when they proc.
– Have Ancestral swiftness be changed, to no longer require you the need to take the talent Natures swiftness, If you do not have the talent Ancestral swiftness would become Ancestral call and would only call the ancestor to you but not give you the instant cast ability, if you do have natures swiftness then it would become Ancestral swiftness and it would stay the same as it currently is. Having to be forced to choose the capstone talent to have the hero talent work as attended is a horrid design and completely shafts totemic recall or the ability to gain self sustain talents.
In this vein, the way lighting rod works with earthquake right now for elemental is super janky, it’s an aoe that applies the debuff to a single target, but it’s a random mob instead of every mob, and often times, it’s the last mob you want to hit with it lol. So if you want to priority target someone with lightning rod you gotta ES or EB and then earthquake after, which wastes a few seconds of the debuff. Maybe make earthquake apply to all hit targets at 10-15% instead of the full 20? Maybe buff single target by making earth shock or elemetnal blast put lighting rod at 30-40% so we really feel those lighting bolts in ST.
Lighting needs a good boost talent anyways, and people will still bring a second stormkeeper charge for burst and ease of use sometimes anyways.
Feral Lunge should be baseline for all specs, and to reduce button bloat, it should be combined into one button with Ghost Wolf.
When you transform into Ghost Wolf, the button changes to Feral Lunge, retaining the same cooldown without affecting the functionality of Ghost Wolf.
The same principle should apply to spells like Chain Lightning and Chain Heal. They should be combined into one spell: if you target an enemy, it casts Chain Lightning; if you target a friendly, it turns into Chain Heal.
Blizzard has done this in the past with spells like Primordial Wave, Chain Harvest, and Evoker’s Living Flame. There are also help/harm macros that achieve this effect, but Blizzard should consider integrating more spells like this baseline to address button bloat.
People often ask me how I manage playing a Shaman with so many spells. I use this approach for many abilities:
It just makes more sense to me. While I don’t think all spells should be shared, similar spells like Chain Heal and Chain Lightning can be combined. Ghost Wolf and Feral Lunge should definitely be merged.
In Heroes of the Storm, Rehgar has Ghost Wolf and Feral Lunge combined, functioning similarly to what I’m describing. Instead of the entire ability being a cooldown like in HoTs, you should still be able to shift in and out normally in WoW as it is now, with the leap maintaining its original cooldown.
The issue with the ghost wolf change is that you can then no longer reactivate the spell to cancel the form.
The issue with Chain Heal vs. Chain Lightning, etc., is that it breaks several other functionalities. Many rely on auto-self cast when casting a healing spell while targeting an enemy. It can also be convenient to cast at your target’s target when casting a harmful spell while targeting a friend. Further, while your approach reduces button bloat, it also drastically increases the learning curve (as spells become approx. twice as complicated), and it hides visible cooldown / mana cost / range indicators for specific spells.
I am not saying this is a bad way to play; I understand why you implement these functionalities, but they are not universally better than the alternative. I think the best option here is the current one: provide the simplest gameplay experience out of the box while providing players tools to alter that experience (perhaps as you have).
Edit: I want to make sure I am clear that I do understand the advantages of this approach, and I think for a player that is familiar with the class, this is an excellent (borderline brilliant) way of reducing clutter, simplifying the UI / binds, etc. Considering the number of spells Shaman has at their disposal, I think combining spells on binds (via modifiers or target qualifiers) is close to a requirement and certainly a QoL improvement. I just think that, for a lot of players (especially depending on the content they are playing), this would have a steep learning curve, and for many players, it would force them to completely relearn how they target, bind, etc.
You have provided an effective workaround that attempts to solve a core issue with this class: button bloat.
We have too many spells, and often times they are not frequently used or you are incentivized to avoid them. Lava Burst builds are evidence of this, where your best option is often to ignore everything else and just press meatball. Tempest is currently an example of this, where your best option is not to use it. Examples: Frost Shock being reliant on Icefury to deal meaningful damage, Flameshock / Primordial Wave essentially being identical, Ele having no methods of spreading Flameshock beyond casting it (other classes have functionality where rotational spells spread DoTs, etc.), totems that have marginal effectiveness to the point of being irrelevant, etc.
I think the real problem is spell tuning and implementation. It was previously suggested that Icefury be replaced by a passive (that stacked over time). It has been suggested that totems are outdated and cumbersome. And, I think its clear from ideal DPS rotation that many spells need damage adjustments so that it is worth casting something else (aside from lava burst or lightning bolt) even at the cost of an extra GCD.
You make a valid counter argument, the ghost wolf thing might be a little too complicated for blizzard to develop but for chain heal/chain lightning my answer to your learning curve argument would be that blizzard made all that work for evoker’s living flame… Albeit, evoker is an advanced class (lol) and you need to type “ADVANCED” in chat before you make one.
but I think they can swing it, to me, having one button is less complicated than 2 buttons but Im just one person and ive also been playing this game for 20 years so I might be out of touch with a new player’s perspective so idk
I’m not a game developer by any means lol.
Either way, happy to respond just for the sake of keeping this thread comfortably at the top of the forums. Cheers~
Yep, edited my response a bit. I want to be clear I am not trying to “down talk” your approach. It clearly has advantages. I think it’s a smart approach, and I understand why it works for you. If this game was re-designed from the ground up, it would probably be a better approach than the one we are currently using (as you note, Blizz took a similar approach to your “Chain Heal” vs “Chain Lightning” suggestion with Evoker and Living Flame). That said, I think at this juncture, it would require a huge adjustment from the majority of Shaman players, and I think a complete reimagining of many spells to work fluidly.
I think the issue you are poking at is completely legitimate, though: there is too much bloat here, rotations are awkward, and oftentimes diverging from spamming one spell isn’t worth the GCD.
Greetings, fellow Shamans and Blizzard developers,
I’ve posted extensively in the Shaman forums and this feedback thread, and after seeing the ongoing discussions and suggestions, I wanted to consolidate all my feedback into one comprehensive post for clarity. As a dedicated Shaman main with extensive experience in both PvE and PvP, I aim to highlight the key areas that need attention and propose detailed improvements for each Shaman specialization. My hope is that by presenting this feedback in a clear and organized manner, we can collectively enhance the Shaman class and ensure it remains engaging and balanced for all players.
General Class Improvements
For example: When earth totems are present, shamans get passive physical damage reduction, when fire totems are active, shamans get passive magic damage reduction, when water totems are active, shamans get passive healing taken increase, and when air totems are active, shamans get passive avoidance etc… something like this would be very effective as well as fit the class fantasy.
Enhancement Shaman
Enhancement has seen some great changes, but it still requires fine-tuning to reach its full potential:
Restoration Shaman
Restoration Shaman is enjoyable but suffers from imbalance and lack of synergy within the talent tree:
Elemental Shaman
Elemental Shaman needs a redesign to better align with the class fantasy and improve gameplay:
Conclusion
Again, I’ve posted a few times in this thread but I wanted to consolidate all my thoughts into one post.
I really wish Blizzard would take the time to address this feedback. This is one of the most constructive feedback threads I’ve ever seen on the WoW forums. It’s very obvious that people love Shamans based on the sheer amount of effort and feedback just in this one thread. People are really spending their time to test and then write up multi-post novels about how the class can be improved, and it’s just wild to me that the class can go through an entire alpha without ANY patch notes or improvements.
Addressing these suggestions would not only enhance the gameplay experience for Shamans but also show that Blizzard values the passion and dedication of its player base. By implementing these changes, we can ensure that the Shaman class remains engaging, balanced, and true to its unique fantasy. Thank you for considering this feedback, and I look forward to seeing positive changes in the future.
Thank you for reading.
Tehra-Zul’jin
TL;DR
Wow this is really good information hope blizzard is reading all this.
Yep they definitely are, I’ll just find the Shaman section in the latest Beta patch notes.