Resto having all those tools makes it really fun and unique playstyle in solo shuffle if you like to pvp (probably even more fun in 3s if you have friends to do them with), I found SS exhausting but definitely had some fun and feel good moments in it as resto. If you haven’t tried it you might have some good fun with it.
Has Blizzard considered adding new spells that weren’t awful though?
Primordial Wave is responsible for the incredibly degenerate Lava Burst spam build.
Ice Fury is just a 2 layer maintenance debuff.
Tempest just doesn’t work with our talents and we don’t know if that’s intentional design or not because the Devs. haven’t said anything.
I like that you listed a bunch of reasons that ele is not fun and then somehow still came to the conclusion that it’s people being mad about a small DPS difference.
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I could make a similar list for most specs. Few are perfect. Rain of Fire, Blizzard and to a lesser extent Poison Bomb all suffer from being ground effect AoEs. Enhancement, Windwalker and Rogues can all struggle with survivability, too. Cloak of Shadows is great but you’re low health, leather wearing melee when it’s on cooldown. You say Elemental doesn’t bring enough to the group but what does a Frost DK bring? They have some utility, yes, but so do we. We’re not the only DPS that suffers from target caps, either. And yes, Elemental can feel like it’s too many buttons with too much (AoE) rotational complexity (with electrified shocks, lighting rods, surge of power etc) for not enough DPS, but I feel like you need a god damned PhD to really bang Arcane in Mythics these days.
Elemental is “fine”. It has problems. Most specs have problems. I don’t see people rushing to bring frost DKs, wind walkers, feral Druids and survival hunters to keys, either. But it’s a great class fantasy, it can absolutely be fun to play, and with a few tweaks I think we could go from “meh” to “excellent”.
We have two months of beta left. I think shaman will be getting some attention. Right now, yes, people are claiming the sky is falling because our hero talents are buggy (so are half the other classes) and we’ve gone two patch notes without changes. Concerning? Potentially. But be patient. If you’re expecting some rework that will make us into the new Fire Mage, I wouldn’t hold your breath. But if you’re looking to do some mythics (maybe 2700-3000?) and some raiding (AotC into some light mythics) or PvP (maybe 2200 solo shuffle?) I think Shaman will be 100% fine even if we don’t receive a SINGLE change from here.
If you want to go further than any of those three benchmarks then, sure, you have a better right to be upset.
Edit: I remember when Legion launched several of our artifacts didn’t even work. Like the Resto Shaman mace wouldn’t even accept artifact power. It took 28 days to be patched. None of this is new. If you’re been playing Blue for as long as I have you’re either accustomed to being a neglected class or you’ve already moved on)
Ok, and all 4 of those specs have received development time for TWW. WW and Survival got significant reworks. Survival(and hunters in general) got significant buffs to their survivability.
Ele has had NOTHING the entire alpha/beta cycle aside from a first iteration of hero talents.
We don’t. Prepatch is end of July. We have basically 1 month left of beta.
There will 100% be patches in prepatch. Also, the largest patch of any development cycle is usually the first patch after a new expansion launch. I expect a MASSIVE patch on September 3rd.
You make it sound like the work is done in one month. This is a rush job launch for quarterly earnings. The work won’t be done any time soon.
I am also sticking to Shaman because I PVP and Shamans are completely fine but for PVE? Definitely not, Enhance is somewhat okay right now but Ele and Resto have been in really sorry state for a good while.
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Alpha/beta is where all the significant testing happens. If they drop something in pre-patch or a week after expansion launch then it won’t have the months of testing that other classes got.
Currently elemental in DF is one of the most unfun specs I have ever played. I dropped the spec almost immediately after getting tier 4 piece in Season 3. I’m not wanting to go into another expansion with the same play style, because it’s not fun. It sucks, so much.
Fun is subjective. I love elemental.
I love activating storm keeper and then flame shocking a target into a full lightning lasso fishing for a lava surge proc. Then capacitor totem into lava burst, nature’s swiftness elemental blast, two instant lightning bolts bolstered by surge of power and storm keeper.
What a class fantasy. What a combo!
Monk is, statistically, the least played class in the game and all three specs are SUPER fun to play, I think it’s a reach to assume that just because something is underplayed it because it isn’t fun. People are meta slaves in 2024. People care more about performance than fun and it shows. If the most boring spec in the game was 50% ahead of every other spec it would be the most played in the game.
I do want some changes for shaman. I’m not saying I don’t. I’m painfully familiar with our issues. But I have faith we will get some attention before launch. I don’t think any of our three specs will end up meta. Shaman has been the developer’s most hated class for 15 years. But think we will be fine.
That’s definitely not how ele is currently played, but you do you I guess.
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It’s an excellent burst window on a 60sec CD in PvP. Earth shock is more often played for Elemental than blast is, though.
Just saying, the elemental class fantasy is very fun. I, personally, love ice fury into spreading electrified shock debuffs and setting up several lighting rods. Spriest is over there doing literally a single target rotation to an AoE pack of 20 mobs just cleaving with a passive proc (apparitions) and a passive spread ( psychic link). Everyone is gushing over how fun Spriest is to play lol.
Elemental is a very active spec with a ton of complex synergies to maximize damage. Little optimizations like magma totem, target an unaffected mob for a 4th flame shock then target a 5th unaffected mob for primordial wave. I don’t think Outlaw rogues give a single s$&@ about what mob they’re targeting with, again, a single target rotation that is passively cleaving.
The frustration of Elemental is how much work you’re doing, how much set up and resource generation required, how many synergies and if/then buffs you need to align, to do 1/3 the damage of the Demon Hunter that pressed his one button.
Elemental is FUN to play, it’s often just unrewarding.
Yeah, none of that is how ele plays in PvE.
It has been, at a time. Even recently. But sure, ignore the post.
We’re not going to see eye to eye here. And that’s fine. I think 90% of shaman would downvote my post if this forum had downvotes. This is an unpopular opinion. Liking shaman, meeting all of my goals every season on shaman, having a good time playing with friends and feeling perfectly viable etc… this isn’t what the shaman community wants to hear. They want to scream into the void.
The front page has 40 threads doing just that. God forbid I make a thread “Hey, I’m having fun. I think we look alright for TWW. There hasn’t been a single tuning pass done yet, so Ele’s performance is tough to gauge yet. I’d like to see some changes and believe we will likely get some before launch, but I’m not bursting a aneurysm losing sleep in the mean time”
Tuning is not, and has never been, the problem people have with shamans or ele not getting development time. There are serious issues with the spec that need to be addressed and they’re not just tuning knobs.
A lot of people are not having fun with the current Lava Burst spam build. A lot of people didn’t have fun with the rigid Lightning Bolt build. Those seem to be the 2 builds we’re going to be stuck with regardless.
Being one of the squishiest classes isn’t fun, not bringing meaningful unique utility to the group isn’t fun, having target capped AoE isn’t fun. There’s so many things that are not fun about elemental that have little to nothing to do with tuning.
Been writing a big post but I don’t know if an essay is the right decision.
Instead I will just say that not getting anything really “new” doesn’t feel great. Farseer summons some “pets” that don’t have that feeling of power. Similarly, Stormbringer, for Ele, just doesn’t flow well with the whole “cancel aura” thing being “optimal” .
I’m not excited for my Hero talents, which is the problem. I can solve the problems in my dungeon group, I can carry a mechanic, I can do whatever you want but Blizzard (so far) isn’t investing in my loved spec. Forget damage, it just doesn’t improve in terms of visuals or interactions. I want 7 Lightning Rods popping off with its amazing animation. I want my Lightning Bolts to get an updated animation. I want my Ancestors to be legendary shamans with legendary abilities, not Mastery x2.
So regardless of if Ele is “viable” or even “good”, we aren’t getting any of the cool beat Hero traits like Mage or Evoker. That’s what I want, along with animations.
This is entirely fair. Our hero talents are super underwhelming. Again, I don’t think that’s specific to shaman though. The Shado Pan hero talents for monk are… what?
Blizzard is sort of a dead studio, at least creatively. But that’s a much larger discussion that is outside of the scope of this thread. TWW, as a whole, feels underwhelming. It doesn’t feel like I’m stepping through the Dark Portal to a fractured, distant land to defeat an iconic, lore shrouded foe. It doesn’t feel like I’m stepping off the boat to Northrend, ready to bring the battle to the Lich King. This isn’t evoking the novelty of Pandaria or the urgency of Legion.
I’m not excited about a solid 50% of these hero talents. The handful of exceptional standouts are making that disparity even worse.
You’re right, we are viable for 95% of the content. The issue is two fold. Community perception- because we have no niche anymore, its much better to bring an augvoker for their buffs, or a dps class that can bring the same buffs, if not better.
The second issue- Over the years, they stripped us of some of our best cds and added abilities like ice strike and prim wave, convoluting our rotation further. Abilities like earthquake is unfun, and since cata (with the release of mastery) weve devolved from LVB hitting hard with lightning damage rotation to lightning literally being a side thought.
Ice strike was created because a few loud mouths wanted ice abilities to be more prominent. Prim wave was an abomination of an ability that met a niche during SL but shouldve been DITW past that. We literally just played through an entire expansion of elementals with a ton of amazing spells, yet blizzard dropped the ball on improving shaman at all.
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I don’t think it matters what character you play at your skill level
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So I just realized I could DL the 11.0 ptr, while not realizing I couldn’t test hero talents. However, there is LITERALLY zero change between live and tww 11.0 patch. When I say literally I mean it, sip, ziltch, nadda. My talents points weren’t reset. That’s why we are sad.
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It’s very strange that PvE builds often (in DF) ignore core abilities. For example the current LvB spam ignoring CL and not really caring about EQ. Or the lightning build doing the opposite.
I love that Ele cares about target count, target location, and generally performs best when it’s adapting to what the mobs are doing. I think it’s way more interesting then the “my ST cleaves” specs that sort of play against themselves in a little silo. It always feels Ele is playing against the whole field of action.
But the spec feels clunky for sure. And many spells now overlap too much. LvB and LB, ES and EB… etc. I think part of the issue is the weak spenders. We cast them too often and so they have to be weak. I like playing around Surge or Power though, and that sort of needs easy to cast spenders to work. Idk man.
I think I would make the following changes:
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Move lava burst back to being HARD hitting but cast/proc much less often. Should feel like getting a sudden death or Kill Shot proc.
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Keep Pwave, build in the current tier set bonus (perhaps to all targets not just 3), but remove the CDR. So now you get a little 5 sec window of playing LvB spam/blast every 45 sec (which is fun) but it doesn’t dominate the spec. With no CDR there is no point to going only lava.
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Elemental blast, delete or move to a 30/45/60 sec CD. Buff it to compensate/rework. No longer replaces ES. Make it it’s own thing.
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Buff EQ and ES. Change EQ to do 1/2 it’s damage on cast. 1/2 as the dot. Helps with movement but still a pay off for uptime.
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create some way in the tree to build around the earth spells. I want a big ES build!
Idk the class is still fun but something feel off.
He is referring to PvP, you guys are just talking about different aspects of Elemental is all.