Ele has never not been the lightning spec my dude. Lava Burst didn’t even exist for the first 20% of the game’s lifespan, and lightning was still the centerpiece at least through Cata. I didn’t play WoD or play a shaman in the bit of MoP I did play, and I didn’t play Legion, but when I played in BFA I recall a return to form with lightning spells being restored to their rightful importance.
Lava Burst taking center stage was always a mistake; a mistake that has happened far too frequently even if its reign has been a max of about 40% (on and off) of the game’s existence. But if you don’t associate ele with lightning you just weren’t paying any attention at all to the first 8 years of the game’s life, and that’s with me assuming that lightning fell off in every instance where I don’t have first-hand experience to the contrary.
Homeslice, fire is right there. It’s fire. It’s mobile. It has degenerate non-caster instant spam. It has DoT AoE. The elemental that you are nostalgic for is a degenerate aberration in every sense of the word. Ele is not supposed to be on the mobile side of the spectrum, let alone the abomination that it was for much of DF where it basically wasn’t a caster at all, and fire should never be more than a cheeky alternative focus at best.
Realistically they need to drop whoever has the Lava Burst fetish and has been trying to shoehorn their narcissistic ideas where there isn’t room for them. Feral had to be split up and it had two whole separate forms with two whole separate combat systems as a basis for differentiation. Elemental does not have the compartmentalization or breadth necessary to even begin to support splitting the tree into a fire and lightning half. Doing so is also contrary to the very idea of a multi-element caster. Trying to shove a fire and lightning spec into the one umbrella spec of elemental is about 10x as moronic as it would be to try and shove separate shadow and fire builds into the umbrella spec of destruction, which they don’t do because even at 10% of the stupidity it would still be a really, really stupid decision.
The fact that LvB keeps popping up like a bad case of herpes reeks of a personal vendetta usurping professionalism. That or just a pure lack of neurons between all of the developers that have collectively worked on ele. The latter is the only thing that could possibly explain a genuine multi-expansion issue with reconciling people enjoying that cooldown nuke make big number and not paving lightning paradise with a third fire parking lot.
All they had to do was something like have unmodified LB be the baseline, then have LvB do a tidy chunk of damage while spreading Flame Shock as well as amplifying LB and Icefury/Frost Shock. If you consume the buff with frost it chains to all the targets affected by Flame Shock, converting it into some type of steam effect, and then any target you hit with LB with that steam effect chains to all the others. So that’s AoE base, then for single-target you consume the buff with LB for more ST damage, and have it leave a debuff that amps up the next frost hit. Then you have Earth Shock (which really needs to be remade into like an actual rock ability) as a single-target spender and Earthquake as your AoE spender. With a bit of tinkering you could probably consolidate the spenders into one button as well, which like LB swap between ST and cleave/AoE depending on the combo order, resulting in you literally having a baseline air/fire/water cast and a spender earth cast.
So now you have your core rotation that combos the elements in different ways depending on the number of enemies you’re fighting, and which only requires 5-6 total buttons. LB is both your baseline and one of your mid hitters for both ST and AoE/cleave, with earth (the other underrepresented element) being your biggest rotational hitter as your spender(s), and then you keep SK as a big frack you cooldown. I would change SK to be more visually impressive as well, but ultimately you end up with lightning being the throughline while all the elements are nonetheless represented, have their satisfying moments, and interact.
Passives aside, my final addition would be an easy layup replacement to Elemental Blast as the big kahuna cooldown (instead of Ascendence), which you could still call Elemental Blast, but which would cause your LvB/LB/IF/ES to turn into “combo” buttons. The first three would be instant and do nothing but call on the element you press, but once you called on three the fourth would be a cast that would have a suitable impact for something which is both a CD and which has a few seconds of set-up, and which would change depending on the combo order. The final button you press could represent the largest differentiator, with the first three representing increasingly small differences, so even a newbie could mostly get where they’re going by just making sure the final button is the right element, while leaving open the potential to express increasing mastery over the nuances of the order of the first three. And of course everyone would get the full joy of actually feeling like it’s a real blast of the elements rather than a multi-colored projectile that’s just named as such.
