After Icefury’s removal from the spec tree for Elemental, there are currently no sources of frost damage whatsoever in the rotation. Given Icefury’s often controversial standing among the community, I understand why they initially removed it. However, something like this would make a ton of sense as a replacement:
New Capstone Talent: Icefury
Upgrades your Lava Burst into Icefury (obviously inheriting modifiers). Every time icefury deals damage (so including from overloads), it gives a stack of frostbrand which increases the damage of your next frost shock by X%, stacking up to 10 times.
This talent checks a lot of boxes. It encourages Ele’s traditional strength of funneling by synergizing with VB, it brings back frost damage in a non-intrusive way and brings back the fun combo mechanic with frost shock. And, given a spot as a capstone talent, it could easily be tuned in a way that’s optional for those who want fire only builds. It also incorporates the “upgrades an ability into another ability” which is obviously popular among the designers at the moment.
The point of removing Frost Shock from the Elemental tree was to make it not part of the damage rotation and have it be a snare / root. Blizz is trying to simplify our rotation and I am all for that it is way to bloated at the moment. I don’t think anyone wants to introduce Frost Shock back into the damage rotation.
Icefury only in TWW got to a state where it wasn’t terrible. The history of that spell is a clunky mess. I don’t mind it now, but I’m also not fussed that it’s gone. Ele is just fine utilizing storm, earth, and fire.
I mean you deff need to give it some thought as to when you are hitting it since optimizing Icefury procs, Empowered Frost Shocks, and FoE is a pretty substantial thing (especially in raid). Munching FoE procs (less Elemental Blasts), consuming MoE with Icefury over better options, and casting naked LBs over empowered Frost Shocks can be a substantial loss.
However, I do think them removing Icefury and Frost Shock for the sake of simplifying the rotation is good for the whole of the game and the wider playerbase, especially given the convoluted way FoE worked (needs a WA to track properly, clunky in how it works).
Don’t have much of an issue with not doing frost damage really. My main issue with it being removed is that Icefury and Empowered Frost Shocks were pretty important movement tools in PvE for maintain damage uptime. And so far while I welcome removal of some of the more complicated (and sometimes convoluted) aspects of Ele’s gameplay, we’ve also have lost alot of movement options (Surge proc from P Wave, a stack of SK removed baseline, Arc Discharge instant cast LB/CL after Tempest). Icefury + Empowered Frost Shocks is just another thing added to that list.
They simply need to focus on the direction Enhancement Shaman was at in Season 1, Two distinctive builds (storm or elementalist) – and make use of the abilities that make up elementalist.
That being Frost, Fire, and Nature damage. Any ability that uses one of these types of spell damage should be focused on making it worth using. Like, make it actually do worthwhile damage rather than I can do without it.
Because taking it would mean more buttons to press or globals that I won’t have time to use (bloat), and wouldn’t even yield a significant increase in damage for all the effort put into using all those buttons.
Stop veering away from what works — Season 1 The War Within Enhancement Shaman pretty solid…Season 2 is still good….Season 3 play it cause you are a diehard fan and wish it were Season 1 or 2.
I’m working on a larger post about this, but this is something that has me very concerned looking at the proposed changes to both Enhancement and Elemental in Midnight, that while a lot of these changes make sense from a mechanical perspective, they seem to be being made with little to no regard for the thematic feeling of the class and it fantasy.
The complete removal of Frost from the entire class’ damage profile is such a case. Like, yes, Icefury was a mechanical problem child basically the entire time it existed, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t playing an important role in the class fantasy (even when not specced into, I would argue) that needs to be provided for elsewhere if it’s being cut.
I’ll admit I’m not a big class fantasy person, and I’m a more game-play-focused individual. But reflecting on this, it occurs to me that Frost damage for both Ele and Enhance has, in a lot of ways, always been a part of the “uptime” aspect of both of their damage profiles.
Honestly, Icefury in its current state is excellent. It’s more so the weirdness surrounding FoE that ends up being the fly in the ointment, but having FoE tied to consuming PotM fixes that. In all honesty, they could have left Icefury + Frost Shock. I don’t think that would require a significant amount of tracking via the cooldown manager either with FoE no longer linked to it.
great opportunity to introduce (optional) water abilities to Enh and Ele that aren’t ice, though!
always found it weird that damaging water abilities have always been completely unexplored in favor of frost abilities that Frost Mage and Frost DK already do better
i too would like to see frost come back to enhance. My idea is to make voltaic blaze and child talent choice nodes with ice strike/hailstorm (or some similar variant). Especially for totemic, voltaic blaze is not that interesting because we already dont need to spread flame shock, and the fire nova talent was already a choice node for hailstorm.
Everyone who’s raiding know, IceFury removal it’s a giant loss for our DPS while moving.
For these that are saying IceFury was a bad/weird spell in the pass, it’s not anymore, in TWW IceFury reach the perfection in elemental rotation, it’s very satisfying to press this button.
Elemental just keeps becoming less of an elemental spec and more just being another fire spec in a game with several fire specs already. It’s really disappointing.
That is what frost shock was for long time just a slow. Reason i stopped playing my ele shaman was because i could not make spec perform decently without icefury.
Before tww there where other other ways to play either as lightning or fire focused that did not need icefurry and do well.
