Playing an Ele Shaman recently and nothing is more tedious than worrying about the Flame Shock DoT. For a spec that does so much beefy direct damage, having to work around a DoT with a cooldown and a backwards method of spreading it with Surge of Power it feels really unwieldy. The only way to get around this clunk is going into deep Flame build to take Liquid Magma Totem, and even that is target capped.
- Honestly, I would just delete Primordial Wave from Elemental, then carbon copy it onto Flame Shock. Flame Shock would then only be pressed every 45 seconds (maybe they could lower that down a bit to like 20), then Flame Shock could be used as a mini burst CD for Lava Burst spam. Remove the reliance of Lava Burst being baseline (crit) buffed when firing into a Flame Shock target to let Lava Burst stand on its own. Just take the weird DoT minigame out of the class in my opinion.
Another small gripe I have is Icefury. Absolutely love the spell as an idea, but in practice, it just feels super clunky? It’s nice to have Frost Shocks to use when movement is needed, but spamming 4 in a row feels like such lazy class design to me, on top of the cast time and long cooldown Icefury has. This spell could feel so much better.
I think Maelstrom energy is extremely annoying as a resource too. It’s almost always either at 50 or 100 and then you just spend, spend, spend. It hardly even feels like it exists to me, or I find myself annoyed that I’m capping it every 3 spell presses. It doesn’t feel rewarding to me ping-ponging around with it idk.
I love Ele Shaman in concept, but like you touched on, there’s so many quirks to it that seem very backwards. It’s like you have a flow going but the spec literally stops you every so often with these weird inconsistent moments that make you question whether or not you actually enjoy playing it at all.
Another random thing I find disappointing about Ele is that I feel like my totems don’t really offer THAT much in group utility. I hardly find myself needing to ever really make use of them. That could be a “newer to Elemental player” issue, but like what do we get? Oh, a totem that slows or roots enemies (many classes have this), a 2-minute CD speed boost in a small area is nice but like why does it need to be 2 minutes lmao? Stampeding Roar on Druid is baseline a 2 minute CD and just better at 60% movement speed and can be talented down to 1 minute. Capacitor Totem is pretty nice and feels like what I would expect from a totem on Shaman, good utility.
Not to mention how absolutely boring it is that Fire Elemental… increases the speed at which your flippin’ Flame Shock does damage and makes it last longer. Oh joy. So much fun. Thanks for putting a quality of life effect into my main class CD. It really doesn’t feel all that impactful other than being able to spam Lava Bursts for longer, which you’re doing anyway all the time. Man, I guess I just really hate current Flame Shock lol.