Hello, some background I’ve played elemental shaman since Wrath of the Lich king and have loved it for the majority of the game’s life. I love the new talent trees and enjoy being able to tweak things to do specifically what my groups need. There are some frustrating points I would like to shed some light on, from my own personal POV of course. If you feel differently that’s great! I don’t want to start a huge war with people, I just want to express my views. So to start I love how if you go for one build you need more Mastery and Haste and for the other you need more crit and haste, however, there is an Achilles heel for me in both main talent routes is that you must take icefury, no matter what. Allow me to explain why I don’t find this particularly enjoyable.
- Icefury in the Fire/Ascendance/Gamble Build raid st and M+
In this build it empowers your lava bursts to do 20% more dmg, great, the problem exists in that it’s not only really difficult to fit in every charge of frost shock without cannibalizing your lava bursts or elemental blasts it’s also really easy to press it and only use a single frost shock charge. At this point, why even take this talent? Well throughout a fight it’s close to a 10k (for my character) DPS loss if I don’t take it.
- Lightning ST and M+ builds
Here you need to use your frost shock > elemental blast/earthshock > lightning bolt to make use of your +15% nature dmg taken by the target. If you deviate from this at all (which this build in ST with the same gear does 8k less dmg for me, in sims) then you lose on major dmg and your kit is overall useless, not to mention this build needs haste/crit but benefits from lightning bolt mastery procs? such a weird stat balance. So needless to say this build is also very hard to fit in every Frost Shock > earth shock > lightning bolt, as movement and target switching are pretty frequent in most content.
- It makes an otherwise fun and smooth spec hectic and un-fun (for me)
I wish I could just not take this talent at all, it clutters my rotation when things get rolling and makes me just not have fun playing elemental as a whole, but this 2 talent slot combo is a whopping 10k-12k DPS loss (in sims) no matter whatever else I take. This (IMO) is unacceptable when you’re talking about a spec system that is otherwise fun and interesting, it makes you feel pigeonholed into taking the talent if you want to be viable at all. If you want a more classic cata/mop feeling shaman you’re just s*** out of luck. I love the feeling of this build
BYQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASrUSSJJBChkWgkkIBAAAAAAlEQKJJlUIFi0SSCASEA
That being said this build is so utterly pitiful in output that it’s better to just play gamble/fire build or choose enhancement/different class altogether.
Another issue is that deeply rooted elements is so much “better” than just taking Ascendance because of the free lava burst procs that you get from it just proccing even if you can’t use it for more than 1-2 casts of lava burst or don’t take the accompanying talents after that. Could we get a bit more talent balancing in this part of the talent tree so maybe the DPS difference is much closer? I’d say an error margin of up to 5k is pretty ok for most players but ideally even closer to 2k. Would love to hear the dev ideas on this as well if one reads this.