If the goal is to prune abilities. How about we finally get rid of the cast time on StormKeeper and just make it a passive that automatically activates every X seconds.
Elemental is still very keybind heavy considering all of the Totems and lack of PvP Passives.
Yeah they did a bad job of pruning elemental. Off the top of my head the only button that’s gone is liquid magma totem, primordial wave was replaced by Voltaic blaze so no button savings there. If they would combine Earth Shock/Elemental blast with earthquake that would save a button. Main target gets by an earth shock and surrounding enemies are hit by earthquake. Same thing for lightning bolt+Chain lightning, first enemy gets full lightning bolt damage and then other enemies get hit by chain lightning, saves another button. Stormkeeper being passive would help, but they could also make it a choice node for passive or ability. Flame elemental could be a proc like the TWW S2 tier set.
Other than that they don’t seem to have done anything to solve the other major issues with elemental other than flame shock. Elementals are lackluster due to their uptime/CD making many talents better than nothing filler picks. Seems super weird to be forced to take flame elemental at the very top of the tree and have a bunch of talents dedicated to it to then not have it be a big part of the spec. It’s a glorified damage buff.
Ascendance is still way too overpowered and warping the entire spec. Until this gets nerfed it’s going to force Blizzard to make everything else underpowered because if they were balanced normal as soon as you hit ascendance they are then super OP. If this doesn’t get fixed I simply won’t be playing elemental, I don’t enjoy being a 3min spec that has 15s of being a god and then spends the rest of the time slinging wet noodles. It’s a mandatory pick, if you don’t take it then you’re just slinging wet noodles the whole time and lose like 20%+ of your damage making you non-competitive.
Other than that there is just a ton of “meh” talents that could either use combined, redesigned, or baked into the kit.
I agree completely. Ascendances turns you into a dps god and then we revert back into a sad button bloated pea shooter. I’m always in the school of more consistent damage instead of feast/famine gameplay.
Blizzard stated that the want to move away from dps cooldown focus play for more consistent damage and I agree it’s gotten out of hand.
Turning Earthquake into a passive proc fron Earth Shock/Elemental Blast might be a bit too powerful in pvp if the knockdown mechanic remains in effect. But generally I like they idea of combining some spells.
Voltaic Blaze looks like a simplification of LMT and Primordial Wave, while taking the same number of talents and occupying the same function.
I have just simple gripes that boil down to
They could have enhanced LMT by increasing the number of targets it applied Flame Shock to from 3 to 5.
Class Identity
They had to bury LMT next to Searing Totem, because the hole was too big.
Inspired Design
"Here's AoE Fire Blast" -signed (not) Mage Team.
Reporting Issues
Players were using Weak Auras to track the number of Flame Shocks?
Performance Attribution
Improved attribution of temporary player objects (totems) by deleting offensive temporary player objects
I really spent a lot of time to make these not mean, because I really don’t like the change and don’t understand the reasoning or intentions behind it
As far as I know voltaic blaze replace flame shock. So that’s actually one more gone
I hate everything about Ascendance. That’s something Blizzard should prune.
You’re in the minority here.
Ascendance is a cool button, but Id rather see more frequent access to it. S3 of TWW has actually been good because we’re popping into Ascendance a lot more frequently although the RNG nature kind of sucks.
Put it on a 1 minute or 90 second cooldown and adjust the duration/power to compensate.
It would be nice if they also gave DRE a higher tendency to proc at the start of combat. Nothing is more annoying than going an entire M+ pull without a proc and doing tank damage only for DRE to proc right as the mobs are dying. This happens frequently enough to be noticeable
Elemental DRE is gone as of latest alpha build. They also reduced Ascendance power. Maybe they’ll be rebalancing our damage into less RNG / less cool downs and more into base.
Probably.
Doesn’t change that the model is hideous, the lore behind it is bad, and the gameplay of it is garbage.
It would be so easy to just give everyone a glyph thar levitates with your normal character model surrounded by your element of choice.
As for lore, it’s crazy that they didn’t allow us to make Dracthyr Shamans.
TBH, Elemental’s core rotation has historically been pretty easy compared to most specs (Part of why I always like it). I wouldn’t argue with SK just getting the standard CD treatment and have it be instant but on the GCD but that’s minor.
Icefury nodes (Including EE) are really the only bloat that got added recently (DF). And then Farseer gets some from the PWave/AS combo. I wouldn’t mind them just working those into one. I generally don’t love frost shock in Ele but I’ve learned to just use the follow-up Frost Shocks on movement so it’s fine.
Anyways, point is that I actually don’t think Ele needed pruning core rotation wise. My bar bloat comes from Utility (Which I like having even when I don’t always use it) and in Farseer.
Resto is worse although they took a much bigger axe to it so I’ll be curious to see it next ex-pac.
I can only think of Destro, Boomy and BM off the top of my head that have a simpler core rotation ranged wise. But then again Boomy has the utility/form bloat so it still fills up buttons.
I disagree with most things here, I think the Ele sham pruning was pretty good overall. I only have a few gripes:
Losing guaranteed Lava Surge every 30 sec feels bad. I get that going Farseer will give you more procs in Midnight, but thats still being fully reliant on rng for what is one of our only ways to get instant casts as a relatively low mobility caster.
Losing single target Flame Shock doesn’t work well. I get that pruning is the goal, but we cant have only one way to get Flame Shock out unless it becomes undispellable in PvP. Pressing Voltaic Blaze only to immediately have the flame shocks dispelled will feel terrible even if you take the talents to get Voltaic down to a 7 second cd. Thats 7 seconds of waiting to get Flame Shocks out and healer dispel lines up perfectly with it too. Not having single target Flame Shock also leads to weird decision making in PvE situations.
Throwing out an idea for how to fix this:
-Make it so Voltaic Blaze can be lowered to a 15 second CD via talents (maybe 30 sec cd baseline?), have it grant a Lava Surge proc baseline and then bring back single target Flame Shock.
Some solutions for this:
-Move Burrow out of PvP talents and into the Class tree (no other classes have such a good defensive in their PvP talents, its crazy that its still there)
or
-Give Ele Shaman a way to get instant Healing Surges. Maybe a baseline passive that gives you an instant+buffed Healing Surge after using Earth Shock or Elemental Blast.