TL;DR, but i highly recommend you read before replying:
-Flame shock doesnt need to be capped.
-Ascendance needs a rework and better primary damage source for it’s use.
-Chain lightning needs to be uncapped.
For both Elemental and Enhance,
Flame Shock should have infinite spread, as well as responding to our primordial wave talent. There’s no reason for it not to function this way other than to uphold an arbitrary restriction. It’s highly unfair to have one of the lowest survivability rates as a class AND have an AOE cap tied to our only DoT and our unique class-wide area of affect ability, chain lightning. We’re doing ~50-100k less overall damage than other classes by the end of a M+ that have uncapped AoE simply because We cannot touch the mobs with our most impactful abilities(i.e: hunters, who are squishy as well, doing 1m+ DPS every few pulls while shamans struggle to hit 700k+). We’re ALSO being out-damaged in our target-cap range by those same classes that have unlimited damage potential.
Please change Ascendance, it:
Needs a lower CD
Needs a longer duration if the CD is unchanged
Needs Windstrike to do both physical and nature damage.
Windstrike needs nature-strike damage to justify being a worthwhile using ability vs lava lash spam in elementalist enhance build.
further suggestions assuming flame shock and chain lightning are uncapped:
remove the Molten Assault, Lashing Flames, and Stormblast talent.
Merge Molten Assault and Lashing Flames, so that it reads: “lava lash cooldown reduced by 6 seconds and spreads flame shock to targets within 5-8yds”.
Bake Stormblast in to Ascendance so that you’re completely benefiting from mastery and physical boosts during your important 3minute CD window.
uncap chain lightning and make it do “reduced damage beyond x targets” like every other class still hitting 1.5m DPS on 20 targets.
It is a head scratcher why some classes are target capped and others aren’t. I could see if the capped classes dominated dps up to their cap, but they don’t. Its just a throttle put in place for no obvious reason.
we’re the least desired mail dps, and the devs have to know this by now. Soon, we’ll be seeing “no shamans” in group titles when people realize that we’re a handicap to bring to dungeons again.
don’t cap any of our spells to anything, and IF they must cap us, make all classes have THE SAME CAP (which is no fun at all). some classes have 3, some have 5/6, some have 8… like bruh WHY so complicated?
The classes that are capped still don’t have a reason for those abilities to be capped except outlaw cause they can hard focus one target and ALL their abilities hit 8 targets for full damage.
besides outlaw, no classes really need caps. It’s not fun to not get invited because you’re playing a special needs class and spec.
Unless things have changed, I doubt you’d ever get that, because of how the chain lightning targets were calculated. The more targets they add, the more computations required to determine the ‘best’ possible leaps the chain lightning needs to make. Though it would look glorious with the right number of mobs pulled!
On top of those arbitrary caps and restrictions, don’t forget to pray to RNGesus Mastery:Overload, Deeply Rooted Elements, Aftershock, Power of the Maelstorm etc etc adds an unnecessary level of RNG to your output that other specs don’t need to put up with.
So lets keep score:
—No group buff
–Poor survivability
–unreliable damage output
–no Brez
++Lust
+crowd control
This is why I don’t main ele shaman. I know people want shamans to be “master of ALL of the elements”, but you don’t need both dps specs trying to do that imo. One could excel at harnessing the power of lightning and the other be more versatile.
you don’t actually know what cringe means you just use it as a buzz words for things you don’t like, internet guy.
all the abilities you mentioned are fine, i just don’t like aoe caps. I just want ST abilities to be purely ST, minimal target abilities that cause effects to other targets/hit like a truck and are tuned to do so, or unlimited aoe abilities that are core parts of your classes aoe rotation and not some niche that you wouldn’t use cause it’s weaker than your 5target funnel.
that’s where i’m at. all the other thematic abilities are fine. i don’t want more totems and i don’t want less abilities. just want the abilities i have to feel smother, I.E: spreading flame shock. dot maintenance is already a handful, spreading it is just extra work.
Also, you mentioned it’s the only class that shoots lightning and doesnt let you shoot lightning… that’s just false. you’re going to use lightning in any ele build for builders but it’s currently just not the bulk of your damage. In Enhance, chain lightning, crash lightning, and lightning bolt are core parts of your damage.
other than that yeah, shamans just need defensives.
there is tons of classes or specs that are all fire , locks , fire mage , DH (fel scarred spec is all about fire lol) and ofc shaman , because we end always with fire based tier bonuses.