Background
Hi 
I’m Lucenia, aka Lucy. I’ve played Elemental shaman for around 15 years now, and I’m also one of the admins of WoWSims, the maintainer of the WoWSims SoD Shaman, Druid, Priest, and Mage sims, and an Elemental Shaman theorycrafter in the Classic Shaman Discord for both SoD and Cataclysm. I wanted to provide some feedback regarding the new runes coming in Phase 4, along with other adjustments that were made to existing runes, and take a look at other aspects of Elemental and Shaman in general that haven’t been touched on yet.
Phase 4 Runes, Changes, and Tuning
Shamanistic Rage
This was changed from a leg rune to a quality-of-life book similar to Totemic Projection. This is a great change for the entire Shaman class that we’ve been asking for since Phase 1. It enables Elemental to take Ancestral Guidance in PVE for passive group healing, or even Earth Shield for PVP.
Engrave Helm - Burn
On the PTR this rune was nerfed from providing 4 Spell Damage per level to just 2. This means that Elemental effectively loses 120 Spell Damage at level 60 from the original value, or about an 8% flat damage nerf at level 50. I’m not inherently against this change, as Burn is a passive flat damage increase, not something the player can do to meaningfully change their damage like a new spell or interaction. However, due to the lack of other impactful runes that I’ll touch on more below, I’m concerned about where this will put Elemental in Single Target going into phase 4. I’m also concerned about the lack of scaling with this rune as we progress through later level 60 phases. I hope that at some point Blizzard will consider adding intellect => spell power to it as well.
Engrave Cloak - Coherence
Since this one seems intended for Restoration I won’t touch on it.
Engrave Cloak - Storm, Earth, and Fire
I want to focus on this one most as it seems most-obviously designed for Elemental. It seems like the intention for this rune was to give Elemental more passive damage through Flame Shock, but more significantly to create “burn windows” where we would spam Chain Lightning to deal heavy AOE (and maybe* Single Target) damage while our mana can sustain it. I have a few concerns with this implementation:
- The periodic damage bonus to Flame Shock is mostly insignificant. In single target it comes out to a negligble amount of DPS, while in AOE it’s more impactful, but still overall minor.
- Elemental’s mana can’t sustain this kind of Chain Lightning spam for long at all, even with Shamanistic Rage. This could be solved by changing Elemental Focus to function like the TBC version that procs on critical hits and reduces mana cost of the next two spells by 40%.
- Spamming Chain Lightning seems to be DPS neutral or even a loss at level 60 based on our sim implementation. Even though Chain Lightning has a lower cast time and higher base damage than lightning bolt, it also has a lower spell power coefficient, meaning lightning bolt naturally out-scaled it in vanilla with enough spell power. In SoD however, this is coupled with the lower Overload proc chance that chain lightning has (50% divided by 3 targets = 16.67% chance) lowering the effective Rolling Thunder procs we receive. If the intention is for us to use this rune in single target, you could consider increasing the overload proc chance at 1-2 targets to 50% and 33.34% respectively, and/or increasing the damage chain lightning deals when it only strikes 1 target.
Right now on the PTR using the Five Thunders set I run completely out of mana (even using Shamanistic Rage) in less than 30 seconds spamming Flame Shock and Chain Lightning. Frankly, the damage I’m able to deal out in that time feels much too high to be reasonable, too. Especially in PVP.
Engrave Cloak - Feral Spirit
I assume that the team’s intention was for this to only be an Enhancement rune, but right now this looks to be our go-to rune for short Single Target encounters. On the PTR in the default gear provided to template characters, the pair of spirit wolves deal around 100 to 125 dps while active, easily out-performing Storm, Earth, and Fire in that short time-span.
I had personally hoped for a rune to upgrade Elemental Mastery to how it functions in Cataclysm - providing a +damage and haste buff and receiving cooldown reduction when casting lightning bolt or chain lightning, in addition to the existing 100% crit chance on your next cast that we have in vanilla.
Other Runes
Of the 8 currently-avilable class rune slots (i.e. excluding rings), Ele only has 4-5 that I would consider truly useful and impactful - Burn (Head), Overload (Chest), Rolling Thunder (Bracers), Lava Burst (gloves), Ancestral Guidance (Legs).
As I already talked about above, I’m concerned about the actual usability and impact of the Storm, Earth, and Fire rune in its current iteration.
Engrave Bracers - Rolling Thunder
After the buff in Phase 3 Rolling Thunder is a much more competitive and enjoyable rune to use. My one gripe (and this goes along with my other comments) is that the mana returned when Earth Shocking isn’t nearly enough. On PTR with a 9-stack Lightning Shield I only gain net-+200 mana. This may as well be negligible throughout the coarse of a fight. This is further devalued by many encounters having passive damage eating our Lightning Shield charges, meaning we’re Earth Shocking even less frequently. I would love to see the % mana returned buffed, or the mechanism put on our Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning like it is in Cataclysm.
Engrave Belt - Power Surge
Power Surge (Waist) is only situationally useful in AOE where we can maintain multiple Flame Shocks to provide a more reasonable proc rate - and even then, in its current iteration I believe that Storm, Earth, and Fire devalues it even further, as we’ll already have permanent access to Chain Lightning on a 1.5s GCD. I’m still in the camp of players who believe that Burn doesn’t need to apply to 5 targets, and that this could be offset by lowering Burn back down to 3 targets while buffing the proc rate of power surge to ~15-20%. I’d also like to see either a damage buff or mana cost reduction tied to Power Surge, as right now half of our procs are wasted by poor timing, and in AOE situations it’s easy to run out of mana (even through Shamanistic Rage) using procs on Chain Lightning.
In single target situations Power Surge does very little for us in its current iteration. Another idea I’ve had is that in addition to resetting the cooldown of Lava Burst / Chain Lightning, it could make the next cast either not incur a cooldown or incur a shorter cooldown.
Boot Runes
Our boot rune options are also disappointing as ele. Decoy totem is situationally useful in PVE, and in most cases you’d prefer to run Spirit of the Alpha still because threat is an issue we have to contend with. I’d either like to see another another option added, or maybe make the Loyal Beta buff provide a 5% buff to all damage, not just physical (though this would obviously have implications for enhancement, too). Another option too is adding something like Wrath of Air totem to go along with what I talk about below about our lack of useful totem options.
Other Concerns Going Forward
Core Toolkit Scaling
Elemental uses 5 abilities that I would consider part of its core rotation - Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, Flame Shock, Earth Shock, and Lava Burst. Of these, only one is a rune ability with the higher level scaling that that entails, and both Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning are only level 56 abilities with no level 60 Ahn’Qiraj book added in vanilla. We’ve already see the consequences of poor caster scaling across the board in phase 3, and phase 4 isn’t looking any better with what we know so far. One way to address this would be to add new ranks of all core offensive abilities with rune scaling to help bring them up-to-par with abilities that scale off of weapon damage.
Dual-Wielding vs Shields/Offhands
This topic has been hotly debated in the Ele community since SoD first released. The reality is that weapon enchants and oils are incredibly powerful in vanilla - so much so that despite the team’s efforts to remove non-main hand caster weapons, we’re still likely looking to dual-wield at level 60 due to the +30 spell power enchant and Wizard / Brilliant Wizard Oils, even if it means using a low level weapon or weapon with no spell power at all. I’m personally on team dual-wield. I think it’s a fun and unique concept for a caster. Plus, the tradeoff exists in PVP where you gain a large amount of armor by equipping a shield. I’m not sure what the right answer is to the debate, but I do think it will be difficult to find a balance one way or the other.
Totems
Right now the only totems Ele benefits from are Searing Totem, Magma, and Fire Nova totems (I’m actually not sure that the latter is even worth spending a GCD on in most cases). With the increased spell damage available in SoD and low spell coefficients on our damaging fire totems we’re already hitting the point where it’s no longer worth refreshing them except for when moving. As I already mentioned, Wrath of Air totem could be an interesting option, or Totemic Wrath (from Cataclysm) as a buff to incentivize us to maintain our fire totems even when they aren’t scaling as well.
World Buffs
I won’t deny that as someone who didn’t play vanilla or the original launch of classic, I’m not a fan of world buffs. They were fun for min-maxing and parsing early on, but now I’ve realized how much I dislike the punishment of your raid wiping, and how much time it takes to acquire them each week. Along with that, the original iterations of world buffs heavily favored melee players (but I’m sure the devs are well aware of this and probably making adjustments).
My other issue with world buffs is how they affect content tuning. Sunken Temple week 1 was tough but a lot of fun. My guild killed up to Eranikus on night 3? of release, then finished the raid the next night (I think this was post-initial nerfs but pre-massive nerfs). This level of difficulty was fun, but the spike that happened after we lost world buffs was incredibly punishing. After the massive nerfs however, world buffs made the raid so trivial that it was no longer fun to progress. I actually had the most fun when - after my original guild called it quits - I joined a new guild and decided to not worry about picking up world buffs. The raid was a good bit harder, but also felt more fulfilling to complete each week. I know it might be a fleeting dream, but I’m hoping the devs will consider either disallowing world buffs in instances completely, or at the very least in the “harder” versions of Molten Core that have been datamined.
Wrapping Up
Sorry for the wall 
I love Shaman, I love Season of Discovery, and I’m excited to keep playing it and building sims for it. Thanks to the devs for all you do and looking forward to seeing what you cook up this phase and in the future!