So I love enhance, love the fantasy, love the animations. But it gets on my nerves that I have to play the Elemental Build at all times. I’ve simmed it extensively a dozen different ways in ST and AOE, and no matter what stat distributions, embellishments, or trinkets I swap around, I can’t manage to get closer than a 40k dps loss. So I had some ideas for talent tree tweaks or changes to bring it closer in damage to Elemental. I should clarify that I don’t particularly want to play the Storm build at all times, or have it be BIS at all times, but I would like to be able to play it with at most a 3-5% dps loss, particularly when I don’t want to ultra-focus on Lashing Flame spread.
So first lets identify some of the major issues with the build.
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Our tier set requires that we lean heavily into flame shock spread thus requiring us to spend 2 points into Molten Assault for shock cleave on a build that otherwise wouldn’t focus too much on Flame Shock, as well as another required 4 points at the bottom of the tree for Primordial Wave and its subsequent talents. So to sum up it’s pretty much an issue of talent point economy (many such cases plz halp). One possible solution I considered would be making Molten Assault a single point talent.
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Tempest Strikes is kinda meh. When simming a Storm build, ele blast often sims for more damage then the talent literally added for a Storm build. (Maybe tweak the damage a little higher? It’s currently 35% attack power, maybe tune up to 50% attack power.
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For a tier set so highly focused on Flame Shock it’s almost criminal we don’t get to play Fire Nova and it’s because the combination of Ice Strike+Hailstorm is so dang powerful in both AOE and ST. One possible solution I thought about for the ST dmg loss would be adding a similar mechanic to Outlaw rogue’s Blade Flurry doing more dmg the less targets it hits. (Napkin math incoming)
Something along the lines of "Fire Nova damage increased by 50% per target below the maximum 50% might sound like a great deal but given that Fire Nova hits for ~40% attack power it would come out to be a gain of ~100% attack power in pure ST, which considering that Frost Shock baseline hits for 63% and is then buffed by Ice Strike to 126% AP, then further buffed by Hailstorm for an additional 150% dmg on top of that it would still not truck like Frost Shock but the main gain of Fire Nova is going to be the constant maelstrom economy we can funnel into more Chain Lightnings, so that’s alright.
- I’ve mentioned it before but its still relevant POINT ECONOMY at the bottom of the tree especially sucks. Storm builds are supposed to be Stormstrike over Lava Lash but wait, we cant take Elemental Assault which buffs Stormstrike, cuz we need Legacy of the Frost Witch for more Stormstrike resets.
Basically we have 10 points to play with in the bottom of the tree, 3 of those points are required to be invested in Ghost Wolf and Witch Doctor’s Ancestry. Another 4 points are required to go towards Prim Wave and its subsequent talents. Leaving us with 3 points to invest. In the Ele build we put one point towards Elemental Spirits, and two towards Elemental Assault. In the Storm Build almost every other talent at the bottom of the tree buffs the build but is utterly inaccessible.
So here are my thoughts, all three specs of shaman (to my knowledge) use Prim Wave, stick it in the class tree in-place of Nature’s Guardian and make that baseline since that is always taken anyway and is just about the weakest form of pseudo-cheat death in the game which for some reason takes two points (I’m not salty at all rogues/mages 
). This frees up one point for play at the bottom of the tree.
Now this next bit is likely to be a bit controversial (not that the entirety of this isn’t) but stick the DRE/Ascendance node at the bottom of the tree in place of Thorim’s Invocation and add the effects of Thorim’s Invocation and Static Accumulation to the cooldown baseline. (I also think actual Ascendance should have a duration of 20-25 seconds or a cooldown of 2min to actually make it actually impactful and not literally never taken, and DRE should work on an increasing proc chance maxing at a 30% chance à la WW’s Fury of Xuen but that’s a separate argument.) In the space where the choice node was I would like a talent that further buffs Crash Lightning damage so that it can be as impactful an ability as it looks like in AOE rather than just a really cool maelstrom generator.
I’m sure there is other things I’m missing, but honestly this was very spur of the moment and I’m running out of mental gas.
Thoughts? Opinions? Targeted hatred of my very being?