Shaman Rework and Consistency in PvP
At the end of Dragonflight, Elemental Shaman’s damage was significantly boosted, allowing players to chain Primordial Wave into Lava Burst for powerful burst damage. Initially, this increase seemed promising but led to widespread complaints of Shamans dominating arenas. Blizzard responded with a quick nerf, which, in my opinion, was premature, as it didn’t account for the new Hero talent trees at level 80. This led to a drop in Shaman viability in PvP without fully understanding their place in the meta.
Since then, Elemental Shaman has gone through multiple reworks, especially when comparing Dragonflight’s final season to the current 11.0.5 rework in The War Within. In Dragonflight, Elemental Shaman focused on arena control while relying on teammates for single-target pressure. This control was achieved through a robust toolkit, including:
- Static Field Totem: Used to disrupt enemy teams by repositioning, interrupting, and blocking melee attackers, allowing Shamans to support teammates and control the battlefield.
- Grounding Totem: Essential for countering casters especially effective against non dot dependent classes like mages(and negating damage buffs for some melee classes like Demon Hunters), providing protection through Totemic Recall, allowing for consecutive Grounding Totems.
- Wind Shear: A powerful interrupt, enhancing the “anti-caster” role with its low cooldown for frequent disruption.
- Unleash Shield: A versatile tool for rooting melee opponents, providing control that doesn’t share diminishing returns with other abilities.
- Hex: Effective crowd control, especially with the Enfeeblement talent, making it highly useful against melee. Even if trinketed, Enfeeblement’s disorientation effect persisted, supporting efficient peeling.
- Lightning Lasso: Though not high in damage, it effectively disrupts melee and double-caster setups, functioning as a strong peeling tool.
- Alt Healing: Exceptional off-healing, especially valuable when the healer is crowd-controlled. With critical Healing Surges, Shamans could recover teammates early in matches when dampening was low to medium.
To maintain control, Shamans applied Flame Shock on all targets, including pets. Each tick provided instant Lava Surge procs, a playstyle I refer to as “remote cleave.” This pseudo-AoE allowed Lava Bursts to target enemies across the battlefield, effectively turning Shamans into a mobile source of spread pressure. In Dragonflight, I even observed Lava Burst animations curving around pillars to hit off-targets behind them! While Shamans lacked direct kill power, this spread pressure enabled teammates to secure kills by forcing healers to distance themselves and deal with sustained damage.
In the latest 11.0.5 rework (most at the beginning) for The War Within , some notable improvements have emerged:
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Stone Bulwark Totem: A much-needed defensive tool, similar to Restoration Shaman’s Earthen Wall Totem, enhancing resilience.
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Heroism in Arena: Now castable in arenas, adding a powerful buff that can be strategically paired with burst windows.
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Increased Relevance of Lightning Spells: Lightning spells are now essential, adding versatility to talent builds.
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Single-Target Flame Shock: This change allows for more focused procs, by not requireing more flameshocks the shamen becomes more viable in single target damage scnerios
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Higher Earth Shock Damage: Unlike in Dragonflight, where Earth Shock primarily supported Lava Burst procs, it now holds a more central damage role. This really builds to the reason to want/need malestorm in the first place. Spending it will cause you to have higher damage
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combining enfeeblemet with vodoo mastery: This enabled the cool down of vodoo master which was reduced from 30sec to 15 and to get enfeeblement as and added benefit verses having one or the other
However, some impairments in the The War Within rework have introduced new challenges:
- Static Field Totem: A staple in Dragonflight, its cooldown was increased by a minute, reducing its viability and limiting Shaman versatility. This IMO is a major setback in playstyle and shamen CC
- Stone Bulwark Totem: No longer usable with Totemic Recall, and it can be stolen by Mages, which is counterintuitive because a totem is loyal to the caster and applies its benefits which is not a standart buff because it is a magical effect being generated and dependent upon the totem existing to manifest the benefit. If a mage has the option to destroy it or spell steal the buff from it atleast allow me to be able to destroy the totem that no longer benefits me. Lastly, it’s also easily destroyed which almost negates its benefit.
- Flame Shock Diminishing Returns: Procs now scale down per additional target, reducing overall damage and limiting “remote cleave” effectiveness.
- Increased Interrupt Vulnerability: With Lightning becoming central to damage, Shamans are more susceptible to interrupts, which can shut down most abilities except fire spells, ironically allowing the “anti-caster” to be countered by casters nullifying the ability to use lightning school and essentially everything else or heal yourself!
- Reduced Alt Healing: Self-healing and off-healing took a hit, especially detrimental in 2v2 arenas. While healing was nerfed across the board, this affected Shaman survivability significantly, making recovery less viable after mistakes or missed positioning adjustments.
The current expansion, The War Within, emphasizes versatility in the Elemental Shaman’s kit, blending Lightning and Lava builds. However, recent talent tree adjustments lean towards a hybrid approach, with talents like Stormkeeper playing a central role. While the pure Lightning or Lava builds were more distinct in Dragonflight, the latest updates have forced a more homogenized playstyle, marking a clear shift from Dragonflight’s / Begining of TWW specialization-focused design to a more blended approach in current patch of TWW.
Currently, Shamans have a modest presence in the top PvP rankings, with 20 in the 3v3 top 500 and 8 in the 2v2 bracket. As an example of the challenges facing Elemental Shamans in the current meta, I know of a Shaman who reached a 2400 rating in Dragonflight but now struggles to stay in the 1600 bracket. This shift reflects the current playability for average to above-average players, even though the top 1% manage to maintain some viability—albeit with few Shamans represented in high rankings.
To address these issues, a hybrid approach is welcome, but I believe that Shamans would benefit from a more specialization-focused design, similar to what Mages have. Dividing Elemental into distinct specializations could improve playability and versatility in PvP. For instance:
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Elemental Specializations: Elemental could be split into distinct trees—Lightning and Lava—with Lightning representing an single target Damage specialization along with kill power and Lava focusing on spread pressure, sustained damage, and marginally more “anti-caster” capability more akin to Dragonflight’s style.
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Enhanced Earth as a PvE Tank: Enhancement could explore an Earth-based path focused on PvE tanking, where Shamans could amplify their armor with Earth abilities and fulfill a tank role and providing a unique capability of damage reduction using a modest earth barrier protection for the whole team. This would add value to Shamans in PvE content while still aligning with the shamen theme.
In PvP, the Lightning and Lava Shamans could have distinct strengths:
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Lava Shaman: Would mirror the spread-pressure playstyle of Dragonflight, focusing on Flame Shock and Lava Burst with pseudo-AoE (or “remote cleave”) for sustained spread-pressure damage along with concentrated anti-caster capability but common rotation not lightning dependent maintaining its orgginal DF insta damage seperating elemental shamen from all other casters as everything is instant
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Lightning Shaman: Could focus on single-target control with powerful bursts and could use both schools more effectively but centered around lightning but at the sacrifice to lose some anti-caster capability but since lightning is more consistent with casting it can be merged with a weaving type methodology with lightning as clearly the prime, similar to the end of Dragonflight and the start of The War Within.
This specialization approach would allow Shamans the versatility to adapt to different roles while preserving their distinct playstyles in both PvP and PvE. Similar to how Frost Mages can use Fire and Arcane abilities without specializing in them, Lightning and Lava Shamans could share some skills but offer players a choice to focus on a particular elemental theme that better suits their PvP needs.
Other off topics for shamen hearth stones should be a separate location from astral recall to increase utility. Reincarnation should be considered to be allowed in arena since self-healing is considerably nerfed, you could skill-cap the ability by making it required to press right before death,