Shaman Talents That Should Be Baseline

Classes Shaman
1

Enhancement:
-Lightning Shield
lightning shield is such an iconic and cool shaman spell i don’t think any shaman should be without it.

-Earthshield
same reason as Lightning Shield, Earth Shield is such an iconic and flavorful spell for shaman, plus, Shamans are insanely squishy, even struggling on trash mobs, so Earthshield as a baseline would really help.

~Hailstorm
the flavor and namesake of Enhancement Shaman is enhancing your weapons, but besides Flametongue i don’t really see any other ability enhancing your weapons like the name of the spec would suggest. However, i know that many people do not like having Frostbrand as part of their rotation, so maybe this shouldn’t become baseline, but personally i would still enjoy it.

-Crashing Storm
Shaman AoE has been very lackluster recently so they really need a boost to make it better and also adds Crash Lightning to the single target rotation, which makes the spec more fun in my opinion. plus, this spell just looks badass

-Ascendance
Enh Sham has no DPS cooldown, the wolves just generate maelstrom and the Earth Elemental is just for trash mobs. The spec feels somewhat empty without a meaningful cooldown, plus this isn’t just a damage boosting cooldown, the range it adds to your stormstrike is super fun and helps counter spellcasters in PvP.

Elemental:
-Echo of the Elements
Does this one really need explaining? This is literally just a baseline effect they chopped out of elemental and added to the talent tree.

-Earth Shield
Same reason as Enhancement

-Ascendance
Same reason as Enhancement. Elemental doesn’t really have a meaningful DPS cooldown and Ascendance is so fun to use, the Fire Elemental is pretty passive and just generates maelstrom

Restoration:
-Echo of the Elements
Same reason as elemental
(that’s it really for Restoration, i don’t play it often and it seems pretty complete to me)

Well those are the talents i believe should be added to each shaman spec to make the spec more fun, more effective, and more flavorful. If you think i missed a talent that should also be baseline, or if there is a talent that you think should not be baseline, feel free to discuss it.

2

No thanks.

3

would you mind explaining why?

4

Hey ho,
at what point was Echo of the Elements baseline? I remember us picking it as a talent multiple times throughout the history of my playtime, but it never was baseline. Don’t get me wrong, I want it to be baseline as well.

I disagree on Earth Shield for Elemental Shamans. This spell was a pure Restoration Shaman spell. And even though it’s the earth aspect of our elements, i’d rather only use fire, lightning and some frost (I know Earthquake is used and powerful, but its animation is subtle).

Our Fire -/Storm Elemental is pretty powerful for it being completely passive and does quite the chunk of DPS on its own. So that is our meaningful DPS cooldown. But I’d like to see some changes to Ascendance anyway. Right now taking Echo of the Elements and Ascendance at the same time has a slight anti-synergy because Echo of the Elements is useless while Ascendance is active; we can spam-cast Lava Burst anyway. In addition the same gripe I have with our mastery is enhanced during Ascendance: Our generators are empowered but our spenders aren’t, therefore our generators/fillers creep up to our spenders/finishers. And that’s something I dislike.

My baseline wish is a bit weird; I’d like Elemental Blast to be a talent that would replace Earth Shock with Elemental Blast. Reasons:

  • Generating Maelstrom with different spell schools (fire, lightning, and with Icefury frost as well) would culminate in a spell that visually unifies all these elements, instead of resulting in an additional element (not spell school, I know, but earth is a thing)
  • Elemental Blast is visually so much more impactful than Earth Shock to me. This visual suggests “boy, this’ll hurt”, which fits the spender-philosophy.
  • Our spender would finally scale directly with our Mastery. And seeing the Elemental Blast animation twice is great. Currently our spenders scale indirectly with out Mastery via cast frequency. Mastery makes our generator spells generate more Maelstrom on average, which leads to more spender casts. But that connection is very weak and while our generator damage numbers grow (if you add overload to main spell damage), our spenders stay at the same level.

I know that if Elemental Blast would at any point replace Earth Shock, Elemental Blast would need more changes. But this post is not intended to suggest tuning. Well, except for the information, that live Elemental Blast is really really bad.

I loved having Echo of the Elements and Elemental Blast at the same time.

Yours sincerely,
Bloodmallet(EU)

5 Likes
5

Blizzard please read this. This is an incredible suggestion, I’d love it and the reasoning for it is perfect. Thanks in advance.

6

Because they’re the most annoying visuals in the game and I can’t stand them. I was overjoyed when they became talents instead of baseline.

This x1000

7

Most of these things were, or should be baseline. They took allot of abilities that were baseline and turned them into talents after legion due to extremely lazy dev’s who lack vision of any kind for class design.

I, me alone! I could in 1 day! design a better class for EVERY CLASS that is more interesting, more interactive, and more pleasing than what they have now. I feel like those behind class design are just stuck in the past and unable to obtain ANY level of clairvoyance.

1 Like
8

Elemental:

Echo of the Elements - make it baseline and replace it with talent that improves it to give additional charges of Flame Shock

Elemental Blast - make it baseline and replace it with a talent called Elemental Surge that causes Lava Surge to affect EBlast (make it instant but not reset its CD) as well and increase their damage when proc’d

Totem Mastery - passive totems have always been iconic to the spec and should be baseline. Totem Mastery should improve their effects, duration, and radius

Primal Elementalist - this is such a boring talent and I hate taking it when its needed, devoting 2 talent points just to get a Primal Storm Elemental is ridiculous.

Icefury - the ST rotation is really dull without Icefury, the talent should be baseline and replaced with one that gives Frost Shock a chance to overload or additional critical strike chance

Stormkeeper - It’s just way too iconic for the spec.

Ascendance - Same as Stormkeeper, but it’s also just not good enough for a lv100 talent. 15s is too short and the dps increase can be pretty underwhelming. It should just be baseline (and taken off the GCD) with the talent increasing its duration and giving some interaction with Earth Shock.

Pretty much every talent could be baseline (with the exception of Earth Shield)l, imo. The modern talent system is not great and needs a major overhaul.

2 Likes
9

In my opninion; shamans have some of the largest number of skills/key binds to utilize the spec to its full potential. Adding more skills/talents to baseline would create more button bloat than we already suffer from. So when asking for talents to be baseline what spell/skill would you give up to replace it.

Ascendance was introduced in MoP and stormkeeper in Legion; so I really dont consider either of these iconic shaman abilities.

Ascendance is clunky with the increase in GCD, the frequency of lava surge procs and the limitation of mobility makes it a challenge. Even when people were taking it at the beginning of the xpac; no one had anything nice to say about it.

Plus adding Ascendance stormkeeper and icefury baseline would cause a lot of balancing issues to a class/spec(s) that is historically plagued with balancing issues.

10

High Tide and Cloudburst are 99% the answer to every situation. I wish they could be baseline because they’re very important (and fun) resources to manage, and the other talents are way too far behind to have any similar impact.

11

I would like Elemental Blast to be for all specs again.

1 Like
12

While I can understand the want of Ascendance as a baseline ability mechanically I personally hate that ability on a visual level and mildly don’t care for it on a thematic level. If it were to become baseline I’d sincerely hope it comes with some glyphs.

I’d also love it if Flametongue and Hailstorm were persistent buffs again.

I would also advocate Totem Mastery as baseline for Enhancement, primarily for theme as well. Either Enhancement gets more totems to use or the devs finally rewrite that blurb for it on the spec page. While they’re at it perhaps they could reinstate Totemic Recall in some way.

1 Like
13

Earth shield should be resto baseline. Lightning shield and sundering for enhancement.

14

Kinda think Lightning Lasso should be available for Enhancement as well

2 Likes
15

Seconded!!!

16

A spell being thematic or iconic shouldn’t be why its baseline. An ability should be baseline because it adds something significant to the regular play of the spec that helps it rotationally. Echo for elemental being a notable talent that should be baseline to help with lava surge management, while echo for resto really isn’t. Making abilities, especially lackluster abilities like some of the suggestions baseline just adds to bar bloat or cases where people don’t even bind something because it doesn’t have a use. In a worse case you could also end up with encounter needing to account for that ability being in the raid (grong on mythic feels like this in regards to tremor being given back this expansion).

Earth shield for dps specs wouldn’t make them less squishy in most group situations because earth shield is such a weak heal to begin with. Porting it as is would not be beneficial. Making it the defensive cd instead of astral shift so you had the DR and a lingering heal for periodic damage (and possibly healing for an amount based on stacks remaining) would be how you’d have to find away to fit it in without changing much. Ideally it’d be more of a earthen shield that chunks away (unlike the current version) reducing the dr per hit till expiring (starts at 40 or 60% dr, reducing 10% per hit, cannot be reduced more than once every 3 seconds).

You start off talking about how hailstorm should be baseline just because of the theme of the spec but don’t quite get to a point where you think it should be before you finish typing it. You’re so close to an actual answer there though, in that people would hit frostbrand if it was a dps increase worth hitting it over not hitting it. Removing hailstorm and improving frostbrands base damage may lead to that.

There is room to make thematic abilities fit for classes, but it takes more than just porting them as is. Classes should be reworked with iconic abilities in mind and especially in cases of old classes like shaman, looking at how those abilities should be modernized from how they’ve been for years and how they would fit into the new rotation of the class and the goal of the “niche” development thinks the spec should fit in.