Shamans are in need of Dire help, specifically for Elemental

Classes Shaman
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10.05 Feb 28 Edit: We got our single target buffs that are around a 5-6% increase to our dps, I’m grateful for these buffs but the below problems still remain. We are having to choose between single target and aoe while handicapping the other. Shamans lack a strong dps profile that they excel in for raid fights due to this and paired with the lack of raid utility still hindering us I’d like to see some talent adjustments in the future.

10.07 Edit:

  • The following abilities now show on the Personal Resource Display: Echoes of the Great Sundering, Primordial Wave, and Ascendance. & They buffed Electrified shocks duration… out of everything… oh and bugfixed an interaction with mwf builds that results in a nerf.

10.05 Edit:

  • We got our AoE buffed, it now feels much better to be on par with other classes level of dps in Mythic + dungeons.

On the other hand, our current situation still leaves us in a state where there is much much more to be desired in regards to our Raid dps, specifically our single target damage as well as our talent choices when thinking about how to spec for a fight that requires 2-3 target cleave. As a below poster said ‘Ele does a rotation for single target, and they do the same rotation for aoe with the only difference being you manage more than 1 flame shock dot.’ This ultimately leaves Elemental players doing less dps than other classes/specs that can shift a talent point to sustain their single target damage while actively cleaving a 2nd or 3rd target. Look at Demo lock for instance, they shift around a couple of points(3-5) and they do a similar rotation* except now their dreadstalkers will cleave passively and they *implode their wild imps. The Result is Demo lock can actively PUMP on two targets without taking a massive hit to the target they’re casting on to generate shards/imps. Ele in contrast has to choose lightning bolt or chain lightning, we have to choose eleblast or eq, we have to choose between the lesser of multiple evils.

My personal suggestions to help fix/remedy this would be any of the following:

  1. Give LvB crit scaling without the need to be in ascendancy. (would also probably need a change to ascendancy in the form of “while in ascendancy your LvB’s deal X% more damage”)
  2. Merge the two keystone choices for Primordial wave into a single keystone as I’ve listed below. Splintered elements + Primordial surge would decrease the bad feeling we’re all talking about here having to choose to go either straight AoE or Straight Single target oriented builds. This would result in a minor single target buff and a minor AoE buff as it doesn’t change anything for specifically 1 target or multiple targets but now lets us flex being able to do both within the same encounter.
  3. Baseline Mountains Will Fall, this is self explanatory. Our mastery is a fairly weak stat when this isn’t talented, we take this keystone when doing a fight like Raszageth because it benefits both our AoE and our Single target(in a very small way mind you), its our middle ground as of right now because there are times where we do want to have the ability to deal AoE damage to multiple targets while prioritizing our DPS on the main target(Boss).
  4. Bonus suggestion Give shamans in general but more importantly Ele shamans an additional layer of personal defensive’s. Whether this be a buff to the earth eles new passive or some sort of cooldown cough cough Hardened skin.

Shamans are incredibly sub-par, they’re not great and they’re not awful but they’re also just not good in the state they’re currently in. Lets go over why and where they need to see some love.

You may look at an Elemental shamans DPS on Warcraftlogs and say “Well, at least you’re not last!”. I’m grateful for not being last but there are other factors to consider when looking at the health of a class & spec. Lets take a gander shall we?
Sometime between Shadowlands and Dragonflight, Blizzard thought it was cool to remove an entire personal defensive cooldown from Elemental shamans in the form of Hardened Skin(40% DR on use) when talenting into Primal Elementalist. This leaves us in the current state of being the squishiest dps in the game, outside of using our astral shift we have no defensive cooldowns other than AG (damage > healing) that we have to spec into.

Elemental Shaman has the unique problem of not being able to deal competitive AoE & Single target dps in a singular talent tree. We’ve got to choose one or the other, the middle ground is so bad that it takes away from your DPS more than its worth doing. Now if this was the same for other classes/specs I would have no problem with it, but it isn’t and leaves us in a less than versatile position. The cherry on top is that we do relatively poor dps when compared to the whole picture in either scenario.

Shamans as a whole used to bring utility + lust to the table when being brought to the party/raid, with the addition of evokers the niche of bringing a lust has become even more saturated and in my eyes is no longer much of an asset.
Shamans niche utility totems that we can spec into on the tree are also so poorly balanced that more often than not its really not worth speccing into them. Take poison cleansing totem or stoneskin totem for example, Stoneskin totem has a 30s cd, lasts 15s and is a 10% physical damage reduction. Not only is the DR on this limited to melee attacks which only really apply to the tank making the party wide affect of this totem pointless. IMO changing this totem to either ALL damage reduction and placing it on a larger CD or making the physical damage reduction greater would be a good approach.
Poison Cleansing totem, less problematic and more so just needs a duration buff imo, currently it lasts 6 seconds and cleanses ONE poison effect every 1.5s. for a maximum of 4 pulses and 4 poison removals, Its just not enough when you need it and doesn’t last long enough for it to be reliable. Currently I take this on TJS and cleanse my tanks poison, but I need to use recall to use the totem twice than once in the entire fight.
Windrush totem is great, but also now a lesser version of evokers zephyr which reduces damage to all those who it applies a movement speed bonus to.

There is a whole slew of things people have suggested in the Elemental shaman discord, but unfortunately its moot unless a Blizz Dev sees and acknowledges our current situation - One of the proposed changes is to merge Splintered elements & Primordial surge into a singular keystone talent. This would result in an increase to our multi target damage up to 3 targets, but would likely remain around the same dps in any higher target count pulls due to a lower prioritization on Lava Burst.

Elemental shamans just don’t bring anything to the raid or M+group that you can’t find on another dps class but does it better, case and point with enhance’s current niche…Enhance could do 10k less DPS than it does right now and still be desired to bring to a raid because Windfury totem value is roughly ~3k dps per person it benefits. If an ele sham does equal or less damage than another caster dps we find our selves in the difficult spot where we don’t get invited into higher keys or invites into a guild roster when looking for a guild. This does not only apply to the top end players unfortunately because the Meta trickles downwards and affects the minds n hearts of all those who play the game.

Please help us.

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I think a major issue with ele shaman is its poor scaling. We have two stats (mastery and crit) that just don’t scale us well.
Currently our ‘big’ ST build relies heavy on mastery which is fine, flinging a string of lavabursts is pretty dope but the issue is the more mastery we have the more maelstrom we generate which means the more spenders we use, which unless you take Mountains will fall (which most builds now DONT) this makes mastery not scale with spenders.
Why do I have to take a talent that is so deep in our tree just to scale ok?

Secondly is crit, which is one of our best stats in AoE situations. Again, this is fine, I love seeing the chain of lightning bolt crits or big ol elemental blasts but this leaves lavaburst (a major spell in our rotation) feeling really bad. Scaling lvb with crit would provide a much needed ST buff to our AoE builds but by no means would it be perfect.

We can’t continue to band aid our problems with aura buffs. Elemental needs changes to mastery/Mountains will fall and lavaburst crit scaling much like Chaos bolt.

Things I would love to see:

  1. Ascendance redesigned and the crit scaling from it just baked into LvB. Make ascendance have an extra chance to overload or something, its a ‘major’ cd but provides kinda meh gains.
  2. Mountains will fall baseline/in a easier spot to get
  3. Earthquake needs some love, I would love to see EQ changed to an upfront damage and maybe Echoes of the great sundering redesigned to be like flamepatch or something. EQ loses SO much value due to movement.

Thanks for the great post Bussy, hope to celebrate some buffs/changes with you later on!

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Both the post above are doing a VERY VERY good summary of the situation.

We really need a dev to read this !

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Personally I think Ele has one of the coolest Masteries in the game. The ability to doublecast is just really fun. It does need some serious numbers tweaks though.
I don’t see any reason why EShock/EQ shouldn’t be included in Overload as baseline, even if it’s at a reduced rate.

I agree LvB should get the inherent crit scaling from Asc and I think Asc should double down on the mastery. “While Asc is active Overload should be guaranteed with a (mastery*X)% chance to cause additional overloads” or something to that effect. Make ASC worth the 3min cd it has or better reward the DRE gamble

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One issue Ele faces is a discrepancy in stats between single target and AoE damage. Even looking at the most basic stat guidelines for every other dps spec in their guides, almost none of them have as big of a dichotomy as we do with mastery (single target), and critical strike (aoe). They all follow some type of order that can be generally useful for both damage profiles. Most of the mid to high specs also include builds that don’t force people to choose between good AoE or decent single target. It would be nice to have a build and stat priorities that allow us to do both without falling off entirely on the other.

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Overall I am enjoying M+ this season and to a lesser extent raiding but some concerns that have already been listed here are making me possibly rethink my main.

I despise how squishy my elemental shaman is. It is so well known in the general community that it is pretty much a meme.

Single target damage remains a problem, even when talented for it.

Self heals are so weak they are almost never enough to save yourself.

The main problem here is that some of these issues have been a problem for such a long time that community perception has been damaged so much that most pugs will still not look at us even if we are brought up to par.

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Honestly Besides our stats I feel like there are a few problems in the Ele Talent tree. our tree is split between ST and AOE like ya said but even alot of the ST things arent used in our best build. Icefury and the empowered frost shocks don’t ever feel worth using in a normal rotation for the damage they deal. in the fire build theyre glorified movement fillers and for lightning youre just using them for lightning bolt buffs. Ele blast is required because Earth shock just doesnt do damage even with tier and magma chamber. like Stats may fix some of this if anything can be done about it. The final problem is our eles just arent that great and primal ele doesnt make them good enough to care about them being full pets. The class has stuff that I see has issues(Single target fire build) but honestly besides personal stuff objectively we’ve got stuff that would really help us if fixed.

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Bouncing back on the stats issue and beyond it being a numerical problem it also comes with the worst of feeling.

Each time you get a piece of gear your both glad and sad that it will only be usable in one type of content.

Having to chose in my vault between raid or m+ does NOT feel good.

When i spend tenth thousands of gold in a craft i can do only every 2 weeks and i have to choose the stats to make it for either ST or AOE it does NOT feel good.

Mountain will falls and the crit scaling on LvB should be either more accessible OR baked into the core kit somehow.

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This is the first time since I started playing elemental as my main spec for high end content that I’m actually proactively an alt character not for splits, but rather for when Blizz probably ignores us again for 10.1. They are out of touch of the entire shaman class. The fact that we don’t even have a tuning pass for .0.5, let alone actual fixes to our issues, is proof of that.

We are just a liability to bring to any content. We can’t survive high keys, we can’t do AoE damage without giving up 25% of our ST damage, compared to 5-10% for other specs. Unless we actually see effort from blizzard to actually address issues like the one’s OP mentioned, we are just going to slowly rot away until the class doesn’t exist anymore

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That talent node between splintered/surge is not fun to play around. The last dungeon i ran i literally sat outside looking at it just thinking “well do i want to be bad for trash or bad for bosses, while also not being great at whatever i choose?”. Spec is shoe horned into doing one or the other while something like DH just does everything and leeches for absurd heals. Feels like playing elemental just brings the group down.

It just spirals from that choice as well. If you aren’t running splintered then magma totem loses some value but if you cut that for anything single target then aoe flame shock talents start to lose value…

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What!? Earth Elementals “Hardened Skin” ability was removed?

That was half the value of taking Primal Elementalist.

Thats just sad.

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Yeap, poof just gone. Shamans are just so squishy now.

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Hey now, Mana Spring Totem is now a passive. That’s huge dps increase. Ele Sham S+++ tier

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If some of the bugs with Elemental were fixed, it might help as well.

  • Earth Shield occasionally expires before the 9th charge and final charge
  • Healing Stream Totem’s final tick heals at the base value, with the final tick receiving no benefits from talents
  • Mountains Will Fall’s Elemental Blast and Earth Shock Overloads do not benefit from the 2p tier bonus.
  • Lightning Rod application, particularly with Earth Quakes is sporadic and inefficiently refreshing in plenty of situations where it really should apply to a 3rd target instead
  • Electrified Shocks are applying to random targets in AOE, and not applying to the Main Target then spreading. This has plenty of implications when the target needs to have both Lightning Rod and the Electrified Shock effect
  • Horizon Strider’s Garments’ 2 piece set bonus ignores Lava Burst. Even if the target doesn’t have flame shock and Lava Burst hit critically, it doesn’t even work. It just straight ignores Lava Bursts.

Just want to emphasize my dismay. Two sparks and both embellishment slots used on crafted mail armor set piece, and the bread and butter of half the spec doesn’t work with the bonus. Might as well add in, I went deep with the leatherworking profession into both elemental specialization and mail armor crafting… just to come out with that as a result to see that the buff was falling off during Ascendance windows.

I don’t even know, buffs or bug fixes certainly would be appreciated.

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I know it’s not ideal but you might have to just reroll Evoker. I got so sick of being declined from keys and underperforming against druids/evokers in raids that I finally broke down and just made one. I will swap back to Resto and Elemental once they actually take the time to try to fix the underperforming.

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These are all great points and to go further on your earth shock point people don’t talk enough about the amount of talent points we need to spend for ele blast

1 point mandatory to take earth shock
1 point to replace earth shock with ele blast which not only adds a 2 second cast time but our spender now cost 1.5 times the resource required to use it
So then we basically are forced to spend 2 points on eye of the storm to reduce that down to 75 maelstrom and on top of all of that we have to spend 2 points on non dmg related talents just to move down the tree so in total we basically have to spend 1/5 of our talent points to move down the tree and make ele blast playable.

Then you compare that to our enh counterpart who just has to take the talent in the spec tree while taking lava burst in the class tree to add another charge.

Then you look at how their resource related talents effect their spenders compared to ours each maelstrom weapon spent adds up to 20% dmg and they can spend 10 stacks on their spenders. Versus what ele gets a basically mandatory resource cost reduction and an increase to the cap on the resource.

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I think another large issue with the spec is the amount talents we have that are casting spell A buffs spell B. MoTE, SoP, both icefury buffs, Windspeakers, PoTM. When in reality in ST your primarily just spamming lava burst into ele blasts many of those MoTE buffs end up not actually buffing anything.

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Signing the petition that “a dev needs to read this.” The first 2 posts are spot on.

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Just jumping in to bump this and say that devs need to pay attention to this and the first two posts do a great job summing up a lot of our issues. Either everyone needs to be able to do good AOE + ST at the same time, or nobody. And ignoring Ele while tuning basically every other DPS over the past few weeks feels extremely bad on top of that. Even the little thing we’re getting in 10.05 with Mana Spring being passive is pointless because it’s so horribly undertuned. Needs to restore about 300-400% more mana to be useful.

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I still don’t see why only enhancement gets Windfury. It’s like giving mark of the wild only to feral, or power infusion to only 1 priest spec. Give ele/resto a caster equivalent, so we can have a reason to be considered for mythic raid composition besides just “need another body”

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