Shamans are in need of Dire help, specifically for Elemental

Classes Shaman
21

Much love, I hope to see some notes on the developer side about our concerns. I think you bring up a great point about how our lvb doesnt scale with crit and literally exasperates the problem with our inability to deal aoe and single target dps in a single spec, most folks have to choose between crit and mastery stacking depending on the content they’re most interested in getting involved in.

Like you said, im trying to do keys and keep up with the dps threshold so I have an abundance of crit, then when i want to raid i now need a seperate set of gear or my dps will be awful.

Alternatively we have the option to play lightning rod which scales with haste and crit, but the tuning on lightning rod mixed with the wonkiness that comes with LR targetting and its short duration leaves it on the weaker side(even weaker than mast stacking mwf build!)

We call that a lose/lose situation… feels bad.

2 Likes
22

lets get this some attention

7 Likes
23

Honestly i feel like some of the talents in Elemental tree should just be baseline for us and not talents.

(1) Echo of the elements

(2) stormkeeper

(3) Mountains will fall

(4) Lava Surge

(5) Windspeakers Lava Resurgence

everything i just Named (or atleast some of it) should be baseline for us and we shouldnt even be in the talent tree. Add something New for us to play with Blizzard.

Also reduce the cooldown of Liquid magma Totem. The fact thats its one minute when we need it to do AoE dps is kinda absurd.

5 Likes
24

Elemental
Flame Shock damage increased by 10% (Elemental only).
Chain Lightning damage increased by 10% (Elemental only).
Lava Beam damage increased by 10%.
Earthquake damage increased by 10%.

1 Like
25

TBH that"s the bandaid stuff we did not want … This wont help the dualitty of AOE vs ST and wont help the survivability but eh … i guess we take it

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26

Restoration

  • Healing Wave healing increased by 6%.

  • Acid Rain damage increased by 120%.

  • Flame Shock damage increased by 20% (Restoration only).

  • Lava Burst damage increased by 20% (Restoration only).
    I don’t see the point of the damage increase myself, now to be fair I am battleshamaning for my guild and I’m doing a ton, it’s nice, but I would have rather have gotten the Healing Increase.
    HWave getting a 6% buff is very nice becasue it is a bit lower than it should be, but we still need a bit of love on all parts imo.
    This gives me more hope that they ATLEAST understand that the Resto tree is in a super bad spot and they need to put more time into revamping it and a simple Band-Aid will have to do for now.
    Atleast yall did something for once Devs, please give us the revamp for 10.1.

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27

we got something! I don’t expect a full fledged shift/change to talents this late into patch deployment as some of my suggestions were asking for, this will do for now.

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28

Honestly its so frustrating blizz removed earth elementals harden skin.

They need to answer for it. They need to Look us in the eyes and tell us we don’t deserve a defensive that is usable while stunned

3 Likes
29

The 10% buff to both chain and EQ is pretty big for M+. The sustained AoE for most specializations, especially on tyrannical weeks where you’re focused on ST, just caused big drop in general performance throughout the rest of the instance. EQ still maybe a bit weak compared to Earth Shocks and Elemental Blasts.

I feel like the Unleash Earth nerf of 2 seconds AND breaks on damage is going to kill the talent. The 4 second root was at least a positive global trade, 2 seconds is not even a gain of half second since it requires targeting and facing. The main reason it’s taken is because it’s not deleted in a single global by a melee auto-attack like Static Field Totem. It’s one of the only PvP talents that requires the investment of 3 talent points to get Earth Shield with Lightning Shield to be effective against melee. It feels unique for our class, but maybe other classes do have a similar investment track where you have to put 3 points into the general utility to get any value out of the PvP talent.

I think most of the changes are okay, but I feel like the nerf to the Tier Set 2 piece bonus seems meh.

A. Going back to the bugs, the set bonus doesn’t affect overloads from Mountains Will Fall already.
B. Looking at other classes, druid and paladins, they were adjusted by reducing the damage in problematic areas and moving that commensurately to other areas.
C. Buffs to Healing Surge is not an improvement to survivability or sustainable healing.

1 Like
30

Taking away defensive utility from resto (and ele) via unleash shield is just unconscionable.

Having lost fleshcraft and harden skin w/ earth ele from shadowlands is just part of an insane approach to shaman survivability.

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31

I criticized this too, our problems are in our healing why buff our damage. Resto has like what 1 intant heal which is riptide and the other 2 are tied to talents which feel like we have to combo to make them work. Our mastery wants spot on healing when some ones low but we dont have neither the tools and much less the numbers to do it. But hey “resto shamy needs higher dps hur dur”

4 Likes
32

Progging on kurrog Mythic atm and it’s just a pain. My choice is either spec on AOE for p2 / earth and do no single target nor cleave OR spec ST and do no cleave nor AOE …

I was used to not having cleave as an ELE but being left out of 2/3 aspects of the fight is an obnoxious feeling.

No rotation ever should be like : “if there is 2 targets, you put your dot on one and just do full single target rotation with non cleaving spell on the other and maybe you’ll be lucky enough for a 7% chance to proc a spell on the second target”

Truelly depressing

4 Likes
33

Yeah, I’m not there yet but I know exactly how you feel. Ele has to spec one way or another and if you try to brute force a “middle ground” you end up with less dps on both single+aoe+overall.

Tack all that onto the layer of having poor personal defensives and then everyone should understand why raid leads are hesitant to bringing an ele for prog.

1 Like
34

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.
:face_with_monocle:
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.
4 Likes
35

Like your suggestion but even with that, it would need :

1 - Some number tuning (not sure about that though, might be fine with your suggestion to merge splintered and primordial)
2 - A way for EQ to do frontload damage at the expense of the knocback maybe ? Probably add a talent for EQ to do full DMg instantly that would replace EOTGS as nobody ever plays with it
3 - The cleave would still be atrocious. I like your idea to make MWF baseline so maybe replace that branch with something that make either ES/EB or LvB cleave

1 Like
36

@Kaivax @Sanq @Linxy @Drough @Orcandent
Care to shed some light on the topics discussed in this thread?
I feel many of these comments have merit and should at least be addressed.
Thank you

1 Like
37

I agree with everything the OP has stated as an ele main since WOD! Some extra thoughts expanded below…

I personally would love to see a change to primordial wave that lets our next Earth Shock/Elemental Blast also hit targets with flame shock alongside lava burst (if we choose) even if it has to be at like 50% damage on secondary targets, which would be huge for spread cleave and could work well with mountains will fall overloads (and it would look and feel really cool) :slightly_smiling_face:

Also, I would really love to see just something done with earthquake where at least SOME of its damage is done instantly, or make it tick faster and increase its AOE size by 2 yards. Examples of this would be Shake the Foundations Shake the Foundations - Spell - World of Warcraft (wowhead.com) or the old BFA talent Tectonic Thunder - Spell - World of Warcraft (wowhead.com) IMO any of these would be a nice QOL for us as normally earthquake does not feel good to use in any situations where the targets move out of it or die too quickly to even take damage from all of its ticks.

On top of this, please remove flame shock’s cooldown finally. Boomkins and Destros have 0 CD on theirs, it would help us tremendously with our spread Flame Shock Skybreaker playstyle and not make Liquid Magma totem and Surge of power the only ways to spread it in a decent amount of time.

Also, please do something for Fire Elemental, Fire Ele does not feel like it should be a 2.5 min CD whatsoever, we really only like it for its flame shock benefits and pets already are very finnicky when it comes to some mechanics and platforms etc.
The 30 sec duration of it never feels like it’s enough either…that’s why the Tier set in Sepulcher felt so good for us, it allowed us to have the pet benefits almost permanently, which other pet classes just get naturally. (locks, hunters etc)

Ascendance needs something to spice it up like the ability to spread lava bursts to flame shock targets naturally or maybe give the lava burst a Dot portion to it or give us some free 0 cast time lava surges/lava beams every few seconds while ascendance is active. Just spitballing ideas here to make it feel worth pressing.

I really like the idea of baking crit damage modifier into natural lava burst a ton and taking it away from needing ascendance for it. it solves our crit scaling issue in single target and it allows us to gear for a fight that has both ST priority AND AOE priority.

Lastly, I would like a short mention of our defensives also, we lost Primal Earth ele wall and don’t have much in place of it. I don’t think we need anything massive, our off healing ability can be very nice with things like AG. I would definitely like to see Astral Shift able to be used while stunned.

If we go extra spicy, maybe something along the lines of an extremely short duration immunity where we get encased in earth and become immobile (like 1-2 secs?)

The lava burst crit scaling naturally and flame shock cooldown removal and the earthquake changes are the biggest things I’d love to see by far, the rest is merely a copium wishlist.

Thanks for listening!

2 Likes
38

Ret palies are getting a rework and part of the reasons were :

1 - Survivability
2 - Utility

2 problem we share with them. If you had on top all the damage profile issues mentioned here, i’d think ELE is also a good candidate for some attention from the devs.

4 Likes
39

not only did we lose PE hardened skin but most ele players in SL were Necrolords and we had fleshcraft which was buffed shortly in the xpac to be an absolutely nutty defensive CD.

So I realize that it wasn’t a class ability but we definitely lost massively on the Def CD side of things in the transition from SL to DF.

100%! EQ does a massive amount of our AoE damage IF the target is kept within the damage zone, problem is its fairly rare that this happens in M+ due to all the affixes + mechanics/swirlies that the group (including the tank) has to dodge. An easy remedy to this would be as you said shifting some of that damage over time to be either front loaded, tick faster, or making the zone larger.

I would love to see a more creative approach to maximizing EQ damage though. Doing something like base-lining MWF and changing that Talent point into a EQ focused talent that erupts EQs for a larger burst via some ability or ramp up…? Obviously tuning would need to happen but the point is there is a massive creative space for EQ that can make the spec feel so much more fun.

As always, good post. Hopefully blizzard sees this and can give us some info about whether or not we’ll be seeing some changes other than % tuning.

1 Like
40

I totally agree dude, it felt odd seeing everyone originally praise our talent tree when they were first coming out and then it seems like Blizz devs took that as a queue to stop working on us whatsoever right after that.

Many classes are ahead of us in quality of life aspects at this point now and we definitely need a real looking at to be in the same realm of usefulness as Evokers, Shadow Priests, Warlocks, Boomies and Mages.

2 Likes