Here’s the logic:
Why don’t elemental shamans currently play Venthyr? (99% of Ele’s above 2.2k rating are Necrolord)
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The best legendary for Ele, by a long shot, is Skybreaker’s Fiery Demise, which makes your flame shock crit +50% more often (both DoT and up-front damage). It also makes your Flame Shock crits reduce the cooldown of Fire Elemental, forming a nice damage+cooldown reduction loop.
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Shamans are vulnerable to being trained into the ground, so Fleshcraft is an excellent additional off-school defensive cooldown.
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The Shaman-specific Necrolord ability is Primordial Wave, a 45-second CD ability which applies flame shock. The Necrolord-specific conduit for Primordial Wave, when ilvl 252 and empowered, gives around a 40% chance for Primordial Wave to have no cooldown. More flame shocks = way more damage with our Skybreaker’s legendary. Primordial Wave also causes the Shaman’s next Lava Burst to hit all targets (within range and LOS) who are affected by flame shock, creating nice spread pressure.
With these benefits, Necrolord is the obvious choice for Elemental Shaman in 3v3, compared to Kyrian (mediocre soulbind benefits for shaman, requires a legendary that’s not as good as Skybreaker’s for Vesper totem to be useful), Night Fae (Fae Transfusion is a nature-school channeled ability and nearly unusable while being trained in 3v3), or Venthyr (Chain Harvest has a pretty long cooldown, mediocre conduit increasing its critical strike chance by ~20% when fully upgraded and empowered, despite Nadjia’s Thrillseeker+Fatal Flaw being good soulbind options).
I want to dive into Venthyr specifically. Reasons that Ele Shamans do not play Venthyr:
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Enhance Shamans play Venthyr, so why not Ele? Enhance Shamans can accumulate 5 stacks of Maelstrom (very easily), making their next spell cast 100% faster and deal 100% more damage, so they can instant-cast a double damage chain harvest. Ele Shamans have no such ability. We have to hard cast chain harvest - it cannot be made instant cast by Stormkeeper or any other modifier. Also, we cannot buff its damage except through trinkets, conduits, etc, because our talent Master of the Elements (casting Lava Burst increases the damage of your next Nature, Physical, or Frost spell by 20%) specifies schools and does not include Chain Harvest’s shadow school.
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Venthyr does not synergize nearly as well as Necrolord with our best legendary (mentioned above). We want as many separate flame shocks as possible, and Primordial Wave is the best way to achieve this with any regularity. The only option for Venthyr to apply additional flame shocks is to use the Chain Harvest legendary (enemies hit by Chain Harvest also get hit by a flame shock), which would require losing our Skybreaker’s legendary (will be different in 9.2).
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In the beta, Elemental Shamans could use the talent Echoing Shock (30s cooldown) to cast a second Chain Harvest at the same target 1 second later with 90% of its usual damage. This was deemed overpowered and removed, despite Echoing Shock’s tooltip still saying “causing your next damage or healing spell to be cast a second time…”. The core of my argument is here.
It’s no secret that 3v3 is currently a 1-shot meta. Most of my kills as Ele come from my teammate 1-shotting during my Lightning Lasso or me 1-shotting with Stormkeeper + Echoing Shock + Earth Shock or Lava Burst. Other prevalent strategies include 40k+ decimating bolts from warlocks, Necrolord banner warrior+rets smashing face, Marksmanship hunters hitting 35k+ aimed shots, etc. Because of this, Necrolord is even better for Elemental Shaman, as our 2-minute cooldown wall, Astral Shift, and our 5-minute cooldown defensive Earth Elemental often cannot keep up with the ~1-minute cooldown 1-shots that other classes have access to. Fleshcraft allows us to stay alive through smaller attacks, while our Astral Shift or cooldowns from our healer keep us alive during big attacks.
Since Venthyr offers far worse defensive benefits for Shaman (it’s incredibly unlikely that Door of Shadows will save you as often as Fleshcraft does, and we lose the Frictionless Coating conduit bonus from Necrolord’s Marileth soulbind), it should at least offer powerful offensive options; however, Chain Harvest… just isn’t powerful for elemental. In an entire day of casual PVP, my max single-target damage with Chain Harvest was 19.8k (Rival gear currently). For a telegraphed 2.1-second-cast ability, this is far lower single-target damage than we’d hope for, compared to the capabilities of other classes (Demon Hunter’s “The Hunt” often hits just as hard and also applies a DoT).
The solution, which I don’t think would make Ele Shamans overpowered, but would instead give us a CHOICE of covenant, is to bring back Echoing Shock + Chain Harvest. Keeping in mind that we’d still lose the numerous benefits of being Necrolord with Skybreaker’s Legendary, this would at least give us 1-shot potential on a roughly 1.25 minute cooldown. A double-crit (~30% in full gear + ~30% in full gear = ~9% chance of both critting) Echoing Chain Harvest would hit for roughly 38k damage, 9% of the time. Keep in mind this is completely telegraphed, requires use of Echoing Shock, requires a 2.1-second cast, has no synergy with our BEST legendary, and requires losing all the glorious benefits of Necrolord; but it would at least give Elemental Shamans a CHOICE of covenant, which many other classes currently enjoy.
Why is a covenant choice important? Player agency is directly correlated with fun. In addition, adaptability means that Ele Shaman would be viable in more 3v3 compositions. For instance, you might run Necro for spread pressure if your teammate is an affliction warlock, while you might run Venthyr if your teammate is a demonology warlock who’s looking to 1-shot.
And that’s my pitch.