With the change from maelstrom to fulmination, elemental shamans now have 2 systems in their kit that are disjointed.
- Casting lightning bolts to build up fulmination for earth shocks
- Casting flame shocks to get lava burst procs.
A simple solution would be to a) make lava burst to have a chance to grant fulmination stacks or b) make master of the elements baseline.
However, what about instead of trying to bridge the gap between the two systems we make a relatively simple base class (like how it is on alpha), but give a lot of flavor in the talents. Most talent tiers will have 3 choices:
- lava spec: A focus on funneling your damage by spreading flame shock and casting lava burst
- lightning spec: Single target or aoe burst with a focus on cooldowns
- master of the elements spec: A bit of both. Reliable and sustained single target and aoe. Kinda like how Master of the Elements plays today
Baseline Changes:
- Fire Elemental is renamed Storm Elemental. The spell is exactly the same I just hate how our fire elemental does not interact with our fire abilities anymore
- A passive that gives you the ability to control your elementals. We are elemental shamans. We should be able to actually control elementals. This does not mean you gain access to meteor baseline. However, I think we should have Harden Skin baseline since we only have a single wall baseline and adding in a wall on a 5 min cd is not going to break the game
Tier 1/3:
- I think these tiers are fine. I don’t love the fact that echo of the elements is a talent, but I am not sure how to change it at the moment
Tier 2:
- The only change I would have on this tier would be switching ice fury and echoing shock. Ice Fury would now a) automatically give a stack of fulmination and b) give your frost shocks a chance (10%?) of giving a stack of fulmination (in addition to doing increased damage). This way this tier is mostly about building stacks of fulmination and it retains some of the resource generation that ice fury has on live.
Tirr 4:
- Fire: Liquid Magma Totem: Every time you cast lava burst, summon a liquid magma totem at the targets location that deals aoe damage every couple of second
- This would mean that your AOE consists of spreading flame shock and then spamming lavaburst.
- Of course the totem will need to be nerfed so it deals far less damage then on live
- I also really like the idea of just having a ton of little totems spewing off as much as they can
- Lightning: Greater Storm Elementals: Empowers your storm elemental to do exactly what the talent does on live
- While I personally don’t like playing this talent on live, I like the idea of having it and the concept behind it. Also with ancestral grace being baseline, this talent will get stronger.
- Elemental: Master of the elements: Your lava burst has a chance to proc fulmination and causes your next non-fire damaging ability to do 15% more damage
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I really like the weaving play style this talent introduces.
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While adding the extra functionality might make it to strong, lava burst granting fulmination had to fit somewhere in the build and this is a good place for it.
Tier 5:
- Only change would be to change Ancestral Guidance to Summon Water Elemental which does the same exact thing, but summons an elemental for flavor reasons (again elemental shamans should have lots of elementals).
Tier 6:
- Fire: Summon Fire Elemental (Replaces Primal Elementalist in this tier): 1 Min CD. Summons forth a fire elemental that consumes all flame shocks on all targets and then damages your current target over 10 seconds. It deals more damage based on how many flame shocks where consumed.
- Lowers your aoe damage a bit but really hones into the idea of funneling your damage into one target. You can get a bunch of flame shocks on targets and then consume it all for big damage on a single target
- Lightning: Echoing Shock: Same as it is on the alpha
- Very excited for this ability in shadowlands and I think it works very well with storm keeper, hence it being in the lightning build
- Elemental: Surge of Power: Similar to how it is on live but it also procs on earthquake (b/c idk why it doesnt on live)
- Fits in the theme of weaving in all your different elements one after the other to empower them.
- I am maybe thinking about swapping the places of this talent and master of the elements so you can go choose surge of power and fire elemental in order to be able to get more flame shocks out
Tier 7:
- Fire: Ascendance: Transform into a flame ascendant for 15 seconds, applying flame shock to all your targets, removing the cooldown of lava burst, and replace chain lightning with lava beam (which would now refresh flame shock on all targets hit)
- This talent has long been very underwhelming. Now it is a huge funnel ability every 3 min.
- By applying flame shock to all targets the gcd problem with this ability doesnt feel so bad. It will almost feel like the resto ascendance healing a bunch whenever you press it.
- Whenever you press this ability you then have a choice to consume all the flame shocks for a huge fire elemental and heavy single target damage, or keep the flame shocks up so you have some aoe damage too
- I am not sure weather to include the clause about buffing your lava burst damage, but that is a problem for the devs to balance
- Lightning: Stormkeeper: Same on live
- I love this ability and it is a blast to use. While I know it was baseline in legion, it very much feels like a talent and I think it should stay as a talent. Wouldn’t change a thing.
- Elemental: Unlimited Power
- I am not really sure what to do with this talent. I like it in theory but it is just a bit to weak. I am thinking that either we can buff it to something like 3% haste or make it also give some mastery, but I am not sure
- One possible rework could be: Unlimited Power: Every time you cast an ability that is not from the same school of magic as your previous ability, you gain 1% haste for 10 seconds. Gaining a stack does not refresh the duration
- Now this talent is all into the weaving in different schools of magic game plan
I know these changes probably wont be implemented, but its alpha, its fun to think of new ideas for the game, and a dwarf can dream. Let me know what everyone thinks