These Shaman changes do not address the problem that Fire Elemental builds face

Cabah-sargeras · July 2, 2024, 3:13am

Compared to other classes…
Shadow Priests with shadow crash can have 100% uptime on their main DoTs of Vampiric Touch and Shadow Word Pain, and are among the strongest DPS in the game. Affliction Warlocks can apply Agony to 8 Targets, refresh agony at any time, and use Seed of Corruption on unlimited targets to apply corruption to everything in a small area, while their other DoTs are intended for a single target. Destruction warlocks can use cataclysm to apply Immolate. Unholy DK’s can always keep their DoTs up with Outbreak. Even Balance and Feral druids can apply Sunfire and thrash to multiple targets in a small area.

The problem…
Elemental shaman fire builds in multi-target have a problem. It can’t easily apply flame shock and maintain them the way other classes apply their dots. Even Enhancement shamans have basically free refreshes of Flame Shock to 4 nearby enemies using Lava lash which is one of their main damaging abilities. It would be nice if Lava Burst could refresh the Flame Shock DoT, but that may be too strong of a change and cause other problems. After the changes, Elemental is also losing “Rolling Magma” which is the main cooldown reduction talent that allows you to hit Primordial Wave every 15-20 seconds even though the normal cooldown is 45 seconds. Losing this talent is a huge nerf to fire builds in both single target and AoE because all Fire builds revolve around this talent to make them strong.

The way that ele shamans apply flame shock and maintain it is very flawed.
Flame shock is limited to only 6 targets and as Ele, you actually lose an application of Flame Shock when playing properly. In 6+ target scenario, after casting Fire Ele, you then need 4 globals before you can start really doing damage. Liquid Magma Totem > Totemic Recall > Liquid Magma Totem > Primordial Wave > Lava Burst. This feels like the button bloat that Ret paladins were complaining about for a long time regarding how many things they need to press before activating Avenging Wrath.

Additionally, you have a very low chance to proc ascendance in order to refresh all your dots. Many times your ascendance does not proc, or comes at a bad time and you are forced to manually refresh your flame shock one at a time, or maximum two at a time at the cost of needing to use a spender into flame shock versus another ability such as Lava Burst or Chain Lightning to do more damage. You would expect that if your Fire Elemental was active and you proc Ascendance that your flame shocks would refresh to 42 seconds, but they don’t, even though that is what the interaction should be. Another issue is that when your Ascendance expires during a Lava Beam cast, you just lose the cast entirely as if you were interrupted. Is there any other class where your cast gets cancelled just because you lost a buff? I don’t think so.

A simple solution…
Liquid magma totem only spreading Flame Shock to 3 targets needs to be changed. Over the course of a dungeon it is between 5%-8% of your damage. What it should do is be on a 30 second cooldown and apply flame shock to 5 targets, even if it comes at the cost of the totem itself doing less damage and making this comparable to a Shadow Crash or Vile Taint. This would make the flow of Fire Elemental Builds much smoother. Fire Ele > Liquid Magma Totem > Primordial wave a 6th target > Lava Burst > normal rotation.

PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE ROLLING MAGMA AND WINDSPEAKER’S LAVA RESURGENCE!
These two talents are what makes Elemental shaman fun to play in keys and are a big reason why the Shaman community chose to keep the Season 3 tier set, because the meatball build is fun! Throwing out spicy meatballs and spending maelstrom on Earthquake is a simple, yet, fun build. The totemic hero talents already do not play on the primordial wave build at all, and removing these talents make Farseer much weaker as it leads to less Ancestor’s being called and leading to less cooldown reduction on your Elementals (Farseer: Call of the Ancestors & Offering From Beyond).

Regarding the planned changes…
Overall, I like the changes that Blizzard is making to Elemental shaman and I am glad that they are finally getting a raid buff. I’m not happy with absolutely every change that has been made, but Shamans getting this much of a change is long overdue. Part of what makes elemental shaman so fun to play is that you have different procs which can allow you to have instant casts and be one of the most mobile ranged classes in the game. However, these changes look to be removing the number of procs that we get and turning us into more of a sit-and-cast style of play.

Unrelated notes…
Can we please get a graphical update for Ascendance? It looks like it’s just transmogging your gear into the “Firelord’s Vestment’s” Mage tier from Bastion of Twilight. Shamans would REALLY appreciate having another button to use as a defensive. Just because we have talents that give us more HP in our class tree does not mean we can survive more.

Verden-draenor · July 2, 2024, 4:25am

I mained Ele Shaman at the end of Shadowlands and the beginning of Dragonflight.

I love a lot of the announced changes and it will likely make me revisit Shaman as my main again. BUT, I want do see the following:

Remove the target count and cooldown of Flame Shock altogether. Now that you have the new “dynamic Lava Surge proc chance” mechanic added, having Flame Shock up on tons of targets shouldn’t be a huge problem anymore.
Add some way to make it easier to spread Flame Shock to multiple targets. Here are some ideas:
- a. Chain Reaction - If Chain Lightning hits any targets affected by Flame Shock, it spread Flame Shock to all other targets it hits.
- b. Molten Splash - Lava Burst critical strikes apply Flame Shock to nearby enemies.
- c. Molten Geyser - Earthquake applies Flame Shock to affected enemies.
- d. Reduce the cooldown of Liquid Magma totem to 20 seconds (similar to Shadow Priest’s Void Crash or Shadow Crash), move it to a much more accessible location within the talent tree, and allow it to continuously spread Flame Shock to all nearby targets while active. Adjust or remove its other damage components as needed.
- e. Growing Flames - Casting Flame Shock on a target already affected by Flame Shock will cause it to spread onto nearby targets.

As for Rolling Magma and Windspeaker’s Lava Resurgence, I can understand why they’d remove those talents. They effectively caused Elemental to ONLY cast Lava Burst when taken, making many of its other talents and abilities effectively moot. I don’t think that’s good class design, and it’s a significantly problem that many players had with Elemental. If Blizzard were to “fix” Flame Shock spreading issues (as discussed above), talents like Rolling Magma and Windspeaker’s Lava Resurgence would become brokenly powerful.

If it were a choice between keeping some iteration of those two talents and allowing Flame Shock to spread more easily, I’d rather have the ability to spread Flame Shock more easily.

Cabah-sargeras · July 2, 2024, 5:17am

Removing the target count of flame shock would only work if we had some way of applying more than 3 flame shocks at a time instead of being limited to using Liquid Magma totem every 1 minute or hard casting flame shock/primordial wave. I like the idea, and that’s why I compare it to things like Shadow Crash, Seed of Corruption, or Vile Taint. The lava surge change is a very large nerf in AoE because a lot of the damage in AoE is instant cast lava burst cleaving up to 6 targets when you proc ascendance or use primordial wave.

Your “chain reaction” is just the Venthyr ability Chain Harvest, which could be it’s own spell. Blizzard tries to make spells and talents in theme with their class to some extent so it wouldn’t make sense that a purely nature ability or earthquake spreads flame shock even though I’d be in support of anything that makes it easier to spread flame shock. You’re “growing flames” idea is already implemented in a way that I mentioned. Surge of Power talent makes your next ability after casting any spender do an additional effect, and if you flame shock after earth shock or earthquake, it spreads to 1 additional target, which is why I mentioned that we’re forced to “manually refresh your flame shock one at a time, or maximum two at a time at the cost of needing to use a spender into flame shock versus another ability such as Lava Burst or Chain Lightning to do more damage”

Your points on Rolling magma and WLR don’t really make sense. Those talents fall into the Fire build, and are not meant for nature builds. Rolling magma comes from Blizzard keeping primordial wave and intending for it to be reduced with more casts of lava burst, and using lava burst into your spenders like earth shock and elemental blast to do more damage and have an instant proc to spend. However surge of power can let you choose to not use lava burst after your spender. After using a spender it’s still very viable to use lightning bolt, chain lightning, or frost shock depending on the situation.