Blizzard dipped their toes in the water. They attempted to right a wrong, by changing the fantasy and thematically styled play of Elemental.
However, they have to admit… they’re underprepared and poorly managed. It’s not the class developers, the fault isn’t on them. You know, judging by the monetization of the recent $90 mount, and the $225 flying spectral tiger that there are much larger powers behind this.
Blizzard can’t let this class over perform this way, we all knew this.
I think the only thing Elemental shamans (myself of 20 years, too) are asking is for you to hold off on pulling one of the most notable triggers, outside of Legion Beta and Prepatch in WOD just before release. You’re good at kicking Ele too far down, it’s a habitual routine for Blizzard. Please do the math, let it stew for a few weeks, then make a judgement call. You’re losing the respect of a sizable player base with some of the best theory crafters handling overcorrections this way.
I honestly should have stepped away and kept my head in the sand with Cata Classic, but even there you’re neglecting everyone. What happened to you? Who happened? Why did it happen?
This honestly has been one the most mismanaged and turbulent specs from a balance and design standpoint I’ve seen since Vanilla. From original spam rotation, to changes killing our farseer build, to ele coming out the gate over tuned and forcing a stat priority change with the last patch, to us having bugs on top of bug on top of bugs, to being overtuned in a way that resulted in nerfs, to now this round of nerfs that are just an over correction to a problem that was solved in the previous patch.
I know a lot of people will dropping elemental if you make this change and others will drop this game (less but some).
Get your house in order, stop with the knee jerk reactions devs and stop using a clever when a scalpel will do.
idk also same one week of power with wind gust nerf at beginning of slands. idk why the blizz troll tease on shamm everytime – i thought this was just on ptr for a minute?
The changes are way to over the top.
With even just the Lightning Rod nerf fdk and uhdk were still ahead of us
www(dot)warcraftlogs(dot)com/zone/statistics/38#boss=2919&dataset=95&sample=1
And as far as M+ goes it seems like all the changes are from looking at clips of preplanned out scenarios all with 1 thing really in common, Max stack spymasters trinket… Put an Elemental shaman without a spymasters trinket in that same scenario and they are not going to get remotely close to those numbers. And im sure even some of the clips referenced to gut the spec were from when ascendance was still bugged.
For single target there were plenty of other classes already out performing elemental, and these changes just knocked the spec even further down.
These changes are definitely a knee jerk reaction that need to be altered to a more reasonable change.
ele is my favorite class in terms of class fantasy and design but i have goals of doing high level keys and i want to not be a burden to any group and it sucks i wanted to main ele forever im not a person who makes alts but now i have goals and im not gonna play a bad class just cause i like it and weigh a groups potential down
Blizzard is literally killing the Elemental spec for nothing. They clearly cant handle the numbers. And if thats the case, why change it in the first place?
Now they fully destroyed our spec and made us unwanted in every Mythic+ content.
Both the prepatch rework and 0.5 rework look and feel rushed. The spec has no identity now other then “lightning”. I don’t understand what the spec is even about anymore. It’s just a bunch of random this buffs that effects. There is no central theme or focus.
There are a bunch of overload talents, but overloads are weak.
There are weaver talents for playing fire+lightning, but they’re so weak you only play fire or lightning.
The elemental talents are useless as the base elementals are weak, and boring.
What is the point of ice fury? Without control over it, it’s just a discount lava burst.
We have a bunch of +x% damage talents, the most boring type of talent. Something we didn’t have before.
Think about fire mage, the theme’s are combustion, heating up procs, and ignite. Everything in the tree plays into these three themes in one way or another. It make sense. And all three concepts work together.
As an Elemental Shaman main since mid-Cata, staying with primarily shaman for every season I’ve played, these changes were a step in the right direction. As a player that enjoyed the full weaving playstyle that Antorus tier set combined with Icefury came with, I truly looked forward to the changes.
Then as development went on with the focus being on Stormbringer and with Farseer receiving no compensation to what it was losing from 11.0.2, I started to get worried. How the spec released felt awful, and damage has rarely been my first concern. I love my Elemental Shaman and pressing more buttons in a dps rotation is fun when I don’t have to fight between rotational buttons and utility buttons.
But despite the goal of the design being multiple elements being viable and the talent tree being curtailed of build narrowing, Ascendance having such a focus results in an even narrower path of “Mastery for all” and Stormbringer results in that “flexibility” being honed in on lightning anyway. Yes, we press Icefury, but the rework itself feels incomplete and Farseer needed a more comprehensive rework to go along with these changes.
Lacking one, there is absolutely no reason to crush Elemental Shaman’s single target DPS along with its AOE peaks; the spec is already being tied to a 3 minute burst window for the majority of its damage, and in a raid environment this rarely is enjoyable or a profile that fights are kind to. After the adjustments to Lightning Rod from the hotfix tuning, we weren’t even topping DPS on the most AoE fight in the raid, calling into question the severity of the nerfs in the first place, including the extensiveness of the AoE nerfs.
Please, do something for the spec I love to play, at least for Single Target.
An addendum; the lack of response to our PTR feedback as active theorycrafters and a testing community until late in the testing cycle is confusing. We as a community told you the changes were out of line in terms of AoE power, and the only nerf that happened before it shipped live was Surge of Power being reduced from two stacks to one stack.
This lack of communication and tuning our class around the outlier - in a spec with Deeply Rooted Elements, a purely RNG mechanic that gives us our burst window in short time frame procs - feels miserable.
Currently, between the bug fixes and nerfs it looks to be ~24% decrease in DPS for single target and ~16% decrease in AOE damage. This is completely unacceptable. To make matters worse, somehow the spec is worse off after a mid-tier stat priority and rotation change.
I’ve been a long-time loyal customer, and if these changes go through as listed, I very likely will become a former customer.
On the 23rd Blizzard nerfed Lightning Rod by 50% and announced a fix for a bug with ascendance.
Lightning Rod contributed roughly 5-7% to our damage, making this a ~3% nerf.
The Ascendance bug is still active in-game. A conservative estimate puts this at 7% in pure damage and 2% in resource generation.
Asc change: 3.75% nerf after adjusting for the Echo Chamber nerf
Preeminence: Ignoring all haste caps it comes out as 0.7% nerf
When you log in on Tuesday/Wednesday, your character will be at least 10% weaker.
If Blizzard actually fixes the Asc bug, your character will be 19% weaker.
Second LR nerf?
about 11-12% of the amount of Lightning damage, so this came out as roughly a 1.5% nerf.
So adding all of those adjustments and fixes puts us at a 24% Single Target nerf roughly, since release
Single target damage is already horrible after the latest rework, now after next tuesday is going to be worse.
After the rework I took some lower level alts off the shelf and that’s probably going to be the plan after Tuesday. Been playing Shaman for a while, but if I can barely keep up in group content then what’s the point?
Not sure what other class I will play, but this is probably it.
This is my biggest issue frankly. We were completely fine, not at the top but I think most of us were happy with the spec and playstyle (I obviously can’t speak for everyone but I have seen similar sentiments posted in various areas). Then we get a random rework mid tier, our stat prio changes which means many of us pay thousands of gold to recraft our gear, and then we get nerfed into dust into a state where the spec performs and feels worse to play than before.
What I am guessing they were hoping would be an exciting moment for the ele players they turned into a double slap across the face.
The problem is that currently the spec feels BETTER to play than before. After 3 straight seasons of spamming a single builder spell, it feels nice to use our whole kit synergistically again. But once again it’s ruined by blizz seemingly having no idea how to design this spec.
I brought over Earthshrine’s write up of the exact impact of the 10/29 tuning pass and other nerfs if anybody wants to review it. Needless to say its looking bleak if something isn’t done. (bump it you rats)
There was this glorious little window in TBC where rogues were overpowered. Patches usually took weeks to come out. They gave us less than one week.
So i feel your pain.
And ill also gesture here at my current main. I gave up on rogues. Because blizzard will always, always hold them back lest they maybe possibly kill someone without using every single cooldown. They gave demon hunters eveything rogues should have ever had and more. So i changed. And ive been much happier.
If the other blue class is never held back? well…maybe…consider playing one.
I wouldn’t say Frost Shock is not worth pressing but it’s not significant part of the damage. Icefury can hit around 1 mln so it’s definetely wroth pressing - same for buffed Frost Shocks. Keep in mind they also cause your Ancestors to cast Lava Burst. Anyway the outcome of the changes are we lost Skybreaker’s, Lightning Bolt CDR, got forced into Stormkeeper and even though they changed Ascendance to work with Lightning spells it will have as much impact as it had before.
What I’d like them to do in 11.0.7 is add a “fire” oriented choice nod for Stormkeeper and maybe Elemental can be saved in PvP.
I looked at mythic Kyveza logs for 95th % and there are 6, yes 6 (7 if you include the outlaw abusers), classes AHEAD of elemental on a SINGLE TARGET boss…
Based on those logs elemental was just below 1.4m dps, take account the nerfs to those numbers elemental will be at 1.05m ST dps. Putting elemental hundreds of thousands dps below the bottom spec on that chat
I would be able to laugh more if this did not happen every expansion (most recent examples in my mind BFA being told we ran out of time to work on your class, SL nerfing the machine gun lighting bolt build because of “to high APM”, the single button spam of DF).
I would urge the devs to take a really hard look in the mirror at how this was handled and realize this happens to frequently to the shaman class and it needs to be changed/stopped. I debated about not even playing The War Within and and this makes me want to stop playing completely. I only log in because I have three of four friends that I run keys with it one of the few times with our busy schedules I can catch up with them.
That aside a 16 to 25% nerf, depending on the situation, seems an over the top knee jerk reaction.