Originally Posted by
Epsi
No one really knows how Blizzard judges class performance. But we know how players calculate it - in rare cases they implement player feedback. They have dedicated class designers (previously Watcher, Holinka, Celestalon and ckali or whatever). All of them have a degree of some sort, they say of themselves that they are dedicated gamers and love their jobs.
The question is now - why Elemental is treated like trash? If you'd ask me which spec deserved some kind of rework in Legion or WoD, I'd always say Elemental. Yet some other classes got major reworks, several even got their 2nd/3rd reworks and on top of this some specs got reworked out of nowhere. The idea of abilities with the sole purpose of buffing other abilities got scrapped 2 expansions ago, yet it is still somehow okay for Ele with Unleash Elements in WoD and SK in Legion. Why?
Not to mention that Elemental ended up with abilities, talents and traits which work against each other yet again. People call them "Lighting" or "Fire" builds, where I call this bullshit. Only one way will be the right one, and if you happen to progress raid on your Elemental, you'll be lucky getting even one set of gear before hunters or the other the other Shaman specs. On top of this "builds" clusterfuck we've level 100 talents which all favour different secondary stat setups.. Again???
They took away Shamanistic Rage and SWG without compensating us in any form. GoW and WRT are still on the same tier. No defensive talent tier. SK (probably the only non offensive ability of a caster dps artifact) has a cast time on it. AoE has been further split between more abilities.
I don't like doing direct comparisons to other classes, and some changes Elemental got were great, but simply not enought to have a ground against Mages:
- every spec has access to block / barrier / cauterize (sprint added in Legion)
- every spec has ice floes and blink (arcane even has a reverse blink)
On top of every mage spec now having 3-4 rotational spells with 0-1 DPS CDs paired with different and balanced flavours to them.