Legion: Elemental Specific

[Vorpalspork]

Did anybody played in beta with lvl 110? Is the ramp up thing still a thing or will it get better (or worse) with gear and traits etc?
Boomkins have the same issue and with lvl 100 it takes ages to get enough astral power? to cast a star fall. However it gets better later because you get some traits for astral power generation.

Our only other source are overloads. With mastery as worst stat this works against this in some way unfortunately.
I also would like to see that FS has a chance to give us Maelstrom^^

Ramp up is still a problem at 110. Boomkins get their moon/moon spells to increase their astral power gain, but we don't get anything like that. We get some increased chances for overloads, so gain may increase slightly, but ramp up is still a major problem with AoE at 110.

[jimmyolsen]

The 10-second duration is a bigger problem than the ramp-up, but the combination is terrible. Liquid Magma doesn't have a ramp-up, but its 15-second duration means that classes with AoE bombs will eat into its duration already. With EQ you're further eating into the duration by using CL unless you've hoarded Maelstrom. Throw in Static Overload, and the EQ incentives decline further. We could really benefit from the Vanilla Fire Nova Totem. Just a 10-yard, AoE bomb, that works like Cap totem. Throw it down, wait two seconds, watch it explode.

The damage concerns of EQ compared to Earth Shock, in my opinion, have been overstated. It's already better DPM at 2-targets than Earth Shock, and even at 3+ targets full duration EQ beats ES on DPET. This is especially true at higher haste values, since EQ actually scales with haste beyond merely the GCD and Maelstrom generation. At 40% haste or higher, a single two-target EQ does about 5% more damage than a 100 power Earthshock (at 9203 Intel, 40%+ haste, 100 MP ES does 74,915; EQ does 39,326 to each target). Thus, when you remove the 2-piece bonus and the Legendary boots from consideration, EQ is a DPS gain over ES on Twins/Council fights once you hit 40% haste.

But this brings up a subsequent concern with EQ. It has a haste scaling problem. Unlike other dots which have a supplementary tick for haste values between breakpoints, EQ (and Blizzard, which is the most analogous spell I can think of) has no such tick. At 9203 Intel, here are my results with various haste values:

2166 Haste (21.66%) - 12 ticks, all non-crits 2809 damage
2711 Haste (27.11%) - 12 ticks, all non-crits 2809 damage
2166 Haste + AS (33.83%) - 13 ticks, all non-crits 2809 damage
2711 Haste + AS (39.82%) - 13 ticks, all non-crits 2809 damage
2836 Haste + AS (41.20%) - 14 ticks, all non-crits 2809 damage

[desert-wind]

You've already been told it's a gain to use EQ over earthshock at 3+ targets, and you still say the spell is worthless?

I also never excused Blizzard's bad design, because it's not bad design. It's bad tuning. There's nothing mechanically wrong with the skill, it's all about the numbers.

But it seems like people are set on making this thread a tearful echo chamber so I'm not surprised that many would rather choose Earthshrine Discord over a thread where it's all doom and gloom.

Ele is premanently constrained to not work by poor design. Lavaburst can't be high because mastery is too scary in PVP despite the fact they could just make it weaker in PVP now. Because Lavaburst can't be too strong, lightning bolt has to be very weak to ensure lavaburst with a proc mechanic is far enough ahead. Our proc which mind you should be where our skill cap comes from is a builder not a spender. ES costs too much and can only be so strong because you can't have an ability hit for 9000% spellpower vs how long it takes to generate so it's overall fairly "eh" and EQ as a spender has to be too weak to be relevant in any real aoe situation because it needs to be significantly weaker than the previously constrained ES.

Again, as always, there are a few simple changes that could fix a lot of the particularly bad design problems facing ele. Two obvious fixes would be to make mastery affect all major damaging spells, adding ES, FS and EQ. This removes one of the constraints around lavaburst / es+eq scaling. PotM on weapon should affect all generators, so LB, LvB, CL, EB and whateverthefrostabilityiscalled, this is obvious because it's straight up fucking retarded that when you're aoeing and throwing LvB or casting ascendance you are wasting proc after proc of one of your core artifact abilities that tbh is pretty crap anyway.

Ele honestly plays like a turd now which is super disappointing after how promising the earlier builds looked. I'm not as invested, and tbh didn't REALLY expect any different after the transition from MOP to WoD went how it did despite constant feedback. It's honestly not that hard to fix and whoever is responsible for the end result of elemental is simply incompetent. It's a shame because the shaman hall and tier sets are nice, I guess it's all for resto and enhance's benefit tho cause they've both had a series of nice design changes. Why did they finally remove enh / ele's dependancy on eachother using the same spells and then just chuck maelstrom at ele after designing it for enhance, fucking lazy as shit.

[elcapone]

Ele is premanently constrained to not work by poor design. Lavaburst can't be high because mastery is too scary in PVP despite the fact they could just make it weaker in PVP now. Because Lavaburst can't be too strong, lightning bolt has to be very weak to ensure lavaburst with a proc mechanic is far enough ahead. Our proc which mind you should be where our skill cap comes from is a builder not a spender. ES costs too much and can only be so strong because you can't have an ability hit for 9000% spellpower vs how long it takes to generate so it's overall fairly "eh" and EQ as a spender has to be too weak to be relevant in any real aoe situation because it needs to be significantly weaker than the previously constrained ES.

Again, as always, there are a few simple changes that could fix a lot of the particularly bad design problems facing ele. Two obvious fixes would be to make mastery affect all major damaging spells, adding ES, FS and EQ. This removes one of the constraints around lavaburst / es+eq scaling. PotM on weapon should affect all generators, so LB, LvB, CL, EB and whateverthefrostabilityiscalled, this is obvious because it's straight up fucking retarded that when you're aoeing and throwing LvB or casting ascendance you are wasting proc after proc of one of your core artifact abilities that tbh is pretty crap anyway.

Ele honestly plays like a turd now which is super disappointing after how promising the earlier builds looked. I'm not as invested, and tbh didn't REALLY expect any different after the transition from MOP to WoD went how it did despite constant feedback. It's honestly not that hard to fix and whoever is responsible for the end result of elemental is simply incompetent. It's a shame because the shaman hall and tier sets are nice, I guess it's all for resto and enhance's benefit tho cause they've both had a series of nice design changes. Why did they finally remove enh / ele's dependancy on eachother using the same spells and then just chuck maelstrom at ele after designing it for enhance, fucking lazy as shit.

also forgot to mention icefury replaces ES for some reason rather than adding to it. I agree adding maelstrom to ele was lazy design, I preferred the lightning shield mechanic actually. They could have spent time/resources and improved the lightning shield mechanic: choosing between a cast time of an empowered lightning bolt vs a instant cast ES vs an aoe like razor from dota 2 for burst options. 3 options at what ever stack you wish. etc. lightning build would focus on casting high level dmg, while lava build would focus on getting stacks faster.

[Lionor]

There is a rather simple to implement fix to Earthquake and AoE concerns.

1. Remove the totem component, make it like the WoD Earthquake (instant cast).
2. Replace Magma Totem with Empowered Earthquake (or whatever you want to call it).

Empowered Earthquake:
For every target hit by your chain lightning your next Earthquake's damage is increased by Y% stacking up to 5 times (lasts 15 seconds), however Earthquake now has a 10 second cooldown. You can spend up to 50 Maelstrom to reduce the cooldown of Earthquake by 2sec per 10 Maelstrom.

Problem solved.

[Antilurker77]

There is a rather simple to implement fix to Earthquake and AoE concerns.

1. Remove the totem component, make it like the WoD Earthquake (instant cast).
2. Replace Magma Totem with Empowered Earthquake (or whatever you want to call it).

Empowered Earthquake:
For every target hit by your chain lightning your next Earthquake's damage is increased by Y% stacking up to 5 times (lasts 15 seconds), however Earthquake now has a 10 second cooldown. You can spend up to 50 Maelstrom to reduce the cooldown of Earthquake by 2sec per 10 Maelstrom.

Problem solved.

What the hell even is this post?

Earthquake is already instant.
Magma Totem doesn't exist anymore.
Empowered Earthquake works against itself. Why would you spend MS to bypass it's CD to drop an unbuffed Earthquake?

[shammypie]

What the hell even is this post?

Earthquake is already instant.
Magma Totem doesn't exist anymore.
Empowered Earthquake works against itself. Why would you spend MS to bypass it's CD to drop an unbuffed Earthquake?

to his credit it makes about as much sense as anything else they have done with the spec. Honestly they could just tune everything and make pvp modifiers and solve the whole thing overnight if they wanted to but hey the dead horse is still in the corner. Want to ask it for a tank spec again while your whipping it?

[Deleted]

I see the shaman forum is still full of dev team apologists, glad i don't post much.

Enjoy holding back your own class/spec from being fixed/improved for yet another expansion. Have fun raiding.

It's something I genuinely never understood, the Shaman forums both here and on the Blizzard servers are full of often terrible players who constantly defend the situation. This leads to massive distortion in how people judge the state of shamans. Most classes cry even when being strong if someone else is stronger and quite often excessively so. It leads to a situation where people assume as baseline that problems are being overstated in general. Which means the existence of apologist and people going "we're fine" in such numbers actually ends with the conclusion that the class is strong. We've seen that during the WoD launch, where the lead game designer was convinced ele was "a bit op" when in truth it was the most atrocious spec by a huge margin and needed various hotfixes to even become remotely viable at the bottom.

Apologism, relativism, defending the state of ele makes matters worse. My favorite occurence was when some high profile resto shaman theory crafted at some point went "resto is strong and great" and then a few weeks later switched to another class never to look back because it was trash.

Ele currently is trash, absolute garbage in PvP. The whole "I can kill stuff with my two pet healers in random Bgs with 10+ spread targets!" doesn't disprove that in any kind of way. And given the state AoE is in and how unneeded maelstrome was it's shaping up to be equally as terrible in PvE.

[Socialhealer]

Ele currently is trash, absolute garbage in PvP. The whole "I can kill stuff with my two pet healers in random Bgs with 10+ spread targets!" doesn't disprove that in any kind of way. And given the state AoE is in and how unneeded maelstrome was it's shaping up to be equally as terrible in PvE.

i've done over 4000 BGs as ele wotlk->mop, only did ashran as ele in wod since pve gear worked so i could destroy people.

my plan is already to pvp as resto in legion lol, ele is just awful if an ele shaman jumps me as resto i'm like, what are you doing? plz stop you're just making yourself look silly.

[Odintdk]

It's something I genuinely never understood, the Shaman forums both here and on the Blizzard servers are full of often terrible players who constantly defend the situation. This leads to massive distortion in how people judge the state of shamans. Most classes cry even when being strong if someone else is stronger and quite often excessively so. It leads to a situation where people assume as baseline that problems are being overstated in general. Which means the existence of apologist and people going "we're fine" in such numbers actually ends with the conclusion that the class is strong. We've seen that during the WoD launch, where the lead game designer was convinced ele was "a bit op" when in truth it was the most atrocious spec by a huge margin and needed various hotfixes to even become remotely viable at the bottom.

Apologism, relativism, defending the state of ele makes matters worse. My favorite occurence was when some high profile resto shaman theory crafted at some point went "resto is strong and great" and then a few weeks later switched to another class never to look back because it was trash.

Ele currently is trash, absolute garbage in PvP. The whole "I can kill stuff with my two pet healers in random Bgs with 10+ spread targets!" doesn't disprove that in any kind of way. And given the state AoE is in and how unneeded maelstrome was it's shaping up to be equally as terrible in PvE.

Thats exactly how things turned out to be.

When even Mages, Warlocks and Hunters are almost always up in arms asking for buffs/fixes/improvmenets.. when they're the leading pures (a big fucking joke on its own that we still have this pures vs hybrids thing and get penalized for it, long after we lost anything that resembles "utility"). And then on the flipside you see Shamans, mostly low-average Elementals going "we're fine. We even do great if X and Y are present in situation Z". Which it had gotten to this place where moderately complaining on the WoW forums meant your class IS actually doing fine, but if you claim you're fine, then oh boy your class is among the top and you're just trying to dodge the nerfs by claiming "we're JUST fine". Very much like what Mages currently. and always have said when asked about their damage, lol.

I actually didn't know this trend also extended to the Resto community though (with that little story), lmfao.

[Deleted]

It seems to affect the entire class, with the only ones I keep seeing complaining slightly without much backdraft being enhancers. But as you said, that's exactly the problem. The perception these people are creating and propagating. It leads to the lead dev telling shamans early WoD after launch that he thinks "Elemental shamans are a bit op, but that's fine!".

Just for the specc to turn out to be completely undertuned trash, they had to hotfix various buffs several times over to get people to bring elemental shamans to raids and other places. It was quite hillarious. It's also funny because the "theory crafters" the shaman class seems to have are mostly maining other classes or are suspiciously absent during the bad phases of the class when they turn out to have been wrong once again.

[miffy23]

It seems to affect the entire class, with the only ones I keep seeing complaining slightly without much backdraft being enhancers. But as you said, that's exactly the problem. The perception these people are creating and propagating. It leads to the lead dev telling shamans early WoD after launch that he thinks "Elemental shamans are a bit op, but that's fine!".

Just for the specc to turn out to be completely undertuned trash, they had to hotfix various buffs several times over to get people to bring elemental shamans to raids and other places. It was quite hillarious. It's also funny because the "theory crafters" the shaman class seems to have are mostly maining other classes or are suspiciously absent during the bad phases of the class when they turn out to have been wrong once again.

If you truly believe that's how devs work, you are utterly deluded.
But I mean, that is already fairly obvious by the ridiculous assumption that only "weak" players and scrubs would dare disagree that a spec is "trash".

[paror]

If you truly believe that's how devs work, you are utterly deluded.
But I mean, that is already fairly obvious by the ridiculous assumption that only "weak" players and scrubs would dare disagree that a spec is "trash".

Comming from a developer background, thats not entirly false/deluded. If no one is complaining or only a small amount of people is affected, things get set aside (and sometimes even completely overlooked for a long time ). History have shown that blizzard actually do react to public outcry. Not to mention every expansion elemental has started out horrible while devs said they were not, it would be nice to start it OP and get tuned down then to start so weak there needs to be a lot of buffs applied.

Having said that, I dont think elemental is in a bad spot at the moment, currently I only despise EQ because I loved the chain lighting spam with instant eq 10x more then the current EQ mechanic. I feel the only time elemental shaman was better then now in legion, was during firelands (sort of perma fire elemental and casting while moving, ah yisss that was the shit) DPS wise in mythic testing they seem to be just above middle of the pack.

PVP-wise, I feel the elemental spec is not doing so well. How to fix I am really not sure as I have a bad overview of all the other specs and what they bring to the table.

[miffy23]

Comming from a developer background, thats not entirly false/deluded. If no one is complaining or only a small amount of people is affected, things get set aside (and sometimes even completely overlooked for a long time ). History have shown that blizzard actually do react to public outcry. Not to mention every expansion elemental has started out horrible while devs said they were not, it would be nice to start it OP and get tuned down then to start so weak there needs to be a lot of buffs applied.

Having said that, I dont think elemental is in a bad spot at the moment, currently I only despise EQ because I loved the chain lighting spam with instant eq 10x more then the current EQ mechanic. I feel the only time elemental shaman was better then now in legion, was during firelands (sort of perma fire elemental and casting while moving, ah yisss that was the shit) DPS wise in mythic testing they seem to be just above middle of the pack.

PVP-wise, I feel the elemental spec is not doing so well. How to fix I am really not sure as I have a bad overview of all the other specs and what they bring to the table.

Public outcry, sure. Not the vocal bitching of a few. We're talking things like camera issues, not spec tuning for progress.

[gambit998]

I agree with the comments most people have said here, The devs are not intentionally ignoring the Shamans i dont think. We are/have been in he past a very very small community. So not alot of people to dissapoint if things arnt completely working right. But that theory was blown out of the water when the smallest community (Monks) got amazing fixes and superior talents ect.

I will say this again i think with the introduction of Maelstrom for Enhancment and the fact that Elemental didnt use mana anymore other than to heal they thought well we could try fix the Enhacment and elemental specs with this. There focus seems to be on Enhancment atm which is fine i am all for enhancement getting some needed fixes. During the Alpha they had ideas for Elemental....that idea was pet focused and it did not pan out well at all so they scrapped it. They then progressed to give us the same things we already have in diminished volume. (Our EQ being weak as hell and spread over so many aoe talents and abilities that it is impossible to do) The Class designers lost there vision of the direction of the spec. WE ARE NOT UNIQUE ANYMORE and HAVE 0 CLASS DIRECTION/IDENTITY. We are now a Mage with subpar damage abilities that can hardly even fulfill the role of a DPS.

In Conclusion: We need our abilities looked over with a fine tooth comb. What is needed to make the class engaging and enjoyable? They need to then break said abilities into hard hitting filler ect. to fix the rotation. Then see if there is even a point to have Maelstom. If yes, Calculate what are generators and what are spenders, then add builders to abilities to speed up the process that makes you want to press a button and DPS like a machine. And now the Biggest one what abilities should be baseline and what should be Talents that actually change the way the spec plays but doesnt make it useless.

This spec needs a rework from the ground up. I love my Shaman i have grown very attatched to her since she was my 1st Caharcter back when i was still horde in classic, and to watch her become more and more useless every expansion is heartbreaking. Every expansion i want to feel more powerful not weaker something on the design side is missing.

[Tyze]

Is there alot of fights in Legion thats heavy on movement?
I love my Elemental but on movement its jusy not fun running around like a headless chicken

[Spoonman]

Im just curious what ppl think the future will look like, will we see a fix on ele or are we doomed in legion?

[freddy090909]

Im just curious what ppl think the future will look like, will we see a fix on ele or are we doomed in legion?

I do not expect any more design changes in Legion. That does not mean we will be bad, but things like our AoE rotation will likely remain flawed.

[jearle]

I agree with some of the posts here. I feel like they fixed alot of QoL issues but broke other things that worked well.

The lost of spiritwalkers grace to elemental was a huge blow to me. With the glyph you had a 7 second window per minute where you could cast on the run. The lack of dps on the move is crippling. The gameplay in Legion just feels so meh. I am only 13 points in as ele but it just feels boring and i dont know why. I like running ele blast because it adds some flavor to the spec but that still does help the situation. Outside of artifact lightning bolt hits like a wet noodle.

Maybe they are just balancing everything around the Legendary items you can acquire, but that is really sad since they are said to be rare. Some of the ele legos look pretty cool, basically giving the HFC 2 piece back, buffing EQ or LvB. I think that sucks to be fair though cause you might never see one of those items.

[Deleted]

Yeah, I went enhancer. It's not particularly great and clunky but it's not as broken (yet) as elemental.