PvP Ele, no dmg

[Blitond]

pvp ele = MAY work against casters if u can cast. WILL NOT work against melee's especially warrs and rogues, cuz u will not be able to cast a shit, but if u do manage to get some lava bursts off, GG anyways, doing like 40k-50 crits, while the warr is nonstop hitting u for that with auto attack, well u get my point. just waaaaaaaay to low dmg on shamans atm, which makes me cry. least favored class of blizz nuff said, compared to mages

I've actually found rogues more manageable than in the past (not saying much as we used to be a free kill for any rogue). They do good damage inside CD's, but other than that not much. Warriors are retarded OP atm though.

[zenga]

1> Improved defenses. We lost some passive defense, but most everyone did. We gained damage reduction tools we lacked, a net relative gain.

I fail to see how it's relevant that other classes lost passives when you compare ele cata abilities with ele mop abilities? Ele lost 12% passive damage and 10% damage reduction while casting. Combined with glyph of elemental mastery that was 42% dmg mitigation. Now we have a 40% astral shift. Glyph of stoneclaw totem vs stone bulwark it's a no brainer for pvp: SBT is now shielding me for roughly 20% of my health each minute, and it requires to stay up to do that. Stoneclaw was shielding me for roughly 10-15%, every 20s or 30%+ of my health. Drawback was that it didnt scale. SBT has more value with totemic restoration though. And I completely agree that Nature Guardian is an awesome talent. But it doesnt outweigh the loss of 22% passives + 20& glyph of EM + stoneclaw glyph. Not even by a far stretch.

Yes there are other tools like capacitor totem and totemic projection, but there is also ghostwolf snare immunity that is gone. If we could have it all yeah, it would be a gain, but we cant, it goes always at the cost of something else.

Improved burst. Ascendance is huge. Elemental Mastery is no slouch either.

That are cooldowns, not so much burst in my opinion. Assuming burst is doing as much dmg within a timeframe that is as short as possible (a shatter combo, a cata UE, EM instant lava burst followed by a 9 stack earthshock, ...). If they were to make lava burst hitting for 2k (for the sake of the argument), would ascendance still be a burst cd? During an ascendance you need quite a bunch of globals to eat most of your opponents health away. Whereas in cata UE/EM/LVB/9stackES combo would take 60-70% of a players health away. So burst is relative to the players healthpool, and so is ascendance dependant on the damage that lava burst does to be classified as burst or not.

[Stormspellz]

shamans's do some great damage, the catch is you have to get chain casts in and current pvp environment that is rather tough to do.

[Deleted]

shamans's do some great damage, the catch is you have to get chain casts in and current pvp environment that is rather tough to do.

More like impossible in 2s, bgs okay, arena, near impossible to do good dmg

[Endus]

I fail to see how it's relevant that other classes lost passives when you compare ele cata abilities with ele mop abilities? Ele lost 12% passive damage and 10% damage reduction while casting.

Because everyone lost similar passives. The whole game was retuned without them. You can't point to those and say "That's why Elemental's performing poorly" when EVERYONE saw similar changes. You're talking about performance relative to other classes. So the changes to other classes are, indeed, relevant.

Combined with glyph of elemental mastery that was 42% dmg mitigation. Now we have a 40% astral shift.

See above for why those kinds of comparisons are malarkey. Everyone lost passives. And now you have 40% Astral Shift, and 20% Primal Earth Elemental or Rockbiter fury unleash, and better healing, etc.

You're ignoring the changes to other classes in the relative comparison, and excluding a bunch of Shaman additions and changes.

Glyph of stoneclaw totem vs stone bulwark it's a no brainer for pvp: SBT is now shielding me for roughly 20% of my health each minute, and it requires to stay up to do that. Stoneclaw was shielding me for roughly 10-15%, every 20s or 30%+ of my health. Drawback was that it didnt scale.

So since it didn't scale, it would still be 16.5k today, it would be under 5% of your health. You can't just say that Stoneclaw's glyph was "better", and acknowledge that it didn't scale, and pretend that it would still be better at 90. It flat out would not.

SBT has more value with totemic restoration though. And I completely agree that Nature Guardian is an awesome talent. But it doesnt outweigh the loss of 22% passives + 20& glyph of EM + stoneclaw glyph. Not even by a far stretch.

You're still looking at the absolute changes to Elemental, in a relative comparison with other classes.

Everyone lost passive damage reduction and DPS increases. Part of the goal with the MoP redesign was to roll a bunch of those passives into the baseline stats. Why aren't you mentioning the passive PvP Resilience we now get? That's absolutely relevant to the point you're making about the absolute change in Elemental's defense.

If you want to go back to relative comparisons to OTHER classes, we're back to you ignoring the passives THEY lost.


Elemental is probably struggling a bit more than it should be, but when you start twisting the facts like this to exacerbate the issue, it damages the discussion. All anyone has to do is disprove the validity of your claims, by one of the arguments I've listed here, and thereby not have to even get into whether Elemental is balanced or not in fact. You need to make an argument that DOES account for these things and which CANNOT be simply dismissed like this. I'm by no means saying you can't. I'm just saying this isn't it. I agree that Elemental seems a bit weak right now. That doesn't mean I think we've lost relative defenses since Cata, because we haven't. There's other issues with efficacy involved, in particular that so much of our DPS is RNG; it becomes difficult to execute burst when we're seemingly tuned around the maximum capacity, but ensuring those procs is impossible so we're typically performing lower than that potential.

[Rawfury]

I think we can all agree that an elemental shaman cannot and will not beat an arms or prot warrior. if they have half of a brain no matter how skilled you are right now.

[mrinvisable2]

shamans is sruggling bit more , i am resto shaman myself because ele is crap in arenas if we see ele /enh shamans they are first target to be focused @ and i as resto shaman ushaly being focused and my es being disspeled we arent as good like in cata

[draganid]

speaking as a dk, both dps specs of shamans are free kills. if it makes you feel any better, so are rogues and nothing makes me happier than taking a rogue and bending him over and imposing my will on him. seriously.

[CHRONICGODX]

endus. please stop theorycrafting pvp. you have good intentions, but i cant imagine anyone walking away from one of your pvp posts with anything but hopeless optimism. you remind me of ghostcrawler.

[Endus]

endus. please stop theorycrafting pvp.

To be blunt, no. This is sort of what the forums are for. This isn't a "hate on Shaman" echo chamber where you get to hear only opinions you agree with.

you have good intentions, but i cant imagine anyone walking away from one of your pvp posts with anything but hopeless optimism. you remind me of ghostcrawler.

Really?

Elemental is probably struggling a bit more than it should be

I agree that Elemental seems a bit weak right now.

Maybe try reading my posts?

Just because I don't agree with "Elemental is the suckiest suck that ever sucked", that doesn't mean I'm saying "Elemental is awesomeface perfect". There's plenty of room between those two extremes. If anything, I'm closer to the first, definitely nowhere closely to "hopeless optimism".

[Diaxx]

The problem with Ele is, most of you want it to be overpowered. The way the spec works makes it extremely easy to become overpowered if Lavaburst was buffed too much.

Ele needs buffs in places besides Lavaburst.

[Croc]

Thanks for all the replys, I'm not farming for a 2nd pvp ele set after all this. May look at enh. All this aside atleast were good healers in pvp, sad tho if you want dmg, reroll.

[Booniehat]

Ele shaman are a joy to play, and excellent in PVE. See challenge modes - there is a reason they're prominently featured.

HOWEVER in PVP, they aren't exactly the worst, but I would say you need to play at (arbitrary number warning) 2400 standard just to keep pace with most other classes playing at 2000 standard. Change those numbers up a little if you must, but of ALL the casters, I would never want to play a Shaman, except for its flavor and style, if I wish to achieve success (without wanting to tear my hair out).

We are now the "boomkin" of MOP.

Compare the caster shaman to its peers. Which, if you wanted to just feel powerful and own, would you play? Spriest? Mage? Warlock? All would probably be better answers. Boomkin has gotten stronger, though I have not played it extensively to know if it's better than the ele shaman.

And just a note: Boomkin and Spriest retained their 15% damage reduction in their forms. The boomkin still needs it, but the spriest definitely does not.

[Chainreactor]

TLDR

In PvP Elemental Shaman is the weakest caster Class/Spec that is also a free kill for Melee

Pigeon holed to spec Resto for PvP like always

[Mormolyce]

Ele shamans are shit in PvP? Unprecedented!

[Deleted]

Dps shamans are squishy, from what i've seen all they can do is blow all CD's and have the enemy laugh at the pityful damage.

Tell that to the 2x healer Warrior team we met last night. I bursted the warrior down in around 3 seconds when he came around the corner. And we're not talking about shit geared here.

[Booniehat]

Tell that to the 2x healer Warrior team we met last night. I bursted the warrior down in around 3 seconds when he came around the corner. And we're not talking about shit geared here.

Mind letting me armory you? I wanna see how you bursted so hard you went through his heals + second wind in 3-4 globals... (no I'm not being sarcastic, really wanna know.)

[Ridethelight]

Tell that to the 2x healer Warrior team we met last night. I bursted the warrior down in around 3 seconds when he came around the corner. And we're not talking about shit geared here.

You must be really proud now.

OT:

Elemental shamans are pretty weak atm, I did some arena and yea the burst can be nice if you get peels from your arena partner but when they focus you we can't really do that much. We can't counter warriors anymore because every warrior glyphed into the silence + with avatar is gg. Speccing into SBT can be nice but it can be purged what was not possible if I can remember from our previous shield. Rogue's are still hard to counter with all the stuns altho the dmg is not that high anymore and please lets not talk about dk's.

Capacitor totem is THE worst stun ever. Do I really have to spec into projection and glyph it to make it even a viable stun. Last arena a healer just threw it on me and I just AUTO attacked it and it was gone. It is so easy to counter it with the 5hp if they don't want to make the totem better just remove it. I just feel sad that Blizzard never even listened to all the feedback we gave on the forums and implemented ascendance so they had to NERF lavaburst.

I'm not saying these are all super mega awesomemazing OP, but they're ways the Elemental toolkit was improved over Cata. Saying they didn't address Elemental's issues is simply not true. They may not have addressed them to the full degree that you wanted to see, but that's not remotely the same thing.

I think improved it a big word, they more like expanded it with half baked talents and a stun.

[Deleted]

Watch the ladders start to form in the brackets that matter (3v3, 5v5) and tell me how many elemental shamans you see after 6 weeks above 2.2k rating. I can tell you right now it will be less than last season, partially due to affli locks being less god-class, but more due to the fact that elemental used to scrape viability because of its insane burst damage.

I'm not saying that elemental shamans don't do dmg. But it feels like Blizzard have taken away our niche of what we used to be last season (i.e the glass cannon) and replaced it with slighty more CD's for defense/utility (net gain as Endus keeps preaching). I will still play elemental, but you cannot help but wonder why they have changed our place within the arena system. Now we don't fill that role we can easily be replaced by any other viable caster which will see less people playing caster shaman... and no one here wants to see that do they?

PS: Endus. Your a great moderator and all, and your probably the most active person on these forums, but please don't comment directly on pvp matters when you have the experience of a challenger in those situations. As I see it (not important), moderators should not only be active and take a balanced view, but should also be knowledgeable about what they are posting about. If you could prove me wrong and say that you run 50-100+ arenas each week above 2k MMR then i'll eat my hat and peep up.

[zenga]

Tell that to the 2x healer Warrior team we met last night. I bursted the warrior down in around 3 seconds when he came around the corner. And we're not talking about shit geared here.

So a double healer team and there were zero shields, no eath shield, no hots on the warrior? Or did you nuke through all that on top of his health pool in 3s? Fully pvp geared ele shaman with a 389 weapon here, and my lava bursts hits in the 40k range on geared players. Even with all your buffs up and incredible luck that every lava burst overloads and procs echo, including your elemental blast crit and possible earthshock crit, you would still not be able to kill him within 3 seconds

---------- Post added 2012-10-10 at 11:56 AM ----------

and replaced it with slighty more CD's for defense/utility (net gain

Theoretical net gain, practical net loss unless you wanna gimp yourself talent wise. They can give us a talent that makes us immune to all damage as long as we run circles around our computer, that 'd be a theoretical net gain as well.

---------- Post added 2012-10-10 at 12:04 PM ----------

So since it didn't scale, it would still be 16.5k today, it would be under 5% of your health. You can't just say that Stoneclaw's glyph was "better", and acknowledge that it didn't scale, and pretend that it would still be better at 90. It flat out would not.

It's not that hard to imagine that if they would've kept the glyph aboard, that they would adapt the shielding amount to mop healthpools, without adding a scaling factor (i.e without changing the mechanics). It's just an assumption that you make, which is as valid as my assumption. That doesn't change the fact that stoneclaw glyph shielded for more in cata, was more practical and just overall superior to SBT for pvp.